My Mother Was My First Country”: Identity and Belonging of Second Generation Congolese Immigrants in South Africa

How do we make sense of Africanity and Pan-Africanism in the face of Afrophobia in South Africa? I consider this question through the exploration of second-generation Congolese immigrant experiences of identity and belonging in South African cities. This is important because of what the journey of migration means in the personal and social imaginary, particularly in a global context of ever-increasing obsession with borders and exclusion.

For this contribution, I present a portrait of Nabarungu Bacumi which is centered on the role of her mother – a powerful yet destructive force throughout Nabarungu’s childhood through to adulthood. It tells a story of how Nabarungu’s mother influences and mirrors her experiences at the level of personal and national identity. Themes in Nabarungu’s poetic-portrait are around the implications of beauty and aesthetic in the personal world and also in public, and the ways that physical appearance are tied to particular localities. It speaks to her experiences of masculinity, experienced with her father and with men, white men. This introduces race as an important theme, a longing to be seen and validated by whiteness. Her story shows that experiences of othering and xenophobia made it difficult to belong to the broader world as a child and as a young woman. Finding internal peace has been a process of finding things more abstract and tangible to hold on to, music and values have become a space in which to find home. This contribution proposes the need for a deeper interrogation of the experiences of intra-continental immigrants and argues for the recognition of an African diasporic experience in Africa.