Intimate strangers: Connecting fiction and ethnography

Abstract

Scholarship influenced by politics of exclusion has presented intra-African migrants in search of a productive and meaningful existence as an unbearable burden on those fortunate enough to be recognized and represented as locals, nationals, or citizens (Peberdy 2009; Neocosmos 2010). Locals feel resentment toward African “Others," whose presence is perceived as a threat, a danger, or an infection in need of urgent attention. Almost invariably, African migrants in African cities are perceived as epitomizing backwardness and as being on the limits of humanity, which must be contained if civilization and modernity are to carry the day. Citizens are instinctively expected to close ranks and fight off this “attack” by an influx of barbarians who do not quite belong and who must be “exorcized” so “insiders” do not lose out to this particular breed of “strangers," “outsiders," or “demons” who are perceived to have little but inconvenience and inhumanity to contribute (Landau 2011). This attitude is in contrast to fairer-skinned migrants from within and outside the continent who are believed to be higher up the hierarchy of “purity” of humanity often expressed in terms of belonging to racial, cultural, geographical, class, gender, and generational categories (Gupta & Ferguson 1992; Stolcke 1995; Geschiere 2009).