Abstract
Originating from the Eastern Horn of Africa (EHOA), Ethiopians comprise the third-largest group of migrants in Kenya and the second-largest group of East Africans in, South Africa, following Somalis. Most Ethiopians are labour migrants who travel to South Africa, irregularly partially or fully, except for a few, mostly the wealthy and highly skilled migrants who travel regularly on varying permits. Nairobi in Kenya is considered by some as a temporary home on longer journeys and by others as a short-term transit locale for many Ethiopians seeking to temporarily migrate to or settle in South Africa and beyond. Nairobi’s strategic geopolitical position, vibrant cosmopolitan populace, social-cultural linkages, and administrative advantage – offer a platform for the migrating Ethiopians to reinforce and build social, political, and economic transnational networks that facilitate their cross-border migration, relocation, settlement and sometimes integration and emplacement within their transit and settled locales and elsewhere.
Focusing on the cosmopolitan transit localities of Eastleigh and Kilimani in Nairobi, Kenya, and the Ethiopian enclaves of Jeppestown and Yeoville in Johannesburg, South Africa, this ethnographic study explores the Ethiopian cross-border migrations, experiences of migrating and everyday practices belonging beyond their nation of origin. This dissertation delves into the politics of belonging, providing an account of how transnational socialities, belonging and social citizenships are understood, experienced, negotiated and practised by Ethiopian migrants. It draws on eight months of qualitative research involving interviews, participant observations and focus groups among Ethiopian migrants, local hosts and migrant community leaders, activists, citizens (‘native’ and localized) and migrant organizations in Nairobi and Johannesburg.
In this study, I engage with notions of transnationalism approach, translocality and social networking as developed in the existing literature as a lens to understand the ongoing constructions of trans-local socialities and the multiple, flexible and ambiguous belongings amongst migrating Ethiopians. I argue that multi-national networks, socialities, and the communities that Ethiopians strategically build or become part of - provide spatial, material, economic, cultural, and political anchorage; produce inclusion and emplacements, and legitimize their social and political membership in the multiple transnational places they are part of. Further, I discuss the experiences and practices of emplacement and belonging among Ethiopians as construed through their deliberate migration into or through specific, familiar,
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or unfamiliar social and spatial enclaves; participation in strategic and cyclical engagement with the changing bureaucratic contexts, which generates continuous contestation of socio-political emplacements as witnessed through the process of documentation and struggle for recognition as trans-locals. These different spheres of belonging experienced and acted out, are experienced individually, through community and kins, or social institutions like the United Ethiopian Association of South Africa, Ethiopian African Diaspora Forum and self-help societies, firstly, legitimize their presence; produce fluid but often stratified social orderings; making claims to global citizenry (often hierarchal) and lastly pragmatically pave the way for the making of liveable lives.
Drawing on the secondary literature on migration, practice of belonging, transnationalism, and citizenship, which discusses the complex dynamics of migration, crossborder migration impositions on identities, social processes and belonging - this work seeks to contribute to existing debates on intra-African migration by looking at the experiences of Ethiopian lives. By providing a contextual understanding of Ethiopian experiences and practices of acquiring documents, staying documented and seeking belonging in the diverse migrant worlds in Kenya and South Africa. This dissertation contributes empirically to the studies of migration management and the growing literature on documentation and belonging. It situates different understandings of what it means to belong in different migration contexts and spaces, which is not only hierarchical, exacerbated by access or lack of documents, but also belonging and access to documents assure migrant symbolic, legal, economic and political stability.