Don showcases good Nigerians in China

By Kofoworola Belo-Osagie

For over a century, the west has been the popular migration route for Nigerians – with multiple generations of Nigerians now settled in Europe and the United States, among others.  However, in the last two decades, China in Far East Asia has also become an attractive destination.

Sociology scholar, Dr. Kudus Oluwatoyin Adebayo’s documentation about the diasporisation of Nigerians in China provides insight into how Nigerians have over the years built a strong community that has achieved many things and challenges the narrative of Nigerians as being mostly criminally-minded trouble makers.

Adebayo’s work, “Migration and Settlement Experiences of Nigerians in Guangzhou, China,” won the Rahamon Bello Best PhD Thesis in African & Diaspora Studies Award instituted by the Institute of African and Diaspora Studies (lADS), University of Lagos (UNILAG) last December.

In an interview with The Nation, Adebayo, a Research Fellow at the Institute of African Studies, University of Ibadan, said his research work in Guangzhou revealed that there was a blooming community of Nigerians and other Africans who are thriving in China.

“My research focuses on the migration and settlement experiences of Nigerians in china particularly Guangzhou city which currently hosts the majority of Africans and Nigerians.  It is a commercial city that has attracted more African transnational traders in the last two decades and we are also finding that a lot of Africans including Nigerians are also settling in that city and this prompted my interest in that area of research.

“I believe it is important to do this research because in the last few years or I won’t say few years, it is a process that started back at the turn of a new century, the migration space has being closing on Africans in Europe, and North America.  And people are looking for alternative migration space and china has quickly filled that void for some people, particularly Nigerian transnational traders who increasingly are looking for ways to benefit from the economic growth of china,” he said

Adebayo said his work highlights these experiences and how Nigerians have making efforts to contribute to peace and progress of their host communities by collaborating with the authorities to maintain peace and fight crime.

“There was a time in china in the early 2000 where we had a lot of young people coming in and there was a lot of criminality in the community. Part of what the Nigerian community – and the Nigerian association there is very massive – was to set up a vigilante group and the sort of things the vigilante where doing was to track down people who they knew were committing crime and hand them over to the police.  This is like trans-nationalising something that we do here in Nigeria – taking the vigilante system abroad and using it as a form of social control to keep the migrant community in line and I think that advancing or presenting this kind of good practices when Nigerians have conversations with china could sort of mean they recognise the significance of the community in trying to stabilise the kind of relationship that sorts of exist between the two counties,” he said.

With many Nigerians living in China and now marrying locally, Adebayo said his research was important for the world to know their story and their positive contributions.

“Nigerians going there are not just doing business but also settling and marrying locally.  So that means that Nigerian men who are marrying Chinese women and the kind of children they also raise have both short term and long term implications for the Chinese society. And I think it is really important to look how this interaction between romance and family dynamics can or would shape the societies over the long term.

“Doing this research is also important because what we have in many research works is that there is always this constant talk about Nigerians’ criminality globally – even the representatives of Nigerian government and the ambassadors and the so called consulate workers – are always talking about how Nigerians engage in criminality all over the world but neglect the other large swath of Nigerians who are also the model citizens who make their contribution to the whole society,” he said.