Paper long abstract:

Co-authors: Ben Page, Department of Geography, UCL & Martin Evans, Department of Geography, University of Leicester

African diasporas often maintain links with their family's place of origin through home-based associations which unite indigenes wherever they may congregate 'abroad', most commonly in urban centres within their home nation and overseas. Some of these associations are now stretched out over space: the home branch itself, chapters that meet in the cities of the home country and chapters that meet overseas. Recently these associations have widened their remit from a focus on the welfare of those living in the diaspora to an explicit concern with the 'lack of development' in the home place. In so doing, they embody the tensions inherent in the intersection of debates about cosmopolitanism and development practice. On the one hand, current policy discourses and postdevelopment ideas about appropriate and sustainable approaches to development foreground the importance of the identity, knowledge and experience of 'the indigene' in the diaspora. On the other hand, recent debates about the 'politics of belonging' foreground diasporic activity as potentially parochial and uneven in its engagement with 'home'. Drawing on research on home-based associations amongst the domestic and British diasporas emanating from four rural home places (two in Cameroon, two in Tanzania), the present paper demonstrates that the different paths of nation-building followed by post-independence Cameroon and Tanzania are reflected in the different forms of each country's diasporic associations and the ways in which they mobilise place-based identities. Ethnicisation, where it occurs, plays out differently in different contexts but can also bring material benefits to home places.