Abayomi Oluseyi Ogunsanya

The study investigates the nexus of migration and place-making by focusing on the experiences of Hausa migrants living in or maintaining a semi-permanent residency in Sabo, Sagamu, Southwest Nigeria as traders, tanker drivers and in other diverse socio-economic capacities. It explores how these migrants deploy such media of communication as cell phones, digital TV, Hausa movies and transistor radio, and such public cultures as hira (a street side conversation group) and dangurama (a dance in nightclub-like setting) to create a sense of home in a ghettoised community that bears all the traces of a ‘diaspora’. The study demonstrates, a là Kiliçkiran (2003), that people who are physically separated from places they know as ‘home’ have a profound desire to re-create a home-place, and that both the public space and the private world of domestic space play a pivotal role in this. The study was based on an ethnographic fieldwork.

The study focuses on the processes and nature of media flows and consumption among Hausa migrants in Sabo locations in southwestern part of Nigeria as part of what I regard as ‘place-making strategies’ and the production of Hausa ethnic-religious identity in a diasporic context. My work interrogates in part Hausa identity in southwestern Nigeria and how this idea is fostered by the flow and consumption of such media artifacts as Kannywood movies, Hausa music CDs/VCDs/DVDs, recorded tafsir (Qu’ranic exegesies), published narratives (novels, plays, poems), and Hausa programmes aired on portable radio. The study demonstrates, a là Kiliçkiran (2003), that people who are physically separated from places they know as ‘home’ have a profound desire to re-create a home-place (called place-making) in order to produce a distinct cultural diaspora, and that the flow and consumption of media artifacts play a pivotal role in this. The study is based on ethnographic fieldwork.