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Paper short abstract:

Using Nyamnjoh's provocations about 'Frontier Africans' we argue that labelling and categorisation of African migrants on the African continent demonstrate western political and research ideologies that corrall individuals according to race, class, ethnicity, nationality and movement.

Paper long abstract:

Working from Nyamnjoh's understanding of and elaboration on 'Frontier Africans' we interrogate the normative categorisation and labelling of African migrants on the African continent. We argue that the imposition of geographical and political boundaries (for eg state borders) were historically driven through European colonisation and imperialism; and in the last century into the twenty-first century by a further globalised political economy that created a tension between the global south and the global north. By implication the categorisation of movement, an offshoot of colonial ordering and western theorisation of the other, has organised the way we think about movement on the continent.

Situated in particular westernised and hybrid political and economic contexts researchers and migration scholars themselves impose categorical conventions that are not specific to African contexts. Our provocations in this paper, catalysed in part by Nyamnjoh's work and our research experiences, open discussions on intra-African migration to context specific research that spotlights alternative realities that are not founded on separatist (or othering) principles. Our work, underpinned by ethnographic fieldwork across different time-space slices and a further reading of and engagement with texts on humaning, cosmopolitanism and decoloniality, interrogates the continuation of a scholarly ecosystem that centers categorisation and/or labelling as a means to understand African movement.