Factors Underlying Return Migration Decisions among Nigerian Victims of 2019 Xenophobic Violence in South Africa

Studies on xenophobic violence have mainly focused on their causes and effects, but have yet to probe how victimisation experiences of xenophobia trigger migration intentions and actual practices. In a balance of tales, I examine how families contributed to staying put/return decisions by Nigerian migrants in South Africa following the September 2019 xenophobic violence. The study asks: to what extent do family facilitate and/or contribute to the decision to return? And how do return strategies unveil the centrality of family in taking migration decisions? Data emerged through online interviews with Nigerian immigrants in South Africa who stayed put, and six family members in Nigeria were reached through snowball sampling. This was supplemented with secondary interviews conducted with Nigerian returnees in three National newspapers (The Punch, Vanguard, Nigerian Tribune and The Nation newspapers). Findings show the centrality of family in both migration intentions, staying-put, and the actual practices of Nigerian victims of xenophobia in South Africa.

World-Making at the Margins

Transnational social networks are vital to West Africans in managing relationships but also in ascertaining viable ways of being and belonging in the diaspora. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in the metropolitan area of Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain, this paper examines the ‘Baay Faal paradox’ to address sites of contention in West African endeavours to bind a sense of self to transnational social networks. I propose urban world-making practices that sustain connections to transnational social networks from the margins of these relations signal what I am calling ‘affective tethering.’ The term ‘tethering’ in my analysis foregrounds an imagined distance between normative models of practice and purported deviations that result in precarious, unstable and patchy connections to transnational social networks. This approach sheds light on the complex relationship between a person’s sense of self and the transnational social networks that inform ideas of personhood in the context of global mobility and settlement.

Social Mobility and Spatialised Slowness

This article analyses the individual aspirations of Sierra Leoneans living in France in relation to normative expectations related to mobility. It argues that aspirations and expectations are expressions of spatialized forms of social becoming situated within broader norms concerning socially-valued forms of mobility. Aspirations to social mobility link up distinct places in a fragmented transnational field, transform them as value-laden spaces, and inform migrants’ assessment of their own trajectory within them. Individual aspirations are formulated with regard to spaces migrants have left, spaces they live in, and spaces they would like to reach. Sierra Leoneans living in France have reached a ‘destination country’ and yet, do not experience their situation as the ideal migratory path. Their achievements are measured with regard to expectations of social mobility as imagined in English-speaking spaces, thereby reinforcing the narrative of mobility and the persistence of local idioms of ‘success’ based on historical transnational connections.

Introduction

This section introduction explores the imaginative dimension of mobility in two West African countries, Sierra Leone and Liberia. Building on literature that highlights the existential dimension of movement and migration, the authors explore three socio-cultural patterns that inform representations of im/mobility: historical continuities and the longue-durée perspective on mobile practices, the association of geographical mobility with social betterment, and the interaction between local aspirations and the imaginary of global modernity. The three individual contributions by Bedert, Enria and Ménard bring out the work of imagination attached to im/mobility both in ‘home’ countries and diaspora communities, and underline the continuity of representations and practices between spaces that are part of specific transnational social fields.

African Traditional Religion and Trans-Saharan Migration from Ghana

This paper interrogates an unexamined component of the religion-migration nexus in Ghana. Using African Traditional Religion as a case in point, the paper examines the function shrines play in sustaining youth migration to Libya and across the Mediterranean to Europe. The paper relies on interviews and fieldtrips to migrant sending communities in the Nkoranza area of the Bono East region of central Ghana. The paper gives an account of the daily realities of prospective migrants, returnees and their families. Among other key findings, it is shown that there is an intricate connection between youth migration, the family system and the deities in sustaining the trans-Saharan migration. This migration, we observe, has become a livelihood strategy, the perpetuation of which reassures the survival of not only the people, but their gods as well.

‘Why Are You Not Crying?’

This article analyses the ways in which young people with a migration background develop their own transnational engagement with their or their parents’ country of origin. Drawing on 17-months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in the Netherlands and Ghana, we add to the emerging literature on ‘return’ mobilities by analysing young people of Ghanaian background, irrespective of whether they or their parents migrated, and by looking at an under-researched form of mobility that they engage in: that of attending funerals in Ghana. Funerals occupy a central role in Ghanaian society, and thus allow young people to gain knowledge about cultural practices, both by observing and embodying them, and develop their relationships with people in Ghana. Rather than reproducing their parents’ transnational attachments, young people recreate these according to their own needs, which involves dealing with tensions. Peer relationships—which have largely gone unnoticed in transnational migration studies—play a significant role in this process.

Temple Run

Amongst young people in Freetown, ‘Temple Run’, a mobile phone game that requires the player to run for their life across treacherous obstacles, is used as code for the perilous journey that an increasing number of young Sierra Leoneans made to Europe via Libya. Through ethnographic accounts, the article discusses the role of dreams of migration in Freetown youths’ articulations of a distinctive political imagination through which they at once critique and re-imagine their relation to the state and assert their identity and expectations as Sierra Leonean citizens. These narratives are rooted in everyday experiences of neglect and state violence but also embody a long history in the region of intersections between migration, insecurity, and contestations of power. Exploring migration as discourse, separate from practice, the paper shows how migration imageries become incorporated into expressions of presence rather than simply longings for absence and into normative ideas of citizenship.

“We Are Suffering Here”

Liberia is a state built on a history of migration. From the transatlantic slave trade to its contemporary generation of transnational citizens, images of elsewhere have always informed this West African country’s local and national discussions of integration and exclusion. This paper shows how historical imaginations and representations of ‘here’ and ‘there’, of ‘suffering’ and ‘escape’, inform contemporary discourses of belonging in Liberia. I argue that the imagination of civilisation – kwii – and distinction plays an important role in the ways distance and mobility are perceived and articulated, both from a physical point of view and a moral-social point of view, at transnational and local levels. Rather than being merely tied to a national elite, the imagination of mobility is, I demonstrate, linked to an ethos of suffering articulated at all levels of society, informed by the experience of structural violence and crises over time.