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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I think Claire needs to look carefully on what qualifies as an expulsion. In 1974, the current dictator of Malawi, Hastings Banda, introduced several laws barring those of Asian descent from operating business in rural areas, forcing most of them to leave the country. They were forcibly moved out of the country, but the end result was the same!
She also needs to be careful on how she defines Africans. Someone born in Africa is an African, regardless of their skin colour or ethnic history!
Anonymous.
I understand that competition over scarce resources may lead to the creation of all kinds of groups, bonded with whatever any leader would find useful.
I can also speculate that group leadership emerges in certain immigrant groups because they are not assmilated into the general society, and that assimilation prohibits the emergence of leadership and grouping. But I don’t know, it’s only speculation.
And the point that identities are created by leaders in order to increase competitiveness over scarce resources give little hard evidence on the creation of leadership, besides some support for my initial speculation. So I still don’t think that I know too much about these processes, but I observe that what seems to happen in West Africa, that groups with larger cultural distance to the host population assimilates more easily, goes contrary to what I observe at home.
In Norway one will find that educated, secular, Turks from Ankara or Istanbul assimilates far more succesful than religious Turks from the countryside. Both will have the same physical attributes ensuring that no one will take them for natives, but the cultural gap predicts assimilation well, but the opposite way of what is found in West Africa. Hence, I ask: “Why?”, and further: “What can we learn about integration?”
And I don’t see why you have to study Marxism to understand your point, but that is a different story ;)
Tord, the Marxist identity theoretician would argue that cultural markers (langauge/skin colour/dress/whatever) aren’t the cause of inter-ethnic violence. Rather, these are employed in circumstances of competition over scare resources to emphasize group exclusivity.
So, for example, the reason there is no conflict between Norwegians and Swedes is because they aren’t competing for scarce resources. Hence, there is no reason to strongly employ and emphasise cultural markers which create group boundaries.
@anon: The Mandingo ethnic group in Liberia would be one example. There are others in other countries.
Could you elaborate on this:
…Islamic traders West Africa
“Why would indig leaders always want to keep their group and its benefits constant?”
I don’t think that is the case. I thnk the point is that leaders in immigrant groups tries to hold on to their power. Hence, assimilation is regarded as a threat, since it will most likely challenge the powers of such leaders.
How these leaders emerge is an other question, and one that I won’t try to answer here.
Why would indig leaders always want to keep their group and its benefits constant? Perhaps immigr groups who can blend in and contribute to the indig group’s weight in national politics will be welcome. I would expect the institutional context to play a role as Daniel Posner suggests.
This is interesting. How do you think these findings can be used, for instance, in relation of integration policy of immigrants in Western European countries?
Here most of the violence goes towards groups that would never be taken for natives, due to their physical appearance. One can hardly distinguish Swedish immigrants in Norway from the native population (unless they speak, of course), however, there is close to zero violence between the two groups. The same can be said about, for instance, Dutch immigrants in Norway.
However, immigrants that would never be taken for natives, like Arabs or Africans, often meets a quite different reality.
Can the realities in some way be connected to the presence of group leadership rather than differences in cultural identity? Swedes or Dutch immigrant groups certainly have no group leadership, while many non-western immigrant groups have.
Freud has a elegant term for this type of discrimination, “the narcissism of minor differences.”
Civilization and Its Discontents, p. 108