Written by Phoebe Owor
Kiki’s Delivery Service is one of my favourite Studio Ghibli films – something about being thirteen and impulsively deciding to move away from home resonates with the story of my African girlhood. Replace thirteen with seven, and we’ll start at the beginning.
Apparently, I ‘begged’ to go to boarding school when I was seven, ever in a rush to ‘grow up’, and I wound up in a small British international school just outside Naivasha in Kenya. I lived out my days as a renowned mud cake maker, a mother in every ‘family’ game played on fallen trees, and occasionally as a priest, marrying friends of all genders in the sacred enclaves of leafy ‘shacks’.
When I was thirteen, my ambitions grew, and I boldly asked to study in South Africa. My motivation? My childhood best friend was going. My parents’ response? Apply.
And suddenly I was in the world, I was part of it, in an economy seat headed to Johannesburg then Port Elizabeth. My Gigi was a girl just like me, named Céline. Together, we began crafting our identities as global citizens, flying across the continent, confident and emboldened by the new visa stamps in our Ugandan passports.
Ten years later, I’m twenty-three and sitting in Schiphol Airport in the Netherlands, flying home to see the family I haven’t seen in a year. I’m thinking about the return journey and what that means. I’m thinking about that funny concept called home and the continent where the Winter is done.
More fundamentally, I’m reflecting on what it means to live life with a community scattered across God’s Green Earth. How it took only a generation for my family to get here. And what it means for future families, particularly African families, to exist transnationally.
While I love to contemplate big ideas and issues, as the new year begins, I’d love to return to the intimacy, particularly the domestic intimacies of everyday life and Becoming to see how they are affected by social processes like migration. I am particularly interested in migration between Africa and Europe… as an African in Europe. But also transnational migrations on the continent Herself, to reflect my adolescence and those of many of my friends.
The essay will unpack in three acts, dear friend:
1. Migration as a Story of Desire: brief macro and micro reflections on migration and what has moved us.
2. Migration as an Affective Circuit: care as the new, gendered surplus value and the remittance as a contemporary shapeshifter.
3. Tales of Global Citizenship: stories of long-distance African intimacies, reciprocity gone sour, and reflections on transnational friendships forged studying abroad/ at UWCs.
Welcome to my ex-centric site, today she is maroon and swirling, with memories from recent and old journeys, external and otherwise. In writing this, I speak from that liminal space of freedom in transit airports, with that familiar feeling that I will not be the same as I was when I return.
Migration: A Story of Desire and Affective Circuits
There are many ways to think about the vast history of migration in Africa – from macro level migrations and mobility within the continent and within countries themselves (e.g., climate and conflict induced migration), to forced enslavement, recruitment into colonial armies, and subsequent reconstruction efforts. On a more micro level, there is also studying abroad, forming a diaspora, migrating for opportunity, for love and for family.
There are a few common factors that have ‘moved’ us, so to speak. But the economy and our ecology feel central. I will focus on the former.
As Kavita Datta (2012) tells us, there is no single story of migration and migrants, but understanding migrants and their money can be crucial in understanding changing financial landscapes and exclusion in Europe.[1]
Migration can be a livelihood strategy used by low-income households to secure a financially stable future through remittances (transfer of money sent by migrants to their families in their home countries). Migration can be an expression of desire – for development, for opportunity, for love. It is a structurally complex act of nature, with migrants depending on the west and the west quintessentially depending on migrants as assets, particularly in the global care chain.
While this analysis will focus mostly on personal experiences of migration, it is important to note the historical and structural underbelly of travel.
Post World War Europe addressed its labour shortages and reconstruction efforts through ‘guest workers’, often from former colonies. There are entire generations of Commonwealth citizens, like the Windrush generation, which settled in Britain between 1948 and 1971.
Such recruitment drives were intensified by neoliberal structural adjustment policies which reinforced migrancy by slicing household income and social safety nets for recently decolonised Africans. Access to student loans, well-funded public hospitals, and a proactive public sector, essentially vanished in countries like Uganda in 1987. By economic design, decolonised African governments and citizens came to accept a new form of colonialism via debt and desire – a reinvented, mutable and deathless connection between Africa and her torturers.
Generations later, I too felt the seduction of this desire. An almost half-baked desire to accept the bureaucratic humiliation ritual of visa applications for whatever scraps of opportunity remain in the west. Yet, I have never imagined studying in my own country, or getting access to a student loan, or using high quality, free public healthcare – even in the west– almost out of disbelief.
A strangely rooted fear of using resources I do not feel entitled to, despite monthly national insurance contributions and exorbitant national health surcharge payments that accompany every visa application I make.
All of this to say, for decades in the past and likely decades into the future, many Africans could rarely afford not to go labour or study in other countries.
On a more intimate level, there is also an element of prestige attached to migration. Movement is a social currency. To study abroad is to have that one ultimate blessing in the eyes of the African Middle Classes – a quality education.
A quality education does not merely allow Africans in migration to survive, but to thrive. To have one’s parents invest in one’s education is a sacred love letter between African children and their parents. The blessing of school fees and the sacrifices it demands.
In this nexus of love and literacy, another Other emerges. An Other that can feel like deep gratitude and abundance, but also guilt, self-minimisation, and exclusion.
To cite Jean-François Bayart (2000), we can think of this other as extraversion, in which Africa’s ‘elites’ actively participate in processes that deepen Africa’s dependent position in the global system.[2] Largely because it is in their interest to do so.
It is in the African elites’ best interest to study and work abroad, to drift as ‘free riders’ in the interstices of the international system, even with the knowledge that their very existence reproduces Africa’s marginal position in that same system.
The proponents of extraversion meaningfully complicate the story we tell ourselves about migration, but also underplay the structural constraints discussed above. Bayart’s theory also does not play attention to the fundamental dimension of care that underlies migration.
Hence, Jennifer Cole and Christian Groes (2016) come in.
Affective Circuits: Care as the New Surplus
In their introduction to Affective Circuits and Social Regeneration in African Migration, Cole and Groes examine African migration to Europe by examining how social networks and broader social and cultural formations are negotiated by migrants themselves.[3]
I love the concept of the affective circuit – the fluid social formations that emerge from the sending, withholding, and receiving of goods, ideas, bodies and emotions. I feel like it captures the bidirectional movements of migration – money, dried food, medicine, phone calls – but also the nuance of connection and disconnection, of conflict, regulation, blockage.
As an anthropologist, exchange will always make me recall Mauss. The affective circuit evokes obligation – the exchange of immaterial gifts, like a loved one’s voice on a call and childhood memories of care, morphs into unspoken obligations to reciprocate through immaterial and/or material means.
The remittance.
From my experience, the form of the remittance shapeshifts. It can be time and perpetual availability for phone calls when abroad or the gendered division of reproductive labour upon arrival home. It can be silence. It can be care.
Care is the new surplus value siphoned from poorer countries to wealthier ones, as Arlie Hoschschild explains, and the global care chain depends on the un/underpaid labour of migrant women.[4] With this understanding, the affective circuit also accounts for a new form of extractionism – emotional labour.
From a Marxist feminist perspective, the ethics of care become complicated and ubiquitous. While I will admit that care is not only about extraction and can enhance mutuality, relationality and reciprocity, I also believe we should avoid sentimentality when describing care. These relations can place undue pressure on migrants, intensify competition and inequality, and construct ‘new’ forms of relationships for entire families.
More concerningly, the economics of care displace what ought to be state functions. Structural issues like access to healthcare and education are transposed onto migrants through the market logic of personal responsibility and competition. While migrants navigate multiple exclusions – visa applications, and divisive competition for opportunities – they also contribute to social reproduction and local economic development through remittances provided to financially support their families.
The proposed affective circuit framework makes multiple important contributions to immigration discourse.
It offers an alternative to the narrative of crisis and suffering that dominates contemporary depictions. It frames African migration to Europe as a means to an end, one that often exceeds Europe as a geographic space and set of opportunities and ideals. It introduces the dimension of morality and obligations to kin back home. It pays attention to how migrants honour, resist, and redefine inherited notions of social obligations as they reproduce, contest, and transform their social relations and cultural norms through different kinds of exchange.
It also importantly provides a means of conceptualising migration not as a one-way phenomenon from the perspective of nation-states, but as an ongoing process that involves many kinds of exchanges between multiple cultural, economic, and political contexts simultaneously.
I will allow the notion of the affective circuit to colour my analysis for this essay – to discuss how the exchange of money, goods, ideas, and people play a pivotal role in how transnational Africans negotiate their identities, regenerate their connections with their community at back home, and produce new forms of belonging.
Like all things, the circuit is laden with gendered emplacement, neoliberal capitalism (hello Miss World Bank and IMF), and stringent immigration regulations.
But we will not be discouraged.
Yellow fever card and passport in hand, let’s examine how transnational exchanges create and sustain cultural cosmologies and contribute to the spatiotemporal extension of persons. Or something like that.
Global Citizens Near and Far! Rebels without ‘Homes’
Social theory makes most sense when applied to real people, so I want to discuss two ethnographies. One by Dinah Hannaford (2018) which centres Senegalese migrants and explores long distance marriages.[5] Another by Primus Tazanu (2018) which centres distrust among Cameroonians in the context of healthcare remittances.
After discussing these, I will also flesh out a case study from my experience studying at a United World College (UWC) in eSwatini – paying attention to technology facilitated long distance, platonic relationships during the Covid-19 pandemic, and the Parakin relations it created after graduation.
Long Distance African Intimacies between Senegal and Italy: Co-Presence and the Disappearance of the Phone Centre
How do we practice kinship across borders?
The answer offered by Hannaford is communication and money – what she terms the ‘co-presence’ of modern transnational families. A spectre of presence in absence.
But what happens when forms of communication radically change?
This is where our first ethnography begins.
We join Hannaford in 2004, when transnational couples largely communicated through emails and phone calls at phone centres.
The phone centre was a ‘mainstay in transnational marriages’,[6] located in immigrant neighbourhoods and often accompanied by money wiring services like Western Union. Through these calls, partners were able to briefly catch up, but unable to have long, intimate conversations. During Hannaford’s fieldwork spanning 2004 to 2018, forms of communication used by transnational Senegalese families evolved. Namely with the introduction of new technology and WiFi into private homes.
We are introduced to Mariama. Mariama lives with her mother, sister-in-law, and two children in a house in Senegal built by her husband Serigne. Serigne lives outside Milan as an economic migrant.
By 2018, the couple communicated over the phone and through Skype. The technology compressed time and space in a way that transcended letters and the phone centre. It created space for transconnectivity and temporarily suspended their emotional distress from physical separation.
At the same time, Mariama appreciated traditional communication – like letters – which were carefully crafted, demonstrated love and devotion, and could be re-read to amplify emotional connections between transnational partners.
To Serigne, while the technology allowed him to see and hear his children grow up, the demands for communication became intense, immediate, and mundane, rather than special and sentimental. In fact, according to Hannaford, both migrant husbands and non-migrant wives came to view these communications as a burden, rather than a treat.
“The quotidian and disposable nature of these communications make them less likely to bring couples emotionally closer together than would more enduring, tangible or effortful exchanges.[7]”
Perpetual availability brought with it perpetual surveillance, straining the affective circuit. Partners began to memorise each other’s schedules, “inaccessibility [became] cause for suspicion of misbehaviour.[8]”
Economically, their affective circuit was overwhelmed. In the work of global householding, where the patriarchy prevails, Serigne was expected to play the role of the household lead, despite his physical absence. Mariama depended on remittances from Serigne to pay for daily family expenses, medicine, and school fees.
Furthermore, the Senegalese government depended on economic migrants like Serigne to financially support their families and communities – with remittances constituting around 10.5% of Senegal’s GDP in 2018. Serigne was even a member of a regional association of migrants from his region of Senegal and contributed funds to implement development projects in his hometown, including new mosques which announced the migrant association as its benefactors.
What do Mariama and Serigne teach us about transnational kinship?
For me, they demonstrate how intimate relationships are transformed by technology and slashed social services. Theirs is a tale of connective potential, but disconnected realities. Of a global technoscape that defines new parameters of what it means to be generous, attentive, and dutiful. Of tensions and a sense of disconnection brought about by mundane, non-stop communication prone to disappointment.
It’s an honest story about the pressures placed on economic migrants to absolve the state of many of its responsibilities to its citizens. The narrative of the dutiful son or daughter supporting their parents through remittances takes pressure off the state to provide robust social security, pensions, free and high-quality education and healthcare. As well as meaningful work opportunities at home.
It also creates false expectations about the financial availability of migrants, who are left increasingly vulnerable to the untenable requests of their families, communities, and the state through narratives of duty, responsibility, and honour.
The co-presence beckons another, Other. A profoundly ambivalent consequence of emotional distance in the co-presence of ongoing availability.
Expectations of Reciprocity Gone Sour: Transnational Social Ties between Cameroon and Germany
Similarly, Tazanu’s (2018) writing looks at how technology in Cameroon created expectations of reciprocity. His negotiation of ‘legitimate consumption’ illuminates how fundamental aspects like healthcare and school fees are considered as legitimate forms of consumption for which money should always be sent.
Tazanu’s writing is complex and, being from Cameroon himself, he is able to capture the intimacies of distrust present in affective circuits that block emotional connection.
Whether it’s the anxiety that remittances will be used to sponsor ‘unnecessary’ lifestyles in Cameroon. Or the fear of family breakdowns caused by the misappropriation of remittances. Complex cultural expectations, obligations and evaluations colour the history of gift giving and reciprocity in Cameroon.
Migrants in in the Anglophone parts of Cameroon are known as bushfallers. Bush, denoting an uncultivated piece of land which offers potential rewards. Faller, denoting someone who ventures to explore/ exploit these opportunities.
Bushfallers demonstrate their success through extravagant consumption when visiting home – they invest in housing, they donate to their churches, construct buildings in their villages, and sponsor their relative’s bride price. In turn, the village provides them with medication, special food, charms, amulets and respect.
In the throes of exchange, entitlement grows.
There is an assumption that migration leads to upward socio-economic mobility, sustained by the actions and appearances of the bushfallers themselves. Reciprocity prevails on what can feel like an unequal basis.
Similar to the co-presences described above, Tazanu notes that mobile phones became a tool that coordinated and channelled remittances to Cameroon.
Taken from fieldwork done in 2009 and 2010, we meet Glory, a student living in Germany, who describes the pressure to remit and the need to ‘filter’ the number of people from Cameroon she had social connections with.
When asked to send money to her sister to open a tailoring workshop, Glory was only able to provide part of the money – much to the dissatisfaction of her sister. Glory was further disappointed when she learned that her sister had not set up the workshop at all. The relationship between the two soured, and they no longer talk.
Techniques such as blocking a person’s phone number, ignoring calls, or refusing to share contact details in the first place became strategies used by migrants like Glory to distance themselves from unwanted relationships and the pressures they brought.
For her self-preservation efforts, Glory was suspected of withholding money or refusing to share the benefits of living in Germany with those at home. Yet even when money was shared, it was often criticised as insufficient.
Tazanu’s research found that families in Cameroon were reluctant to acknowledge that they received money from family abroad and those who did, did so by vastly undervaluing it.
This is contrary to common understandings of reciprocity where relationships between givers and recipients promotes harmony. In this context, the perceived socio-economic status of migrants conferred upon them obligations that led to family and community breakdown – breaking down the very rules of reciprocity.
Yet this is just one side of the story.
At the same time, migrants like Dorine felt positively obligated to reciprocate. She willingly supported her Cameroonian parents when she arrived in Germany, as they had supported her until she arrived. Dorine believed this changed relationship was at it should be.
For William, the story was more complex. He realised his siblings’ requests for money were to help solve non-existent problems. He perceived the mobile phone as a ‘technology of deceit’ compared to landlines.[9] Through the phone, his siblings could individually inform him about the family’s financial needs – couching them in the language of education, health and death which were understood as the top priorities which justified remittances. All without the knowledge of the family members concerned.
Affect was evoked by the language of ‘emergency’ – inflated prices of books, fabricated stories about internships – to exert pressure and ensure instant financial returns. The affective circuit between kin became fraught with frictions facilitated by mobile phones.
Through these experiences shared by Cameroonian migrants, Tazanu’s article highlights the unease that arises from direct requests and expectations of remittances. He shows that instant communication does not necessarily strengthen social ties, but create new tensions, quarrels and spaces of unease.
In nuclear families and beyond.
UWCSA: Parakinship and the Quest for Becoming in Transnational Friendships
As mentioned at the top of the essay, I am writing about the intimacies of migration. So of course, the familiar attachment of platonic relationships formed at boarding school came to mind.
Let me set the scene.
You are 16 or 17 when the world shuts down, sitting in a Theory of Knowledge class discussing ways of knowing. A tall German boy leaves the classroom to answer a phone call. He returns seconds later, clears his table, and says Goodbye.
Or something along the lines of “I need to go pack up my room”.
You don’t see him again.
You see, UWCs are exceptional schools in many ways. We were nestled at the top of a hill sandwiched by two other hills. We were isolated, we were energetic, we came from more than 60 different countries. And we were significantly impacted by Covid-19, like every school in the world.
The UWC movement creates the perfect conditions for Parakin relations between international students – relations modelled on but extended beyond kin relations. We were enmeshed in them, we became little institutionalised support networks for each other to offset the relative absence of actual kin networks.
Founded by Kurt Hahn, a German educator and civil servant who witnessed the creation of the Treaty of Versailles and taught until Hitler rose to power in 1933, the UWC movement was created to pilot the idea that education could be a route to peace and increased compassion.
The founding doctrine, delivered at the NATO Defence College in Paris in 1955, translated into the first UWC in Wales, founded in 1962. Since then, there 18 UWCs have opened and function in 4 continents delivering education to over 10 500 students annually. Each school is influenced by their host country, its cultural context and community.
The ethos is simple (and one I will always know by heart): Deliberate diversity to make education a force to unite people, nations and cultures for peace and a sustainable future.
In eSwatini, the rights-based character of the school is more pronounced. Influenced by Ubuntu philosophy in Southern Africa – I am because we all are – and founded in opposition to apartheid in neighbouring South Africa, Waterford Kamhlaba was opened as a multiracial school in 1963. Economically, like all UWCs, it is funded by individual donations, government support, endowment funds, fees, and important scholarship partners like Shelby Davis.
From my experience, uncertainty facilitated the formation of Parakin relations and alternative affective circuits at Waterford. Looking specifically at my IB years between 2020-21, there were two significant events.
First, as mentioned, the pandemic at the beginning of 2020, just after friendships began to settle and cement. Students had no choice but to form platonic intimacies online through platforms like Instagram, TikTok and Zoom. This was compounded by the ‘deliberate diversity’ at UWCs which manifested different privileges, disadvantages, and obligations for how students were able to interact with each other online, as well as how they were able to return to school. For example, eSwatini’s government did not allow people with Chinese passports re-entry into the country until late May 2021, yet I was able to return to school in April.
Secondly, the period of national civil unrest in mid 2021 – what we colloquially referred to as ‘the civvy’ – which began on 20 June 2021 when young people took to the streets to call for a democratically elected Prime Minister. They blocked roads and set fire to tyres. We sat isolated on the green hill, in our face masks in class, and watched the Black smoke rise. The unrest persisted until October but never truly died down. After all, eSwatini is Africa’s last absolute monarchy.
These events created the conditions for further emotional bonding, the exchange of fears and frustrations as we prepared to write our final exams and apply to university.
Our affective circuits fused with each other as we became adults. We were tied together through the exchange of ideas through our education and localised social and political formations e.g., activist societies like SAGA and Amnesty International.
More intimately, we experienced dorm life together, visited each other’s rooms to say goodnight, sometimes slept over. With movement restrictions caused by Covid and the ongoing civil unrest, we became a heterogenous unit separate from our multiple nationalities.
We became ‘international students’, Waterford kids at the top of the hill, recognisable at first glance when in town or at parties.
This analysis interestingly diverges from the analysis posited by scholars like Tazanu and Hannaford who account for Parakin groups built around nationality. Here, the only criterion for belonging was being a studying immigrant.
So what happened when we graduated?
After bringing a diverse selection of people from across the world together, allowing them to form deep Parakin relationships and bond over emotional and political difficulties, what happens to the intimacies they formed? How are they maintained?
After graduation, the story becomes riddled with tensions, as Tazanu would recall. The affective circuit had to be facilitated through technology once again, as it was during the pandemic, but something shifted.
There was a greater expectation to be available and to know how to sustain transnational relationships.
During the pandemic, socio-economic differences were made explicit. Different friends had varying levels of accessibility to the internet. Communication was necessarily informal, and intimacy was created in those stolen moments. On WhatsApp group video calls and Netflix watch parties. The newness of the pandemic softened the obligations of reciprocity as we collectively had to relearn and restructure our lives online.
Following graduation, the affective circuit was modified. The same issues of different time zones and insufficient data bundles persisted, but the mastery of technological tools had changed.
Compared to pre-pandemic life, there was now an expectation to know how to exist transnationally and digitally – time zones and all. Spontaneous group calls morphed into pre-planned recurrent calls, movie screenings were organised weeks in advance, communication was formalised and these new practices strengthened certain social ties, and broke others.
This is what I believe Tazanu and Hannaford omit from their analyses of tensions – mastery of technological tools and the displacement of time zones.
What happens when ‘We Meet’ is used to find suitable calling times? When there is an option to send minute long voice notes when phone calls are not available? When cancellation and avoidance cannot be seen as incidental, but feed into resentments?
Furthermore, digital personhood is a different beast completely. It’s a doppelgänger’s existence which grants little consideration to mental health or neurodiversity.
Good online communication requires an intangible element of skill, there are different generational expectations, with different obligations (e.g., Whatsapp vs. BeReal). To me, there is also an intensified aspect of intimacy online versus in person. More pressure around word choice, photo selection, data protection.
To take the analysis to its extreme, Tim Ingold can be evoked. Ingold elaborates on Mauss by seeing technological tools as having their own intentionality, unfolding in a continual dialogue with us – a mechanical, physical and physicochemical order that emerges in the intangible category of skill acquisition.[10]
Wordy? I know. In short, we produce technology and it produces us. Even silence online is read as a response.
Conclusion: On Navigating Double Exclusion
We are now back in the airport.
Your flight’s pre-boarding has begun, and you saunter to a familiar boarding gate.
You’ve been travelling for at least 24 hours and planning the gifts you’re taking home for at least 24 days.
You and your family contribute to the emergence of a new, transnational class structure – one inflected with care, unspoken obligations, tension and separateness.
You travel from privilege and a lack of choice.
In the intimacies of your weekend phone calls, the whiteness of neoliberal capitalism rears its head.
You are seen as dependent and dirty. But your very existence in the west reconfigures their economic dependency on you.
Entire transnational industries rise to service you – the other Other – Western Union and Remitly advertisements clog your Youtube viewing experience.
You contribute meaningfully to two GDPs – you build the European metropole and your home country.
Your university tuition was double that of your colleagues, and you pay each year to remain in their country.
You stay out of privilege and a lack of choice.
All while the metropole ventures to intensify its immigration regimes against you, pushing out boats carrying global citizens that look just like you.
And when you see your family again, the one constructed through a space-time compression facilitated by Whatsapp calls and group chats, another, Other awaits you.
Your quest for Becoming has altered your sense of belonging.
There are new restaurants in your neighbourhood you will not visit. There are relatives in hospital beds and caskets you will not see. You will forget how to drive.
Suddenly and slowly, you come to terms with this Double Exclusion. Like the millions of Africans before you.
You craft new forms of belonging, out of necessity.
Clay and straw – armed with literature, a hard head, and that familiar twinkle of mischief that has not left since you were seven, or thirteen, or twenty-three.
The return journey is an intimate, alternative narrative of your Becoming.
You will blossom, as a result of your privilege and choices.
Swirling, pulsating, and bleeding out annually in Terminal 3.
[1] Datta, K. (2012) Migrants and their money: Surviving financial exclusion in London. Bristol and Chicago: Policy Press and University of Chicago Press.
[2] Bayart, J.F. and Ellis, S. (2000). Africa in the world: A history of extraversion. African affairs, 99(395).
[3] Cole, J. and Groes, C., 2016. Introduction: Affective circuits and social regeneration in African migration. In Affective circuits: African migration to Europe and the pursuit of social regeneration (pp. 1-26). University of Chicago Press.
[4] Hochschild, A.R. (2015). Global care chains and emotional surplus value. Justice, politics, and the family (pp. 249-261). Routledge.
[5] Hannaford, D. (2018). Easy access: new dynamics in long-distance African intimacies. Africa, 88(4).
[6] Hannaford (2018) p. 674
[7] Ibid at 649
[8] Ibid at p. 650
[9] Ibid at 396
[10] Ingold, T. (2000). The perception of the environment: essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill. Routledge.
