Migration among the Yoruba diaspora is an age-old practice driven largely by socioeconomic factors, new citizenship status, and a sense of belonging in the precolonial era. Focusing on the Yoruba commercial diaspora, Migration and Diaspora Identity by Rasheed Olaniyi provides a rich historiography of the contrasting socioeconomic and political realities of Yoruba immigrants’ life in Kano (northern Nigeria) and Tamale (Ghana) between 1900 and 1970. Grounded in ethnographic methods and important theories, Olaniyi contrasts the dynamics of Yoruba diaspora migrant life with the contentious political turn that stripped them of dual citizenship status in the colonial and postcolonial contexts of Kano and Tamale.
The book traces how political and economic factors challenged the expression of dual citizenship among the Yoruba diaspora, highlighting transnationalism as a coping mechanism and the strategies they adopted to navigate the imbroglio associated with deprivations and expulsions rooted in indigeneity laws in Kano and Tamale. The nostalgic feeling this evokes is reinforced by the Yoruba worldview on the temporality of migration and the immigrant experience, as well as the expectation of returning home someday. Nevertheless, the Yoruba immigrants were active participants in Ghana’s socioeconomic, religious, political, educational, and linguistic life. Using their entrepreneurial, artisanal, and linguistic adaptation skills, the Yoruba diaspora in Kano and Tamale navigated the dynamics of their new homes. Yet they maintained a strong bond with kin and remained connected to their homeland through regional trading networks.
Motivated by the cocoa boom and the associated demand for labor, and unfettered labour mobility, the Yoruba immigrant community in Ghana grew so large that it pervaded every part of Ghana by the 1940s and 1950s. Driven by similar economic factors, particularly the commissioning of the Lagos–Kano rail line, Yoruba immigrants migrated to Kano during the colonial era. However, unlike in Tamale (Ghana), the exclusionary British colonial policy led to a bifurcation in Kano between the immigrant population, categorized as British protected persons, and the host population, categorized as British subjects. Motivated by the quest to preserve the Islamic culture and institutions, this bifurcation promoted urban apartheid in Kano, the exclusion and deprivation of the immigrant population from citizenship rights and privileges, and a restrictive residential settlement pattern for the non-native immigrant communities in Sabon Gari away from the native Hausa population in Kano. The Yoruba immigrants’ dilemma was compounded by the implementation of the Northernization policy of the 1950s, designed to check the perceived and real fear of the dominance of core positions in northern Nigeria by southerners. This resulted not only in the marginalization of southern immigrants in public services but also in the preference for expatriates over them to counterbalance southern dominance in northern Nigeria. The Northernization policy discriminated against immigrants from southern Nigeria, particularly the Yoruba immigrants in Kano. Similarly, Ghana’s Alien Expulsion Order of 1969, following economic downturn, stripped the Yoruba immigrants in Ghana of dual citizenship rights and economic privileges.
Remittances occupy a significant position in the migration experience and cycle of the Yoruba immigrants in Tamale and Kano. The book underscores the significant contribution of migrant economic accretion and remittances to fostering local development in their homeland communities amid the dearth of colonial development initiatives. Remittances from diasporic communities and organizations bolstered human development in the homeland by establishing educational, infrastructure, healthcare, and religious institutions that later played pivotal roles in local development.
Citizenship rights and the privileges associated with them underline a major theme of Rasheed Olaniyi’s Migration and Diaspora Identity. Some Yoruba and other West African immigrants in Ghana enjoyed citizenship rights due to their long period of immigration and settlement dating back to the pre-colonial era, and to the absence of colonial restrictions based on citizenship in the Gold Coast. The introduction of the Nationality and Citizenship Act of 1957 and, much later, the 1969 constitution, stripped some Yoruba diaspora of citizenship rights in Ghana’s postcolonial era.
Following economic downturn and political crises blamed on the immigrant “others,” the enforcement of the 1957 Deportation Act demanding the exit of illegal immigrants from Ghana within two weeks changed the migratory dynamics and diasporic experiences of Yoruba immigrants alongside West African immigrants in Ghana. Unfettered labor mobility under the British colonial government in the Gold Coast also gave way to strict immigration laws and regulations. This development changed the migratory realities of the Nigerian diasporic community and immigrants in Ghana in the postcolonial era. Consequently, deportation became a tool of economic nationalism and an offshoot of the criminalization of the immigrant “others” as experienced in Ghana in the late 1960s and in Nigeria in the early 1980s. The expulsion of over 200,000 immigrants who had constituted the backbone of Ghana’s informal economy since the pre-colonial era elicited mixed emotions: some experienced incomplete migratory cycles, while others found meaning as agents of social change in their homeland, and others migrated further to Chad, Benin, Togo, and Côte d’Ivoire.
Overall, the book provides a rich historiography of the migration patterns and the contradictory realities of the Yoruba immigrants in Kano and Tamale. However, the theory of constructivism in international relations could offer further analytical insights into the diasporic experiences and outcomes of the Yoruba immigrants in Kano and Tamale.
