Chapter 48: Migrant homemaking in Sub-Saharan Africa: from self-help housing to conspicuous construction

• Main Author: Pauli, Julia (auth)
• Format: Electronic Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Cheltenham, UK Edward Elgar Publishing 2023
• Subjects: JFFN; Housebuilding; Migration (rural-urban & transnational); Social class; Kinship; Southern Africa; West Africa
• Online Access: DOAB: download the publication; DOAB: description of the publication

Massive displacements, forced labor migration, and large-scale resettlements ordered by colonial states, but also internal and transnational migration, have stimulated specific forms of homemaking in urban and rural regions throughout sub-Saharan Africa. The chapter first briefly scrutinizes earlier forms of housebuilding and migration in colonial African contexts that let to various forms of self-help housing and the appropriation of colonial urban planning and state housing. Extending on these insights, conspicuous house constructions by regional elites and, increasingly, by the so-called emergent African middle classes, are discussed. A third section describes transnational migrants and their homemaking practices. Finally, it is argued that these three phenomena - self-help housing, elite/middle-class housing, and transnational home constructions - are not separate phenomena but have to be understood within the complex webs of kin relations in which they are embedded.