Introduction
In 2012, a Nigerian man died while in police custody in Guangzhou, China, sparking a rare mass protest by hundreds of Africans living in southern China. According to official accounts, the Nigerian man and a Chinese national had begun arguing over a taxi fare, drawing a crowd of spectators. When the Guangzhou police subsequently brought the men to the station, the Nigerian man died due to sudden medical complications. Speculations abounded after the police refused to return the man’s body to Nigeria for burial, raising suspicion among the hundreds of Africans residing and working across commercial sites in southern China. The signs from the subsequent protest demanded in Chinese and English, “Give Us the Dead Body.”
The crowd demanded the body for many reasons—as material proof in an opaque case; as symbolic evidence of systemic state harassment of black life; as collective affirmation for other African migrants treading uncertain futures; and as closure for mourning kin in Nigeria. The man was one of the tens of thousands of Igbo Nigerians who have migrated across the Global South for commercial opportunities since the early 2000s. In its many forms, this incident circulated across the world in the early 2010s, slipping into my interviews and casual conversations with various African and Chinese businesspeople across the commercial networks linking the Global South.
Diasporic Nigerians have regularly demonstrated support for domestic protests calling for social and political reform in Nigeria, such as the 2012 #OccupyNigeria and 2020 #EndSARS movements. Additionally, Nigerians have also been regularly active in mobilizing around the lives of Nigerian citizens abroad, simultaneously demanding accountability in their global places of residence and state action from the Nigerian government. Since the late 2000s, there have been dozens of demonstrations across Asian, Middle Eastern, and African metropolises concerning the incarceration, harassment, death, and body repatriation of Nigerian citizens in these sites (Bodomo Reference Bodomo2010; Castillo Reference Castillo2014; The Straits Times 2019; Sahara Reporters 2020).
This article focuses on what I call “diasporic agitations,” tracing genealogies of significant diasporic events and transformations in relation to postcolonial politics. The term “agitation” as a descriptor of social action and as a mode of political engagement surfaced explicitly in many of my conversations with Nigerian interlocutors. Agitation is a targeted mode of engagement—of protests, strikes, and awareness-raising—as well as a state of being, of heightened political consciousness and readiness to demand change. While anchored through specific practices such as protests and demands for body repatriation for burial in ancestral hometowns, diasporic agitations are strategically and deliberately multi-scalar, interlocking at different times with various communities and audiences.
These mobilizations engage conceptions of home at the level of kinship, hometown, state, region, and nation, while also invoking broader imaginaries of the African continental and transnational black racial community. Migrant associations, particularly among Igbo-speaking Nigerians, are often understood as a constant and systematic organizing fixture of Nigerian social life. Yet focusing on these moments of agitation highlight the dynamism of African diasporic mobilizations and what Mojúbàolú Olufúnké Okome (Reference Okome2011) has called the “many possible meanings” of return migration and diasporic consciousness in relation to the postcolonial state, whose saliences and scales assume new meanings depending on the geopolitical contexts.
Based on archival and ethnographic fieldwork conducted among mobile Nigerians in the Global South between 2012 and 2017, this article focuses on two periods that exemplify diasporic engagement with the postcolonial state, of antagonism as well as collaboration. First, I revisit the 1970s post-civil war reconstruction of southeastern Nigeria, a period of profound diasporic transformation for Igbo-speaking peoples. This archival retracing examines how the postcolonial Nigerian state deliberately mobilized diasporic hometown associations to help rebuild infrastructure in southeastern Nigeria by invoking imaginaries of pre-colonial socialities, condemning the failure of colonial political formation, and institutionalizing patrilineal kinship as a unit of political organization. In this context, diasporic associations worked in tandem with the postcolonial state to generate multi-scalar conceptions of home and belonging, linking village infrastructure projects with national developmentalist rhetoric. Yet this state demand for diasporic financing in postwar reconstruction also spawned a range of new critiques of Nigeria’s failure to properly reconstruct and reintegrate the former Biafran territories, laying the foundation for later decades of Igbo ethno-regional grievances of the postwar abandonment and infrastructural marginalization of southeastern Nigeria.
I then turn to ethnographic material documenting the wide range of contemporary diasporic associations and socialities mobilized by Igbo Nigerians living and working across the Global South in sites such as China and Dubai. These include youth meetings during annual Christmastime homecomings to ancestral hometowns, ethno-regional and national organizations in migrant communities abroad, and burgeoning and dynamic social clubs that morph according to different migratory waves, such as the 2010s influx of Nigerian returnees from China.
Diasporas are neither inherently radical nor conservative; they can be synergistic and complicit with state agendas as well as sources of dissent, often simultaneously. Indeed, contemporary secessionist agitations—explicit echoes of the 1960s Nigerian Civil War—as well as nationalist calls for unity have gained significant momentum, amplification, and energy from the Nigerian diaspora. As Nigerian migration, and African migration more broadly, increasingly encompasses Global South destinations, mobility largely consists of trajectories that are not immigration-focused but rather dynamic loops of circular migrations. These trajectories see migrants creating pathways to new destinations while returning regularly back to hometowns and commercial hubs in Africa. In this context, along these south-south trajectories, the political stakes of claiming and defining “home” are increasingly heightened.
Migrants, Sojourners, Diaspora
Nigeria is home to both the largest population on the African continent and the largest African diasporic population, and Nigerians are the most numerous mobile Africans across many Global South trade sites.Footnote 1 Since the 1990s, trade sites across Asia and the Middle East have experienced an influx of thousands of African businesspeople who supply African markets with everyday consumer commodities and building materials. Strikingly, the actors driving this shift have been predominantly Igbo-speaking men from lower- to middle-class backgrounds, whose ancestral hometowns are located in southeastern Nigeria. By the 2010s, transnational Nigerian commercial networks included sites across Asia and the Middle East, including China, India, Pakistan, Thailand, Vietnam, Turkey, Dubai, Indonesia, and Malaysia, as well as nodes across western and southern Africa.
These contemporary south-south Nigerian migration and commercial circuits have built on and transformed a long history of political engagements by African migrant and diasporic communities. Academic work on the transnational West African diaspora has largely centered on trans-Atlantic circulations, stemming from the violent trans-Atlantic slave trade and its wake that bound Africa with Europe, the Americas, and the Caribbean through vectors of people, capital, and commodities. Over the last few centuries, West Africa has been profoundly reshaped by waves of outmigration and migrant circulations in the circum-Atlantic field, where political and social life was reconfigured by the immense loss of life as well as the transformative role of returnees in generating new forms of identity and belonging in the region (Ajayi & Falola Reference Ajayi and Falola1958; White Reference White1987; Matory Reference Matory1999; Piot Reference Piot2001).
Along these intergenerational migratory passages, scholars have examined the relentless reformations of cultural identities in relation to power. Diasporic identities in particular are, in Stuart Hall’s words, “not an essence, but a positioning,” “those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference” (Reference Hall1990:235). These themes of anti-essentialism in Black Atlantic diasporic theory have provided key insights into diasporic formation, noting that diaspora is less a dispersion of people than a dynamic interplay of genealogy and recognition in the context of global white supremacy (Gilroy Reference Gilroy1993; Kelley Reference Kelley, Bobo, Hudley and Michel2004; Ebron Reference Ebron, Oboe and Scacchi2008; Beliso‐De Jesús & Pierre Reference Beliso‐De Jesús and Pierre2020). More recently, anthropologist Kamari Clarke (Reference Clarke2010) has suggested that investigations of diaspora must also consider what Clarke calls “parallel diasporic spaces,” or linkages between contemporary, historical, and global registers of diasporic consciousness and experience.
Building on these insights generated from the Black Atlantic, this article considers how these older migratory legacies of racial and capitalist formation intersect with the contemporary phenomenon of migration by Nigerians toward the Middle East and back to Africa, tracing the social impacts of mobility “back home.” In African Studies, along a largely separate vein to Black Atlantic diasporic theory, literature on migrant associations has largely explored their historical formation as an ethnicity- and identity-based urban phenomenon that arose from migratory circulations during colonial transformations of labor and the civil service (Cohen Reference Cohen1969; Osaghae Reference Osaghae, Honey and Okafor1998; Honey & Okafor Reference Honey and Okafor1998). As colonialism forged regional circuits of labor migration, many African migrants from various regions formed hometown associations in their new locations, often coordinating projects such as fundraising scholarships for promising students.Footnote 2
In particular, people from southeastern Nigeria were disproportionately mobile across all regions of Nigeria, through both formalized channels of the colonial civil service and informal auxiliary migrations such as those tied to small-scale commerce (Isichei Reference Isichei1976; Nwabughuogu Reference Nwabughuogu1982). While hometown and ethnic associations were by no means unique to the predominantly Igbo-speaking people from southeastern Nigeria, Igbo-speaking people made up the largest percentage of non-indigene urban populations in cities across Nigeria during the colonial period and its immediate aftermath (Harneit-Sievers Reference Harneit-Sievers2006; Njoku Reference Njoku, Falola and Njoku2016). This migratory past is often cited as a predecessor to the particularly far-flung Igbo diaspora in the contemporary era. Yet, as scholars such as Chinua Achebe (Reference Achebe1983), Apollos O. Nwauwa, and Chima J. Korieh (Reference Nwauwa and Korieh2011) have astutely emphasized, the postcolonial emergence of Igbo identity must also be historicized in the context of the Nigerian Civil War and the subsequent postwar massive out-migration from southeastern Nigeria into the entrepreneurial sector of urban centers across Nigeria and farther out to regional commercial hubs.
In recent years, the span of migratory networks of Nigerians has reached across Nigeria, Africa, and the West toward Asia and the Middle East. As African commercial migration has generally increased toward Asia in the last few decades, Igbo Nigerians have been particularly numerous and prominent in these new migratory routes. This phenomenon has been documented through the rise of China-Africa Studies as an interdisciplinary field in the 2000s; this academic field arose in response to shifts in global geopolitics away from a Western hegemonic world order, acknowledging the sharp increase of migration, commerce, and geopolitical interest between countries of the Global South (Brautigam Reference Brautigam2009; Monson & Rupp Reference Monson and Rupp2013; Lan Reference Lan2017; Bodomo Reference Bodomo2020). Yet it is important to note how these shifts toward the Global South do not represent simply a romanticizable departure from previous structures, but rather a complex historical layering that intersects with older entrenched patterns and geopolitical dynamics of race and capitalism (Sheridan Reference Sheridan2018, Reference Sheridan2019; Schmitz Reference Schmitz2014; Huang Reference Huang2021). Strikingly, across many contemporary south-south trajectories, permanent migration is rare. While vastly varied in composition, Chinese and Nigerian migrations toward each other are largely mirrored in their transitory and circular nature (Liu Reference Liu2019; Xiao Reference Xiao2015; Adebayo Reference Adebayo2020). Sylvie Bredeloup (Reference Bredeloup2012) has described these modes of south-south mobility as “sojourning,” wherein a dynamic constellation of destinations—such as Hong Kong, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, or Delhi—fall in and out of popularity, with different waves and networks emerging from different African countries. In contrast to many Western-bound journeys, the majority of these south-south mobilities are generally not immigration-oriented in aspiration.
This article thus seeks to consider sojourning through the frame of black diasporic theory and African historiography, highlighting how diasporic mobilizations and return migration have also transformed the postcolonial state. These constantly shifting geographies of Nigerian migration and commerce along south-south trajectories are particularly significant contemporary sites to ethnographically consider the flexibility and dynamism of such diasporic forms. They illuminate how in the context of volatile global terrains, diasporic mobilizations play a key role in not only stabilizing the dimensions of migrant life abroad (Bertoncelo & Bredeloup Reference Bertoncelo and Bredeloup2007; Simone Reference Simone2010; Castillo Reference Castillo2016; Adebayo & Omololu Reference Adebayo and Omololu2020), but also engaging with postcolonial states and transforming places of origin, defined at multiple scales of continental, national, regional, racial, and hometown identifications.
Methods for Mobile Trajectories and Centered Lives
The narratives which inspired this article are drawn from eighteen months of archival and ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2012 and 2017 among contemporary Nigerian commercial networks primarily in Lagos, Nigeria, as well as in Guangzhou (China), Dubai (United Arab Emirates), and southeastern Nigeria. Rather than following a particular product along the commodity chain, or focusing on a particular neighborhood or market, I traced cohorts of Nigerian businessmen in China and Dubai and tracked their range of social relations back to Nigeria, conducting interviews with around one hundred traders, business partners, apprentices, employees, and representatives of various degrees of kinship relationships.
Academic literature and journalist accounts of African migrants to Asia and the Middle East have understandably focused primarily on male migrant experiences, as men represent the majority of these sojourners. Indeed, most of my own interviewees were Igbo men. Yet relying solely on such narratives can portray these trajectories as products of individual, masculinized entrepreneurial efforts, rather than illuminating the social collectivities and relationships on which they rely and from which they draw support. As a Chinese American woman researcher, my longer-term ethnographic access to commercial networks was sustained by working alongside the women workers of these commercial networks—young women, both Nigerian and Chinese, working as business partners, secretaries, and saleswomen for their cousins, fathers, and husbands. While this article focuses mainly on the stories of men, the work is informed as well by these experiences involving women. Moreover, the complexity and range of social connections became clearer over time, as these men got married, had children, and relocated to major commercial cities in Nigeria. Almost all of my interlocutors who had participated in Nigerian organizations in Asia and the Middle East in 2012 had returned to Nigeria by 2017, joining other diasporic associations and founding new ones.
This long-term ethnographic engagement illuminated dynamic patterns of mobility among Global South destinations, which continually circled back to Nigeria. Much social science work on African migration across the Global South and in China-Africa Studies has focused on dimensions of migrant life abroad, such as experiences of racism, the formation of African communities in Asia, and the logistics of inter-cultural transnational business. While these experiences certainly featured in my interlocutors’ narrations of their travels, they were often much more interested and invested in discussing Nigerian politics and how their global movements were strategies for social mobility upon their return to Nigeria.
The transformations of transnationally mobile Nigerians’ engagements with diasporic organizations also raised historical questions, which led to colonial and postcolonial archives in Nigeria, the United States, and the United Kingdom. The archival research for this article primarily draws from 1970s state-run Nigerian newspapers, East Central State News and The Renaissance, and government reports about southeastern Nigeria, which was then known as the East Central State. Rather than approaching the phenomenon of diasporic associations as either a novel occurrence or a timeless, taken-for-granted cultural institution, combining archival and ethnographic work illuminates both the striking historical transformations and the ongoing dynamism of diasporic formations in the postcolonial context.
Revisiting 1970s Post-Civil War Reconstruction
During fieldwork in the early 2010s, I often asked my interlocutors why they thought Nigerians were the most numerous and prominent African population in many commercial sites of the Global South. Their answers regularly circled back to Biafra, the 1960s state whose failed secession attempt sparked the devastating Nigerian Civil War. Biafra’s historical territorial base covered what is now generally referred to as “southeastern Nigeria,” which includes the ancestral homelands of Igbo-speaking peoples. As Arinze, a man in his early thirties living in China, clarified, it was not just Nigerians abroad but disproportionately Igbo Nigerians, explaining, “Anywhere you go on earth, you find a black man, you will find an Igbo man. But it is because of Biafra the Igbo man must go afar to hustle, to make a living.”
The 1967 secessionist state of Biafra as a theme recurred and resurfaced throughout my fieldwork among these global Nigerian commercial networks, whether or not I inquired about it directly. The Biafran flag appeared behind glass shop counters in southern China and in circulating social media memes among those living abroad. Incendiary Radio Biafra airwaves streamed through tinny speakers on public transport within Nigeria, and flyers advertising Biafran commemorative protests fluttered through market aisles in Nigeria’s commercial capital of Lagos. Some of this was no doubt due to a resurgence of neo-Biafran activist movements in the 2000s and 2010s, largely launched by members of the Igbo diaspora living outside of Nigeria (Oyewole Reference Oyewole2019). While not all of my informants agreed with the contemporary neo-Biafran groups, all of them identified the 1960s Nigerian Civil War as a major point of historical contention with ongoing legacies.
One man named Arinze, for example, had not lived through the war himself, but his parents belonged to the generation that lived through Biafra’s secession, which caused a war that forced a new reckoning with the meaning of home in postcolonial Nigeria. Arinze’s parents had grown up in northern Nigeria, but anti-Igbo violence in the 1960s preceding the outbreak of war triggered the village-bound migrations of thousands of Igbos from across Nigeria, many of whom had never lived in their ancestral hometowns before. Some intellectuals have contextualized the emergence of Igbo consciousness through this traumatic experience of the Nigerian Civil War (Achebe Reference Achebe1983, Reference Achebe2012; Nwauwa & Korieh Reference Nwauwa and Korieh2011). Furthermore, as I delved into postcolonial archival materials, it became clear that the systemization and extensive proliferation of hometown associations and diasporic institutional forms across each town in eastern Nigeria must also be situated within the political and economic context of the postwar reconstruction period.
“Surviving the Peace”: Postwar Diasporic Developmental Machinery
In the 1970s, southeastern Nigeria was tasked with the enormous undertaking of reconstruction after a devastating civil war. The secessionist unfolding of the Nigerian Civil War between 1967 and 1970 meant that the majority of its devastation—on human life as well as on infrastructure—was experienced in the secessionist territories of Biafra in the southeastern Nigeria. As one autobiographical account described the postwar recovery, “There became a desperate need to survive the peace of the graveyard” (Akamnonu & Eke Reference Akamnonu and Eke2010). Notably, to “survive the peace of the graveyard,” many former Biafrans migrated across Nigeria in order to rebuild their livelihoods, with many of them entering into entrepreneurial endeavors in the markets of urban metropolises. Yet while these postwar migrants ventured far and wide, their ancestral towns and cities in the process of rebuilding sought to remain connected to these “sons and daughters abroad” for financial assistance for the massive task of reconstruction, through both official and unofficial ties.
Immediately following the civil war, the Nigerian Federal Military Government under General Yakubu Gowon pursued an official policy of “no victims, no vanquished.” The Nigerian government did not pursue war crime prosecutions, but instead it delegated the entire responsibility of postwar reconstruction in the former Biafran secessionist territories to the government of the region, then called the East Central State. The East Central State administration was led by Ukpabi Asika, a prominent Igbo civil servant who was critically aware of his administration’s symbolic importance in rebuilding and reintegrating former Biafrans into the Nigerian nation state (Offodile Reference Offodile2016).
In the early 1970s, the Asika administration launched a comprehensive reconstruction program that explicitly mobilized diasporic and town associations in southeastern Nigeria to fundraise for and coordinate their own community development projects (Odenigwe Reference Odenigwe1971; Okoli Reference Okoli1980). Asika sought to decentralize local governance through the creation of local community councils, which were “administrative machinery for achieving local development.” These councils would “exploi[t] the zeal of communities for development of their areas” by liaising with community organizations that were responsible for fundraising and planning projects such as town unions, age grades, social clubs, and other cultural societies (The Renaissance 1973b). As one government official warned, the postwar region “must substitute the old slogan of ‘sharing the national cake’ with ‘bake your own cake with your own condiments’” (East Central State News 1971). Operating on a highly limited budget, the regional government thus actively sought out other sources of financing, eventually identifying hometown organizations and their diasporic branches as collaborators for reconstruction. As government officials explicitly made known, their policies acted “with bias in favour of communities which place the right emphasis on self-reliance—communities who know, and knowing, act on the realization that the only kind of progress worth having, the only amenity worth enjoying is the one we can provide ourselves” (The Renaissance 1974c).
The administration approached postwar reconstruction as a joint venture between private town unions, whereby the state released community development funds to communities that had demonstrated their own “self-help” initiative, either “matching” community fundraisers or providing start-up grants for specific community-planned projects. While this joint financing system had begun during the colonial era in southeastern Nigeria, it was notably reenergized and retrenched in the postwar period (Odenigwe Reference Odenigwe1971). Nearly every issue of state newspapers in the early 1970s highlighted community fundraising efforts. For example, the Nkwogbe market in Ihiala (in Anambra State) was rebuilt in 1972 with N200,000 of community funds after the state government had provided N6,000 (The Renaissance 1974b). The most common postwar town projects included rebuilding town halls, local markets, health centers, post offices, dispensaries, elementary schools, maternity homes, and clinics, as well as providing scholarships for promising students and supporting infrastructure such as roads, water pipes, and electric lines (Obi-Ani Reference Obi-Ani1998; Chuku Reference Chuku, Chuku and Aham-Okoro2020).
Critically, community fundraising was implemented through levies on all town members along with the community’s migrant diaspora. In the 1970s, the newspapers of the East Central State government, East Central State News and The Renaissance, featured vivid appeals from various towns encouraging their “sons and daughters at home and abroad” to fulfill their duties of financing and contributing to postwar infrastructural reconstruction. “Sons abroad” played a key role in the formation of what Dmitri Van Den Bersselaar (Reference Van Den Bersselaar2005) has called “diasporic public spheres” in the colonial era, which conceptually redefined the boundaries of hometowns to capaciously include mobile memberships as inter-regional migration increased across Nigeria. In the postwar context, appeals to “sons and daughters abroad” took a markedly formalized path, whereby the state began giving hometown unions statutory backing, making them fundamental units of administration and local taxation through the Developmental Administration Edict of 1971 (Eze Reference Eze1976).
The postwar Nigerian state thus explicitly sought to systematize diasporic financing and capitalize on pre-existing associations through joint “state-community” ventures. Levy schemes included collecting specific amounts from all members of the community over the age of sixteen residing in the hometown and abroad, often with a lower amount required from women as compared to men (The Renaissance 1973c).Footnote 3 In one example, prominent leaders in the Okwudo community asked the youth and those abroad to donate to their village reconstruction efforts. One Okwudo community councilman “called on all sons and daughters of Okwudo to identify themselves with the aspirations of the town and the work of his council in order to enhance rapid development,” while the chairman of the Okwudo Abroad Union condemned the attitude of Okwudo Youths Abroad who “have for the past left all the practical development of the town to the elders at home” (The Renaissance 1973d). While such formations of community organization and fundraising predated the Nigerian Civil War, the postwar state government folded them directly into state-led efforts and openly relied on them financially and politically for developmental projects.
Capitalizing “Home”: Community, Patrilineal Kin, Nation
Through the postwar reconstruction period of the 1970s, the regional government promoted this public-private, or rather “public-community,” joint form of development through the slogan of Olu Obodo. Roughly meaning “working for the community,” Obodo (town or community) has multiple valences and scales, signifying a range of collectivities (“Olu Obodo: A Seminar on East-Central State Public Service in Its New Setting.” 1973). As Asika himself explained this slogan:
Obodo is no longer just the clan, it is no longer just the community: traditional, historic, and ethnic. Obodo has its reference in a sovereignty, a nation-state. Thus though[t] at various levels of action, the clan may be relevant, the historic community may be relevant, but in the interaction of the various units the final Obodo provides the definition of what is valid and what is not valid at the lower levels of interaction.
(The Renaissance 1974a)Thus, this multivalent conception of “community” in olu obodo linked duty to small-scale rural and municipal development to a larger national project.
In contrast to olu oyibo, understood as working for the white man or foreigner, olu obodo combined public service with a sense of loyalty to a more localized conception of a community-level polity, whether or not one was actually employed by the state (Osaghae Reference Osaghae2006).Footnote 4 The state government deliberately critiqued the imposition of colonial political entities and mobilized imaginaries of precolonial polities to underpin the new community council system, claiming “to return local self-government to communities that were fully sovereign and independent of all other separate geopolitical entities, both de jure and de facto, before colonial subjugation and the imposition of the so-called pax Britannica at the beginning of the present century” (The Renaissance 1973a; Ukegbu Reference Ukegbu1974). Furthermore, this new community council system re-institutionalized patrilineal kinship as an organizing unit of local governance, where political representation was explicitly based on kindred clan units (Odenigwe Reference Odenigwe1971; “Community Government in the East-Central State” 1974).
Yet critics of the “self-help” rhetoric of the postwar reconstruction repeatedly pointed to the way communities themselves subsidized projects that should have been state-funded and led, allowing the federal and state governments to abdicate their own responsibilities. As Emmanuel J. Nwosu wrote in The Renaissance in Reference Nwosu1973, the state government took “this local enthusiasm for self-help for granted, to the extent that one finds government functionaries bullying the rural people at the same time as these people are, in one way or the other, straining themselves to be their own keepers. This is why some people feel that the machinery for inducing self-help is fast becoming exploitative in character.” Importantly, such rhetoric of “self-help” has also transformed into a cornerstone of the way contemporary Igbo identity is articulated and understood in relation to the postcolonial Nigerian state, as a source of evidence of postwar state abandonment as well as collective perseverance (Harneit-Sievers Reference Harneit-Sievers2006; Nwauwa & Korieh Reference Nwauwa and Korieh2011).
I revisit this chapter of postwar history to reconsider the role of the postcolonial state in not only creating the conditions necessary for the formation of particular diasporic and town associations, but also in requiring support from the social organizations and capital mobilization from their members along gendered and patrilineal kinship lines. Although the state no longer plays a central role in coordinating such investments, many contemporary diasporic financing projects follow similar previous templates and models. Furthermore, as the postwar Nigerian state explicitly sought to systematize diasporic financing through joint “state-community” ventures, the postcolonial Nigerian state has emerged as both a central figure of collaboration and as a target of political critique by the diasporic associations.
Toward the Global South
In addition to hometown organizations, migrant Nigerians have produced a vast range of other kinds of associations that build on older kinds of affiliation while also generating new kinds of connections across both space and social identities. Following the civil war, southeastern Nigeria experienced a massive out-migration, as former Biafrans attempted to rebuild their livelihoods largely through entrepreneurial ventures. In the 1970s, commercial hubs across Nigeria experienced a massive influx of urban migrants from southeastern Nigeria. Mr. Obiora, an Igbo man in his sixties living in Lagos, noted that “we came looking for greener pastures.” During his lifetime, he had lived in the eastern Nigerian commercial city of Aba before the war, in his ancestral hometown in Abia state during the war, and eventually in Lagos following the war.
In the context of regional and rural out-migration, Igbo migrant associations have played an important role in forming and linking communities across Nigeria in the post-civil war period. While some migrants are directly linked to particular hometown associations, a range of other institutions have proliferated and jostled for power to represent Igbo people in their new sites of residence. Rather than being a “natural” ethnic formation, these organizations follow what Chukwuemeka Chukwuemeka (Reference Chukwuemeka2021) has called fractal logics, or dynamic multi-scalar patterns of expansion and contraction, depending on the population of the migrant community; they are also important sites of what Chinyere Ukpokolo (Reference Ukpokolo2012) has called “home-diaspora power contestations.”
Nearly five decades after the end of the war, these patterns of entrepreneurial out-migration have persisted, and since the 1990s they have increasingly included other African, Asian, and Middle Eastern destinations. Strikingly, by the 2010s, most international airlines operating out of Lagos were based in and faced toward the Global South, rather than North America or Europe. These transnational connections are regularly illuminated during annual migrations to “the village” during holidays, especially at Christmastime, in southeastern Nigeria. In 2015, Uchenna, a Nigerian man in his twenties living in Lagos, described the annual village youth association meeting in December, where several hundred unmarried young adults gathered on a recreational field in town. The majority of the participants were based in the major cities of Nigeria, predominantly Lagos, while at any given moment, an estimated 10 percent of the young men lived abroad, generally involved in transnational importing of some kind. Of those who lived abroad, about 40 percent were located in China, while others were scattered across Dubai, Malaysia, South Africa, Indonesia, India, Turkey, Europe, the United States, Vietnam, and Thailand.
Africans with more resources traveled to Western destinations for more immigration-oriented trajectories, while those traveling toward Global South destinations were more circular in their migratory paths, regularly looping back to Nigeria and onward to other destinations. As Uchenna emphasized: “If you’re rich you don’t go abroad” to Dubai and the Asian destinations for trade. As another man in his mid-thirties, who had imported phones from China to Lagos since 2005, recounted, “People from my village [in Anambra State], you can find them in China, Korea—more before, not now—Germany, London, Thailand… My village enter many countries. I join village meetings to do good and be good and successful. I travel, so I see good things that can be here in Nigeria. But, it is up to God’s intervention.”
Many other interlocutors, particularly from Anambra, Abia, Imo, and Enugu states, similarly reported that Christmastime was an important annual period of homegoing and gathering. Many of these youth meeting attendees, featuring unmarried men and women, created social media groups on WhatsApp to introduce themselves to each other and share information. Participation in these in-person youth gatherings changed as the members aged; after marriage, women were expected to go to their husbands’ villages during Christmastime rather than their own, while men shifted their attention toward other gatherings for men who had passed the threshold of marriage. Nonetheless, these WhatsApp groups enabled members to participate and be included in the village youth group even if they could not attend in person. As one young man described, “Anywhere you are, even in China, London, anywhere at all you are, you can equally know what is going on….We are many more than one hundred, so many people in other countries and in other parts of Nigeria.”
National Associational Life in a Global Nigeria
Protests such as the ones in Guangzhou are particularly spectacular moments of African migrant mobilization, and they are underpinned by a range of less public and more regular organizing practices, such as collective fundraising, planning social events and gatherings, and coordinating diasporic investments back to Nigeria. Throughout the year, Nigerian diasporic associations also gather in migrant residences outside of eastern Nigeria, reflecting varied patterns and waves of migration and settlement. In sites across the Global South where permanent immigration is close to non-existent, their memberships can fluctuate drastically, contingent on global geopolitical events and shifts in the domestic economy. They are, subsequently, often highly flexible formations that adapt quickly to varied memberships. For example, when Nigerian migration increased in the 1990s and 2000s in Dubai and Guangzhou, diasporic Nigerians quickly formed Nigerian national associations or “community offices” (Castillo Reference Castillo2020).
During a quiet July afternoon in the middle of Ramadan in 2012, I interviewed a man named Martins in his sharply air-conditioned office in the historic Dubai neighborhood of Deira. Martins’ desk was piled with stacks of assorted business cards and pamphlets, a laptop, a landline phone, and three constantly ringing mobile phones. Like many Nigerian businessmen who have rested their feet abroad for longer stretches of time in trade sites in the Global South, Martins relied on his eight years of experience importing commodities between India, China, Dubai, and Nigeria to start up his own logistics agency based in Dubai. His agency arranged business logistics for Nigerian traders, coordinating various stages of commodity sourcing, packing, shipping, clearing customs, and delivery to African markets.
In addition to his full-time business in Dubai, Martins was the leader of Dubai’s Igbo association, a highly flexible diasporic organization that had experienced many transformations over the eight years that Martins had lived in Dubai. As one of the longest-serving members of the Igbo association, Martins became a leader of the Igbo Nigerian community in Dubai in the early 2010s. During the day, young Nigerian men patiently lined up outside and inside his Deira office, waiting their turn to request his assistance with various legal and logistical issues they were facing.
Dubai was a pivotal site for Nigerian entrepreneurialism in the 1990s and early 2000s, enabling new geographies of commercial access and mobility. In contrast to trade sites closer to industrial production, Dubai offered a comparatively comprehensive array of commodities imported from across Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. This wider commercial range also enabled merchants with less working capital to buy smaller and more diverse quantities of goods instead of larger wholesale orders. This flexibility and relative accessibility also meant that Dubai’s Nigerian population was particularly sensitive to the global fluctuations of exchange rates. While a general Nigerian association grew in the early 2000s, following the 2008 global financial crisis, Martins noted that the Nigerian association’s membership halved suddenly as trade suffered a setback.
Across different Global South sites, Nigerian association groups form, expand, consolidate, and collapse, depending on the population numbers and the geographic origins of their members. Expansion and consolidation take on relatively systematic patterns; if membership increases from a particular region or state of origin, its members will branch off to form their own organization, while still retaining recognition of the overall umbrella of the Nigerian association. Moreover, depending on the numbers, these state associations can further subdivide into members of a particular Local Government Area (LGA) of origin or hometown. Usually, having around ten or more members from a specific location or area could warrant founding a new branch. For instance, in Dubai, as membership in the Nigerian association increased in the early 2010s, it progressively divided into three associations—Yoruba, Igbo, and Hausa—representing Nigeria’s three major ethno-regional groups. Furthermore, as the Igbo association continued to grow in membership, those from the southeastern states of Imo and Anambra branched off into their own organizations.
These associations were by no means unique to Dubai; by the early 2010s, in sites like Guangzhou, the leader of the Nigerian association served as the de facto Nigerian consulate; he actively advocated for Nigerian citizens who were detained or who faced legal trouble (Castillo Reference Castillo2016). Furthermore, there were enough Nigerians in the Guangzhou metropolitan region of southern China from the same hometowns to form their own hometown associations. These were largely from local government areas across the southeastern states of Anambra, Imo, Abia, and Enugu, along with one catchall Yoruba (southwestern ethno-regional) association. By contrast, there were only enough Nigerians in Istanbul in 2015 to mobilize around particular southeastern Nigerian states—Imo, Anambra, and Abia—as well as one catchall Yoruba group.
Nigerian immigrant associations in the West also have had similar patterns of progressive division in the past decades. In the context of Nigerian immigrants in the United States, scholars such as Anthony Igiede (Reference Igiede2013) have noted that diasporic associations also increasingly mirror the polarization of domestic Nigerian politics around ethnicity. Yet, it is interesting to note that in the context of the Global South, with comparatively much more volatile and rapidly shifting Nigerian migrant populations, these associations have always been deliberately and nimbly multi-scalar between national, state, and city delineations. Despite sharpened domestic political rhetoric polarizing ethno-regional differences, diasporic associations easily consolidated under one larger national umbrella when necessary and mobilized across ethno-regional affiliations.
China-Africa scholars have analyzed how African migrant associations and social linkages in sites such as China provide “networks of survival” and are instrumentalized for entrepreneurial advancement (Marfaing & Thiel Reference Marfaing and Thiel2015). Yet as Roberto Castillo (Reference Castillo2015) has noted, while academic literature on African migration to destinations such as China has highlighted the “economic” impetus and dimensions of these trajectories, such characterizations flatten the complexity of aspirations and strategies of mobile Africans, as well as the social contexts from which they emerge and navigate. Indeed, as Heidi Haugen (Reference Haugen2012) has described this phenomenon as the “second state of immobility” of Africans in China, the uneven tempos and experience of contemporary globalized mobilities exist in a geopolitical hierarchy of aspiration, where entrepreneurial activities are formative yet not definitive of many migrant Africans’ narratives. As both Castillo and Haugen demonstrate, the organizations of African migrants use existing social identities—national, ethnic, continental, or religious—while simultaneously exceeding and transforming them in the process. Building on such insights, this article situates diasporic organizational forms amid an array of dynamic social engagements. Rather than taking for granted particular national, ethnic, or hometown affiliations of African migrants, these connections are forged through a range of projects and necessities as they arise.
Furthermore, the activities of such diasporic groups vary drastically. In addition to more traditional forms of collective fundraising for projects such as building infrastructure like water tanks and pipes, many of these groups importantly serve as a social connector, organizing regular gatherings for its members abroad. Some international groups pool money for medical bills and other forms of support for their diasporic members, rather than supporting particular projects in Nigeria. In China, many Nigerians reported pooling money regularly to pay the deportation fines of members who had been jailed for overstaying their visas. Hometown associations were not always the main source of this financial support; more of my interlocutors had paid for the fines of close Nigerian friends and acquaintances that they had made in China than for fellow hometown or home state association members.
Home Beyond the Hometown
After thirteen years of living and trading in China and Dubai, one man in his mid-thirties named Chijioke returned to Lagos to set up two shops in Nigeria. A few months after returning to Lagos in 2017, Chijioke began attending monthly meetings of an organization called the “Ezeagu Brothers United in China (Lagos Branch).” Comprised of over fifty men, the association’s members all originated from ancestral hometowns located in Ezeagu, a Local Government Area (LGA) in Enugu State in southeastern Nigeria. Unlike historical and other contemporaneous hometown associations, however, the members of the Ezeagu Brothers United in China (Lagos Branch) all also additionally had lived in China at some point and now were residing in Lagos. Like Chijioke, the men had all traveled, lived, and conducted business in China for varied lengths of time since the late 1990s, and they now gathered on a rented field on the western side of Lagos to socialize once a month.
Throughout the 2010s, influxes of Nigerian merchant returnees from China arrived in Lagos for a variety of reasons, including a series of immigration crackdowns, the 2014 Ebola outbreak, the economic volatility wrought by global oil price crashes, and the COVID-19 pandemic. It is in this context that the “Ezeagu Brothers United in China (Lagos Branch)” emerged, as returnees created new forms of identification that were continuations of socialities forged abroad which also enabled them to maintain a distinction from other merchants in Lagos. Organizations such as these help connect those who identify from the same place of origin while also distinguishing them as having the particular and distinctive experience of having done business abroad. Furthermore, many returning merchants have resettled in a particular area on the western side of Lagos, which is home to two major wholesale commercial areas and has high proportions of transnationally connected Igbo-speaking traders.
While he lived in China in the early 2000s, Chijioke participated in the original branch of the Ezeagu Brothers United in China, where membership fluctuated between twenty and fifty members. They met every few weeks in the Guangzhou metropolitan region of southern China, mostly to socialize and discuss the challenges of daily life in China, while occasionally mobilizing around specific events or projects. For example, some of the original members first began connecting and coordinating with each other when someone from their hometown was arrested for an expired visa and faced detention and deportation. As Chijioke explained, “If the police catch you, they want to send you back to Nigeria, they [the association] can help you and pay for your flight and make sure that you go back to your country.” For each case of deportation due to an expired visa, members contributed and pooled their funds until there was a collected amount of around $5,000 to help pay the fines and purchase a plane ticket back to Nigeria. They would further collect a few hundred more dollars to send the deported man upon his arrival back in Nigeria, for him to buy clothes and get back on his feet.
Other moments caused members to mobilize quickly and in a range of capacities; in 2012, the hometown organization joined other Nigerian and African groups to participate in the protests that opened this article. This protest and other similar demonstrations not only mobilized smaller units of Nigerian migrants but also other migrant Africans as well who had experienced anti-black racial profiling in the Guangzhou metropolitan region. Other claims of anti-black racial profiling regularly circulated on social media, where Nigerians living in sites such as South Africa, India, and southeast Asia shared images, news stories, and memes of national sorrow and global racial solidarity.
These organizations also explicitly mobilized to develop and transform their places of origin in a variety of ways, from donating to village infrastructural projects to collectively constructing new commercial plazas. For example, while they were in China in the 2010s, the Ezeagu Brothers United in China group also began organizing more systematic and long-term projects, including the collective financing and construction of a commercial plaza in the eastern Nigerian city of Enugu. Between 2015 and 2017, for example, Chijioke made regular contributions for a total of $2,500, and the thirty-one other regular members made similar donations. With these pooled funds, they collectively purchased a parcel of land in Enugu and constructed a commercial plaza with 32 equally-sized shops, one for each investing member. These varied events and projects brought together the different members while they were living in China. Beginning in the mid 2010s, many Nigerians who had resided in China for a few years began returning to Nigeria on a more permanent basis.
Mobilized associational cultures also extend beyond hometown associations, to the extent that the majority of my interlocutors regularly participated in multiple forms and scales of pooling collective funds for hometown infrastructural projects at varied levels, such as the clan, street, and hometown. My interlocutors regularly pooled money for credit rotation clubs, and to finance the burials for fellow members of market lines, market associations, social clubs, religious groups, and friendship groups. For example, in addition to the Ezeagu Brothers in China (Lagos Branch) meetings, Chijioke attended at least six other monthly meetings, including a group of his family members living in Lagos, his hometown association, his village association, a credit rotating club, businessmen in his church, and two kinds of market associations. While Chijioke represents an example of considerable involvement, I spoke with many businessmen during my fieldwork who attended at least two or more of the above kinds of meetings with some regularity, and attendance in such organizations tended to increase with age and seniority. These included meetings related to market associations, family and clan groups, village and town associations, and male prestige social clubs, whose memberships explicitly drew from across many possible existing affiliations, with members representing different market sectors, market areas, experiences abroad, and places of origin.
By 2017, Chijioke’s participation in “Ezeagu Brothers United in China (Lagos Branch)” was mostly a social endeavor; the members would gather regularly to enjoy a cold beer after work, occasionally reminiscing about their times in China. Yet in addition to functioning as casual social gatherings, these organizational relationships and social media groups are also potential sites of political agitation and mobilization. For example, members have used these groups and market associations as channels to organize yearly commemorative protests around the Nigerian Civil War. Each May, major markets across Nigeria populated by Igbo businessmen shut down their activities to commemorate Biafra’s 1967 secession. While some contemporary pro-secessionist groups have claimed these shutdowns as support for their causes, many traders who participate in these annual protests express ambivalence toward the pro-secessionist groups while also emphasizing the importance of historical commemoration. These commemorative protests are not specific calls to action, but rather represent a kind of political agitation to provoke the Nigerian state and national consciousness; they are a call to realign national narratives, acknowledging this historical recognition as the first step in a process to address historical grievances.
Concluding Thoughts
This article considers the afterlives of migration experiences and how these groups transform places of origin through diasporic agitations. While much literature on African hometown mobilizations has pointed to strong communal ties and affinities as a source of development, this article revisits the role of the postcolonial Nigerian state in institutionalizing diasporic associations as a mode of developmental machinery within postwar Nigeria. By tracing the historical transformations of these groups, this article seeks to dispel static and essentialist characterizations of identities and social imaginaries, considering instead their dynamism and complexity across volatile global terrains.
Mobility creates new terrains of belonging and sites of rest. Stories of young death, unfulfilled lives, and unexpected tragedy are common, and they take on an additionally unresolved dimension when they happen across the oceans and when the bodies are irretrievable. Some bodies are never returned, as in the case of some of the young Nigerians who died in Asia and the Middle East, like the case that opened this article. Other mass African protests in China have mobilized around the deaths of Nigerian men who have passed away from jumping out of windows while attempting to escape immigration raids. Indeed, the specter of unresolved migrant deaths, such as the Nigerian man’s death in Guangzhou, coursed through many of my interviews when I asked about the significance of diasporic associations for Nigerians living abroad. As one Nigerian man in his thirties living in China succinctly volunteered, “Like in China, China is not my country. And anything can happen, and you don’t have your brother, you don’t have your relation, my blood-blood, so that’s why we belong in that association. If anything happen to you, you can have someone that can help you call your people if you have problem. So your people will not worry much about you. That’s why we are involved in this association.” Such fears of abjection highlight the ways in which life and the materiality of the body are intricately tied to the legacies of individual subjects as well as to a broader network of people.
When it is not possible to bury the physical remains, souls are nevertheless put to rest through symbolic burials in southeastern Nigeria. For example, one young man whose body was never returned from Taiwan was laid to rest in his father’s compound in Abia state, a length of plantain tree trunk placed carefully inside a full-sized coffin in place of his body. The young man who had described this example had not yet traveled abroad himself, and he was working in Aba, the eastern Nigerian market hub and industrial city. As he narrated this story, he quickly turned to his goal of building a house, musing that it was “very necessary for every man [to build his own house], and it will still be there whether alive or dead.” Such stories circulate widely among diasporic Nigerian men as they traverse transregional and transnational markets, serving as urgent reminders that they should establish a place of ultimate rest. It is in this larger cosmological context that the remaking, reimagining, and reconstructing of eastern Nigerian landscapes recurs through diasporic investments and circulatory migrations.
Most contemporary Nigerian men who claim ancestry in the southeastern region spend most, if not all, of their lifetimes outside of their ancestral hometowns, yet nevertheless they remain connected to the ancestral hometown through what has been called the “diasporic public sphere” (Van Den Bersselaar Reference Van Den Bersselaar2005). While some accounts attribute this diasporic public sphere to strong cultural ties and social connections to particular places, this article situates the continual re-territorialization of origin both historically and currently in the context of global migratory circuits that include recurring village-bound migrations, whether ceremonial, for burial, or induced by political crisis. By focusing on the two periods of postwar reconstruction and the 2010s, this article highlights how diasporic formations are dynamic processes that transform not independently from but in relation to state and global geopolitics.
The civil war profoundly entrenched the role of ancestral hometowns in eastern Nigeria as a site of refuge. During the war, many Igbos across Nigeria found themselves relocating to ancestral hometowns they had not lived in for generations, reconnecting with kith and kin alike. In the aftermath of the war, the devastated postwar landscape similarly produced another massive migration, this time away from southeastern Nigeria, as people scrambled to rebuild their lives and livelihoods, many through entrepreneurial ventures. Furthermore, ongoing postcolonial political turmoil regularly triggers village-bound migrations, particularly around elections. During the tumultuous and delayed 2015 presidential election, the majority of my interlocutors in Lagos had quietly sent their wives and children to eastern Nigeria, which experienced a massive influx of Igbo people from across the other regions of Nigeria. For others I interviewed, ancestral villages served as a place of temporary refuge for Igbo Nigerians fleeing from the violence caused by Boko Haram in northern Nigeria. These renewed imaginaries of the postwar hometown are not simply unilineal conceptions of connection; rather, they are connections that are constantly remade in the context of finding refuge during political instability and also as a final resting site for burial (Smith Reference Smith2004, Reference Smith2017).
Historical recognition of the war itself and its legacies is still a highly contested domain in Nigerian popular discourse; the act of defining the contours of the past is inevitably charged with political implications in the present. One Nigerian trader named Ike, who began traveling to China and Turkey in 2014, recalled his first experience abroad: “The first time when I travelled, I blamed the Nigerian government for so many things, for not putting things in place. I felt so bad …. Most countries now when you get there, you see Nigerians are connecting everywhere. Every nook and cranny, you see a Nigerian and you begin to wonder: who is the cause of all of these things? Me, what I believe is that Nigerian government is not really doing what they are supposed to do and that is why a lot of people struggle. Someone like me, who finished university, but I have to join business and all that, traveling to eat.”
For Ike, and many others like him, seeing so many Nigerians conducting business across the world evoked a sense of awe. Yet it also provoked sharper critiques of the conditions that have forced such widespread searches to make money, leading Ike to wonder who and what was “the cause of all of these things?” Such sentiments caused many of my interlocutors to resort to criticism of the Nigerian nation state, whether articulated through neo-secessionist Biafran agitations or by expressing support for domestic protests such as annual Biafran commemorations or broader ones against Nigerian police brutality. Indeed, many transnational Nigerian businessmen regularly critiqued the Nigerian state while at the same time also advocating for the state to intervene and support the livelihoods of Nigerians both abroad and domestically. In this context, neo-secessionist rhetoric and calling the state to action were not oppositional but were in fact synergistic demands for transformation.
Regarding the protest in Guangzhou, the deceased man’s hometown and friend networks mobilized the larger Nigerian and black African community working in the neighborhood. The protests in China also served as a platform for diasporic black Africans to appeal to their own governments for urgent legal support for their citizens abroad; by 2014, the Nigerian government had responded to such public pressures by officially establishing a consulate-general in Guangzhou. Most recently, during the 2015 Ebola epidemic and the ongoing 2019 COVID-19 pandemic, anti-black xenophobic incidents in southern China have highlighted the political urgency of diaspora-state agitations, where members of the Nigerian diaspora have publicly and forcefully appealed to both the Chinese and Nigerian states for action (Adebayo Reference Adebayo2021). In the most recent case, this pressure translated to strong public condemnations by Nigerian officials who met with the Chinese ambassador in Nigeria, urging China to take action.
Increased circulatory migration toward the Global South and ongoing political crises in Nigeria have further transformed these diasporic organizations, leading to the proliferation of dominantly male associations that play a significant role during annual and lifetime festivities, political crises, and burials. Indeed, as translocal formations, diasporas are historically contingent on the conditions of their emergence, but they also continue to be remade accordingly. While specific hometowns anchor some of the associations that feature prominently in migrant and diasporic Igbo Nigerian life, many of these other diasporic associational forms have members that draw from across varied hometowns, states, and regions. The continued salience of diasporic associations among mobile Nigerians is not merely about connecting rural places of origin to urban residences, but rather they involve situating oneself at a nexus of multiple transregional and transnational circuits, while also making claims to the postcolonial state. Furthermore, the increase of south-south migrations, marked by shorter term sojourns, has intensified the political stakes of redefining home.
Acknowledgments
I thank the generous anonymous reviewers, the 2018 African Studies Review emerging scholars workshop participants and faculty mentors (Dawne Curry and Bayo Ijagbemi), and Nana Osei-Opare for their useful and supportive feedback on this manuscript’s many iterations. The research for this article was supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the National Science Foundation.
