ABSTRACT
Every Friday morning in Nairobi the ‘East Africa Women’s League’ (EAWL) opens its doors for the weekly coffee morning and market. Situated in a secluded, leafy courtyard ‘the League’ was founded in 1917 and became British Kenya’s key ‘European’ 1 women’s organisation. One hundred years after its inception it still operates, although most members are past retirement age now and the League’s previous prominence and influence have waned. Many League members, the majority of whom are still white and British, have lived in Kenya for most of their adult lives; many without acquiring citizenship. Leading inherently transnational lives, often stretched across the previous British Empire, they experience a conflicted sense of home. Based on ethnographic research in and around the EAWL, this chapter explores migrant narratives of belonging by tracing readings and negotiations of the category ‘expatriate’. The term holds an important, yet not straightforward function in migrant discourses. It is specifically British migrants’ narratives that I focus on in this chapter, although their white non-British peers largely shared in their constructions of belonging and elaborations of the ‘expatriate’. In the few studies on Kenya’s white minority, the term ‘expatriate’ is used to refer to temporary Euro-American residents, framed as a postcolonial phenomenon. Similarly, in much migration literature, ‘expatriate’ is taken, sometimes too self-evidently, to denote high-skilled, temporary labour migrants. While these studies commonly use ‘expatriate’ as an analytical category to describe a particular migrant group, this chapter explores the category as it is read and constituted by migrants themselves; ‘expatriate’ here emerges as a much more complex, ambiguous and troubled category.
