The African experience of homelessness is a multi-faceted one: through the impact of capitalism, globalisation and xenophobia, there are multiple scenarios where one’s sense of belonging is constantly put in jeopardy. This phenomenon truly transcends the physical and metaphysical realms in a way that only the person experiencing it can explain. To be Black and African in the world is in itself an extreme sport, one where survival is the ultimate prize.

It makes you think of a song like Home Again; the breakthrough single by British-Ugandan soul musician Michael Kiwanuka. A folk-like story about contending with both losing and finding the self.  If you’ll indulge this minor angular shift for a moment, it could be argued that when we think about the idea of homecoming, we are that much closer to understanding the true essence of homelessness.  

The different perspectives of our theme come together, thus producing an intricately woven thread that causes one to ponder the true essence of home. For instance, in the visually appealing nonfiction piece A Placeholder for the Unhomed by Nigerian essayist Zenas Ubere, a work itself inspired by a series of portraits titled  Bodies Without Walls (2025) by Lagos-based photographer Dami Adeyemi. The aesthetics of homelessness and the way Zenas Ubere grapples with it in close proximity to him prompt one to consider the realities of what it truly means to lack shelter. The pavement as a bed, the sky as a roof, and the thought of how anyone can live this way.

The works in this issue insist on a fundamental point: homelessness is not merely the lack of a home, but rather the result of active dispossession. It is engineered, in the same way poverty is engineered. It is a violent act, and one that is certainly not accidental. For Black/African people, this engineering has a long history; that is, the violent unhousing of our ancestors through centuries of slavery tore people from their land, kin, language, and cosmology. Our ancestors, forced to labour and toil to build nations that denied them belonging. The original sin upon which all of modern society is built, and the legacy from which most, if not all, our current and persisting problems arise. The lingering effects of this displacement shape who is rendered disposable, who is policed/surveilled, and who is pushed to the outskirts of society. In this sense, homelessness is not new to the Black/African experience.

In Doreen Masika’s Fogbow, displacement is rendered through the eyes of a family currently living in Dadaab, one of the world’s largest refugee camps. Trading in their three-bedroom bungalow in Bargoni for a tent, the family is frozen at the moment of loss, suspended in a life that no longer moves forward in the ways it once did. In Enyinna Nnabuihe’s Rats, we are confronted with the ease with which society dehumanises unhoused people, the ease with which unhoused people are made out to be vermin. In Sheila Ngei’s poems, we are reminded that homelessness is also linguistic and cultural. Through the veneer of migrating languages and fractured dialects, the poems trace how tongues evolve while carrying the weight of movement and displacement. In Flourish Aikodion’s We Who Walk Without Belonging, we witness homelessness through Zainab, who was sold into modern-day slavery and indentured servitude as a young girl.

Taken together, the works herein challenge the notion that homelessness is an individual failure rather than a systemic one. They reject narratives of charity and demand a reckoning: a reckoning with imperialism and capitalism, a reckoning with war, and a reckoning with borders. We invite readers to sit with this issue attentively and critically, assessing assumptions about home, belonging, and responsibility. We ask you to consider which systems enable homelessness, who benefits from its expansion, and whose lives are made precarious in the process. 

Yours,
Yvonne Wabai & Sihle Ntuli,
Rajat Neogy Editorial Fellows 2025/2026.