Appeals to shared Africanness: Negotiating precarious childhoods and intra-African migration in two coming-of-age narratives in contemporary South Africa

Abstract

Child and youth migration has not only been marginalized within scholarship on literary engagements with global migratory processes, but has also, for the most part, been studied in the narrow context of movements from the Global South to the Global North. This essay examines the complex dynamics of child and youth migration manifest in narratives of migration to South Africa from elsewhere on the African continent. Focusing on the coming-of-age of young migrants and refugees in Meg Vandermerwe’s novel Zebra Crossing (2013) and Aher Arop Bol’s refugee memoir The Lost Boy (2009), I argue that the texts critique common readings of African childhoods as either utopian or dystopian and move beyond dichotomous framings of young migrants through the lens of victimhood or criminality. The texts highlight young migrants’ precarious experiences relating to intersecting hierarchies of race, gender, ability and immigration status, while at the same time foregrounding their situated, relational agency that is often negotiated through appeals to shared Africanness. Drawing on scholarship on the postcolonial Bildungsroman, I suggest that both texts deploy the form to reclaim access to – and subject to criticism – the current human rights order. By focusing on intra-African migration, this essay extends literary migration scholarship to address how the selected texts exact new vocabularies and alternative imaginaries for the study of contemporary migration narratives.