It is impossible to understand African lifeways without recourse to oral traditions because behaviors, orientations, and attitudes are succinctly codified, contextualized, and only fully explainable with reference to oral traditions, especially through the use of proverbs. Unfortunately, recent studies have not sufficiently utilized proverbs as analytical frameworks to explain African kinship. Thus, in this article we explore dynamics of kinship among international migrants of Nigerian origin through qualitative, primary and secondary data. We demonstrate that in the worldview of the international migrants, (1) kinship is mutable, (2) kinship constructions are based on practical usefulness and rational signification rather than simply biological relatedness, and (3) kinship’s etherealness can be best understood through traditional proverbs. We conclude that kinship is complex, dynamic, and liable to continuous construction, reconstruction, appropriation, and rejection depending on its instrumentalities.
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Àkànle et al. (2012) studied this question.