Written by Melissa Karen Sances
Photos by Nikki Gardner Photography

Sponsored by Valley Home Improvement

Published in Northampton Living (April 2023)

Are you teaching today? It was one of the first English phrases she understood, even though she was the new girl in Zumba class. No one knew that Aimee Salmon had never danced, that growing up in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, moving just wasn’t on her radar.

Silently, she would answer her admirers in French. Bien sur que non! Of course she wasn’t teaching. She’d shake her head. But it didn’t matter. After class she’d turn around to eager dancers. “We were following you from behind,” they would say. “Do you want to go for coffee?”

Over le café and through Google Translate, Salmon started to make friends – and to consider actually teaching. “What made me become an instructor was the joy,” she says. “Even though they don’t understand you, they’re smiling back at you.” As exercise became her passion, spreading joy became her mission.

Nine years later, she radiates it – from her glorious Afro to her calves that kick butt. The owner of Africana Dance & Fitness and the Africana Store, she’s also a Frances Perkins scholar at Mount Holyoke College, where she double majors in psychology and education and minors in entrepreneurship. Next month, at the convocation ceremony, she’ll stand with her fellow scholars and sport a sash in their exclusive color: purple. It will match her hair.

As a child, Salmon didn’t envision who she might like to be, or what she might like to do. Sometimes she went barefoot or had to wear dirty clothes. Her father left her mother with 7 children to provide for in a country rife with turmoil. She watched her mom double down, to take on extra shifts as a midwife; and in her steadiness, there was a hint of possibility. “She raised us with the value of no matter what happens in life, you can make choices,” Salmon says.

Still, reality was grim. “There’s war all around you, you see how women are treated. I never thought I would go to America, or ‘One day I’m going to Northampton.’ Sometimes things happen in my life. I don’t know, maybe I’m dreaming.”

One thing that happened in her life was meeting her future husband, an American working at HEAL Africa Hospital developing a patient data system for a pediatric AIDS clinic. When he wasn’t at work, Christian Salmon studied French at her brother’s language school. One day her uncle, a karate instructor who’d taught her self-defense in the past, suggested she and Christian take a martial arts class together. Soon they were engaged, and she was applying for a visa to join him in Massachusetts, where he was a professor at Western New England University.

When Salmon arrived in Northampton in 2014 she realized that while her fiancé was at school, she would be alone in a country where she didn’t speak the language. And one other thing: She was pregnant with his son. It was overwhelming and it was lonely, but it was a beginning.   
Salmon enrolled in classes at the International Language Institute and asked Christian to speak English only. She discovered the Hampshire County YMCA. And after C.J. was born, she enrolled at Greenfield Community College.

“I’m kind of a doer,” she says with a laugh.

Then came the visions. To be on the board of the language institute. To become a certified group exercise instructor. To transfer to Mount Holyoke. To own her own business. “Sometimes visions can be scary,” she says. “You want them to stop.” But they only got bigger, and then they got bigger than her.

Fitness became a means to build a local and remote community. Her store allowed her to support African artists and to educate patrons. And, especially, to celebrate her culture. “Should I cry that I grew up in the Congo?” she asks. “No. I’m going to share Black dolls, Black joy, and the joy of Africa.”