Africans on an ‘English Farm in the Pacific’

Abstract

This chapter continues the discussion of participants’ lived experience in New Zealand by framing and analysing participants’ lived experiences via four themes, namely, ‘neighbourhood life’, ‘employment and workplace issues’, ‘African masculinity’ and ‘being a New Zealander’. The analysis of data suggests that mainstream society does not fully accept Africans as legitimate New Zealanders but, instead, regards Africans, at best, as sojourners and, at worst, as perpetual refugees—a stateless people. The lived experience of participants discussed in this chapter suggests that Africans feel marginalised in New Zealand. Ultimately, the participants’ lived experience reflects modernity’s race logic which claims that Africans ought to be modified and ‘fixed’ by whiteness in order for whiteness to launch Africans from the long dark night of prehistory into modernity and Western civilisation (Goldberg, Racist culture: Philosophy and the politics of meaning. Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, 1993).