# I. Introduction: Situating Integrating

and Fragmenting Polarities in Francis Nyamnjoh's Fiction ven though mobility has been a timeless buzzword of Africa's socio-economic and politicocultural struggles, "the intricacies of mobilities and identities within Africa are largely ignored [and] mobile Africans on the continent are, perplexingly, not often considered diasporas in their own right" (Nyamnjoh, 2013: 653). Landau and Bakewell concur with Nyamnjoh by asserting that Africans are increasingly living in an "era in which varied forms of human mobility -across towns, countries and political borders -are redefining the meanings of home, community and belonging" (2018:1). Indeed, by road, sea, air and space, Africans are constantly moving physically, socially, emotionally, and virtually and every corner of the African urban is becoming a socio-economic and politico-culturally connected and connecting neighbourhood. The progressing micro, macro, macro-macro, and micromacro growth of African mobility now resembles what Rosenau has elsewhere referred to as "a mobility upheaval" (2004:36). At the microlevel, it has been stimulating imaginations and facilitating cultural encounters; the macro level has been enlarging the size and relevance of subcultures, heightening the need for international cooperation, and the micro-macro level increasing movement across African borders. Granted that Africans straddle territorial spaces and maintain identities with them, many aspects of their lives are fragmenting and integrating, especially when they move to the cities.

Mobility to urban centres provides a platform for Africans to construct priorities among affiliations, attach themselves to collective enterprises and connect to distant others who share their aspirations or fears. The vastness of African encounters and confrontations with distant cultures through national and foreign travel results in what Rosenau, calls "fragmegration" (2004): a simultaneity of integrating and fragmenting polarities defining (and sometimes confining) how identities are formed and performed. Viewed from both the integrating and fragmenting dimensions, Africans are increasingly thinking of themselves in non-constant, non-fixed or fluid ways because they are constantly forming/performing different identities, and realizing that the distant is becoming ever closer, tying up their identities to ever more diversifying local and global worlds. The integrating and fragmenting tendencies of African mobility are increasingly demanding that we view "the physical and social mobility of Africans as an emotional, relational and social phenomenon captured in the complexities, contradictions and messiness of their everyday realities" [that are themselves] multi-layered, multivocal and multifocal dimensions of everyday negotiation and navigation of myriad identity margins" (653).

Nyamnjoh thematizes "fragmegration" in both his scholarly works: Africa's Media, Democracy and the Politics of Belonging (2005), Insiders and Outsiders: Citizenship and Xenophobia in Contemporary Southern Africa (2006), "C'est l'homme qui fait l'homme": Cul-de-Sac Ubuntu-ism in Côte d' Ivoire (2015); #Rhodes Must Fall: Nibbling at Resilient Colonialism in South Africa (2016), and Drinking from the Cosmic Gourd: How Amos Tutuola Can Change Our Minds (2017) and fictional oeuvre: Mind Searching (1991), The Disillusioned African (1995), A Nose for Money (2003), Souls Forgotten (2008), The Travail of Dieudonné (2008), Married but Available (2009), Intimate Strangers (2010), and Homeless Waters (2011). In all the above works, Nyamnjoh argues that if mobility has always been part and parcel of the African, "today, new technologies of communication and transportation allow for more frequent and multidirectional flows of people, ideas and cultural symbols" and that "such acceleration and complexification simultaneously facilitate and impair the formation of transnational communities, multiple identities and multilayered citizenship, and the blurring of boundaries between different categories of mobility and the mobile" (654). To Nyamnjoh, even though Africans may be more nimble-footed today than ever before, they are also being drawn to fixities. That is, Africans' "obsessions with purity, authenticity, primary and often parochial identities coexist with notions of nation state and its logic of large-scale, exclusive communities" (654). Also, Africans "are busy rediscovering cultural identities as heritage and as commodity"; a "'traffic in difference'" that "combines with political and social policing of borders to simultaneously endorse and contest dominant ideas of globalisation as a process that encourages flexible mobility and open-ended cosmopolitan identities" (654).

This paper therefore draws on Nyamnjoh's IS to argue that African mobility is generating the emergence of an epoch of African "fragmegration" characterized by profound transformations that are fostering contradictions and affirmations between globalizing and localizing, centralizing, and decentralizing, integrating and fragmenting polarities both at the micro-and macro-levels of Botswanan society. It demonstrates that in African urban centres identities are formed and performed through a combination of fragmenting and integration forces. The paper also highlights the mechanisms of contraction and expansion which sustain and generate localizing, decentralizing and fragmenting forces, and globalizing, centralizing, and integrating forces, respectively. In the paper's context, "fragmegration" affirms that interwovenness between human lives defines Botswanan urban life or identities not merely as urban politics, but as coexistent worlds, domains, projects, or texts of ongoing and overlapping Botswanan interconnections. The paper further argues that in the African urban centre, the diverse multiplicity of urban opposites engenders an endless series of tensions between urban core and periphery, national and transnational, communitarianism and cosmopolitanism, cultures and subcultures, decentralization and centralization, universalism and particularism, flow and closure, pace, and space, self and Other and the distant and the proximate.

The paper concludes that reading IS through the "fragmegration" lens foregrounds Nyamnjoh's argument that the new global cultural system needs to promote difference instead of suppressing it and that global structures should celebrate diversity, rather than replicate uniformity; that instead of asking people to become the same, we need to start portraying, dramatizing, and communicating our differences to one another. Most importantly, the fragmegrative lens uncovers the nuances that Nyamnjoh's fiction brings to mobility, migration, belonging, citizenship, and globalization by affirming a Nyamnjohian social action that emphasizes interconnections, interrelationships, interdependences, collaboration, and coproduction and encourages "commonalities and possibilities ad infinitum." That Nyamnjohian social action asserts that both immigrants and indigenes need to act and be acted upon and anything could have the possibility of becoming "the subject and object of action" thereby "making power and weakness nimble-footed, fluid and situational, and giving life more of a character of flux and interdependence than permanence" (2015:8). To flesh out the above hypothetical contention, the paper borrows critical perspectives from Rosenau's twelve worlds of "fragmegration."

According to Rosenau, the world of "fragmegration" is made up of Four Local Worlds (Traditional Locals (TL), Resistant Locals (RL), Exclusionary Locals (EL), and Affirmative Locals (AL)), Four Global Worlds (Affirmative Globals (AG), Resistant Globals (RG), Specialized Globals (SG) and Traditional Globals TG)) and Four Private Worlds (The Alienated (TA) (the Cynics (TC) and the Illegals (TI)) and the Passives (TP) (Tuned-Out Passives (TOP) and Circumstantial Passives (CP))). The local worlds are those inhabited by persons whose orientations and actions are smaller in scope and scale than those of the people who occupy the global worlds. TL are isolated from the rest of the world because they "work and think in terms of their immediate geographic space; RL "work and think in response to globalizing dynamics they regard as threatening and thus worthy of opposing"; EL are aware of interconnectivities, "but they work and think more in terms of retreating from, rather than resisting any links to globalized space"; and AL adapt the external inputs to local practices and norms without diminishing the distinctive features of their world and contribute to the integrative dimensions of "fragmegration" (52). To Rosenau "TL live in closed communities, RL live in political arenas, EL dwell in enclaves, and AL live in open communities" (53). Global Worlds are populated "by individuals who share tendencies to think and act on a scale that exceeds a local context [and they are global because] their daily routines are linked into distant developments" (53). AG "share positive inclinations toward the processes of globalization seeing them as moving humankind toward a greater integration and prosperity"; RG "regard globalizing dynamics as detrimental to the wellbeing of peoples"; SG are involved in "only limited dimensions of global affairs such as human rights issues"; and TG's concerns "are framed in terms of their country's interests and are thus territorially specific" (53).

Private Worlds are populated by persons who "are oblivious to what happens in any local or global world [and] live exclusively in their own private worlds" because they see "no nearness and no farness; but only daily routine, precedent, avoidance, or disdain" (54).

Local and global events are not of interest to them, "either because prior developments have alienated them or because they have never evolved community concerns of any sort" (54). TP are "people who have never been part of any local or global world, [while] TA are likely to have been in one or more worlds at some prior time and then subsequently rejected them" (54) because of say cynicism about politics, worldwide decline in the respect for politicians, governments, and other public institutions. TC refer to those "whose alienation is such that they refrain from engagement with any political world" (56). TI are those who are "so selfconscious about their own alienation that they resort to illegal, even violent, behaviour to express their contempt for all the local and global worlds" (56). TOP designate those "who may be fully aware of their apathy but who do not avail themselves of ample opportunities afforded by time" (56). CP are those "whose daily conditions are such as to leave them no time to care about anything beyond their daily efforts to maintain their subsistence" (56). The life situations of CP "are marked by a lack of education and a hand-to-mouth existence that compels them to focus so intensely on the daily needs of food, clothing, and shelter" (56). IS attests that the above worlds are sites of continual fluctuation and the movement within and among the worlds is either fast-or slow-paced, either spasmodic or continuous, depending on the degree to which the mobility, migration, belonging, citizenship, and globalization course of events increasingly intrude.

Intimate Strangers (IS) is the capstone of his thematization of mobility of humans, ideas, and things with their consequent encounters and the (re)production of similarities and difference. IS marks one of the major affirmations of Nyamnjoh's argument that "those who move or are moved always tend to position themselves or be positioned (hierarchically) in relation to those they meet and to one another" (654). Set in Gabarone, Botswana IS delineates the life of Immaculate, a Mimbolander (Cameroonian) who migrated to Botswana in search of greener business pastures. Told through the first person, the story is largely a collection of transcribed accounts about maids and madams presented from Immaculate's perspective as a research assistant or transcriber for Dr Nanny. Nyamnjoh employs the literary trope of migration to affirm that both geographical dispersion and psychological derangement have become intermittent themes that resonate with what Ojo calls "postcolonial texts that seek to give voice to new relationships between immigrants and locals, suggesting the ways in which immigrants both transform and are transformed by their new country" (2018:59). The plot is also partly the story of Immaculate's resilience against otherization from Quitdoqu and his wife, Kathleen, Yolinda, a coworker at G-Textiles, Dr Marius Kaba and his wife, Mama Comfort, Immaculate's boyfriends, Noway and Phillip and the entire Botswanan community that has designated her a Makwerekwere (stranger or foreigner). In IS, Immaculate invites us to express and explore the complex experiences of immigrants in the African diaspora, the problems of learning new cultural codes, the dilemma of the choice between retaining native cultures or assimilating, and the ever-mutating conflicts between immigrants and their new host societies. Embodying a reaction against real, perceived, or even potential transgressions upon national borders and/or cultural boundaries, IS critiques anti-globalist visions that establish firm divisions along those nationalistic and cultural boundaries that Botswanans consider integral to a uniform national identity.

In IS, non-Botswanan identities are (re)mapped in racial, representational, geographical, or historical terms; borders are empowered and disempowered and that empowers and disempowers the multiple identities of the immigrants who are dwellers of those borders. More than in any Nyamnjohian narrative, IS grapples with an African mobility upheaval that is resulting in transitioning, crossing of territories, and changing of perspectives because characters are meeting others from different ethnic, class and cultural backgrounds, and are seeking to create new identities out of their engagements. The novel paints an elusive world of identities, affiliations, and allegiances that calls into question Botswanan orthodoxies of political attachments and heralds global "fragmegrations" such as Brexit, Donald Trump's border wall, the 2019 xenophobic attacks on foreigners in South Africa, the 2019 closing of the Nigerian borders by President Buhari and the reemergence of far-right, populist parties in Europe and the world.


# II.


# Delineating Traditional Locals, Resistant Locals, Exclusionary Locals and Affirmative Locals in Nyamnjoh's IS

This section argues that in IS, some characters champion convergence, dramatize Botswanan distinctiveness and refuse "to straddle worlds, navigate, negotiate and reconcile [socio-economic and politicocultural] chasms" (Nyamnjoh, 2015:4). That is, there are Botswanans who are TL, RL, EL or AL because their orientations and actions are hegemonically small in scale/scope because they price conversion over conversation and refer to non-Botswanans as Makwerekweres (foreigners). Also, their fragmenting
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dimensions of "fragmegration" involve movements toward or commitments to the local -to those proximate and limited and limiting spaces that are, or seek to be, disengaged from a global context -either through indifference to, aversion to, or retreat from globalizing dynamics and consequently diversity. Such characters uncritically reproduce taken-for-granted dichotomies and bounded notions of being and belonging because they ignore the fact that Botswanan identities are inventions, mutually constitutive existential and epistemic constructions founded on socio-economic and politico-cultural processes that constantly denaturalize cultural practices and strip them of primordial Botswanan authenticity and essentialism.

When IS opens, a 24-year-old Mimbolander, Immaculate, who has been in Botswana for 13 years, admits that until she migrated to Botswana and had a job with Sun Power, she had never known that an African could be different from another African until her mistreatment at Sun Power (1). During lunchtime, nobody (except two nameless Zimbabwean boys aged 22 and 23, respectively) sits with Immaculate or shares food with her because she speaks Makwerekwere (foreigner or outsider-like). To aggravate her exclusionary or outsider status, her co-workers respond in Setswana whenever she greets them in English (2). Moreover, Immaculate lives at G-North with Mr Quitdoqu (her cousin) through whom Sun Power recruits hyper-cheap labour directly from Zimbabwe and Zambia. Their house is "like a camp" (2) and at the same time a dumping ground for Sun Power. At Quitdoqu's, Immaculate is forced to work like a slave (2). When Quitdoqu marries Kathleen, Kathleen becomes too racist towards Immaculate: "[y]ou people from Africa, you are just so dull. You say you have A' Levels, what is A' Levels? It's nothing! In America, from 11th Grade, we go to university, which means we are cleverer than Africans" (2). Immaculate tells us that Quitdoqu's wife, though the youngest in the house, was like a bitter African slave master who treated them the way African slaves were treated in America in the olden days. Immaculate concludes that when she thinks of Botswanans having negative attitudes towards other Africans, she believes that no matter where one comes from, what God has created one to be is what one is because even Kathleen, who is not a Botswanan, treats her like the Botswanans of Sun Power do (2).

The above disintegrating tendencies towards Immaculate reveal that immigrants arrive at their destinations with many uncertitudes and hassle numerous oppugns like finding employment and accommodation; adapting to new laws, cultures, and languages; negotiating/navigating obstacles to assimilation and integration; and enduring the pangs of loneliness and indefinite separation from their families. They equally echo the painful realities of survival that immigrants must confront in contemporary societies like Botswana, intolerant of cultural difference. Most importantly, the instances of disintegration are Nyamnjoh's subtle ways of introducing us to the smallscale orientations and actions of the workers of Sun Power and Kathleen; orientations and actions that demonstrate their "historic ties to land; long-standing patterns of life and power balances other than ethnicity that are felt to be threatened; and historic ties to an ethnicity that are felt to be under siege" (Rosenau, 2004:52) and qualifies them as Rosenauian TL, RL and EL respectively.

The delineation of Immaculate's chagrin, is Nyamnjoh's way of asserting that as an immigrant Immaculate would have loved to communicate and be communicated to; understand and be understood; engage in and be engaged with multicultural communication which would foster understanding, tolerance, respect and harmony among Botswanans and immigrants. Also, the Botswanan Others' refusal to integrate Immaculate at work and Kathleen's denial of Immaculate's humanity in Quitdoqu's house constitute Nyamnjoh's ways of establishing IS as a narrative that thematizes cross-cultural movements, cultural memories, and individual and collective struggles for integration abroad, and sometimes at home because ceteris paribus, Quitdoqu's home should have been Immaculate's home away from home. Sun Power and Quitdoqu's home as places where Immaculate is not wanted, serve as spaces for criticism and mediation about migration and otherness. They are also spaces from which Nyamnjoh projects the voices of the discriminated African immigrants -Mimbolandians, Zimbabweans, Zambians, etc., who long for hybrid spaces they can call home in the African diaspora both in Africa and the West.

Immaculate would have loved that her immigrant status or identity takes the form of a patchwork pragmatically being assembled and reassembled from disparate and overlapping socioeconomic and politico-cultural pieces, but unfortunately, purist Botswanans want to map it out for her as a preestablished, neatly laid out and carefully followed plan, symbolized by the discriminatory employment policy at Sun Power and Kathleen's racist disqualification of Cameroonian intelligence and education. The acts of discrimination against Immaculate call to mind Mendieta's argument that "one is never cosmopolitan without setting out from some locality, whether it be spatial or temporal;" that "one is never simply rooted, localized without that indexicality being deciphered with reference to some view of the global map" (1999:242). By rejecting Immaculate as a foreigner, the Botswanans do not realize that to be local is to be on some sort of map, a map that aims to provide a glance at the whole because the Botswanan locality would always be a trajectory from a distance to a place, and from that place back toward that horizon of distantiation.

Granted the fragmegrative implications of that rejection, it is not surprising that the two Zimbabwean boys who recognize Immaculate's humanity in Sun Power are nameless. Even though one could argue that their namelessness represents the ever-increasing illegal migration in contemporary society, another hypothesis is that because names, especially in the African context, most often speak a language, their namelessness is a Botswanan valorisation of their "identitylessness" and fragmentation within Botswanan society. By crossing the border between Zimbabwe and Botswana, they have become socio-linguistic pariahs just like Immaculate. The Zimbabwean-Botswanan border, just like the Botswanan-Mimbolandian one, has become a line of demarcation (fragmentation) instead of a line of contact and cooperation (integration), a meeting point, or a line of inclusion. However, when Kathleen sends Immaculate away from Quidoqu's, these two Zimbabweans introduce her to a Botswanan immigration officer, Angel, who offers Immaculate free accommodation at her place. This is Nyamnjoh's adroit manner of depicting the simultaneous fragmenting and integrating tendencies of postcolonial societies.

The Botswanan TL's seclusion from globalizing dynamics, the RL's fear and contestation of modern changes and the EL's fear of and isolation from the perceived encroachment of a more encompassing world are further demonstrated by the fragmenting idea that everyone must speak Setswana as an act of selfdefinition or integration. It is a bizarre attempt to capture the locality or alterity of Botswananness through a linguistic gauntlet that ignores the agency of Africans to appropriate, modify and shape languages to their purposes. Behind the Botswanan assertion of linguistic nationalism lies an ontological demand that Botswana be coded "not-for-other-Africans", confined to a Setswana linguistic zone hemmed by Chinese Walls or Iron Curtains that include insiders and exclude outsiders. Such linguistic nationalism is strange, coming from a country that relishes the expatriate services of the Chinese over those of Africans: "I [Immaculate] got a job at G-Textiles where I was the only foreigner, apart from the Chinese joint-venture partners in senior management" (7). When, during the Al Jazeera television programme "Studio B, Unscripted: With Elif Shaka and Wole Soyinka" on November 22, 2019, Shafak declared that the "core of nationalism is ugly" and then called for a global "cognitive flexibility", she was obvious thinking about situations like the one faced by Immaculate in Botswana and many immigrants around the world. G-Textiles' preference for the Chinese reminds one of Kinyondo's fear that China may recolonize Africa because according to him, Sino-African relations are characterized by a balance of trade skewed toward China, very little Chinese foreign direct investment (FDI) flowing to Africa, the crippling of African economies by China's "debt trap diplomacy" and negligible Chinese support of Africa as compared to the huge contracts revenues and diplomatic support China gets from the continent (2019:1).

From another perspective, Immaculate's declaration that she did not know that there was any place in the world where English was still a strange language, just like Kathleen's boasting about US citizens' intelligence, reverberates with the rush by some Eurocentric or Anglocentric Africans to romanticise and universalise the English language and US culture, respectively. However, the declaration is more that of a multilingual African who relishes her mastery over English and tries to enrich the language and liberate it from its European provenance. To Nyamnjoh, therefore, Botswanans need to learn to enhance Setswana and free it from its Botswanan origin. That way, they would be transforming the Setswana-other languages boundary from a line of demarcation and separation of the linguistic us/them or insiders/outsiders to a line of contact and cooperation, a meeting point for multilanguaging, or a line of multilinguistic inclusion. That would help Botswanans such as Yolinda (who masterminds Immaculate's firing by G-Textiles), and stop xenophobically identifying multilingual Zimbabweans, Zambians, Ghanaians, Nigerians and Mimbolanders as outsiders who have come to seize their socio-economic and political opportunities.

Nyamnjoh also captures the Traditional, Resistant and Exclusionary Localization of Botswana through Angel's revelations. To Angel, something positive can be done about the Zimbabwe-Botswanan border because borders are man-made. She argues that the water resources used to unite Botswana and Zimbabwe but presently, they divide them to an extent where they can no longer share even food and water (10). When Immaculate concurs that her uncle used to tell her that boundaries are our greatest killer, Angel tells Immaculate that every June and December, the Botswanan Immigration Police undertakes what they call a "Clean-Up-Campaign", a biannual house-to-house and workplace-to-workplace search aimed at identifying Zimbabweans whom the Immigration Police consider as litter (10). The Clean-Up-Campaign generally does not involve Botswana's neighbours from South Africa, Lesotho, and Swaziland because they are not considered Makwerekwere. Botswanans feel more comfortable with them than with Zambians, Malawians, Central, East or West Africans (9). Angel equally reveals that there was a year when the Chief of Immigration appointed her to lead the Clean-Up-Campaign group but that she refused and told her boss that he was more of a Zimbabwean because he was Kalanga (11). Angel's argument qualifies her as an AL because faced with global dynamics symbolized by Immaculate, Angel neither isolates herself from, nor is aversive to, nor inclined to retreat from them. By accommodating Immaculate, she absorbs external encroachments on her own terms without fearing her local world will lose its integrity.

Unlike the other Botswanans, she is not a TL, RL or EL because she is not disruptive with respect to globalizing patterns. Through Angel, Nyamnjoh affirms that appellations such Africa, South Africa, Lesotho, Swaziland, Zambia, Malawi, Central, East or West Africa are fragmegrative European imperial constructs whose cartographic applications fail to recognise that Botswana and her neighbours are inseparable, each (re)appropriating the other and being (re)appropriated and (re)projecting the other and being (re)projected through the profound transfigurations that foster contradictions and affirmations between globalizing and localizing, centralizing and decentralizing, integrating and fragmenting polarities at the micro-and macrolevels. The Golfer, Tiger Woods, commendably summed up this (re)appropriation and (re)projection processes when he revealed that it bothers him when people label him as African American since he is a "Cablinasian": one-quarter black, one-quarter Thai, one-quarter Chinese, one-eighth white, and one-eighth American Indian (qtd. in Rosenau, 2004:23). In line with Wood's coinage, Nyamnjoh's argument in IS is that Africans are all, a little Botswanan, Zimbabwean, Zambian, South African, Basotho, Swazi, Malawian and all the other African demonyms at once. Or if they are not yet, then they are becoming a little all the 54 African demonyms every day.


# III.

Sketching Affirmative Globals, Resistant Globals, Specialized Globals, and Traditional Globals in Nyamnjoh's IS This section focuses on Immaculate, Dr Marius Kaba, a Mimbolander and Professor of Medicine in the Diamond University of Science and Technology (DUST), Dr John-Strong Long-Bottom, another Mimbolander and Professor of Environmental Sciences at DUST and Dr Winter-Bottom Nanny, an African American who has traced her descent to the Tikar of Mimboland who think and act on a scale that exceeds a local context. The section identifies them as global in the sense that their daily routines are linked into distant developments, but at the same time each of their global worlds is differentiated by the ways in which they conceive large scale and contextualize the non-territorial. The section argues that IS asserts that the above characters increasingly have complex loyalties and multi-layered identities, corresponding to the globalization of socioeconomic and cultural forces and the reconfiguration of political power. These characters demonstrate that the movements of African or global socio-economic and politico-cultural goods across Botswanan borders and the intermingling of African or global cultures create the basis of a transnational civil society based on overlapping identities and interlocking collectivities.

Nyamnjoh thematizes the global worlds through Kaba, Long-Bottom and Nanny. As immigrants, they are like containers, "filled up not with purities, but with entangled or mangled intricacies in the sense of the myriad identity margins they negotiate and navigate in the course of their mobilities" to and within Botswana (Nyamnjoh, 2013: 657). Their impurities "sum up to their individual or collective habitus, from which they draw their cultural and social capital to authenticate themselves relationally" in Botswana (657). Even though the narrator tells us very little about Kaba's and Long-Bottom's abilities to produce and help their students consume productive knowledge, what is clear is that as Professors, they are filled with the diverse epistemologies from their local Mimboland world, Botswana, and other places. Also, the researcher, Nanny, embodies epistemologies from her first local US world, second local Mimboland world and Botswana (that she and her research straddle). Seen from this perspective, the three characters qualify as globals because of their capacity for re-enacting, reactivating, or reigniting and maintaining multiple epistemologies and identities. Put differently, Kaba's, Long-Bottom's and Nanny's professions as knowledge seekers and producers make it difficult for them to think of themselves in constant, fixed ways because their professions stress the formation and performance of myriad identities.

Through Kaba, Long-Bottom and Nanny, Nyamnjoh asserts that one of the primordial needs for the globals is self-knowledge, knowledge of the other and the world. His depiction of these characters attests that it is in this process of knowing together as AG, RG, SG and TG that knowledge becomes a journey of corealization, co-learning and collective learning involving both ontologies and epistemologies that imbue us with the readiness to embrace new (re)definitions of self and society and break open boundaries towards liberation. Kaba's and Long-Bottom's lectureship and Nanny's research denote the expanding scale, growing magnitude, speeding up and deepening impact of interregional flows and patterns of socio-academic interaction. The lectureships and the research epitomize a Global Worlds' shift or transformation in the scale of human social organization that links distant epistemological communities and expands the reach of power or knowledge relations across the Botswana and the world.

Kaba's and Long-Bottom's lectureships and Nanny's research should not be read as prefiguring the emergence of a harmonious Africa or global world society or as a universal process of African or global integration marked by a growing convergence of African cultures and civilizations. In line with the dual processes of "fragmegration," Nyamnjoh uses Long-Bottom's sexual exploitation of Evodia Skatta (a Mimboland student at DUST) and Kaba's wife's, Mama Comfort's expulsion of Immaculate (a fellow Mimbolander) from her residence to remind us that sometimes the awareness of growing interconnectedness creates new animosities and conflicts and fuels reactionary politics and deep-seated xenophobia. Mama Comfort's and Long-Bottom's mistreatment of their fellow countrymen reminds us of Rosenau's argument that movement among the worlds, say from AG to RG to SG and to TG, can be either fast-or slow-paced, either spasmodic or continuous, depending on the degree to which the course of events increasingly change (2004:57). That mistreatment also reminds one of a jolting event that induced the Indian novelist, Arundhati Roy's movement from a TOP to an AG when in response to her country's announcement of her possession of a nuclear bomb, Roy declared that the time had come for her to step out from under the fairy lights and say what was on her mind: "If protesting against having a nuclear bomb implanted in my brain is anti-Hindu and anti-national, then I secede. I hereby declare myself an independent, mobile republic. I am a citizen of the earth. I own no territory. I have no flag" (Vanaik and Bidwai, 2000: 10). Roy's movement was based on her patriotism for India and could be contrasted with the Botswanan Clean-Up-Campaign that is based on a nationalism that trumpets Botswana's virtues and denies her deficiencies and is contemptuous toward the virtues of other countries that constitute the homelands of the Makerekweres. Immaculate is a commendable example of an AG because she goes across or through the junctures and ruptures of historical authority such as the forces of the Botswanan Immigration Officials' formidable structures and power; forces that touch her encounters and relationships and everyday life. She wallows inside the fragmentations and displacements of Mimbolandian, Botswanan, Zimbabwean, US, etc., cultural groups and identities -hers and those of others for whom she cares. She navigates and negotiates in and around the contours of her intersecting positionalities, spatialities and temporalities in relation to surrounding ideologies and hegemonies of Mimboland and Botswanan societies, and deep within the struggles over power and powerlessness among cultural groups, members, and dominant structures and forms. Even though part of Nyamnjoh's novelistic intention is to foreground the links between ethnography and to criticize the fragmegrationladen ways in which anthropological research is sometimes carried out, Immaculate's participation in Nanny's research, "Burdens of Womanhood: Being an Underling at the Margins," especially through her interviews and transcriptions of the maids' stories, makes her traverse several cultural trajectories. By collecting and transcribing accounts about maids and madams, presented from her own perspective, Immaculate transcends the role of a research assistant and transcriber and becomes an intercultural communicator for and with the anthropologist, Nanny. By developing the voices of the individuals who participate in Nanny's research, Immaculate fosters their thinking and acting on a scale that exceeds a local context, thereby certifying their belonging to the global worlds variously as AG, RG, SG and TG.

By examining the interplay, trickery and blurring of shifting, elusive and sometimes contradictory nodes of identity formation and performance and power and powerlessness negotiations at work in the interactions and relationships between maids and madams in Botswana, both the researcher and her assistant explain how the critical perspective of AG seeks to understand the role of Botswanan power and the contextualizing constraints on communication in order ultimately to achieve a more equitable society. The research foregrounds issues of power, context, socio-economic relations, and historical and structural forces as constituting and shaping African culture and intercultural communication encounters, relationships, and contexts. It also makes change possible by pushing against the grain of the status quos and interrogating dominant power relations and structures in Botswana. As globals, Nanny and Immaculate are organic intellectuals and critical intercultural communication scholars; they teach us to navigate through and stay true to the highest quality of analysing Botswanan, African and global fragmegrated gender thereby paving the way to transgressing and breaking down that which we interrogate.

IV. Constructing the Alienated (the Cynics and the Illegals) and The Passives (Tuned-Out Passives and Circumstantial Passives) in Nyamnjoh's IS This section focuses on characters (like the Makerekwere man, Noway) who distrust the Botswanan and Zimbabwean leaders and institutions that appear to be taking their communities in the wrong direction; feel they have lost control over their lives and have thus become TA (TC and TI) and TP (TOP and CP). They are searching for connections that keep eluding them. They feel disconnected from all the old things they were born feeling they were supposed to feel connected to, like the churches, God, institutions, schools, and parental figures. Through most of their actions, they appear to have either tuned out or become deeply alienated from any world other than their own private ones that they keep creating and recreating. The section argues that for Noway and Phillip, there is only daily routine and disdain. Happenings in the local Botswanan and Zimbabwean worlds and the global world do not interest them because prior Botswanan and Zimbabwean developments have alienated them, thus stifling their engendering of any community concerns. Granted that they have never really had proper occasions to experience any local or global world in the real sense, they are unlikely to abandon their oblivion to the course of events. That is, to some extent, the dynamics of fragmegration have mostly been passing them by.

The Makwerekwere community in IS is made up of the Mimbolanders; Immaculate, Kaba, and his wife, Mama Comfort; and Long-Bottom and his girlfriend, Skatta; the African American, Nanny who has traced her descent to Mimboland; the Zimbabweans: Noway; and the numerous men and women who have migrated from Zambia, Malawi, Central, East, and West Africa to Botswana in search of greener pastures. The Makwerekweres are labour migrants who have been forced out of their home countries by "push" factors, and "pull" factors toward Botswana. Apart from Kaba and Long-Bottom who could be considered institutional migrants, the rest are generally of low skill, without residence and work authorisation from Botswana. As migrant workers, the Makwerekweres form the oppressed classes of Botswanan employment borders; they perform functions that impose passivity and alienation on them. Even though the Makwerekweres community submits to a certain degree of passivity or alienation, Noway and Phillip stand out as two wrecks who seemingly have little or no control over their lives and do not trust anyone or institution. In IS, TA (TC and TI) and TP (TOP and CP) respond to the passivity and alienation that burden their private worlds by venting their frustrations on the female Makwerekweres in the form patriarchal oppression. Female Makwerekweres are saddled with the demands of the borders of domination that exist between them and their male counterparts. Some of the relationships between them provide a socially vibrant landscape, facilitating a pluralistic model of resistance which resonates with Yeatman's idea of "interlocking oppressions" (qtd. Brooks, 1997:107). Women like Immaculate and Skatta are "multiple oppressed subjects [struggling] to claim the multiplicity of their oppressed subject status" (Brooks 107). These women, as Makwerekwerized subjects, have been relegated to the position of "Other" and are further "colonised" by various forms of patriarchal domination. As a group, Makwerekwerized women are in an unusual position in Botswana, for not only are they collectively at the bottom of the occupational ladder, but their overall social status is lower than that of any other group. They are the group that has not been socialised to assume the role of exploiter or oppressor in that they are allowed no institutionalised "other" that they can exploit or oppress.

Conversely, Makwerekwere men have it both ways. They can act as the oppressors of the oppressed. Makwerekwereism victimises Makwerekwere men, but sexism allows them to act as exploiters and oppressors of Makwerekwere women. For instance, even though Noway is dating Immaculate, he lies to her that he is divorced. Immaculate is so kind that she sometimes accompanies Noway to visit his children in Zimbabwe. During her stay with him, he keeps collecting money from her and pressurizing her to take care of his children. He also keeps promising that he will consider whether their relationship will lead to marriage (307). When Immaculate gets fed up and asks Noway's sister whether Noway intends to marry her (Immaculate), Noway's sister responds: "No, Noway is married and he is not divorced" (307). Noway later resigns from his job, is paid P23000 as compensation but he squanders the money, joins Immaculate in her brickyard where she moulds and sells blocks but keeps squandering the money. Immaculate pays P500 for the panel beating of his truck and he secretly sells the truck and goes and squanders the money in Zimbabwe. When Immaculate can no longer bear his excesses and decides to leave him, he destroys her "O" and "A" Level certificates and the police intervene to stop him from killing her. After Noway, Immaculate gets involved with another private worldist, a spendthrift Botswanan called Phillip, who in collaboration with his mother, keeps draining her financially. Just as was the case with Noway, Immaculate discovers that Phillip and his mother have cast a spell on her. Also, another woman who is marginalised by a Makwerekwere is Skatta, Long-Bottom's permanent concubine and drinking partner whom we are told "exuded raw sexual energy that crackled and commanded" (17).

The marginalisation of Makwerekwere women by alienated men indicates that striving to become a non-Makwerekwere and to be free from the Noway-Phillip oppressive Private Worlds requires some form of double consciousness. The suggestion is not that taking on either or both unfinished identities necessarily exhausts the personal resources of female "foreigners" in Botswana. The argument is that the Makwerekwere woman stands between (at least) two great cultural assemblages of Otherisation or fragmegration. She remains locked symbiotically in an antagonistic relationship marked out by the symbolism of Makwerekwere which adds to the important cultural power of their central Manichean dynamic -woman and man. From this perspective, Nyamnjoh's argument resonates with Du Boisian postulations about the African American's double consciousness. Thus, to paraphrase Du Bois, after the Botswanan and the male Makwerekwere, the female Makwerekwere is a sort of third fragmegrated daughter, "born with a [Du Boisian] veil, and gifted with second sight in [the Botswanan] world, a world which yields [her] no true selfconsciousness, but only lets [her] see [herself] through the revelation of the [man's] world" (1903:5). Immaculate's experiences and confrontations with Noway and Phillip (patriarchy), reveal her double consciousness, "her sense of always looking at herself through the eyes of fragmegrating others, of measuring her soul by the tape of a [Makwerekwerized, gendered and fragmegrated] world that looks on in amused contempt and pity" (5).

Through Immaculate's first-person point-of-view narration of her ordeals, Nyamnjoh lets us feel her fragmegrational twoness -a Makwerekwere, and a female Makwerekwere; two fragmegrating souls, two fragmegrating thoughts, two unreconciled fragmegrating strivings; two warring ideals in one [Makwerekwereized] body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder (5). In IS, therefore, the life of the female Makwerekwere is the history of this strife, a longing to attain self-conscious womanhood, "to merge [her] double self into a better and truer self. In this merging, she wishes neither of the older [Mimbolandian, Zimbabwean, Zambian, etc.] self to be lost" (5). She would not Makwerekwerize or Mimbolandize Botswana, for Botswana has too much to teach the world and Mimboland. She would not bleach her Mimboland or feminine soul in a flood of Botswanan localising or Otherising dynamics or Makwerekwere male domination and privatization, for she knows that her female blood has a message for the world of border transgression and negotiation (5). She merely wishes to make it possible for a woman to be a Mimbolander, Botswanan, and a non-gendered subject, without being cursed and spat upon by her fellow male Makwerekweres, without having the doors of opportunity closed roughly in her face by purist Botswanans like Yolinda and an illegal and a cynic like Noway who destroys her certificates.

By presenting a fragmegrated and fragmegrating patriarchal set up in which Botswanan cultural and institutional beliefs and patterns accept, support, and reproduce the domination of female Makwerekweres by their passive or alienated male counterparts, Nyamnjoh attempts an insight into the conundrum -how does it feel to be a problem within another problem? That is, he tries to examine how it feels to be an "other" within another "other"; how it feels to be the victim of an exclusionary border within another exclusionary border. Even though the conundrum cannot be ascribed one satisfactory de-fragmegration solution, it reminds us that the ontologies of fragmegration are rooted in what Rosenau calls complexities that defy easy summarization, "generating uncertainty among individuals who have to contend with a lack of clarity over the directions in which their preferred cultures are moving, as well as clashes between global and local forces that leave them even more fully exposed to conflicting tensions over who they are and where they want to be in the future" (60).

Most importantly, we learn that the deconstruction of a fragmegrating patriarchy would continue to be both an individual and an institutional quest dependent on scholarly insight and exposition, as well as individual courage, goodwill, and commitment to justice. The seed for that scholarly insight and exposition is sown through Nanny's research. Nyamnjoh message seems to be that drawing upon Nanny's research, we would have to start from the standpoint that another non-Makwerekwerised, ungendered Botswanan world is possible, and that people and institutions engaged in female Makwerekweres' ethical, political, and epistemic projects would have to strive for border liberation and not emancipation. The main difference between emancipation from fragmegrative patriarchy on the one hand and freedom on the other, would be as Hooks points out, that emancipation would be what fragmegrative patriarchy "gives" while "liberation" would be what the sexually and economically disenfranchised Makwerekwere women such as Immaculate and Skatta would want and have the right "to take" (1990).

V.


# Conclusion: Going Beyond Fragmegration, Acknowledging and Celebrating Incompleteness

This paper has demonstrated that IS attests that fragmegration challenges the proliferation of borders and border struggles in a contemporary world where multiplicity and heterogeneity are cut and divided by devices of fragmegrational control and hierarchisation. It has also been shown that the novel affirms a planetary diversity where multiplicity and heterogeneity are turned from elements of weakness into elements of strength. It asserts that in a Botswanan or African world where identities are inventions, mutually constitutive existential and epistemic constructions stripped of foundational authenticity and essentialism, the search for the integrating processes of fragmegration necessitates a constant (re)construction and (de)construction the Local, Global and Private Worlds. The paper has also proven that in IS, border or worlds transgression is a motif that Nyamnjoh nets into the warp and woof of the narrative structure. Furthermore, the paper has equally affirmed that by focusing IS on the production of postcolonial labour power as a commodity across a variety of the borders, borderscapes, storyscapes, and border zones of the Rosenauian Twelve Worlds, Nyamnjoh provides a window on the heterogeneity of global space, the multiplication of labour, differential inclusion, and border struggles.

The Rosenauian worlds in IS perform integrating and fragmenting, connecting, and disconnecting, exclusionary and inclusionary, enabling and disabling, localising, and globalising roles and are either softening or hardening, or temporary or permanent. IS is, thus, a Nyamnjohian bold statement on deterritorialization, diaspora, travelling, border crossing, nomadology, networks and flows. What makes IS peculiar is that the setting comprises a dynamic system that brings together a set of heterogeneous Botswanans and Mimbolandians with functional complementarities; there are stable and unstable patterns of behaviour that are endogenously and exogenously generated by interlocked heterogeneities. The novel captures a meshwork of socio-political and cultural entities that grow in unplanned directions because they are made up of a diverse humanity that exists with other meshworks and hierarchies. The vast setting from Mimboland to (Gaborone) Botswana and Zimbabwe articulates heterogeneous elements without imposing uniformity because they are determined by the degree of connectivity that enables them to become selfsustaining. Meshwork dynamics such as processes of destratification, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization of places, territories, regions, and identities function as a counter-narrative of totalising boundaries -both actual and conceptual. The paper has asserted that IS presents borders and worlds as zones of control or abandonment, of recollection or forgetting, of force or dependence, or of exclusiveness or sharing. These are zones of cross-cultural consciousness imbued with meetings, interferences, shocks, harmonies, and disharmonies between the cultures of the world, addressing complex flows, diversity, and multi-locality in different ways.

All in all, Nyamnjoh suggests that in order to take positive integrating and emancipatory strides within and between the Rosenauian worlds, Botswanans or Africans would have to acknowledge and celebrate their incompleteness by thinking and acting from a perspective that Ngugi (in his thematization of the relationship between Africa and the West) has described as "globalectics" (2012). Derived from the shape of the globe, globalectic thought and action would have to be an assertion that on the Botswanan or African surface, there is no one centre; any Botswanan or African point is equally a centre and that "as for the internal centre of the globe, all points on the surface are equidistant to itlike the spokes of a bicycle wheel that meet at the hub" (17). To borrow from Ngugi, globalectics Botswanan or African thought or action would combine "the global and the dialectical to describe a mutually affecting dialogue, or multi-logue in the phenomena of nature and nurture in a global space that is rapidly transcending that of the artificially bounded, as nation and region" (17). Globalectics Botswanan or African thought or action would need to allow Africans to speak to their own cultural present even as they speak and listen to IS from their own cultural present. It would be a way of reading IS with the eyes of the world; it would also be a way of seeing the world with the eyes of IS. Above all else, it would embrace wholeness, interconnectedness, equality of potentiality of parts, tension, and motion; it would be a way of thinking and relating to the world, particularly in the era of globalism and globalization by emulating Immaculate's immaculate acknowledgement and celebration of her incompleteness the most potent feature and future of a common global cosmopolitan identity.
			© 2021 Global Journals Year 2021 Francis B. Nyamnjoh's Intimate Strangers: Mapping "Fragmegration" in Botswanan Urban Centres
		
		

			

## Acknowledgement

I acknowledge research funding by the Andrew Mellon Foundation under the auspices of the African Research Universities Alliance (ARUA) in collaboration with the University of Ghana, Legon.

			

			

				


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