Migration and Inequality: African Diasporas in Germany, South Africa and India

Abstract

The paper will do three things: firstly, trace the social/economic dislocations unleashed on the African working and cognate classes by neoliberal interventions in the form of the Economic Recovery Programme (ERP) and the Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) respectively; secondly, examine the resultant outward movements within and outside the African continent by these classes; and finally explore the potential of an emerging transnational solidarity which is not restricted to, but includes the traditional working class. These will be done through the prism of the lived experiences and networks created by “subaltern” African migrants in Germany, India and South Africa. The paper contends that as the neoliberal regime of accumulation takes hold of the African continent from the 1980s onward, a counter movement of subalterns’ exercises its agency, and migration is one of the ways in which this is activated. Using Hardt and Negri’s metaphor of the multitude, we argue that mobile dispossessed Africans (amongst other group subaltern group), are challenging their marginalization by reconfiguring demographics in the countries under study (Germany, India and South Africa), and thus making demands on a social and economic architecture that increasingly externalizes them – as exemplified by Europe and its instrument of ‘Othering’ – Frontex. We will then engage and problematize the linear view of a teleological human evolution with globalization at its summit: undress the ugly underbelly of neoliberal economic violence in Africa beginning in the 1980s; and Casting a gaze on its attendant social and spatial estrangement. The aim is to empirically engage (unlike the dominant trend of theorizing) the other side of the rosy picture, but also to encounter and highlight the agency of ordinary people who are the ‘losers’ in the global accumulation regime. In doing this, we will encounter African migrants in South Africa who are on one hand, remaking and challenging the closed notion and operationalization of national boundary/identity by laying a claim to a society in which they live and work, and on the other hand, unsettling a narrow, elitist evocation of globalization and pan-Africanism; from Germany we will follow the trajectory of Africans who are asserting their belonging in the face of an expanding de facto alliance of gate keepers spanning far right formations to mainstream political parties (including the ruling Christian Democratic Party (CDU); and in India we will explore a growing but largely ignored African Diaspora which is organically acting out South-South cooperation divorced from, and even counter to the halfhearted governmental rhetoric of South-South cooperation. A common thread running through all these are the links that these migrants create: (1) amongst themselves as Africans; (2) with local subalterns with whom they are materially allied as they attempt to navigate a deeply unequal and classist world; (3) and finally the remaking of the host environment demographically and culturally. We will conclude by pitching camp with globalization; but a qualitatively different form of globalization – one that is grounded in the experiences, aspirations, solidarities and eventual self-liberation of ordinary people from the bosses that currently drive neoliberal globalization. This paper will do two things to existing scholarship: It will “dynamize”, humanize, and complicate the lived reality of African Migrants, (like every human), and study their reality comparatively. In doing this we attempt to make a positive critique of existing methodological approaches to the study of non-western forms of migration; by departing from the hyper rational-choice undertones of western migration studies while not ignoring the significance of economics in the migration equation.

Data is both primary and secondary: A set of interviews conducted with African Migrants in Cape Town South Africa, Frankfurt Germany and Delhi India will be the primary source; seminal and relevant literature relating to the study will also be relied upon.

The author would like to thank the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung for financial support.