Transnational social fields of the Yoruba in Toronto

Abstract

Until very recently, the word "immigrant" had evoked images of people who had come to stay, having been transplanted from their original home in order to make for themselves a new home to which they would pay allegiance. This thesis questions the assumptions that minorities and migrants demonstrate an exclusive loyalty to one nation-state. This is examined by exploring the mode of social connections and frequency by which one of the most salient African ethnic communities in Toronto, the Yoruba (the pedigrees of Oduduwa from the Federal Republic of Nigeria), maintain ties on various levels with their "home community" in this period of globalization. Yoruba migration is linked to their enmeshment in global capitalism, beginning with colonialism which extracted natural resources for the development of the European industrialism, and later neocolonialism which caused the pervasive penetration of global capital in the form of loans, and the collusion of internal social forces with the Western transnational corporations, leading to the pauperization of the mass of the Nigerian population. It is argued that the crass material exploitation of Nigeria, both in the colonial and postcolonial periods is not enough to explain the Yoruba migration and their transnational practices but should be viewed in conjunction with the "dependency complex" caused by the colonial and neocolonial domination of their "psyche".