Understanding the Trajectory of Migration and the African Condition in the 21st Century

Abstract

Using data from music and comparing the manifestation of migration from Mexico and Cameroon, this paper analyses the phenomenon as a human condition that only appears existential during our time. The disinterest in its contemporary hyping is related to the vested ideologies that manipulate the ambivalence of postindependence into notorious spaces where the labour force is exhausted through a combination of forces ranging from the ineptitude that characterises political mimicry to the flashy horizons of the western metropolis. In its glocal context then, the engagement with musicians will indicate the casual dynamics of migration for observers and commentators from which individual citizens begin to take their destinies in their hands; and highlight the entrapped context of migration both as a national and international impasse for vested interests. This will also expose the ironies of nation-building and globalisation as an inability to participate or cooperate convincingly within the brackets of neoliberal ideology.