James Currey Children on the Move in Africa: Past and Present Experiences of Migration

Product Description Children in Africa are heavily involved in migration but we know too little about the circumstances in which they migrate, their motivations and the impact of migration on their welfare, on wider society and in a global context. This book seeks to retrieve the experiences of child migrants, and to examine how child migration differs from adult migration and whether the condition of childhood pushes individuals towards specific migratory trajectories. It also examines the opportunities that child migrants seek elsewhere, the lack of opportunities that make them move elsewhere and to what extent their trajectories and strategies are gendered. Analysing the diversity and complexity of children's experiences of mobility in Ghana, Madagascar, Mali, Nigeria, South Africa, Senegal, Sudan, Togo and Zambia, the authors look at patterns of fosterage, child circulation within Africa and beyond the continent; the role of education, child labour and conceptions of place and home; and the place of the child narrator in migrant fiction. Comparing different methodological and theoretical approaches and setting the case studies within the broader context of family migration, transnational families, colonial and postcolonial migration politics, religious encounter and globalization in Africa, this book provides a much-needed examination of this contentious and critical issue. Review [T]ouches on many current themes in the literature of African childhood. Razy and Rodet's introduction does a particularly good job describing the state of the field, making it useful in classrooms . interrogating how migrant children have fit into various representations of the world enriches our understanding of contemporary social contexts and has the ability to expand the purview of African policymakers in the future. ― IJAHS Elodie Razy and Marie Rodet have assembled an impressive range of contributions to this fascinating volume on African children and migration . in all, this is an impressive collection with a broad reach that will undoubtedly stimulate further much-needed work on African children and childhoods. The volume reaches across boundaries, both spatial and disciplinary. ― JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH Children on the Move in Africa offers a timely and insightful perspective into the long-established phenomenon of childhood migration in Africa. The volume effectively demonstrates that migration not only shapes the child migrant's identity, but it has also influenced the trajectories of the continent as adults call on their experiences of childhood migration to make value judgements on work, national identity, and social cohesion. ― AFRICAN STUDIES REVIEW About the Author Elodie Razy is Assistant Professor in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Liege (ISHS). She is the co-founder and co-editor of the online journal AnthropoChildren: Ethnographic Perspectives in Children & Childhood. Marie Rodet is a Senior Lecturer in African History at the School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London). She is currently working on her second monograph on slave resistance in Kayes, Mali.