This paper explores Helon Habila’s Travellers (2019) as a juridical allegory of migration through the concept of “the law of the journey.” Departing from the conventional linear migration narrative, Travellers constructs a mosaic of interconnected portraits that illuminate the lived realities of displacement, statelessness, and legal precarity in contemporary Europe. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s notion of “the right to have rights” and Giorgio Agamben’s theorisation of “bare life,” the paper argues that Habila’s fiction demonstrates how migrants are simultaneously governed and excluded by law. Through its fragmented form, the novel mirrors the suspended temporality of transit and the invisibility produced by extraterritorial asylum regimes. Characters such as Manu, Mark, and Portia embody varying conditions of rightlessness, exposing the ethical and political contradictions of global mobility. By situating Travellers within both legal theory and contemporary Nigerian migrant fiction, the study reveals how literature interrogates the limits of human rights and national sovereignty. Ultimately, Habila’s work transforms fiction into a site of ethical encounter and resistance, insisting that recognition and belonging must travel with persons beyond borders. The paper concludes that Travellers reimagines the migrant journey as a legal and moral frontier, compelling individuals to confront the politics of exclusion and responsibility.
Olatunji et al. (Fri,) studied this question.