The struggles of African migrant women—marked by exploitation, violence, and forced movement—are often underreported and depersonalised. Diaspora Africa co-founders Chimee Adịọha and Amaka Obioji call for a shift in how their stories are told, urging a more intersectional and action-driven approach.
Written by Chimee Adịọha & Amaka Obioji
Africa has seen a high record of breaking news and numerous trends on contemporary migration and mobilities, some of them are trends documented on Diaspora Africa’s Migration Monitor. We bend to the contemporary because this period, too, has attracted more digitised indexing than previous periods in Africa’s migration history.
Most news sites, whose news is ridden with generalisations of migration as the movement of people away from their homes, use a mild way to report people-centred mobilities but a harsh strategy to eliminate the nuances of mobilities itself. These nuances make up the known and unknown complexities associated with the needs of movement. As we turn towards intersectionalities, especially when it comes to women and girls, we are often met with the categorisation of gender as a singular complex, with no attention to other burdens faced by the same “women and girls”. This results in the loss of spotlight, the loss that we get to experience when “women and girls” migrant stories are half, broken, or repressed.
It is our hope that we use the affordance of the International Women’s Day to accelerate our thoughts and possible actions as a conduit for an “all round” approach to the fugitivity surrounding African migrant women, their unending transitions, and a push for what we will call their version of citation justice, the glaring need to platform repressed voices. By fugitivity, we are concerned with the endless movement of migrant women within and outside Africa. We are using fugitivity as a concept that keeps African women in a state of constant and continuous movement; even when they settle, they are still faced with other varieties of torture. It is when we acknowledge this fugitivity that we can begin to rethink the gaps and holes that African migrant women have suffered from and, at the same time, proffer relevant suggestions and recommendations in combating them.
Zenaida Machado, in a Human Rights Watch commentary in April 2023, outlined a brief timeline of media reports and evidences that shows Angolan security forces on the mission to abuse Congolese migrant women and children by raping them amid their fugitivity, in the brink of their lives as migrant subjects navigating safety. Angolan authorities denied these evidence-based allegations, one of them, including a documented gang rape of women and girls in custody and waiting for deportation procedures.
Exactly one year after Zenaida Machado’s commentary on Human Rights Watch, in April 2024, Katie McQue investigated for the Guardian on the brazen effrontery of the Kafala laws in United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and Jordan. The laws, a contemporary resurfacing of enslavement, exclude female domestic workers from labor protection laws, thereby exposing them to torture, abuse and trauma. Katie McQue’s investigation shows that in the list of 250,000 African and Asian migrant women who work as domestic workers, two die every week. We also flash our light unto Beatrice, who Katie McQue reports as a 21-year-old Liberian being deceived into being a domestic worker in Oman by a man from her community.
Three months after, in July 2024, a New York Times report by Eve Sampson, out of many migrant-related incidents it detailed, highlighted the stories of migrant women who were raped, including girls, traveling along the Mediterramean route. Most of them were forced into sex work so they could find money to pay for their journeys, forced into marriages with kidnappers, and involved in planned and unplanned transactional illegalities.
We are using fugitivity as a concept that keeps African women in a state of constant and continuous movement; even when they settle, they are still faced with other varieties of torture.
While some of the above incidents relate to women’s experiences on irregular migration pathways, women also face challenges when they migrate through regular pathways; whether through work or education, they are oftentimes exposed to a heightened risk of exploitation and gender-based violence due to their vulnerability as both migrants and women in their host countries.
In December 2024, an Aljazeera report revealed the ill decisions of Nigerian women traveling to Iraq. Shola Lawal spotlights a Nigerian woman, recruited to work as a domestic helper in Iraqi city of Basra, she was raped by her boss at gunpoint, got pregnant afterwards and was forced to undergo a painful abortion. In her narration, many women like her in Iraq also face sexual abuse and rape. Several women had reported stories of victims who had faced so much abuse and torture that they ended up dead. The report details incidents across other African countries such as Uganda, where women continue to be tricked and sold at $3,500 into working in unfavorable conditions, some of them escaping, and some missing or not being accounted for at all.
Similarly, the United Kingdom has recorded a high level of migrant abuse and modern-day slavery due to its recent introduction of health and social care work visas that exploit migrant care workers, who are mostly women. In a report by the Guardian, some workers were reported to be sleeping in cold, cramped rooms or only receiving a fraction of their pay. Others have said they paid exorbitant fees to agents for visa costs worth only a fraction of the price.
What our above shortlist of select reportage does is to interrogate a number of things: first, to assess the low turnout of reportage that these contemporary incidents suffer from, their losses from modern and contemporary media representation and archiving, which we consider as an urgent representation concern. Second, we want to acknowledge that African women, in their journey of fugitivity, are faced with depersonalisation, the kind that takes away their completeness as full human beings.
What does accelerating action mean for us? It means looking beyond mere themes of migration and wearing the spectacles of complexity to think and organise within the parameters of intersectionality, within the parameters that is the fact that African migrant women and girls are under the burden of mobility, with their stories underreported, underdocumented, under archived. Here we bring in Joycelyn K. Moody’s piece on migration narratives: “To disregard black women’s fugitivity is to risk misreading black women’s lives…”. This directs us to throw a total gaze to the stories and mobility complexities that African migrant women have embodied over time in the course of finding new homes, new lives, and new ways of surviving.
There is a new wave of migrant abuse on women, and we must view this new wave, not as one thing, or trace its genealogy to just the movement of women across borders. What we are proposing, therefore, is to view these incidents, bearing in mind that it is most critical to all women, whether travelling regularly or irregularly, traveling within or outside, finding white collar jobs or vocational jobs.
We want to acknowledge that African women, in their journey of fugitivity, are faced with depersonalisation, the kind that takes away their completeness as full human beings.
Therefore, as we have stated these bothering concerns, as contributors to the stories of African migrant women, as institutions with trumpets for mobilities, as archivists and development workers, and as documentarians and writers in mobility contexts, we must learn new ways in approaching the foundations and motivations for poor representation.
As we forge in our work and attach all ties and labels to them, such as inclusive, intersectional, and equal, we must take a second look at how -as the mobile women in our narratives- these labels can transition from mere rhetorical elements into actionable practices. We must continue to retell all stories of African migrant women, we must seek help to put their stories into production, reproduction, and dissemination. We must gear towards interrogating fugitivity as well as the systemic blocks hindering African migrant women from escaping both state-sanctioned and non-state-sanctioned inequalities.
Chimee Adioha & Amaka Obioji are both Co-founders of Diaspora Africa. Diaspora Africa uses storytelling and digital technology to advance African migrant justice globally.
