Sometimes I feel like a Motherless Child: Nigerian Migration, Race Memories and the Decolonization of Motherhood (2018)

The aim of the chapter is to analyze a ‘postcolonial archive’ concerning the social production of adoptable migrant children inside Western institutions. Even if anthropology has belatedly taken children into account, today these small subjects have finally been put in their proper place: at the crossroads between the public and the private, between the State and the ‘maternal instinct’.
Many Nigerian women who arrive in Italy are qualified as victims of human trafficking when they report their pimps, and are subsequently protected by the state through its social institutions. When they became mothers, something changes in the relationship between them and the institutions for care and assistance: no longer perceived as vulnerable women to protect, they became potential dangerous and harmful mothers to their children. The author would like to stress how this scientific and bureaucratic construction of African immigrant babies introduces ruptures and challenges in the relationship between African immigrant mothers, their relatives and the state. “I’m not dead, yet”, shouts a Nigerian mother in Court. Many among them never see their children again; children that magically become Products of Italy, new citizens.