Back to Africa: Second Chances for the Children of West African Immigrants

Abstract

This paper examines phenomenon of West African parents living in Europe and North America who send their older children back home: from places of high immigrant aspiration to those of hardship and privation. Drawing on a project on West African immigration to Europe and on previous field studies in Africa, we conclude that West African immigrants fearing consequences of their children's indiscipline in where racism and hostility can endanger entire family, may send unruly children back to home country. In doing so, we believe, they build on long-standing African disciplinary efforts in hopes of toughening their children's resilience to challenges in new place and wait for risk to dissipate. Key Words: African families, cross-cultural, culture/race/ethnicity, ethnography, fostering, migration. Recent decades have seen a sharp rise in number of West African nationals in Europe and North America. Most have been young men seeking work or a degree, though women have come in greater numbers as well, whether independently or, under family reunification provisions, to join a husband (Sow, in press). More thinly documented have been West African children who are directly affected by international migration to West. Some of these children are left behind when a parent travels abroad for work; others come as migrants themselves, whether as dependents of a working parent or, in more extreme cases, unaccompanied by an adult. Among most puzzling cases are those of children of West African immigrants in Europe or North America who are sent back to Africa, particularly children of older school age. Leaving places that seem to offer every advantage - established health and educational systems as well as likelihood of a stable, prosperous future - these children effectively return to countries with levels of personal hardship and privation that most Europeans and Americans would find unacceptable for their own children (Aries, 1962). When asked to explain their actions, immigrant parents may point to lower costs of living and abundant child care back home. Alternatively, they may declare that a child is adapting poorly to new place or needs to grow up knowing family's ancestral roots. If pressed, though, nearly all West African immigrant parents living in Europe and United States, which we describe collectively as the West, ultimately say they want their children to gain a secure footing West. Observations like these raise two questions. First, what might immigrants of recent West African origin find so objectionable about countries usually described as pinnacles of African immigrant ambition to point that they would send their children back to live in one of poorest regions on earth? Second, why would they so often send their children back home at just point when children should be preparing most intensively for a successful professional life in their new homes? Stripped of their wider social and cultural contexts, we believe apparent facts in this case are misleading. Drawing from our past and present studies in Africa and Europe and from a range of secondary sources, we examine in some detail West African tenet that ensuring a child's social and intellectual development requires maximal parental access to long-standing disciplinary practices. We then turn to two related concerns of West African parents about life in Europe and United States. One is what parents see as a Western tendency to coddle and spoil children and to restrict parents' access to discipline they may deem necessary for bringing a child into line. A child with an easy life, they fear, will have faltering interest in school and career achievement, losing ambitions parents had for him or her, quite possibly main reason they made international move in first place. Even more serious for parents may be repercussions of an undisciplined child's involvement in gangs, violence, and crime. …