Abstract
This is a comparative study of African diasporas, their engagements with one other and with home places, both internationally and domestically, using four case studies in two countries: Tanzania and Cameroon. The authors’ premise is that the current fashion for globalisation and transnationalism has prompted a focus on international diasporas at the expense of local ones, particularly in the context of contemporary enthusiasm for harnessing remittances to the development project.
In order to redress the balance and to highlight the importance of domestic diasporas in development processes, the authors explore the relationships that members of domestic diasporas develop and maintain both with each other—in the larger urban areas—and with the homeplace. Although concerned with welfare in the city, home associations also maintain a stronger interest in their home places than do members of the international diaspora, who tend to visit home less frequently and, particularly in the case of Tanzania, tend to form national associations rather than localised ones.
The case studies themselves focus on development projects, in the widest sense of the term—a mortuary, schools and a water project—and through them explore the ways aspects of belonging are encouraged and developed by all concerned: those ‘at home’ responsible for the project; and those in the diaspora—domestic and international—who have political aspirations, claims to status or family responsibilities to meet. Through such engagements, home associations are both produced by and produce the places whence they emerge, thus consolidating a sense of belonging that allows people to make claims on one another.
The authors emphasise the contingent nature of associations: social, cultural, historical and political specificities all provide the framework for the construction and development of such associations; and the importance of home associations lies more in their social and cultural roles than in the economic success of the development projects they undertake. Indeed, in formal terms, many of their projects are marginal, even unsuccessful.
This is an ambitious book, and its scope is wide—perhaps too wide, for there appears to be material here for a number of books. That said, it is largely successful, and if one of the premises of the book—that there is a continuity of practice between domestic and international diasporas—does not seem to be borne out by the data, this title is nevertheless an informative and incisive critique of local modes of belonging in contemporary African states.