Hosts or vicarious agents? Reflections on alternatives to LADO

Abstract In this contribution I reflect on LADO (Language Analysis for the Determination of Origin) as a highly contradictory field of work for Afrikanists, or linguists specializing in African languages. First, I concentrate on contributions made by African artists and art collectives, as well as by African philosophers and European thinkers that help to understand migration and mobility otherwise. Nyamnjoh’s work on incompleteness as well as Phipps’ work on the powerful stranger and the arts of integration are in particular made productive for demonstrating that knowledge about African (and anticolonial) concepts and philosophies of hospitality, mobility and language also offer possibilities to create alternative social and political spaces and, ultimately, order. I also address the historical and present conditions which shape the disciplinary environments from which Afrikanists emerge, as experts, and sometimes also as vicarious agents in Europe’s war against migrants. This contribution ends with a view at alternatives that can be achieved by making productive insights that also form part of knowledges produced by Afrikanists and other linguists.