Friendship fears and communities of convenience in Africa’s urban estuaries: Connection as measure of urban condition

Abstract

Across the developing world, immigrants, internal migrants and long-time residents increasingly co-occupy and co-produce estuarial zones: sites loosely structured by the disciplines of state, formal employment or hegemonic cultural norms. In these hyper-diverse, often highly fluid sites, the appearance and form of friendships and solidarities are varied and revealing. Drawing on examples from rapidly transforming African cities – particularly Johannesburg and Nairobi – this article adds three facets to the emerging literature on urban friendship. First, it outlines conditions under which the localised intimacy of friendship represents a potentially frightening form of social obligation and regulation. Given many ‘southern’ urban economies’ uncertainty and migrants’ orientation to ‘multiple elsewheres’, local solidarities – including friendship – are often more frustration than facilitator. Second, it suggests that amidst these seemingly anomic, distrustful sites, residents forge shared values and socialities that eschew friendships’ potentially confining bonds. These ‘communities of convenience’ illustrate the value of solidarity in migrant-rich spaces while raising broader questions about the spatial scale and role of affective relationships in overcoming economic and physical precarity. It lastly argues that the relative strength of localised friendships provide a means of comparing urban sites while revealing rationalities – political, economic and social – at work: friendship fears reveal the distinct estuarial spaces shaped by ongoing movements of people into, out of, and through precarious cities of the south.