Chapter 9: Further Thoughts: The Figure of the Migrant in Contemporary Discourse: Reflections and Lived Experiences

We conclude this book in a rather unconventional manner because we believe that every story matters. As migrants ourselves, we cannot reflect on the stories of migrants without reflecting on our own stories. Both of us, the writers of this book, are migrants from Zimbabwe and Nigeria living and working in South Africa. However, before we share our own stories and experiences of migration, we must firstly reflect on and summarise the discourses of migration in Nigeria and Zimbabwe that we analysed in the preceding chapters. The things that people say in everyday communication and the way they say them reveal much about their attitudes, beliefs, and convictions. In the digital age, social media has become a marketplace of ideas where users share views and experiences on different issues, including migration. In the preceding chapters, we argued that one way to understand discourses of migration in the digital age is to evaluate the views that citizens share on social media platforms.