Beyond Blackness: Sub-Saharan African Immigrant Knowledges and Agency in Canada

Over the past two decades, research on immigrants and refugees (henceforth referred to as “immigrants”) in Canada has revolved around their struggles to rebuild self and family, and hopefully transition into fully participating Canadians.¹ In many studies, immigrants are often presented as helpless or needy newcomers requiring the intervention of culturally sensitive service providers to navigate social supports and acquire important information in a bid to enable successful integration into Canadian society.² As the official actors and implementers of migration policies, service providers’ views and operations remain central to how we view and treat various immigrant groups. The role of individuals, families and communities within immigrant populations as strategic sites of support has received very little attention in literature. This is even more so for smaller, under-researched groups like African immigrants.³

Africans are no strangers to life in Western advanced countries, but the rapid increase in their populations as newcomers, especially in North America, is a relatively new trend. The early 1900s witnessed the rise of active colonization projects in Africa by Western powers. The 1940s and 1950s were characterized by rising public dissent against Western colonization, fueled by growing nationalist struggles. Regardless of the tempo of colonial relations, Africans travelled to various parts of Europe and, subsequently, North America; these were often temporary sojourns to acquire higher education, which fed into a broader national goal of expanding the pool of human capital for economic development in a post-independent era.

The economic recession, political crises and social unrests of the 1980s, referred to as Africa’s “lost” decade, marked the beginning of large cohorts of emigrants to Western advanced countries in search of a better life. The new African ‘Diaspora’ emerged in the first decade of the 21st century as a small but fast-growing population. In Canada, they grew from just 1.9% of recent immigrants at the turn of the millennium to 13% in 2016.⁴ Current statistics place Africa second among Canada’s immigrant sending regions. Most African immigrants are from Sub-Saharan (popularly referred to as Black) Africa, which includes countries like Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, Rwanda, Uganda and Zimbabwe.

The literature on Sub-Saharan African immigrants in Canada is not only sparse, but also, in many ways, it hides more than it reveals. Often, African immigrants are either tucked into the larger group of ‘Canadian immigrants’ or an undifferentiated pool of ‘Canadian Blacks.’⁵ Despite the huge diversity among immigrants from a sub-continent of 46 countries, the experiences of Sub-Saharan Africans remain largely hidden among the analyses of ‘other immigrant groups.’ Similarly, research on Black Canadians or anti-Black racism does not do justice to the diverse ways that various social markers such as gender, ethnicity, language and religion define African experiences of racism.⁶ Often, their unique histories, cultures and languages as well their experiences of transnationalism are not well explicated. More importantly, we rarely hear the voices of African immigrants as experts of their own, diverse experiences.

This special issue draws from emerging research studies as well as commentaries on Sub-Saharan African immigrants—as stakeholders, knowers and actors in their own life experiences. We caution, however, that as a contribution to an acutely sparse extant literature, the scope of this special issue is highly limited. Our modest goal is merely to add to the scholarly fodder required to fuel more debates on much-needed but long-neglected discourses. The articles in this special issue explore both the commonalities that African immigrants share with other immigrant groups as well as the specificities of their experiences, particularly the intersections of social markers that have unique significance across different African migrant communities. Interestingly, although not by design, the presentation of authors also capture some of the areas of emphasis in contemporary debates such as return migration, challenges facing the second generation and resilience as a knowledge framework, which increasingly drive research, policy and practice in North America. Most importantly, this special issue showcases the crucial role of stakeholders within African immigrant groups and the potentially...