This panel contributes to a growing body of research that seeks to understand the ramifications of long-distance international movements to and from African cities. International migration and mobility remain under-researched in contemporary urban Africa. We will be presenting research conducted in four locations: Fes (Morocco), Accra (Ghana), Lagos (Nigeria), and Lubumbashi (DRC).

Migrants from the entire continent and beyond are making their living in African cities. This panel will look at how immigrants create their homes and livelihoods within these cities. We will explore how migrants engage with surrounding local communities, considering levels of integration ranging from cosmopolitanism to ghettoisation. We will also consider immigrants’ practices of long-distance translocal sociality: how do immigrants in Africa maintain ties and exchanges with their families and wider social networks located elsewhere?

Long-distance exchange and mobility is not confined to immigrants; African traders in particular are involved in commercial activities far beyond the continent, reaching the Middle East and China. The panel will also look at the mobility of traders from major African markets, who have built up expertise in international trade. Their location is multisited and constantly shifting, both within the city and beyond borders, as they go about their business, creating “globalisation from below”.

These fresh insights show a different picture to the ‘global abjection’ we are familiar with, and challenge the Northern bias of the global cities literature. As urban residents actively participate in the wider world through entrepreneurship, mobility, and long-distance social networks that span the continent and strecth beyond it, they reproduce and transform African cities.