ABSTRACT
Based on ethnographic research in and around the East Africa Women’s League (EAWL), this chapter explores migrant narratives of belonging by tracing readings and negotiations of the category ‘expatriate’. It reviews relevant literatures on white immigration to and belonging in Kenya and on transmigration, older-age and ‘expatriate’ identities. The chapter explores the constitutive absence of the term ‘migrant’ from respondents’ narrations of ‘expatriates’ as non-citizens. It addresses more explicitly the term’s tense polysemy and ambiguities and its role in narrating a sense of belonging that straddles colonial and post-colonial habits, attachments and discourses. The chapter discusses the belonging of older white British transmigrants associated with the East Africa Women’s League through tracing ‘their’ category ‘expatriate’ – its polysemy, ambiguities and tensions. League membership changed with independence as many ‘Europeans’ left Kenya and membership was begrudgingly opened to ‘Asian’ and ‘African’ women.
