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LEGAL STATEMENT For personal use only. All rights reserved by Paul Tiyambe Zeleza. All parts of the document "African Labor and Intellectual Migrations to the North: Building New Trans-Atlantic Bridges", also known as "African Labor and Intellectual Migrations"; "AfricanLabor.pdf"; "AfricanLabor.doc"; and "AfricanLabor.rtf" are for personal use only. They are owned in whole solely by Paul Tiyambe Zeleza. All rights reserved. No part of these pages or parts thereof, either in text or image form, may be used for any purpose other than personal use. Therefore, reproduction, modification, storage in a retrieval system or retransmission, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, for reasons other than personal use, is strictly prohibited without prior written permission. Inquiries should be directed to: Paul Tiyambe Zeleza Center for African Studies-UIUC 210 International Studies Building 910 South 5th Street Champaign, IL 61820 (USA) African Labor and Intellectual Migrations to the North: Building New Transatlantic Bridges Paul Tiyambe Zeleza Professor of History and African Studies Director, Center for African Studies University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Acknowledgments: Some sections of this paper were presented at the Symposium on African and African American Intellectuals, University of California, San Diego, May 22, 1998; and the SAPES Monthly Seminar, Southern African Regional Institute for Policy Studies, Harare, Zimbabwe, August 4, 1998. I wish to thank the participants at the symposium and seminar for their comments. Thanks also to my intellectual friends Thandika Mkandawire, Tade Aina, Cassandra Veney, and Dickson Eyoh for enlightening discussions on these issues, and to Bertin Kouadio for research assistance. 1 Introduction In 1978, Ali Mazrui argued in his book, Political Values and the Educated Class in Africa , that Africa needed to domesticate, decolonize, and diversify the project of western modernity through what he called the strategy of counter-penetration, a multiple project of engagement and entry into the economic and cultural heartlands of the West. The heroic forces of economic counter- penetration would be financed by Arab petro-dollars and those of cultural counter-penetration fueled by the trans-Atlantic traffic in education. Migrant African intellectuals would speak for Africa in the West, seal relations with African Americans, and together, they would subvert western claims to the universal, to global hegemony. For Mazrui (1978), then, migrant African intellectuals were crusaders for African racial redemption and civilizational presence in the world concert of cultures. More extravagant claims for migrant intellectuals were made by Edward Said in 1993 in his book, Culture and Imperialism , in which he saw Third World intellectuals and writers exiled in the North as cosmopolitan combatants, upon whose hybrid shoulders rested the liberation of both the western and post-colonial worlds. “Liberation as an intellectual mission has now shifted,” he wrote, “from the settled, established, and domesticated dynamics of culture to its unhoused, decentered, and exilic energies, energies whose incarnation today is the migrant, and whose consciousness is that of the intellectual and artist in exile, the political figure between domains, between forms, between homes, between languages” (Said, 1993: 332-3). While for Mazrui the potency of the migrant intellectuals’ passions lies in creative social conversations, in forging alliances with historically oppressed populations in the North, specifically the African Americans, the “voyages in” of Said’s exiled intellectuals are confined to lonely textual readings, supplemented by professional contacts and perhaps the conference circuit. For Appadurai (1996) in his book, Modernity at Large , mass migration is one of the twin forces that characterizes the current age of globalization, the other being electronic mediation. In this new global cultural economy the imagined communities of nation-states are being transcended by the imagined worlds of various cultural-scapes, that is, mobile landscapes of people, images, ideas, technology, and finance. These massive, rapid, and disjunctive flows and relationships which he terms ethnoscapes, mediascapes, ideoscapes, technoscapes, and financescapes lead to deterritorialization: the fracturing of links between nation and state and the transnationalization of the primordial, albeit invented, identities of ethnicity, religion, and race, identities that can turn violently implosive or can constitute elements of a progressive postnational imaginary. Migration, from this perspective, therefore, is a product of, and produces, globalization as a constellation of cultural flows that create a transnational world configured around postnational networks of diasporas. This essay seeks to interrogate these three images of migration from the South to the North as civilizational counter-penetration, revolutionary cosmopolitanism, and cultural transnationalism. The culturalist biases of these perspectives tend to ignore a fundamental feature of migration, that more often than not people migrate to sell their labor power and that the patterns of migration, labor procurement and utilization are conditioned by the dynamics of capitalist development, expansion, and accumulation. The economic dimensions and role of migration in sending and receiving countries should not, therefore, be overlooked. Not only is international migration tied to the changing dynamics of capitalism as a world system, it constitutes a critical element of the international division of labor. The essay takes the view that the cultural and economic processes of international migration are intertwined; that African 2 migrations are as much a part of the complex mosaic of transnational cultural flows as they are of labor and other economic flows. The essay seeks to unravel the factors that influence Africans to migrate to the North and to assess the consequences of their migration particularly on the countries they leave behind. Is their migration motivated by individual self-indulgence, or can it contribute to Africa’s development? Are they following the old trails of Pan-Africanism or the newer tracks of transnationalism; not migrants, but transmigrants who develop and maintain multiple relations and locations, whose personal, political, cultural, economic, social, and organizational involvements span borders, linking their countries of origin in Africa and their countries of settlement in the North? The paper is interested in analyzing the trends of African migration to the North in general, and of skilled workers in particular, specifically the intellectuals. Is their migration a blessing or a curse for Africa and African scholarship? What is their role? What should be their role? The migrant African intellectuals, it will be argued, constitute the third community of African scholars, the other two being those located in the continent’s own universities and independent research centers that have mushroomed in recent years. If the condition of the migrants is to be productive and progressive for Africa, the essay argues, there is need for close and constant collaborations, contacts, and conversations between the three scholarly communities. Needless to say, the term community is not used to imply social and spatial homogeneity for each of the identified groups, for there are numerous and complex intersections that link them, which this essay in fact seeks to investigate. Rather, it serves as a heuristic device for identifying the different locations and contexts of scholarly production and reproduction among African intellectuals. The essay is divided into five parts. First, it examines the scale of contemporary global migrations, and second, of Africans’ migration to the North. Third, it analyzes the forces behind it, probing the various theories that have been advanced to explain international migration and the rise of transnationalism. Fourth, it surveys the production of African intellectuals on the continent and in the North and the extent of the “brain drain”. Finally, the essay explores ways of building new intellectual bridges across the Atlantic, of blackening the Atlantic, and the crucial role that can be played by Africa’s migrant intellectuals in this endeavor. Dynamics and Directions of Global Mobility The late twentieth century has been characterized as the age of globalization marked by the rapid movements of capital, commodities, and cultures, of images, ideas, and institutions. To what extent can it also be seen as “the age of migration,” to quote the title of Castles and Miller’s (1998) book? i Going by the hysterical pronouncements of politicians and the media, especially in the North, and the inflated rhetoric by the academic seers of globalization one would think the i They argue that contemporary migration is characterized by five tendencies: globalization of migration whereby more and more countries are affected by migration movements; acceleration of migration whereby migrations are growing in volume in all major regions; differentiation of migration whereby most countries have a whole range of types of migration, such as labor migration, refugees, and permanent settlement; feminization of migration whereby women are playing an increasing role in all regions in all types of migration; and politicization of migration whereby domestic politics, bilateral and regional relationships and national security policies are increasingly