Throwing Maos: Money, Music, and African Nightlife in Guangzhou

In this reflective, descriptive essay, I explore a vital yet underexamined dimension of African life in China: nightlife. Through the story of how Nigerians—and other Africans—presented and performed their cultures on the stages of venues that, for a time, became known as “African bars,” I reflect on the embodied aesthetics, rhythms, and aspirations that animated Guangzhou during the heyday of African presence in the city.

‘African nightlife in China is as diverse as African nightlife can be,’ I was told by Joe, a 44-year-old Igbo man from Port Harcourt, Nigeria. Since I first briefly met Joe during a dinner with representatives of the Nigerian community in Guangzhou, he had contacted me several times. Sometimes, he would call me in the middle of the night from Lagos, just to check in and ask about business and investment opportunities in Asia and Latin America. I told him many times that I knew nothing about those topics, but he kept asking.

For the ten years before the pandemic, Joe came to China a couple of times every year to get car parts for his father’s shop back in Rivers State. Occasionally, if we were both in Guangzhou, he would text me late at night asking whether I wanted to ‘hang out’. I declined several times, but on a Friday night in July 2014, he insisted that I meet him at a hotel. On the phone, Joe told me that a very popular artist in Uganda and across Africa would be performing in town that night. ‘The organisers are Nigerian promoters from Beijing and they will give us access to the backstage,’ Joe tried to convince me. I had just arrived in Guangzhou from Hong Kong for a full month of fieldwork in the city and was trying to get access to different African communities. So, I decided to go.

By then, much had been said about Nigerians and other Africans in Guangzhou—and in China at large—and their everyday lives, but very little had been reported about their nightlife. News reports had lightly touched upon certain bars and music shows. Ethnographers and cultural geographers had, at times and in passing comments, mentioned that corners of neighbourhoods like Sanlitun in Beijing or Xiaobei in Guangzhou were called ‘African corners’ and were frequented by late-night returning crowds. Yet, for at least a decade prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, Africans played multiple important roles in the nightlife of several Chinese metropolises, and in some—like Guangzhou, but also Wuhan, Tianjin, Beijing, and Shanghai—African communities managed to establish nightlife scenes of their own.

Just before midnight, I arrived at a Days Inn Hotel, lost in the far north of Baiyun District. After a couple of glasses of whisky in Joe’s room, he told me we needed to wait: some of his friends would come to pick us up. Around 2 a.m., two vehicles with heavily tinted windows arrived. Out of the first one—an old Volkswagen Jetta—came four men wearing black boots, camouflaged pants, black T-shirts bearing images of Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, the military leader of Biafra during the Nigerian Civil War and a central figure in Igbo nationalism, and army-style black berets. I was in awe. They behaved with the disciplined seriousness of men in uniform, yet somehow also looked as if they were going to a costume party. I smiled at the youngest-looking one and tried a handshake, but he stepped back and away from me. The oldest one, also the only one wearing black sunglasses, spoke to Joe and signalled that we needed to get into the car. I decided to shut up and follow.

We got in. Five Igbos, a Mexican, and a Chinese driver. I never saw who was in the second car, but it followed us. On the way, Joe told me that the group was from Dongguan, an industrial city some 70 kilometres south of Guangzhou. ‘They are wanted by Guangzhou police, so they seldom come. They are just in for the concert and after that they will flee the city,’ Joe told me with a big smile and what I saw as exhilaration in his eyes. I was mildly worried, but the whisky helped me quash my anxiety. I remember telling everyone that we were like the beginning of a joke: ‘Five Nigerians, a Mexican, and a Chinese get in a car…’ Nobody shared my sense of humour.

When we arrived at the venue, a colonial building along the Pearl River, there was a huge crowd outside. The main gate was guarded by six bouncers, four Chinese and two Nigerians. On the right side, a line of more than a hundred Africans stood in the suffocating midnight heat. On the left, Chinese couples cut the line and entered hassle-free. I was later told that Chinese patrons were uninterested in the African show and were therefore let in for free. Africans were paying 200 RMB to be in the same place at the same time as the Chinese.

Inside, the venue was packed. Some fifty Chinese—along with the Biafran ‘army’—were seated in the VIP lounges at the back, while more than two hundred mostly young Black people occupied the best seats. ‘Almost all of them are Ugandan students,’ Joe told me. ‘Nigerians will come later, sit in the VIP areas, and drink the best fake whisky you can find in town.’

After two hours of Latin music, cigarette smoke, and beer, a young Nigerian singer climbed onto the stage and began performing. It was clear that he was not the main attraction, but after a couple of songs the mostly African crowd became intensely engaged. At one point, a woman jumped onto the stage and started dancing alongside him. As she danced, she pulled several RMB notes from her purse and began sticking them onto the singer’s forehead. Notes that fell to the ground were quickly picked up by a young man wearing a STAFF shirt. Two male fans joined her, dancing around the singer and throwing several US$20 notes at him. More people followed. After a few songs, I counted around US$500 and perhaps RMB2,000 thrown and collected. The singer went into his final song with a RMB100 note stuck with sweat to his forehead and a US$20 bill clinging to the back of his neck. I was in utter astonishment.

At first, I thought it was fake—a performance enacted to make the singer look popular and successful. I assumed the people throwing the money were his friends or relatives. When his show ended, I approached Joe and told him what I thought about what I had just seen.

‘You clearly know nothing about Nigerians, my friend. They are not his friends. They are “spraying” him because they like his music and believe in what he says,’ he explained. ‘Tonight, they only made five thousand renminbi. They are not happy.’

I could not believe the amount and remained reluctant to accept that the spraying had been authentic.

Interestingly, when the Ugandan star finally came onto the stage, a young man got up and, while dancing next to him, began throwing renminbi at him. The star did not seem to appreciate the gesture. He angrily picked up the money and threw it back into the audience. After that, nobody dared spray him.

At approximately six in the morning, I saw Joe and the Biafran ‘army’ getting back into the old Volkswagen Jetta. I walked briskly in the opposite direction and hailed a taxi.

By noon the next day, I woke up in my two-star Xiaobei hotel room with a strong whisky hangover and the smell of cigarette smoke all over my body. ‘How is this fieldwork?’ I remember thinking. Through a VPN, I looked up ‘money throwing’ on Google. The top results were about the perils of ‘throwing money at a problem’. I was not looking for that. I was thinking about the literal act of throwing money—propelling it through the air—and I remembered doing this at different events throughout my childhood.

Growing up in central Mexico, for instance, we used to throw coins at young and emerging lucha libre wrestlers to support their early careers. I would pick the heaviest coins and aim for their heads. Many of my earliest memories involving money are similarly associated with scrambling and fighting with other children over bolo: money, mostly coins, thrown by godparents during christenings to symbolise abundance and prosperity.

My simple online search led me to a range of non-academic sources, mostly blogs, attributing the ‘origin’ of money throwing to different countries and traditions. What became clear fairly quickly was that there were multiple histories of throwing, pinning, attaching, or otherwise displaying money, varying enormously across space, time, and culture.

In Java, during the Yadnya Kasada festival, villagers throw money—and sometimes goats—into the crater of Mount Bromo, making offerings in relation to the abundance provided by the volcanic landscape. In parts of Europe, Latin America, and the Philippines, money may be pinned, wrapped, or taped onto newlyweds while people dance around them. These practices are variously called ‘money dances’, ‘dollar dances’, ‘bridal dances’, and so on. In other contexts, throwing money can connote humiliation. During the 2015 FIFA corruption scandal, British comedian Lee Nelson threw fake American dollars at then FIFA president Sepp Blatter as a protest. The Ugandan singer’s angry reaction in Guangzhou had already shown me that having money thrown at you was not universally understood as praise.

The physical gesture might look similar, but the practice was not necessarily the same. These different uses of money revealed something about cultural relationships with its materiality: what money could do when it was tossed, pinned, displayed, crumpled, given away, or made to fly rather than simply exchanged. This distinction was repeatedly emphasised by Nigerians when I spoke to them. Spraying, they insisted, was not simply ‘money throwing’.

Not long after I first witnessed spraying, I travelled to Paris for an unrelated academic conference. During a night out, I met a Togolese actor and comedian who had lived for ten years in China before moving to Japan, where he had already resided for another fifteen. When I described the money throwing I had seen in Guangzhou, he told me, with what I perceived as a hint of arrogance, that if I thought the person spraying was simply ‘dancing with the singer’, then it would be very difficult for me to understand the practice.

‘The African custom of spraying has nothing to do with dancing with the person to whom you are throwing the money. It’s not a donation. It is way more complex than that. The interpreter is only a conveyor. I’m not sure you will be able to understand it,’ he said dismissively, before changing the topic.

Back in Hong Kong, I asked Facil Tesfaye, an Ethiopian historian—and then my boss at the African Studies Programme at the University of Hong Kong—about it. I told him what the Togolese man had said.

‘The first thing you need to think about is what spraying is. It is not money throwing, so you need to stop describing it like that,’ he told me. ‘Yes, it is throwing, tossing, flicking, attaching, all those things, but that is not what matters.’

He suggested that the relationship was not simply between an audience member and a singer. The performer could act as a conveyor of something else: praise, history, spirit, collective memory. ‘Look up griots, or jalis, and look into praise singing,’ he told me.

I had stumbled upon spraying while researching transnational mobility among African musicians in Guangzhou, but by then I had become captivated by the practice itself. Over that summer, after attending more clubs and concert venues where Nigerians and other Africans performed, I realised that spraying—at least among Nigerians—was not only authentic but widespread. I began asking people where it came from.

‘Compared to others, we Nigerians have a very different relationship with money,’ Joe told me a few days later.

‘Do Chinese, or other non-Nigerians, spray?’ I asked, somewhat naively.

‘Of course not. Chinese would never throw a cent on you like that. It’s a Nigerian thing. Actually, it’s an Igbo thing more than a Nigerian thing,’ he asserted.

I believed that for a while, until I spoke to Ade, a young student and entertainment entrepreneur from Osun State whom I had met in a Nigerian restaurant in Guangzhou a few years before meeting Joe. Ade had since moved to Beijing because he felt Guangzhou’s African entertainment spaces were becoming overcrowded, but, like Joe, he continued sending me random messages just to ‘check in’.

‘It’s not an Igbo thing, not at all,’ he told me emphatically during a WeChat conversation. ‘We Yoruba also spray and have been doing it forever, mostly during weddings. So definitely not an Igbo thing.’

As I spoke to more people, I encountered divergent—and sometimes contested—genealogies of spraying, as well as different modalities of throwing, tossing, flicking, placing, and attaching money. Styles varied too: speed, rhythm, duration, intensity, denomination, number of notes. There was no singular Nigerian way of spraying, just as there was no simple point of origin.

Some people associated its contemporary popularity with the Nigerian oil boom of the 1970s, a period of spectacular wealth and conspicuous consumption. Onyeka, an Igbo artist I met at an exhibition in Hong Kong, told me that spraying became particularly visible against the background of this new opulence, but she believed its roots went much further back.

‘People think it’s an Igbo thing just because us Igbos are everywhere, and they see us doing it, but it certainly comes from beyond Igboland.’

Olu, a Yoruba postgraduate student in Hong Kong, similarly connected spraying to much older practices of gift-giving to performers and celebrants.

‘In post-independence, modern Nigeria, gifts, like everything else, were substituted by money,’ he told me. ‘In the past, people would show appreciation for public performances, especially those of poets and singers, by giving out gifts. This is an ancient practice. I would not be surprised if you could find it across all of West Africa.’

I brought these stories back to Facil, who was then teaching a course on African music and culture. He invited me to one of his lectures, where he discussed griots and jalis. While the griot is often associated with the Mali Empire, he explained, related traditions of oral history, praise poetry, storytelling, and musical performance existed across West Africa. Such performers carried histories, genealogies, reputations, and collective memory through speech and song.

After Facil’s class, Olu explained that contemporary Nigerian performers could draw upon similar forms of knowledge: family names, regional histories, reputations, poetry, epic tales, geography, folklore.

‘They honour the individual through song,’ he said.

Listening to these accounts, I began to understand spraying not as the survival of some timeless African tradition, but as a rearticulation. The gesture had histories. It could carry older practices of praise, gifting, public recognition, and the retribution of artistic labour into very different monetary, musical, and social worlds. The form persisted precisely because it could change.

Some weeks after that first nightclub scene with Joe, I met Chuk, the youngest of the Biafran ‘army’ men who had picked me up that night. We were eating grilled tilapia in a Nigerian restaurant tucked into the back of the Elephant Mall in Xiaobei. Between bites, he pulled out his phone and showed me a Facebook post: a grainy image of the Biafran pound, its notes still bright with the colours of a state that had ceased to exist decades earlier.

‘We are the lost tribe,’ he said, only half-joking. ‘We don’t forget.’

Chuk and his friends—all Igbo—referred to themselves as Biafrans, rather than Nigerians. Their clothing bore old insignia, sometimes stitched by hand. One had printed his own T-shirt with Ojukwu’s face on it. They spoke of Biafra less as a clearly articulated geopolitical project than as a horizon of identity. In China, far from Abuja and the everyday gaze of the Nigerian state, Biafra could be worn, posted, remembered, performed.

This performative longing was not only about secession. It could also be about refusal: of national betrayal, marginalisation, erasure. It animated their aesthetics, their humour, and even their code of behaviour. One night, I heard them talking about ‘arresting’ someone—a fellow Nigerian accused of cheating at a party. It sounded like half joke, half threat: a kind of vigilante justice rooted in displaced sovereignty. They told me they had arrested people in China before, but quickly shut down my follow-up questions.

I kept thinking about the image Chuk had shown me: the Biafran pound, a dead currency resurrected as meme, emblem, memory, dream. And I thought again about that first night, when men wearing Ojukwu’s face had watched Mao’s face fly across a Guangzhou dancefloor. What did it mean to throw the red bills of a rising superpower in a circle of men who longed for a country that had burned out before many of them were born? Was it satire? Submission? Or, somehow, sovereignty reclaimed through performance?

Perhaps none of those things, or all of them momentarily. What mattered was that money was already carrying more than monetary value. Biafran pounds and Chinese renminbi occupied radically different political histories, but both could become objects through which histories, sovereignties, identities, and aspirations were made visible.

In the months that followed, I kept seeing spraying happen again and again. Sometimes elaborate, sometimes subdued. Always meaningful. It tended to emerge at moments of heightened intensity, when music, mood, and crowd aligned. The clubs were often similar: dimly lit, tucked between discount salons, pharmacies, halal barbershops, and electronics stores in neighbourhoods like Xiaobei and Sanyuanli. Spraying happened late—usually after one in the morning, when the energy was thickest and the performances sharpest.

These were not large venues. Some were second-floor units above auto repair shops. Others were restaurants temporarily transformed into makeshift lounges. Many were unofficial and moved frequently. The performers were not usually flown-in stars or headliners. They were hustlers, like their audiences—men, and a few women, who juggled phone resale, shipping logistics, online trading, and other businesses alongside music. They performed mostly in pidgin, Yoruba, and Igbo, sometimes with hooks in English or French. For many, music was not quite a career. It was an aspiration, perhaps a rehearsal of one.

The spraying usually began with one person—almost always a man—standing up, pulling a crisp note, or a not-so-crisp one, from his pocket, walking towards the performer and releasing it into the air. That first gesture could crack something open. Others followed.

The longer I watched, the more I realised that it was not simply the throwing that mattered. It was how one threw. The fingers curled around a folded note. The flick of the wrist. The angle. The sideways glance signalling readiness. The pause. The build. The beat.

Marcel Mauss might have called these ‘techniques of the body’: socially learned ways of moving that become so familiar they appear almost natural. Spraying was learned, copied, improvised, and refined. One young man told me he had learned to spray by watching music videos online.

‘You can’t just throw,’ he said. ‘You have to land.’

Timing mattered. The most effective sprays seemed to land on the beat, their movement synchronising with the sonic energy of the room. Some men flung bills high, allowing them to flutter dramatically down. Others pressed them onto a singer’s forehead or chest, almost like a blessing. Some used bundles of folded RMB100 notes; others delivered individual notes with exaggerated flair. I even saw money guns—small plastic devices that fired bills into the air with theatrical glee.

These were variations, but they were not random. They were conventions improvised through repetition. Diana Taylor’s notion of the repertoire as an embodied archive became useful to me here. Spraying transmitted social knowledge without requiring anyone to explain its rules. One learned through watching, participating, getting it wrong, doing it again. In this sense, spraying was not merely a gesture but a repertoire: a bodily memory carried into a new geography and recalibrated there.

It was also part of a music world: a network of performers, audiences, promoters, venues, conventions, sounds, gestures, expectations, and affects through which a scene became possible. Spraying supported the performer financially and emotionally, but it also signalled participation. One could not spray without being seen. One could not be sprayed without being acknowledged.

That reciprocity made the gesture electric. The performer was being recognised, certainly, but the sprayer was also producing himself as someone capable of recognition: a patron, a participant, a person with money to throw. Spraying elevated the artist while simultaneously producing the sprayer, momentarily, as someone with status and power.

That mattered in Guangzhou. Many of the people I knew inhabited precarious positions in the city. Some had uncertain immigration status. Others lived between short-term visas, overstays, business arrangements, student status, and the perpetual possibility of having to leave. African bodies were highly visible in parts of Guangzhou, but visibility did not necessarily translate into recognition. Quite the opposite: visibility could mean surveillance, suspicion, policing.

To throw money into the air under those conditions was therefore a peculiar act. It converted one kind of visibility into another.

And the money itself mattered.

Money is never only about economic value. I do not mean simply the cost of rent or the price of rice. I mean how money looks, how it feels, what it represents, and what happens to it as it moves. In Guangzhou, spraying RMB100 notes meant spraying red bills carrying Mao Zedong’s face. Mao became part of the performance—not because the people spraying necessarily admired him, but because his face made the note immediately legible as Chinese money: official, valuable, serious, real.

And then those serious red notes were made to fly.

They fluttered through blue strobe lights, stuck to sweaty foreheads, fell beneath shoes, and were scooped from dirty floors. The state’s official script of value was momentarily re-encoded through another economy of recognition. The note was still RMB100; nobody forgot its monetary value. But its value in that moment could not be reduced to what it would purchase.

Indeed, the apparent paradox of spraying was that the more money one gave away, the more value one might publicly acquire. Value appeared through loss. The note was not primarily there to buy something. It was there to be seen being spent.

This did not make spraying wasteful or irrational. Quite the opposite. It was often precise, calibrated, aesthetic. The colour mattered. The denomination mattered. The number of notes mattered. The manner in which they were released mattered. Money’s materiality—its colour, texture, movement—became part of the visual grammar of the performance.

Occasionally, even its economic authenticity became secondary. Some of the notes I encountered were fake—film props or ‘training notes’ bought cheaply in stacks. Yet fake notes could still do some of the performative work of real ones. As one Nigerian promoter told me: ‘It’s not about the face. It’s about the movement.’

That sentence stayed with me.

Spraying did not necessarily redistribute much wealth. Sometimes it did. But it circulated attention, reputation, recognition, aspiration. The physical currency became a medium through which other forms of value moved.

This was also why I sometimes found myself watching the Chinese bartenders and club managers rather than the performers. Some seemed amused; others looked suspicious or disdainful. Perhaps I was reading too much into those looks. But what struck me was the collision of different monetary scripts. Money was being used publicly, spectacularly, outside its ordinary transactional form. It was not passing discreetly from buyer to seller. It was being thrown, displayed, wasted and not wasted, converted into something social before everybody’s eyes.

Spraying was therefore never just about money, just as these clubs were never simply entertainment businesses. They were scenes: socially produced spaces in which diasporic identities were made and remade through performance.

Harry Elam and Kennell Jackson describe ‘black cultural traffic’ as the movement of Black cultural forms across time, space, communities, and markets. Such traffic does not follow clean lines from origin to destination. It mutates. It gets borrowed, translated, commodified, misrecognised, and remade. Spraying in Guangzhou was part of this traffic. It was not an Igbo or Yoruba practice simply lifted from Nigeria and deposited intact in southern China.

The music around it made that obvious. Performances layered pidgin and Yoruba praise lines over hip-hop gestures, rap flows, Afrobeats, R&B, and occasionally trap. Lagos, New York, Accra, Kinshasa, London, and Guangzhou could coexist in the same three-minute song. Blackness travelled through these spaces, but it never travelled untouched.

At times, performers appeared to be negotiating forms of Blackness already made recognisable through African-American popular culture. The singer in Guangzhou might draw upon hip-hop gestures that Chinese audiences could already identify as ‘Black’, even as Nigerian audiences heard something much more specific in his language, accent, references, and praise lines. There was therefore a double performance at work: an outwardly recognisable Blackness and a much more intimate set of diasporic cultural codes.

But these were not simply performances for Chinese spectators. Often, Chinese patrons were barely paying attention. The dancefloor constituted a community for itself. The nightclub temporarily became what Paul Gilroy might call a circulatory system: people, sound, style, money, memory, and aspiration moving through one another. Lagos and Luanda, Kinshasa and Kampala entered Cantonese alleyways and southern Chinese nightlife.

For a few hours, these small spaces offered a different organisation of social life. José Muñoz’s writing on performance and futurity is helpful here. Performance can give temporary form to realities that do not yet exist. Spraying could work in precisely that way. The performers were not necessarily successful musicians. The sprayers were not necessarily wealthy patrons. The clubs themselves might disappear the following week. But for a few minutes, these positions could be inhabited as if they were already real.

Illusion, I came to realise, was not necessarily the opposite of truth.

Spraying could be aspirational theatre. It rehearsed what might be.

Yet the more I became fascinated by this economy of recognition, the more obvious its exclusions became.

Not everyone got sprayed.

One night, I watched a Nigerian vocalist work the room with extraordinary confidence. His voice moved between Yoruba praise lines and pidgin ad-libs. The sprayers, seated near the DJ, began releasing folded RMB100 notes in a steady rhythm. Bills landed on the singer’s shoulders, clung to his sweaty neck, dropped to the floor, and were scooped up by staff.

Behind him, two women danced in sync. Their movements were precise, athletic, electric. They held the rhythm, lifted the mood, and maintained the crowd’s attention when the singer stopped to drink water.

Not a single note went their way.

When the show ended, the singer collected the money. The women packed their things and left.

This was not an exception. It was the rule.

Spraying created visibility, but it created it selectively. It cast some bodies into the light and left others in shadow. Men overwhelmingly sprayed other men. Women danced, served drinks, worked in the clubs, and occasionally sang, but they rarely participated equally in this kinaesthetic economy of praise. Recognition circulated along patriarchal lines.

The same was true of nationality and ethnicity. Sprayers did not spray just anyone. Nigerian performers dominated many of these scenes, not simply because of numbers, but because they increasingly set their aesthetic terms. Artists from Ghana, Uganda, Congo, Sierra Leone, or elsewhere could participate, but they did not necessarily receive recognition in the same way.

One Congolese attendee complained to me that the clubs were ‘too Igbo’. A performer from Sierra Leone joked that perhaps he should start ‘pretending to be Yoruba’ so that somebody would spray him.

Pan-African unity could be proclaimed from the stage, but the dancefloor told a more complicated story.

There were hierarchies of legitimacy, familiarity, nationality, masculinity, class, and ‘realness’. Those who did not know how to spray—or when to spray, or whom to spray—could be marked as outsiders even within an ostensibly African space. A cultural practice capable of producing belonging could simultaneously become a mechanism of gatekeeping.

Spraying also generated obligations. A performer might be expected to praise the sprayer by name, acknowledge him publicly, offer a shout-out, or reciprocate later. Generosity and power were difficult to separate. To spray someone could be joyful, but it could also assert seniority, masculinity, wealth, territorial belonging, or control. Some people spent beyond what they could afford for reputation. Others deliberately held back because they did not want to appear to be showing off.

These contradictions mattered. They prevented me from romanticising the scene as some uncomplicated space of diasporic resistance. The African diaspora in Guangzhou was never a unified bloc. It was fractured by nationality, ethnicity, gender, class, immigration status, and aspiration. Spraying did not erase those differences. It sometimes made them extraordinarily visible.

Yet perhaps that was precisely why the gesture interested me. Spraying condensed so much into something apparently so small: a flick of the wrist, a note released into the air.

The music eventually stopped. The lights came back on. The bills were collected from the floor. But the performance did not necessarily end there.

In the days that followed, these nights travelled through retelling, photographs, phone videos, WeChat posts, WhatsApp groups, and calls home. A shaky clip recorded in Guangzhou might reach Lagos, Accra, or Kampala. Someone would tag the sprayer. Somebody else would mention the artist. The moment became a story, and the story acquired value.

Performance survived through circulation.

For people elsewhere, such images could offer glimpses of diasporic possibility. ‘Abroad’ appeared not only as hardship, migration bureaucracy, work, and hustle, but also as rhythm, friendship, stage, style, and spectacle. The images distorted diasporic life, certainly. But they also animated it.

For those who had actually been there, they could do something more intimate. One sprayer told me he replayed videos of himself throwing bills ‘to remember who I was that night’. A performer told me she watched footage not to look at herself, but to see who had been watching her.

I began to think of these recordings as archives of recognition. They preserved not simply what happened but evidence of having been there, having been watched, having briefly mattered within a scene. And as the images circulated, the performance could begin to anticipate its own mediation. Who was filming? Who would see the clip later? Was the spray directed towards the performer, the people in the room, the camera, or some imagined audience elsewhere?

The gesture travelled because diaspora travelled. Memory travelled. Blackness travelled. And the meanings attached to the gesture changed as they moved.

Ten years have now passed since those nights in Guangzhou—nights thick with pidgin hooks, red bills, cigarette smoke, and the thrill of being seen. Much has changed. The pandemic closed borders and shuttered clubs. Visa regimes tightened. The African presence in southern China, once so palpable, has thinned considerably. Many of those I met moved on: to Canada, the UAE, Lagos, or somewhere else. Some stayed. Some disappeared from my field of vision. The scene, as I knew it, no longer exists.

This is not a chronicle of that disappearance, nor a eulogy. It is a reflection on a gesture—spraying—and on what that gesture briefly made possible. Through spraying, I came to understand something about how Blackness, value, aspiration, memory, and recognition moved through bodies, currencies, sounds, and performances. In Guangzhou’s Nigerian music scenes, spraying was not simply flamboyance or excess. It was an embodied claim to presence in a city where African lives could be intensely visible and yet remain strangely peripheral.

What I have tried to follow here are the circuits through which meaning travelled: not only cash crossing a dancefloor, but sound crossing oceans, gestures crossing generations, and memories sedimenting across years.

Spraying was never just about the bills, just as African presence in Guangzhou was never only about trade.

That seems particularly important to me now. Much of what has been written about Africans in Guangzhou—and about Africa-China relations more broadly—has understandably been organised around trade, migration, diplomacy, investment, entrepreneurship, and state policy. These things matter. I spent years researching many of them myself. But their dominance can also make the market and the nation-state appear to be the natural containers through which African life in China becomes intelligible. They are not.

Frida Ekotto has argued, in a formulation that has stayed with me, that art creates new epistemologies: new ways of understanding the world, while also sustaining spirit and making hope possible. Unless Africa-China relations are opened to art, she suggests, the conversation risks remaining trapped within the language of economics and imperialism. I would extend that provocation beyond art itself. We also need to take seriously nightlife, pleasure, friendship, humour, desire, performance, style, memory, gender, music, boredom, aspiration—in other words, the messy textures of the everyday. Otherwise, we risk reproducing a kind of methodological nationalism inherited from older geopolitical and Cold War frameworks, in which Africans and Chinese encounter one another primarily as representatives of economies, markets, states, and continents.

The men throwing Maos across those dancefloors were traders, students, migrants, entrepreneurs, overstayers, performers, hustlers. But they were also people going out on a Friday night. They were listening to music, showing off, flirting, drinking bad whisky, remembering home, imagining futures, negotiating hierarchies, making friends, performing masculinity, arguing about Nigeria, and trying to be seen.

Looking back, I realise that I had stumbled into a fleeting ethnographic window. But within that fleetingness lay something durable: a glimpse of how diaspora feels in motion, how recognition can be choreographed and withheld, and how apparently ordinary—or extravagant—gestures sediment into the stories we tell about where we have been.

As I left one of those clubs in Guangzhou for the last time, a man that I had seen many time but never spoke to stopped me outside.

‘You still writing about us?’ he asked, smiling.

I nodded.

He laughed.

‘Tell them we no poor o. We dey live.’