Families in Africa: Migrants and the Role of Information Communication Technologies. Edited by Maria C. Marchetti-Mercer, Leslie Swartz and Loretta Baldassar

Abstract

This book contributes to a growing literature that seeks to understand the meaning of transnational families in contexts of increasing human mobility. It adds to this literature by focusing on diverse African migration experiences from the perspective of migrants themselves. Capturing the multiple ways that family is made by migrants living in South Africa, it covers the experiences of those who move from rural to urban areas, as well as cross-border migrants from Malawi, Zimbabwe and Kenya. It answers important questions about how people perform family in contexts of extended separation due to migration. It helps to understand how, in contexts like South Africa, where Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are less available and data are more expensive than some parts of the world, this might challenge existing knowledge on transnational families. Most notably, the book covers migrant experiences from very different socio-economic circumstances, race and space without flattening out the diversity of experiences—something not common in the existing literature. It also includes significant reflexive writing from the authors’ own migration experiences.

The book consists of 10 chapters of which six offer empirical insights and four are conceptual in nature. The approach of the empirical chapters is to focus very much on individual narrative and migrant stories. These are valuable in their own right, but they also, in their individual focus, connect to broad themes that can shape future research in the field. This is where the true value of the book lies.

The first such theme is the significance of geography in an increasingly connected world. As with existing literature, this book shows how ICTs do indeed allow for connection across space that mean family life continues in the online world. For example, Chapter 2 discusses the impact of COVID on the research and how it normalized online family life, which is an important reflexive contribution. And yet, far from rendering geography irrelevant, the chapters also show the ongoing emotional pull that notions of co-present and often nuclear families hold over migrants (see, e.g., Chapter 4). The poignant narratives show what is possible in a world mediated by ICTs but also what is lost. Reading across the chapters, it would appear that what is most lost is intimacy. Whilst the practical activities of family life continue, the deeply emotive and intimate nature of family is hard to sustain over distance.

Connected to this, the nature of care and what care means in contexts of geographical distance comes through strongly across the chapters. Whilst ICTs allow for connection, many of them also allow for mediated representations of oneself (particularly on social media) that can reduce the honesty, and thus intimacy, of family connections. When reading Chapter 3, I was struck by how ICTs are not simply something people use to continue their family relationships. Rather, they facilitate the construction of new forms of family and shape the nature of family that is possible and desirable. This raises questions for future research on what might constitute a ‘real’ relationship. Existing research into young people's use of social media clearly shows that they increasingly consider online relationships to be as real as face-to-face ones. And yet, this is clearly not so for all members of a family, and this shapes the nature of what family can be in contexts of migration, who can participate in family life and in what ways.

The book shows clearly how, in spite of shifting conceptualizations of care, the quality of online care is mediated by people's comfort with different technologies and is shaped by age, access to laptops and smart phones and location (such as rural or urban). Many families still prefer a phone call, even if it is expensive (as in Chapter 3). For others, creating intimacy requires a visual image of the other person (Chapter 6). In Chapter 8, we see this line of theory developed the most, and I was left asking whether one needs a body and touch in order to provide care. Thus, together the chapters revisit the important question of how co-presence is constructed in contexts of migration and what forms of family are most likely to feel satisfying to which migrants. In this way, the book considers how emotional connections are shaped by place (brought into focus most clearly in Chapter 9) as well as by the type of migration (refugee migration, economic migration or migration for study to name a few), the nature of the family left behind (older rural family members vs. younger urban ones) and the conditions in the host country. An under-acknowledged factor shaping the nature of family relationships is time and the way that time zones limit people's access to those they love making connections less spontaneous. Through these findings, the book moves between a focus on the day-to-day practicalities of family to the management of significant events such as births, deaths, medical crises and graduations.

This book provides useful similarities and contextual contrasts to the existing research on transnational families. Its focus is very much on the detailed experiences of migrants and presents their experiences in their own voices. It will be useful for scholars and students in many different disciplines although perhaps mostly in migration studies, psychology, sociology and gender studies.

The author declares no conflicts of interest.