Paper short abstract:

By analyzing the migration and return of Kenyan runners and the changing public perceptions of this trend in Kenya, my presentation shows how personal, communal and national identities are redefined to adapt to precarious economic conditions and make room for possibilities of more stable futures.

Paper long abstract:

Moving to study and compete in the USA in the 1970s, Kenyan runners were one of the earliest cohorts of postcolonial African migrants to the USA and Europe. In the 1990s, the nature of migration changed as some Kenyan runners opted to change citizenship and run for other countries. While initially perceived as a betrayal in public discourse, this latter form of migration soon came to be accepted as a pragmatic solution to navigating economic precarity. In both of these migration scenarios, Kenyan runners not only maintained ties with their homes through remittance, they often returned home to settle and build their communities after retiring. In fact, these returning migrants became and are crucial to sustaining the long distance running system of Kenya by leveraging their social and financial capital. My paper, a historical rendering of these migration patterns of Kenyan athletes, considers how the actions of these athletes expose the limits of viewing the migration of Kenyan athletes as a crisis. While the framing of African migration as a crisis often stems from anxieties of the nations to which they move, in this scenario, it is the postcolonial Kenyan nation state that frames it as a crisis. Yet, athletes, through their words and actions, especially, the investment of their winnings in the economy, challenge this perception and assert the congruence of sport migration and patriotism. Through creating new parameters to define good citizenship, they frame Kenyan identity as capacious to accommodate their choice of how to deploy their labor.