Fractured bonds: the silent cost of migration on African families and kinship

For centuries, Africa has been framed through misaligned narratives, including within African migration studies where leading scholarship continues to focus on remittances and economic outcomes while overlooking the sociocultural and emotional costs of transnational family separation. This study challenges such viewpoints by engaging Akanle’s notion of kinship network, and Adeniran’s migralusion and transnational simultaneity theory. Drawing on qualitative pilot data from Nigerian and Cameroonian transnational families, the study explores how migration destabilises patriarchal hierarchies, leading to the redistribution of responsibilities and decision-making authority in ways that often result in intra-familial conflict. The study highlights the acceleration of generational sequence, wherein youth are driven to shoulder adult roles prematurely. It records the erosion of cultural continuity, as rituals performed without migrant kin foster detachment and weaken collective meaning-making, culminating in socio-cultural disorientation described as cognitive immobility. While remittances subsidise practices and digital media sustain connections, neither substitutes physical presence nor mitigates the emotional toll of loneliness felt transnationally. Ultimately, the study argues that migration’s deepest costs are not just economic but lie in the breakdown of familial intimacy, the weakening of intergenerational relationships, and the gradual loss of shared cultural identity, requiring a major paradigm shift in scholarly and policy debates.