E. Tendayi Achiume explains why we need to keep putting race on the table in debates about migration.

Introducing Curated Conversations

Welcome to Curated Conversations: Exploring the Politics of Migration through Ideas (Season I). This podcast series examines the past, present, and possible futures of migration within and from the African continent. It approaches migration with a critical and philosophical lens, drawing on the expertise of leading experts, thinkers, and practitioners in a series of in-depth interviews and discussions about migration histories and policy regimes. The geographical scope of the series is broad, with coverage spanning the length and breath of the continent in all its global connections. Experts from across Africa and its Euro-American diaspora are invited to share their knowledge, lived experience, and diverse perspectives on the interplay between borders and social phenomena. 

Curated Conversations seeks to forge a new discussion around African migration in Europe and the West, but also within Africa itself: one that foregrounds African knowledge, lived experience, and political thought towards a humane and socially just order of mobility. The questions it asks include: What kind of ideas inform current migration policies in Africa? Where do they fall short, and what kinds of alternatives can we imagine?

The conversations were recorded between November 2022 and July 2023.

Curated by Ali Nobil Ahmad and Linah Kinya, African Migration Hub, Heinrich Böll Foundation. Co-published by African Arguments and the Heinrich Boll Foundation, Horn of Africa Office. Produced in Nairobi by Amp Studios Africa 

Episode 1: Race, Migration, and Decolonisation with E. Tendayi Achiume 

Despite the global shift in discourse about race following the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, international borders continue to be portrayed as race-neutral by those who design migration policies. Why is the sphere of migration governance so seemingly resistant to addressing or even naming racial inequalities, and how should we respond?

Reflecting on her tenure as UN Special Rapporteur on racism and xenophobia, Professor Achiume addresses the curious absence of race in the sphere of migration policymaking. At the root of “racial aphasia”, she argues, is a refusal to acknowledge the historical legacy of colonialism, on which today’s international regime of global mobility is built. Tracing this history from the emergence of passports to decolonisation, her conclusions are unequivocal: “There’s no modern racism that can be divorced from historical structures”.    

At the same time, she adds, some forms of xenophobia and discrimination, such as the treatment of Black African migrants in North Africa, cannot be reduced to the legacy of European colonialism, since they have roots in diverse histories of discrimination and exploitation. In a wide-ranging discussion of her own scholarly corpus and expert policy reports for the UN, Achiume does what she regards is the duty of researchers and activists when it comes to African migration: from Morocco to South Africa, our job is to “keep putting race on the table” in forums that refuse to acknowledge it.   

Speaker Bio 

Professor E. Tendayi Achiume is a Professor of Law at UCLA and former UN Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance. She is the first woman to serve in this role since its creation in 1993. The current focus of her work is the global governance of racism and xenophobia; and the legal and ethical implications of colonialism for contemporary international migration.

Further Reading

E.Tendayi Achiume (2019) “Migration as Decolonization” (2019) Stanford Law Review 71 (6): LINK: https://escholarship.org/content/qt8m83b98j/qt8m83b98j.pdf & “Racial Borders” (2022) Georgetown Law Journal 110 (3) LINK: https://www.law.georgetown.edu/georgetown-law-journal/wp-content/uploads/sites/26/2022/05/Achiume_RacialBorders.pdf

Debra Thompson (2013) “Through, Against and Beyond the Racial State: The Transnational Stratum of Race,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 26 (2013): 135.