Performing conviviality in diverse and precarious urban spaces: everyday experiences of Nigerian migrant entrepreneurs in Downtown, Harare

ABSTRACT

The article explores how the notions of place, belonging, home and identities are relationally constructed through convivial encounters in diverse and precarious spaces. Drawing on “convivial” ethnographic study among Nigerian migrant entrepreneurs in Downtown, Harare, the article shows that while anti-immigrant rhetoric and nationalistic attitudes characterize migrants’ quotidian lives, both migrants and Zimbabwean nationals often accommodate these tensions, and identify mutual commonalities based on relational ontologies of “togetherness”. Thus, convivial encounters act to reposition Downtown from being an exclusionary space to a more accommodating space where difference is routine, and regularly, often amicably negotiated in prosaic social interactions. By exploring these dynamics, the article has contributed to scholarship on urban research that develops concepts such as “light-touch relations”, “niceness” or “kindness”, to articulate how diversity and exclusion can be breached. The article also challenges the Eurocentric bias that has dominated debates on conviviality from its inception.

KEYWORDS:

• Conviviality
• diversity
• Downtown
• encounters
• Harare

Acknowledgements

I am deeply grateful to the African Academy for Migration Research (AAMR) for generously funding this research through their Postdoctoral Completion Grant Fellowship. I also want to thank anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments on various drafts of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 A programme implemented by the government of Zimbabwe in the early 2000s to redistribute land from the White commercial farmers to the highly marginalised Black populace.

2 Native land.

3 For example in the morning of Monday 7 February 2011 a group of ravaging ZANU PF youths singing revolutionary songs descended on Downtown. This was an enormous mission, carried out in a single stroke without any warning. They targeted Nigerian owned businesses at Gulf complex and adjacent streets, in the process besieging their businesses in a classic xenophobic style. Although this happened some years back, it is at most an incident that remains indelibly engraved in migrants’ collective consciousness.

4 The New Yam Festival is an Igbo festival which marks the beginning and end of a farming season. It is done to thank the gods for life, wellbeing and accomplishments.

5 All names used in this article are pseudonyms for privacy protection purposes.

6 A local dialect.

7 For example, in 2008, Zimbabwe’s former President Robert Mugabe signed into law the Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment Bill. This bill stipulates that locals are the sole custodians of the country’s resources and opportunities, and therefore, justified taking over foreign owned businesses and handing them over to locals.

8 ZANU PF is a political party that has ruled Zimbabwe since independence in 1980.

9 A Black market is an illegal economic activity that takes place outside government-sanctioned channels.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by African Academy for Migration Research.