‘Life is peaceful here’: Nigerian refugees in Limassol between colonial afterlives and city-making

Abstract

Divided by ethnic conflict, plagued by an economic crisis, and enforcing restrictive bordering practices at the edge of Europe, the Republic of Cyprus hardly constitutes an obvious choice for Nigerians fleeing conditions of state breakdown, crisis, and social immobility. The perceived ‘unusualness’ of this migration has made Nigerian and other African refugees particularly vulnerable to human rights abuses, violent nativist discourse, and racialised hyper-exploitation in the labour market. Yet despite these difficulties, some Nigerians strive to build a life on the island, with modest success. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this article attempts to unravel the prevailing methodological nationalism, upon which notions of the ‘unusualness’ of African migration to the island are premised, in two ways. In contrast to notions of being itself a former colony, ‘too small’ to accommodate refugees, I show that colonial-era emigration to Africa has engendered anti-black racism in Cyprus, which has only been strengthened by EU membership and economic crisis. By focusing, on the other hand, on the city of Limassol as an ambivalent landscape of crisis and opportunity, I demonstrate how the urban rather than the national dimension can put notions of ‘unusualness’ into perspective. Within a global condition of crisis and social immobility, Nigerian refugees emplace themselves within the opportunities that Limassol, as a nodal point of social relations along multiple scales—national, regional, European, and global—has to offer. While this fact in itself does not improve their position vis-à-vis a restrictive asylum policy framework, it nonetheless renders them a constituent part of the city.