Nigerian Hausas in Ghana’s capital, Accra, have integrated within the society’s Muslim minority, to the point that many indigenous Ghanaians consider the Hausa language a native Ghanaian language and the Hausa tribe a native Ghanaian tribe. In contrast, Nigerian Hausas in Niger’s capital, Niamey, are excluded by their hosts.
Why are Nigerian Hausas integrated into Ghanaian society in Accra but rejected from Nigerien society in Niamey?
That’s Claire Adida, a Stanford political science PhD, in one of her job market papers. Violence against migrants within Africa is quite common. The recent violence against Zimbabweans in South Africa is just one example.
After twelve months of fieldwork in Ghana, Benin, Nigeria and Niger, Claire suggests an answer:
Immigrant group leaders face incentives to sharpen cultural boundaries in order to preserve the distinctive identity of the communities they lead.
Furthermore, host society members feel threatened by, and are thus more likely to reject, immigrants who can easily integrate through the cultural repertoires they share with their hosts and free ride on indigenous benefits.
Conversely, if immigrant groups share few or no cultural traits with their host society, their leaders face a lower threat of group identity loss. They lack incentives to highlight boundaries they perceive already naturally exist.
My first impression: say what? The objects of discrimination in many societies have been those that are easy to distinguish: the Indians in Uganda, the Chinese in southeast Asia, the Jews in Europe, Islamic traders West Africa. So the excluded group is not necessarily the closest one.
In an e-mail, Claire explains that the theory applies to those who have a non-zero chance of passing (which other races do not). Then she really sets me straight:
It’s fascinating to me that antagonism toward non-Africans gets so much attention/press relative to antagonism toward Africans. Of all expulsion episodes on which I have data for SSA countries between 1960 and 2000, only one targeted non-Africans specifically: Idi Amin’s expulsion of Indians in 1972. The other 44 expulsions targeted/affected Africans!
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