Fiction and reality of mobility in Africa

Abstract

This article draws on rich ethnographies and ethnographic fiction depicting mobile Africans and their relationships to the places and people they encounter to argue that mobility is more appropriately studied as an emotional, relational and social phenomenon as reflected in the complexities, contradictions and messiness of the everyday realities of encounters informed by physical and social mobility. The current dominant approach to studying and relating to mobile Africans is problematic. Nationals, citizens and locals in communities targeted by African mobility are instinctively expected to close ranks and fight off the influx of barbarians who do not quite belong and must be ‘exorcised’ so that ‘insiders’ do not lose out to this particular breed of ‘strangers’, ‘outsiders’ or ‘demons’, perceived to bode little but inconvenience and savagery. If and when allowed in, emphasis is on the needs, priorities and convenience of their reluctant hosts, who tend to go for the wealthy, the highly professionally skilled, the culturally bleached and Hottentot Venuses of the academy, even at the risk of accusations of capital flight and brain drain. The article demonstrates how to marry ethnography and fiction to study African mobility not only as a ‘collection of logical bones and flesh’ but also as ‘emotional beings’. It calls for conceptual flexibility and ethnographic empirical substantiation, and challenges social scientists to look beyond academic sources for ethnographies and accounts of how a deep, flexible and nuanced understanding of mobility and interconnections in Africa play out in different communities, states and regions of a world permanently on the move.

Keywords::

• citizenship
• mobility
• migration
• Africa
• ethnography
• fiction

Notes

^1. A 1988 documentary film by Dennis O'Rourke.

^2. See ‘First Contact’, a 1983 ‘classic film of cultural confrontation’ by Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson.

^3. Released in 2010.

^4. See ‘Tales from the jungle: Margaret Mead and the Samoans’, BBC FOUR Autumn 2006, available from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = cOa3ftAKnzo [accessed 10 June 2012].

^5. See ‘Secrets of the Tribe’, by José Padilha (2010) – a documentary film critical of unethical practices and abuses of research the Yanomami Indians in the 1960s and 1970s by anthropologists.

^6. “Tales from the Jungle: Malinowski and the Trobriand Islanders,” BBC FOUR Autumn 2006, available from: http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2006/09_september/12/four_anthropology.shtml#malinowski [accessed 18 April 2012].

^7. ‘Tales from the Jungle: Margaret Mead and the Samoans’, BBC FOUR Autumn 2006., available from: http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2006/09_september/12/four_anthropology.shtml#margaret [accessed 19 April 2012].

^8. ‘Tom Harrison: The Barefoot Anthropologist, BBC FOUR Autumn 2006 documentary narrated by Sir David Attenborough, available from: http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2006/09_september/12/four_anthropology.shtml#harrisson [accessed 18 April 2012].

^9. See French President Nicolas Sarkozy's provocative speech in Dakar on 26 July 2007 for his idea of ‘immigration choisie’ – ‘chosen and not endured immigration’ – and the reactions it elicited from African and Africanist intellectuals, the first of which by Achille Mbembe can be accessed from the following link: http://www.ldh-toulon.net/spip.php?article2057 [accessed 20 April 2012].

^10. See ‘From brain drain to brain gain’, in Education Today (the newsletter of UNESCO's Education Sector), No. 18, October 2006–January 2007, pp. 4–7; see also ‘Drain or gain? Poor countries can end up benefiting when their brightest citizens emigrate’, in The Economist, available from: http://www.economist.com/node/18741763 [accessed 17 July 2012].

^11. See http://www.sowetanlive.co.za/incoming/2012/03/28/of-refugee-and-migrant-premiers [accessed 19 April 2012]; see also ‘The Tweet that Caused a Storm’, Sunday Independent, 25 March 2012, p. 18.

^12. This is a commonly used term in South Africa and Botswana. In the Botswana context, the term makwerekwere is generally used in a derogatory manner to refer to African immigrants from countries suffering an economic downturn. Stereotypically, the more dark-skinned a local is, the more likely she/he is to pass for a makwerekwere, especially if s/he speaks Setswana. BaKalanga, who tend to be more dark-skinned, are also more at risk of being labelled makwerekwere. In general, the le-/ma- (sing./pl.) prefix in Setswana designates someone as foreign, different or from outside the community. It is not used just for ethnic groups but for any group or profession that seems to be a bit different from the average.

^13. While entanglement suggests the possibility of disentanglement, manglement points to a more intricate process of osmotic interconnection in which disentanglements are not easy options.

^14. See http://www.commonwealthfoundation.com/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket = CVtkREuw1Vk%3d&tabid = 245 [accessed 16 April 2012].