Strategies and Tactics of Integration of Transnational African Migrants: Case Study of Ethiopian Migrants in South Africa

Abstract

Ethiopians come from a fractured country, with a heightened sense of ethnic identification. Ethnicity is central to their self-identification, accompanied by deeply entrenched ethnic cleavages at home and here in South Africa. Past and recent ethnic-based dynamics and cleavages are actively playing a part here. Such dynamics gained salience with the modern Ethiopian state’s practices and through their political history (Vaughan, 2003). These are part of the pervasively African concern: tension between the ethnic and the national, and the impulse to reconfigure and reconcile them. It is crucial to ask how these tensions evolve and transform in movements and moments in transnational spaces, and the interactions and encounters of these tensions and impulses in these spaces. Similarly, South African society too is very much divided, with its own tensions and contradictions. These coalesce with the tensions and dynamics that Ethiopians bring with them.