BLACK SOCIAL HISTORY : AFRO-NORWEGIAN ARE BLACK PEOPLE OF AFRICAN DESCENT FIREST AND SECOND GENERATION AFRO-NORWEGIAN :

                BLACK               SOCIAL             HISTORY                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            African immigration to Norway refers to immigrants to Norway from Africa. An estimated 88 764 people in Norway are either first or second generation immigrants from Africa.

North and Northeast Africa.

Immigration from countries in Africa to Norway increased slightly from the end of the 1980s, but grew markedly from 2000 onwards. The increase is owed mainly to a rise in the number of immigrants from North and Northeast Africa, including Somalia (25,496), Morocco (8,058), Eritrea (5,789) and Ethiopia (5,156).

Other Africans

Compared to North and Northeast Africans, the percentage of Africans from other regions as a proportion of recent immigrants to Norway from Africa is relatively low.

Most other Africans in Norway come from West Africa, especially Ghana (2,034), Gambia (1,409) and Nigeria (1,247). There is also a sizeable population of Africans from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (2,050).

In the perfect land, could there be self-doubt? The sad story and violent death of Benjamin Hermansen suggest that there could.

For many years Norway, long on forests and fiords, short on people, has peered down from an aerie of virtuous prosperity, offering praise, cash and counsel to those less blessed with social cohesion and oil riches. ''It is typically Norwegian to be good,'' a former prime minister, Gro Harlem Brundtland, once remarked famously. This year the United Nations Human Development Report, indeed, ranked this Scandanavian nation as the best place in the world to live.

But the case of Benjamin Hermansen, a 15-year-old African-Norwegian boy who was stabbed to death on a sidewalk by neo-Nazis, has offered a disturbing challenge to this tranquil country's vision of itself, raising the question of what it means to be Norwegian and European in a demographically changed continent. The questioning has intensified since the trial of those accused of being his killers began last month. ''People realized that Norway is not the country they thought,'' said Nadeem Butt, the director of the government-financed Center Against Racism. ''Most of the people thought racism is not a problem. That has changed quite radically. People do understand now that this is a problem.''