‘Don’t call me mzungu’: negotiating migration categories and privilege in Nairobi

This paper explores how privileged migrants in Nairobi, Kenya responded to the Kiswahili term ‘mzungu’, in relation to how Kenyan interlocutors understood and used the term. The paper draws on five months of ethnographic research conducted in 2016. Mzungu carries intertwined connotations of whiteness, socio-economic privilege and foreignness shaped by a specific colonial and neocolonial history. Many migrant interlocutors first encountered the term upon their arrival in East Africa and felt uncomfortable with or outright rejected it; others, however, mobilised the term themselves, often with a semi-ironic distance. As this article argues, such cautious to negative emotional reactions are as revealing of the experience and politics of migration as the positive embrace of identity categories. Specifically, based on the premise that ‘words contain worlds’ [Gluck, C., and A. L. Tsing. 2009. Words in Motion: Toward a Global Lexicon. Durham & London: Duke University Press], the paper examines such reactions to gain insight into the lived experience and operation of privilege in migration. Further, the paper calls for research into Global South host contexts and the migration-related categories that operate there to help overcome migrations studies’ persistent Western-centric bias.