Nigerian Immigrants as ‘Liminars’ in Ghana,West Africa: Narratives on Mobility,Immobility and Borderlands

Introduction: setting the context

This article is concerned with the conceptualization of Nigerian immigrants in Ghana as ‘liminars’ ¹ and draws on three concepts in migration scholarship, namely mobility, immobility and borderlands. The first two concepts, mobility and immobility, are dualistic and in perpetual opposition to each other, and conceptually draw directly from ‘being mobile and immobile’ respectively. Together, they constitute an important research frontier in migration scholarship that has gained ascendancy since the beginning of this century (Carling, 2002; Haugen, 2012; Jónsson, 2008; Van der Velde and Van Naerssen, 2011). This was necessitated, first by the fact that migration research was often concerned with contrasting migration (migrants) with non-migration (non-migrants) (Carling, 2002; Jónsson, 2008). As such, as argued by Jónsson (2008: 10), ‘the possibility of wanting to migrate but not being able to do so was often lost’, and thus paved the way for more focused attention on immobility in mobility/immobility research. The third concept in this paper – borderland – is more about ‘interstitial zones of hybridization’ (Dudziak and Volpp, 2005 p. 595) with both mobility and immobility features, or to resurrect Anzaldúa’s (1987: 19) classic description, a place of ‘half and half’ ‘neither one nor the other but a strange doubling’ – a ‘two in one body’. These three concepts are interrelated to some extent such that it is possible to glean understanding of both mobility and immobility from borderland in the ‘creation’ of Nigerian immigrants as liminars.

Although much has been written about each of the three concepts in broader migration scholarship, an attempt to bring them together empirically is almost non-existent. This article draws on migration practices in West Africa, specifically from Nigeria to Ghana, and seeks to contribute to understanding these concepts from both conceptual and empirical points of view. It argues that Nigerian immigrants in Ghana are mobile but also immobile and are trapped, or live in, (temporal) borderland space that reflects liminal living.

Though there is a long history of Nigerian presence in Ghana (Antwi Bosiakoh, 2009; Arhin, 1979; Eades, 1994; Peil, 1974), there is no uniformity on the existing statistics, just like their counterparts around the world. Nonetheless, it suffices to note that the Nigerian immigrants in this study are an important part of the growing Nigerian presence in Ghana (Antwi Bosiakoh, 2017a,b; Akinyoade, 2015) and a key part of the estimated 5.2 million Nigerians living in other countries around the world (Orozco and Mills, 2007). According to some sources (see for example Olatuyi et al., 2013) as many as 5% of all Nigerians in the diaspora live in Ghana, making Ghana the third top destination for Nigerian migrants in the global south following Sudan and Cameroon, and the fifth destination in the world including the US and UK (Antwi Bosiakoh, 2017b; Olatuyi et al., 2013). The migration of these Nigerians to Ghana is predicated on the sub-regional economic governance structure; that is, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), with protocols and regulations seeking to engineer free movement of people and goods. These protocols and regulations implicate migratory movements within the West African sub-region. As such, almost all the Nigerian migrants in this study explained their migration to Ghana by the fact that Ghana and Nigeria are members of ECOWAS, and they are therefore entitled as ‘citizens’ to visa-free entry to any ECOWAS member state including Ghana. Here is a case of ECOWAS as a sub-regional economic institution occasioning migration, or from a more theoretical point of view, the case of mixed embeddedness of sub-regional institution/protocol in migratory projects/pursuits of immigrants.

Conceptualizing borderland: understanding mobility, immobility and liminality

The study of borderlands emerged from the fundamental existence of a border – a line or boundary dividing a ‘space’ into two parts (Havlíček, 2007). It originated from the field of geography, but modern discourse in politics places its growth in significance to the rise of ideas of nation states, particularly in Europe (Orozco-Mendoza, 2008; Stoddard et al., 1983). While its usage is often confused with boundary, and the two are frequently used interchangeably, they are not the same. Van Wijhe (2010) notes that ‘boundary’ from ‘bound’ is broader with inward orientation but ‘border’, with its quintessential ‘line of territory’, creates an inside and outside, interior and exterior shades of demarcation (see also Paasi, 2011). In politics, Anderson (2013) reminds us about how borders and boundaries helped organize the Roman Empire into a hierarchical form of settlements, cities, provinces and regions. Borders thus helped delimit territories and the possessions therein, and leaders deployed them to picture their possessions and influences (Brunet-Jailly, 2005). From geography and politics, the notion of border has percolated into other social science disciplines, and, increasingly, the study of borderland communities as unique kinds of communities with localized cultures – including ethnicity, language, and other cultural variables – has gained ascendancy (Beswick, 2007; Madsen, 2014; Oates-Indruchová and Blaive, 2014). Toward the later years of the twentieth century, political geographers floated the idea that borders may be institutions; albeit, as institutions they may be fraught with disputed functions (Newman and Paasi, 1998; Paasi, 1999).

Over the course of the last three decades, there has been increased interest in border as a theory (Anzaldúa, 1987; 1999; Newman, 2006a,b) with publications in the form of conference proceedings and edited books. The Journal of Borderland Studies was established in 1986, while other journals continue to devote pages to issues that relate to borders and bordering (Diener and Hagen, 2009; Liikanen, 2010; Newman, 2006a,b; Parker and Vaughan-Williams, 2009; Popescu, 2011). In May 2006, the European Journal of Social Theory was devoted to theorizing borders, with Newman (2006b), arguing that the growth in border studies stands in sharp contrast to the borderless ‘chorus’ in the globalization discourse. Also, Rumford (2006) expounded the need to extricate ‘border theorizing’, which draws attention to the shifting role of political borders, and the changing relations between borders and society. Concerning the latter approach, Rumford (2006: 155) argued that theorizing borders also concerns the ‘attempt to understand the nature of the social . . . and social theorists now place borders more centrally in the study of society’. After all, as he eloquently illustrated, theorizing ‘mobilities and networks is, at the same time, to theorize borders’. In celebrating this line of thought, scholarship on networks and mobilities has developed, thanks to Castells (2004) who oriented us on how ‘space of places’ is now under siege from ‘space of flows’.

There is also a sociological contribution to theorizing borders as a socially constructed and re-constructed abstract notion (Lindemann, 2005) that possesses the power to shape the life practices of inclusion and exclusion within the boundaries of the social world (Luckmann, 1970). Here, the sociological configuration of social ties along the lines of dyad and triad, and the interactions they engender among group constituents (Simmel, 1950), and the ways in which these interactions are embedded with notions of borders and bordering on identities, come into sharp focus. Moreover, when sociologists talk about social class stratification, the ideas of border and bordering underlie these thoughts as they seek to create spaces/zones (Rączaszek, 2011) and borderlands.

Thus, border has moved beyond the physical territorial lines of demarcation and separation to incorporate the socially constructed abstract spaces of conceptions, where, increasingly, the concepts ‘closed’ and ‘open’ have emerged to illustrate different degrees of ‘entry into’ and sometimes ‘exit from’ the borderland space. For example in the preface to Borderlands La Frontera, Anzaldúa (1987) conceptualizes borderland as the place where ‘two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch, where the spaces between two individuals shrink with intimacy’. This conceptualization helps to subvert and mitigate duality (for example in mobility and immobility), what Kellner (1989) calls totalizing, and represents ‘the coming together of opposite qualities within’ (Anzaldúa, 1987: 19), the symbol of the fusion of opposites (Anzaldúa, 1987: 47), ‘a boundless, floating state of limbo’ (Anzaldúa, 1987: 72), or simply, the new mestiza. In the Anzaldúan conception of borderland is a plural personality that transcends duality – a crossfire between camps and a battleground.

Borderlands thus maps a sense of mestiza – a plurality of self or, as Anzaldúa (2000: 176) explains in Interviews/Entrevistas, ‘the dimensions of the experience of living in between overlapping and layered spaces of different cultures and social and geographic locations, of events and realities’. To be in a borderland, to be mestiza, or to use Anzaldúa’s other term ‘nepantla’, is to be a ‘supreme border crosser’ (Anzaldúa, 2004: 20), ‘a hybridity, a mixture’ or a ‘liminal state in-between worlds, in-between realities’ (Anzaldúa, 2000: 268). It is a consciousness and awareness of multiple subjectivities that denotes ‘space’ Rey (2001: 197) or ‘condensation points’ (Pavlakovich-Kochi et al., 2004).

What Anzaldúa (2004) calls liminal state animates Van Gennep’s (1960 [1909]) and Turner’s (1967, 1987) notions of ‘liminality’. Van Gennep’s liminality concept draws on the rite of passage process in which the ritual subject (i.e., the individual undergoing the rite) transits from one identity to another by traversing three distinct stages – separation, liminality and aggregation. Separation denotes the symbolic detachment of the ritual subject from the rest of society; liminality (margin) signifies an ambiguous moment in which the ritual subject has few or none of the attributes of the past or the coming state; and finally, the aggregation stage which represents consummation of the passage and the ritual subject re-joins society with full rights and obligations.

Following Van Gennep (1960 [1909]), Turner (1967, 1987) conceptualized liminality as inter-structural betwixt and between personae, where individuals no longer fit the prior classification and have no new classification yet generated for their situation. Liminality in this sense then becomes a transitory and transformative (empowering) stage in seclusion (Turner, 1987: 8), and the liminar is endowed with the freedom to reflect, ‘to juggle with the factors of existence’ and ‘promiscuously intermingle and juxtapose categories of event, experience and knowledge with pedagogic intention’ (Turner, 1967: 105–106). In migration studies, specifically in the migratory process, the meaning of liminality incorporates temporal-spatial, in between origin and destination (that is, out of the origin but not yet in the destination), the movement process, among others. It is characterized by ambiguity and uncertainty, evoking multiple meanings and in Turnerian terms, the actors can be conceptualized as transitional beings, ‘neither one thing nor another; or maybe both; or neither here nor there; or maybe nowhere . . . and are at the very least “betwixt and between” all the recognized fixed points in space-time of structural classification’ (Turner, 1967: 96).

In this paper, I draw on the notions of borderland and liminality to examine both mobility and immobility experiences in the migratory lives of sampled Nigerians in Ghana. Borderland and liminality help unify different parts of opposing categories like mobility and immobility, offering fundamental lenses for understanding social realities at the intersection arena – the place of contacts, cooperation and conflict (Havlíček, 2007; Morehouse, 2004) or the ‘contested terrain of exclusion and inclusion’ (Matlon, 2015: 148).

Methods

This paper is drawn from a larger research project on the mixed embeddedness of Nigerian immigrants’ informal entrepreneurship in Ghana. The bigger research project sought to qualitatively investigate the embeddedness dimension of Nigerian immigrant entrepreneurs in Ghana, in the sub-regional economic community structure ECOWAS, and in the transnational context both within West African states and others. The fieldwork lasted 7-months in 2015, and was intensive and multi-sited (Antwi Bosiakoh, 2017b), employing a range of qualitative data gathering strategies including in-depth interviews, observations and market conversations with 41 Nigerian entrepreneurs about their entrepreneurial activities in the country. The choice of a qualitative approach in this article is a reflection of the larger project’s methodological concern to make participants become narrators of their lived experiences. Participants were identified in a multi-stage sampling process involving purposive selection based on personal contact cases from earlier study (stage 1), snowballing for further/expanded cases, and referrals from some leaders of the Nigerian immigrant community in Ghana. This process helped to reduce refusal rates and ensured variations in the cases and responses. A great deal of effort was made to investigate the entrepreneurs’ migratory narratives as understanding these was essential for understanding their entrepreneurial activities. The interviews, all lasting approximately one hour, were face-to-face in the interviewees’ preferred languages (Twi and English) at their business premises or other mutually agreed place including home, church and school premises and a restaurant. The analysis in this article focuses on the entrepreneurs’ migratory narratives. The fieldwork sites were Accra – the capital of Ghana, Kumasi – the second largest city after Accra, and Ashaiman, a large sprawling, suburban settlement ² with strong attraction for some Nigerian immigrants.

Following Marcu’s (2016: 358) call for more studies on the discourse of mobile people to highlight broader global trends in cross-border mobility, this article adopts a three-theme analysis approach to examine the intersections of mobilities, immobilities and borderland narratives in West Africa and further places the actors – Nigerian immigrants in Ghana – into a liminar category. These themes were generated by coding participants’ narratives on their migratory experiences which first led to two analytical domains: 1) mobility and 2) borderland. Further coding revealed immobility related to the initial code ‘mobility’, which became mobility/immobility or (im)mobility. Further analysis of (im)mobility and borderland provided useful insight on the notion of liminar. These coding themes/analytical constructs provide the framework for organising and reporting the research findings.

For ethical purposes, all the procedures for this research met the requirements set out in the Australian National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research (2007, updated March 2014) (the National Statement) and was approved by Macquarie University’s Human Research Ethics Committee (Human Sciences and Humanities) (Reference No. 5201400968) - at its meeting on 28 November 2014. Further, all the names of respondents in this article are pseudonyms to ensure anonymity. Following from here is a conceptualization of borderland for understanding mobility, immobility and liminality.

The migratory processes and experiences of Nigerian immigrants in Ghana

Nigerian immigrants as liminars in Ghana

In the context of this article, some aspects of the empirical realities of Nigerian immigrants in Ghana lend themselves to liminality. For these immigrants, the various facets of their migration and immobility experiences and practices correlate with the conceptualization of liminality. To systematize the discussion, I first place liminality within the ‘movement process’ of Nigerians in Ghana, i.e. to conceive the immigrants as ‘moving’ such that their present location in Ghana is seen as in between the migration origin country and their intended destination – a borderland. As noted earlier, some Nigerian immigrants like Onyeama, Otunla, Odichi, and Adamma, etc., nurse dreams of travelling to more developed countries in North America, Europe and elsewhere. For these immigrants, their migration to Ghana and their stay in Ghana, part of the step-wise process of migration, feed into the moving process. They are on the move, out of their origin country of Nigeria but not yet in their intended destination. Van Gennep’s (1960 [1909]) notions of separation, liminality and aggregation fittingly apply to their situations. By leaving Nigeria, they have separated. However, they have not yet achieved aggregation, the actualization of the long-term migration dream of living in a developed country. Being in Ghana in this case is to be in a liminal context – a ‘midpoint of transition in a status-sequence between two positions’ (Turner, 1975: 237).

This midpoint position is similar to being in a borderland – a liminal zone. The immigrants are liminal residents, what Walker describes as a ‘liminal group’ (2008, p. 53). As liminal immigrants, narratives on their stay in Ghana are characterized by a strong sense of ephemerality and temporariness (Barenboim, 2016; Coutin, 2003; Dudziak and Volpp, 2005; Rando, 2007; Villegas, 2014) with explanations grounded in the long-term goal of travelling to a Western country. This is reflected in how their entrepreneurial efforts are directed to service the temporary nature of their stay in Ghana; that is, to finance and facilitate their intended journeys out of Ghana. Although temporariness characterizes these liminal immigrants, an element of permanency is also embodied in their experiences. For example, Adamma’s short visit in Ghana turned into months and years. She and Odichi were in their fourth year in Ghana and Otunla and Onyeama in their seventh and eighteenth year in Ghana respectively. A clear majority of the immigrants (63.4%; n = 26) had, at the time of fieldwork, stayed in Ghana for more than 5 years, 44% (n = 18) for more than 10 years and the remaining 19.5% (n = 8) for 6 to 10 years inclusive. Therefore, for these immigrants, their liminal stay in Ghana is characterized not just by evanescence but also permanence.

Additionally, the meaning of liminality in the lives of the immigrants reveals empowerment (Acosta, 2008; Khoshneviss, 2017; Mata-Codesal, 2007), similar to Anzaldúa’s (1999, 2007) mestiza, which allows some immigrants to appropriate and be in both worlds, that is Nigeria and Ghana at the same time. This is exemplified by their acquisition of Ghanaian passports even though they continue to be Nigerians. By this, the immigrants who are also ‘Ghanaians’, traverse the structures of nationality, appropriating the sense of belonging, benefits and support from both worlds. They appear very adroit in navigating the existing transnational space. For example, an Igbo man living in Kumasi and married to a Ghanaian Moslem girl may have his nuclear family in Ghana and the extended family in Nigeria. He would send his children back to visit ‘their hometown’ and he himself would move frequently between Ghana and Nigeria, because he has business in Kumasi and Lagos. And while in Ghana, he would love to eat Fufu ⁶ but in Nigeria, he would be drawn to Eba ⁷ , and would have a Ghanaian day-born name for everyday conversation and a full Ghanaian name on his Ghanaian passport, besides his actual Nigerian name on his Nigerian passport.

A key part of the theme of empowerment potential in liminality relates to the entrepreneurial activities pursued by the immigrants. These activities are conceived as part of the liminal practices – a liminal entrepreneurship. First, they are pursued in the liminal zone or in borderland Ghana, that is in the zone between Nigeria (separation stage) and the intended western migration destination (aggregation stage). Second, as noted earlier, these entrepreneurial actions are part of the process and effort of transiting to the aggregation stage of their migration journeys, and here we find the transformative potential in liminality through liminal entrepreneurship. This liminal entrepreneurship, pursued with agency and instrumentalism (Brettell and Alstatt, 2007; McMullen et al., 2016), thus nourishes their ‘core’ migration goal. Liminality is thus of theoretical essence in their long-term migration goal and in several significant practices of the immigrants, including their entrepreneurial pursuits in Ghana.

But being liminars or performing as liminars is not an end in itself. It is a part of the process of moving into the aggregation zone (Van Gennep, 1960) which denotes the eventual migration to North America, Europe or elsewhere deemed more developed than Ghana. This, however, is not without the potential division in loyalty because of the possible multiple belongings. But, as shown by Vasta (2013), this process does not necessarily undermine cohesive belonging. They do not disengage from loyalty and attachments with Nigeria; they progressively pursue attachment and ‘loyalty’ with Ghana. These loyalty and attachment engagements with Nigeria and Ghana nourish their future migration aspirations. Here is a case of multiple engagements and belongings, (with)out senses of (un)ambiguity. They are a misnomer, because while appearing to ‘belong’ in Ghana, their identity as Nigerian is never shrugged off. Perhaps a better way to capture this situation is to conceive of them as partially belonging and engaging because, as argued by Walker (2008: 54), ‘one cannot fully belong to more than one culture’, as in the ‘process of acculturation in one culture, one is simultaneously being dis-acculturated from another’, or perhaps in the processes of dis-acculturation and acculturation one is also involved in the creation of an entirely new cultural identity imbued with features of (dis)accultured societies. In this way, the meaning of Bourdieu’s (1977: 95) habitus as an ‘acquired system of generative schemes objectively adjusted to the particular conditions in which it is constituted’ aptly fits the immigrants’ shifting positions of belonging and attachment.

Conclusion

This article on the mobility, immobility and borderland narratives of Nigerian immigrants in Ghana sheds important light on the actuality of migratory movements and migration politics within the West African sub-region, where the existing supra-national ECOWAS (infra)structure seeks to foster economic integration through free movement of goods and people. In reality, however, this is fraught with challenges leading to institutionalized border corruption. More broadly, the article contributes to mobility/immobility research in the global south - in Ghana – by global southern citizens, Nigerians. For these immigrants, their migration places them in precarious positions and their experience of precariousness has characteristics of borderland physiognomies that reflect legal-illegal boundary subversion personae and Ghana becomes a borderland, sometimes temporal-spatial borderland with involuntary immobility potential for some of them. These borderland experiences also implicate the entrepreneurial pursuits of the immigrants. Together, understanding the immigrants’ mobility, immobility and borderland living experiences and practices help to place them into a liminar, a categorization which proffers an important pathway for understanding migratory configuration in West Africa. Like structures of socio-cultural, historical, economic, politico-institutional and policy forces which shape behaviours and actions of migration actors and entrepreneurial formation processes, conceptualizing Nigerian immigrants as liminars in borderland Ghana helps to understand how their mobility, immobility and borderland impulses exude a transformative, empowering and agency-oriented instrumentalism; for example, through their liminal entrepreneurship.