Lost in the Madding Crowd: Accelerated Adulthood of Ethiopian Migrant Children in South Africa

Studies on children’s migration tend to focus on their migration experiences from a single narrative such as children as accompanying minors, as luggage, as a source of anxiety for adults and as transnational families. Increasingly, children are also considered as active agents in migration that can dynamically influence the lives of other family or household members. With the exception of children as active agents, the above research has allowed adults to speak for children in raising concerns about their experiences of migration. The missing link, however, is that of children who have been intentionally robbed of their “teenagerhood” and fast tracked into adulthood. This paper draws on research among Ethiopian ‘minors’ in the Western Cape and Eastern Cape in South Africa to explore the notion of accelerated transition from minors into adulthood of Ethiopian migrant children. It seeks to complexify and nuance the single narrative approach in childhood studies by drawing on the concepts of children as luggage and as agents to fill the single narrative lacuna and to understand the workings of accelerated transition to adulthood, the challenges and mitigating circumstances thereof. We argue that the allure of transitioning from a ‘border’ to a ‘boss’ is the price that children yield to in order to move from being a ‘luggage’ to self-activating their agency in the process to change the standard of living for the left behind families.