Understanding acts of citizenship: stories of black activism in Greece

ABSTRACT

The Greek citizenship regime in the first decade of the 21st century has been described as one of the most restrictive in Europe. The campaign ‘No to racism from the baby’s cot’ was created in mid-2000s and called for legislative changes that would allow second-generation immigrants born and/or raised in Greece the right to acquire Greek citizenship. Building on critical studies of citizenship and using life-history interviews, the article explores the political formation of two leading activists who were involved in the campaign, charting the evolution of their experiences and struggles. This way, it shows that citizenship is more than a formal legal entitlement and citizenship struggles are part of the process of making and being a citizen. The story of Loretta Macauley, president of the United African Women’s Organization, focuses on the African women’s contribution to the campaign and situates this within a broader practice of sisterhood and struggle in line with Black feminist intersectionality. The story of Michael Afolayan, a young second-generation activist involved in the campaign, provides a view of black youth involvement in specific forms of political participation, drawing attention to the ‘hybrid’ identity behind the term ‘second generation immigrant’ and the serious implications this identity has for collective action.

KEYWORDS:

• Black Lives Matter
• feminist organizing
• collective action
• fanon
• life history interviews

Introduction

Over the past few decades, the immigration policies of the European Union (EU) have been criticised as neocolonial, reflecting the ongoing legacy of European colonialism and state authoritarianism (Mufti 2014). As de Genova (2017, 22) notes, questions of race and racism present themselves in a particularly acute way in the context of European migration, since Europe’s borders are haunted ‘by an appalling proliferation of almost exclusively non-European/non-white migrant and refugee deaths and other forms of structural violence and generalized suffering’.

Greece is no exception to the acuteness of these questions. As part of the EU’s refugee externalisation policy, the Greek state acts as ‘the gate-keeper for Europe’s border regime’ (Kouvelakis 2018, 16) and is complicit in what Balibar (2003, 121) calls the emergence of a real ‘European apartheid’ – the dark side of formal ‘European citizenship’. Between 1991 and 2001, Greece’s foreign population increased from 167,276 to 797,091–7,1% of the country’s population at the time (Papadopoulos and Fratsea 2013; Eurostat 2012). But until the advent of the first immigrant regularisation programme in 1998, the vast majority of immigrants in Greece faced a legal vacuum. Although the regularisation programme gave them the opportunity to obtain valid residence permits, doing so entailed problematic bureaucratic procedures. In particular, the renewal of a residence permit was based on exclusionary requirements, including proof of legal employment and a certain number of social security stamps.

Furthermore, an estimated 200,000 young people who had been born and/or raised in Greece and who had immigrant parents (hereafter referred to as ‘second-generation immigrants’¹) were unable in practice to acquire Greek citizenship during the early 2000s (Iliadis 2015). According to the Hellenic Migration Policy Institute, in 2005–2006 around 108,000 children of immigrant origin were enrolled in Greek schools (Delithanasi 2006; Boitard 2007). The consequences of non-citizenship became even more evident when many of these ‘second-generation immigrants’ reached the age of 18 and realised they needed a residence permit to live legally in the country in which they had been born and/or raised.

The Greek citizenship regime during the 2000s has been described as ‘one of the most restrictive regimes in Europe’ (Triandafyllidou 2015, 43). It derives from the constitutional identification of the people with the nation (Kalyvas 2010, 358), and it can be traced back to the Greek state’s 20th-century practices of repression against political dissidents and ethnic, linguistic and religious minorities. Rather than jus soli (birthright citizenship), Greek citizenship has traditionally been based on jus sanguinis (the ‘blood principle’ or principle of origins) (Christopoulos 2013a), thereby reproducing a ‘predominantly mono-ethnic and mono-religious view of the nation’ (Triandafyllidou 2015, 43).

The draconian nature of Greek citizenship laws led to significant activism in the second half of the 2000s. This activism is exemplified in the ‘No to racism from the cradle’ campaign, which was launched in the mid-2000s in Athens, Greece’s capital and largest city. This campaign stands out for many reasons. First of all, it was launched by African women and Black youth, and it thus draws attention to Black activists, whose stories of struggle deserve our attention. As Papadopoulos and Fratsea (2015) note ‘Africans have been a neglected target group in Greek migration research’. The true number of immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa who live in Greece remains unknown, since most are undocumented, but it is low according to the available data: in 2010, nearly 5,000 people from these countries had valid residence permits in Greece, over half of them men and 10% of them aged under 18 years (Papadopoulos and Fratsea 2013). However, there is much to learn from this group’s experiences of struggle.

Second, the background of the campaign reveals the rich landscape of struggles at the time, connecting those based on claims to citizenship with feminist contributions by African women and the broader politicisation of young people of immigrant origin. Using a theoretical framework grounded in critical citizenship studies (CCS), Black feminism and intersectionality, this article draws on life history interviews conducted with two leading activists involved in the ‘No to racism from the cradle’ campaign, and it sheds light on the activists’ trajectories, collective action repertoires and framing processes. Finally, we raise questions about the impact of the campaign, exploring what success and failure mean in this particular case.

On theory and method

A useful starting point for engaging with the activist experiences of Black immigrants in Greece is the concept of ‘acts of citizenship’. As Isin (2008, 17) notes, CCS has taught us that what is important is not only that citizenship is a legal status but that it also involves practices of making citizens – socially, politically, culturally and symbolically. In this context, acts of citizenship are those through which citizens, strangers, outsiders and aliens emerge not as ready-defined actors but as ways of being with others (Isin 2009, 382). The figure of the ‘activist citizen’ to which Isin refers is related to the new ‘sites’, ‘scales’ and ‘acts’ through which actors transform themselves (and others) from subjects into citizens as claimants of rights:

The rights (civil, political, social, sexual, ecological, cultural), sites (bodies, courts, streets, media, networks, borders), scales (urban, regional, national, transnational, international) and acts (voting, volunteering, blogging, protesting, resisting and organizing) through which subjects enact themselves (and others) as citizens need to be interpreted anew.

(Isin 2009, 368)

Therefore, CCS addresses the political paradoxes of citizenship as simultaneously a means of governance and exclusionary rule and an important identity through which progressive struggles are enacted and performed (Nyers 2015, 27, 34). This approach points out that people constitute themselves as political subjects and citizens ‘prior to being legally or discursively recognised as such by state authorities’ (Nyers 2015, 25).

In a similar vein, McNevin (2011, 4–5) interprets irregular migrants’ acts of contestation as a new frontier of the political, arguing that irregular migrants’ growing political activism generates new claims to citizenship that deploy alternative political geographies. McNevin (2013, 185, 198) emphasises citizenship’s dynamic and performative dimensions rather than its static and formalistic ones, proposing ambivalence as the basis for an alternative theorisation that is capable of holding the tensions that are characteristic of irregular migrants’ struggles:

Such an approach acknowledges the transformative potential of claims based in human rights, even though such claims may paradoxically affirm a human rights regime that has proved less than emancipatory for certain groups of people, and that is, in important ways, connected to institutionalised modes of violence.

(McNevin 2013, 185)

McNevin (2013, 185, 195) is critical of theoretical approaches that rely on a reductive reading of power in order to dismiss struggles based in claims to citizenship and human rights as always already co-opted.² By contrast, she argues that the transformative dimension of claims made on the basis of human rights is better discerned via a dialogical relationship between theory production and concrete migrant struggles – an approach that goes hand in hand with an emphasis on the act of making claims and the broader social environment that contextualises that act (McNevin 2013, 197).

It is on this basis that we explore the ‘No to racism from the cradle’ campaign, highlighting the role played by African migrant women and youth and their forms of collective action. First, to contextualise acts of citizenship in the case of ‘second-generation migrants’ of African origin in Greece, we draw on a growing body of scholarship highlighting the ‘hybrid’ identity behind the term ‘second-generation immigrant’ and the fact that the children of immigrants can negotiate their identities and sense of belonging in many different ways (Nibbs and Brettell 2016).

Second, in focusing on African women in the United African Women’s Organisation (UAWO), this article builds on contributions from Black feminism. Emejulu and Sobande (2019, 3) define Black feminism as ‘both a theory and a politics of affirmation and liberation’ and ‘a praxis that identifies women racialised as Black as knowing agents for social change’. As they argue, locating Black feminist and Afro-feminist politics in Europe is provocative because it offers ‘radical counter-storytelling about whose knowledge counts, whose politics matter and who gets to be part of the “European story”’ (Emejulu and Sobande 2019, 6).

Our article also draws on intersectionality theory to explore social justice claims and avoid narrow understandings of solidarity. As Bassel and Emejulu (2010, 518) explain, the idea of intersectionality ‘refers to the study of the simultaneous and interacting effects of gender, race, class, sexual orientation, and national origin as categories of difference’. While the term was first presented in legal theory by Crenshaw (1989), there is general agreement that other Black feminist contributions of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s – such as work by Davis (1983), Lorde (2007), Collins (1986) and Anthias and Yuval-Davis (1992) – played a major role in subsequent decades, influencing the use of intersectionality as an analytical tool to explore different forms of activism.

Based on the above theoretical framework, we present findings derived from life history interviews – a type of interview that focuses on interviewees’ narration of their own life stories (Blee 2013) – with two activists involved in the ‘No to racism from the cradle’ campaign. The article is informed by a rich body of research on the use of life history interviews to gather data on social movements and political organisations (e.g. della Porta 1992, 2014; Rosenthal 1993; Blee 2013).

della Porta (2014, 265) identifies the specific strengths and limitations of this methodological approach. It is important to note that the primary focus of life history interviews is to locate participants’ subjectivities within broad social, political and cultural contexts. della Porta (2014, 284–285) argues that compared with other techniques, life history interviews are better suited to describe and trace the processes by which attitudes are transformed into action and rationales for action are created. According to della Porta (2014, 264), this type of in-depth interview enables us to reconstruct the modes in which far-reaching historical events penetrate the collective imaginary:

Covering the evolution of the experiences of activists, life histories allow us to reconstruct the path of involvement in specific forms of political participation, the role of networks in socialization, the continuities, but also the turning points at the intersections between individual experiences and environmental transformations.

(della Porta 2014, 265)

These advantages are based on the assumption that the research participants have a sophisticated understanding of the world around them; consequently, the interviewees are seen as participating in the making of history (della Porta 2014, 265, 267).

The findings from the two interviews presented in this article are part of a broader research project on immigrant activism in Greece during 2000–2015. The project includes 14 life history interviews with immigrant activists and six open-ended semi-structured interviews with lawyers. All the research participants were asked whether they wished to remain anonymous, and to consider carefully whether their choice would have any consequences for their safety, well-being, migration status and/or eligibility for services (Clark-Kazak 2017)³; if they had even a single doubt, anonymity was recommended. Of the 14 immigrant participants, 12 chose to use their own names, including the two activists whose stories are included in this article.⁴

We used a network of personal contacts to approach participants, either personally or through intermediaries. The interviews were conducted face to face and audio-recorded. They took place in Athens during the summer of 2019 and were conducted in Greek, which is the first language of the second author. Before the interviews, participants were given an information leaflet about the research and were asked to sign a consent form. They were also given the opportunity to choose the interview location, and all reasonable efforts were made to make them feel comfortable to speak.

Instead of using questionnaires, we prepared an interview outline to orient the interviewees towards the same range of topics (della Porta 2014, 268). While we mainly focused on the second half of the 2000s, participants also shared their thoughts about the political situation, their own political formation, and the everyday realities that immigrants had faced in Greece during the 1980s and 1990s. To prepare for the interviews, we developed thorough background knowledge about the organisation and social movement to which the activists belonged (della Porta 2014, 280). In line with experimental and participatory approaches (Krause, 2017: 19; Cox 2015), the interviews were open-ended dialogues on activist theorising and the participants’ roles as active organisers. Overall, the findings contribute to what Barker and Krinsky (2009, 220) identify as movement strategising: ‘a dialogical exploration of dilemmas and a reflexive process that implicates the identity, the social relations and the purposes of those engaged in it’.

To analyse the life history interviews, we undertook the following main steps. First, we used a fieldwork diary to note all the particulars of the interview settings and encounters, which proved a useful guide for later interpretation of the data (Fedyuk and Zentai 2018, 184). Then, we transcribed the interviews and identified codes that reflected the project’s key questions and themes, using manual methods and ‘a combination of open, closed, and focused coding’ (Blee 2013, 3). Only the parts of the interviews that were quoted were translated into English, as accurately as possible. We then reconstructed the life stories through summaries, following both a chronological and a thematic model (Rosenthal 1993, 2).

A major concern about the interpretation and presentation of our results relates to the high degree of subjectivity involved in this stage of the project (della Porta 2014, 279). della Porta (2014, 285) insightfully points out that collecting, transcribing and interpreting life history interviews requires many more material resources than one might expect. As Blee (2013) notes, ‘the point of life histories is to capture activists’ meaning and emphasis rather than record the facts of history’. To avoid getting trapped in subjectivism, we tried to build connections between the main findings from the interviews, relate them to the broader context, and combine them with secondary data from other sources, such as mass media accounts, visual and written materials, movement documents, non-governmental organisations’ reports and court records.

Last but not least, we heeded Fedyuk and Zentai’s (2018) call for reflexive reflection on the researchers’ positionality during the conception, collection and interpretation of data. As they explain, this is important considering ‘the symbolic role the interviewer might (in)voluntarily represent by their association with a certain class, gender, nationality, or race’ (Fedyuk and Zentai 2018, 174). They argue that reflexivity helps us to examine whether the data really do answer the questions posed, which new or previously ignored research directions they open up, and whether the original research design requires further clarification and adjustment (Fedyuk and Zentai 2018, 186). Following this methodological suggestion, we tried to remain open and reflexive, treating the researching self as a subject for intellectual inquiry (Stanley 1993) in light of our own academic and activist backgrounds and privileges.

In this regard, our previous activist experiences proved influential in building the interviewees’ trust, and reflexivity became crucial in our attempts to portray, with nuance and sensitivity, the complexity of being a child of migrants or a woman – particularly a Black migrant woman – in contemporary Greece. As Blee (2013, 2–3) notes, ‘scholars who develop a close relationship with activists may worry that in writing the analysis, they will misrepresent, misinterpret, or insult them’. We carefully considered this point throughout the writing process in order to avoid misrepresenting the interviewees or attributing our own political perspectives to them.

We selected the two life stories explored here as the most suitable for this article ‘on purposive and theoretical considerations’ (Barglowski 2018, 8). Both research participants had played and continue to play a crucial role in social movements in Greece, and both undertook leading roles in the ‘No to racism from the cradle’ campaign.

We begin with Loretta Macauley, president of the UAWO. Her story not only sheds light on her political formation but also reveals the living and working conditions of African women in Greece since the 1980s, the creation of the UAWO, and the initiation of the campaign for the right to Greek citizenship.

Sisterhood and struggle: the UAWO and its president, Loretta Macauley

Wake up African women and men! Wake up immigrants! Immigrants in Europe and America are ahead of us. Let’s try to reach them. Come out so that the Greek State knows that we are not satisfied with the way we are treated!

Athens, 1 May 2008. (UAWO 2008)⁵

Macauley was born in Freetown, Sierra Leone’s capital and largest city. Freetown’s port is strategically positioned on the Atlantic coast, and its history is interrelated with the history of colonialism, the slave trade and war, the repercussions of which are still being felt today. Macauley’s response to our question about her political formation in Sierra Leone in the 1970s was indicative of this:

If you talked politically you would disappear, you and your family. I didn’t like what was going on. I wanted to speak up. My family was very afraid because our life would be in danger. There are so many who lost their lives in prison. It was a nightmare. […] We were cut off from the outside world. The newspapers were pro-government. Progressive books were forbidden. Even Bob Marley was forbidden. People brought his music secretly from outside the country. We had to hide to listen to his music, but he opened the eyes of many people in my country.⁶

Macauley arrived in Greece from Sierra Leone in 1982. In Greece the 1980s are often described as the years of ‘change’. This was the main slogan of Andreas Papandreou, the leader of the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) in 1981, when PASOK was first elected to government on a highly progressive platform. However, Macauley’s story draws attention to the difficulties she faced after her arrival in Greece, thereby underscoring that PASOK’s platform was not in fact as progressive as the party claimed. She quickly realised there was no way for her to obtain asylum, despite the situation in Sierra Leone. Some other undocumented women told her that her only alternative was to engage in domestic service. Macauley followed their advice and soon became a live-in domestic worker in Athens. This is how she described her working and living conditions during the 1980s (the supposed years of ‘change’) and most of the 1990s:

It is as if you don’t exist. Even if you die, you are nowhere registered. Nobody cares. You are invisible. When you face abuse, racist comments or sexual harassment by your employers, you feel as if there is nothing you can do about it. Always the same threat: they will call the police, and you will get deported.

The number of African immigrants in Greece during the 1980s and 1990s was relatively small, and most of the women Macauley knew were undocumented. As she described it, the role of African associations was mostly restricted to organising celebrations and religious activities that gave African women, especially those employed as domestic workers, an opportunity to socialise. However, they were able to share their problems only with one another, not with other people more broadly, and they felt ‘isolated, powerless and afraid to react’.

After the advent of the first immigrant regularisation programme in 1998, Macauley managed to obtain a residence permit. However, like many others, she then endured an experience of ‘illegalisation’: in 2004, she was wrongfully fired from her job of 11 years without compensation, and she could not renew her residence permit. This was the turning point for her political involvement:

I rethought all the years I spent without papers, and I said to myself I cannot do it again. A friend of mine told me she knew a woman from Albania who was an activist and gave me her phone number. I went to meet her. As soon as I saw her, I started crying. I told her that my passport had expired, I had no money, and I couldn’t renew my residence permit.

This woman introduced Macauley to women’s organisations such as the Panhellenic Network of Migrant Women and encouraged her to discuss her problem. At first she was reluctant to talk:

It’s not easy, you know. But then I thought I had two choices. Either share my problem and try to find a solution, or stay with my fears and possibly face deportation. I left my fears behind because I was more afraid to be deported.

Despite her lack of legal papers at the time, she joined various campaigns and demonstrations in Athens. Her general impression of these broader social movement activities was extremely positive. At a personal level, she was able to renew her residence permit thanks to the solidarity of the activist networks. At a collective level, she started working out plans for an organisation of African women: ‘I was thinking, “Look at the white women, how organised they are and the power they have! We, the women from Africa, should also form our own organisation, speak for ourselves and stand up for our rights”’.

Macauley’s idea was mooted for around half a year until early 2005, when she spoke to around 50 women living in Athens, collected phone numbers, and on 27 February called the first meeting, aided by the president of the Greek Forum of Migrants (GFM).⁷ This meeting in Athens resulted in the creation of the UAWO. In its early days, approximately 30 women from Sierra Leone, Kenya, Nigeria and Tanzania actively participated in the UAWO; over the following years, more than 70 women from even more countries joined. The network of contacts the UAWO built and its achievements for women’s empowerment are two notable accomplishments:

We started having contacts with activists, organisations and journalists. We could even go to parliament and speak for our rights. We were not isolated in a closed community any more. Women were feeling strong, discussing, dancing, interacting and fighting together. […] The undocumented women could find a place in the association that gave them power, and they didn’t feel the fear I used to feel when I was undocumented.

Macauley explained that while the UAWO is always very open to participating in different activist networks and building alliances with different actors, its members are particularly keen to avoid any political patronage from other immigrant or Greek organisations. She particularly referred to ‘this trick’, as she called it, ‘when someone has more knowledge and experience than you have and uses it to divide you’. This brings us to a milestone in feminist methodologies that is valuable for research and activism alike: the importance of speaking with, rather than for, marginalised groups (Alcoff 1991; Gill 2013).

Macauley added that the UAWO often works with male-dominated African communities on campaigns and anti-racist events. Further, there were cases where the UAWO had provided support to African men who had approached the organisation for help to address their everyday problems in Greece. But not everyone in Greece’s African communities regarded the creation of the UAWO as a welcome development. Macauley shed light on issues related to gender asymmetry and patriarchal social relations. As she explained, in the 1980s and 1990s, African men had had better opportunities to learn Greek, educate themselves and socialise in public spaces, whereas African women had been mostly confined to the domestic sphere. Subsequently, in the 2000s, some African men did not like the fact that African women were organising and having power. As Macauley put it: ‘It’s this kind of attitude, “don’t speak, you are a woman”. Those who are macho want the women to remain backward’.

Based on her work with the anti-racist movement in Athens during the 2000s, Zavos (2014, 193) emphasises that ‘sexist and racialized borders [are] often redrawn within the movement’, and she identifies the UAWO as an example that challenged masculinist hierarchies and entitlements as well as traditional patriarchal social relations (see also Zavos 2012). Further, the story of the UAWO brings into focus what Bassel (as cited in Schaap et al. 2022, 106–108) describes as ‘the struggle within the struggle’: everyday political work to simultaneously challenge gender relations, racial stereotypes and segregation within multiple structures of domination.⁸

Thus, the UAWO was grounded in the lived experiences of African women, addressing issues of exploitation, racism and sexism. Nevertheless, although the UAWO was not a monothematic initiative around children, the main issue raised by most of the women who created the organisation was the struggle for their children’s rights. In particular, during the UAWO’s first meetings, mothers shared their experiences of fighting the bureaucratic machinery from day one of their children’s lives – literally, ‘from the cradle’ – in order to obtain birth certificates. The Greek authorities denied the mothers’ requests and forwarded them to their respective embassies, which all too often – especially in the case of the African embassies – either were not functioning or were unwilling to cooperate (Mitralia, as cited in Boitard 2007). Until the launch of the ‘No to racism from the cradle’ campaign, this was an individual nightmare for every immigrant family. Birth certificates for ‘second-generation immigrants’ therefore became one of the campaign’s central demands. Indeed, there is a direct link between children’s rights to citizenship and belonging and the CCS understanding of migrant activism as a claim to citizenship (further discussed below). In the context of Greece’s strongly child-centred culture, the use of children’s rights and well-being as grounds for mobilisation proved to be strategic and helped to win legitimation for the campaign’s demands. Although the common and culturally sanctioned identity of motherhood might be divisive in other cases, in this case it created a common ground for action among women from different backgrounds.

To achieve its aims, the UAWO worked closely with a wide range of immigrant and pro-immigrant groups, including the Panhellenic Network of Migrant Women, the GFM, the Network for Social Support to Immigrants and Refugees, and several other immigrant associations. Most importantly, it attracted a few ‘second-generation immigrants’ and gave them the opportunity to find their own voices. Michael Afolayan was one of them.

‘Nothing was given to us. We had to fight for everything’: the story of Michael Afolayan

Afolayan is an artist, musician, actor and performer. He was born in Athens in 1980 to Nigerian immigrant parents. During his school years, his parents – like all immigrant families – faced difficulties regarding the annual renewal of their residence permit and their children’s access to education. However, Afolayan was unaware of the situation, as his parents tried to protect him from this stress as much as possible.

Some of the details of Afolayan’s initial political formation can help us to understand the broader context of his later activism. Afolayan listed religion, hip hop and political street art as his main influences when he was a teenager. Although he would come to critically rethink his parents’ religious background, he noted that during his early childhood it provided him with ‘a sense of community and solidarity’, ‘an ethical perspective’ and a ‘saving-the-world’ mentality. The music video television programme Yo! MTV raps introduced Afolayan to a whole new world, and he was particularly attracted to bands such as Public Enemy and their political messages and radical critique. This is how he described the home-grown hip hop scene in the late 1990s:

The hip hop culture was a big hub in Athens at that period. There they accepted you for what you were, you exchanged ideas, they supported you. […] On the local hip hop scene, they had a lot of respect for the Black rappers, and by extension they also respected me. […] And all this was political too. […] Hip hop gave me the possibility to feel free, the possibility of mobility.

During the late 1990s, Afolayan was a member of both the hip hop band Interferences (Paremvoles), in which he used the alias ‘Dash’,⁹ and the graffiti crew 114.¹⁰ The latter used political graffiti from Athens to Thessaloniki as a means of expression and a challenge to the existing social order.

In 1999, when Afolayan was 19 years old, the police arrested him during an identity check because he did not have a valid residence permit:

That was a critical moment for my political development. When they told me that I did not have a valid residence permit, I kept repeating that I was born here. I felt as if they were not talking to me. I was detained for some days. I was really shocked. Until then I never thought of myself as an immigrant, ‘second generation’ or anything. Then, gradually, waiting in the same queues, filling in the same applications, caught in the same stressful and bureaucratic situation, I said yes, I am an immigrant, a ‘second-generation immigrant’, and I have to fight for my rights.

As a result of his non-citizenship, Afolayan had neither a Greek identity card, full access to the labour market, the right to vote or stand in local, national or European elections, nor the right to travel freely abroad or to live and work in other EU countries (Generation 2.0 RED 2013). After the creation of the GFM in 2002, Afolayan approached it and raised the issue of the right to Greek citizenship for ‘second-generation immigrants’. This was the beginning of his long-standing involvement in citizenship struggles: ‘I have been in this struggle since I was 20 years old. Wherever Ι stand, I speak for the rights of the “second generation”. Nothing was given to us. We had to fight for everything’.

In 2005, through the GFM, Afolayan learnt that a group of African women were organising meetings and discussing their children’s rights as a matter of urgency. This is how he joined the ‘No to racism from the cradle’ campaign.

‘No to racism from the cradle’

Led by the UAWO, the ‘No to racism from the cradle’ campaign began with a protest at the end of November 2005. Zavos (2014, 234) argues that this initial protest ‘presented an important shift from the traditional leftist antiracist repertoire’: ‘The presence of mainly African women migrants and their children, and their leading position in the demonstration, presented a novel sight, since such occasions were usually saturated by the visibility of Greek activists and migrant men’ (Zavos 2014, 233). Drawing on McClintock’s (1995) analysis of mimicry as a subversive political strategy, Zavos (2014, 234) emphasises that mimicry was used during the protest as a form of agency, ‘a way in which the disempowered use the tools of their subjection to claim presence’: ‘In using symbols from mainstream popular culture, including a Benetton poster, Xmas carols, and the famous John Lennon song, migrant women strategically appropriated and resignified common and evocative, visual and oral narratives and images’.

Both Zavos (2014) and Zaphiriou-Zarifi (2019) explore the UAWO’s contribution to the struggle for children’s rights by applying the notion of acts of citizenship. As Zaphiriou-Zarifi (2019, 22) argues, the UAWO stands out for ‘claiming citizenship rights for non-citizens creatively, performatively and in multiple spaces’. In this context, Zaphiriou-Zarifi suggests that mobilising the mother stereotype was a clever political move:

Though it may appear to reinforce stereotypes, the women adopted the pre-written scripts according to which they are normally ‘read’ in Greece in order to subvert such representations. […] Starting with an issue that was shared by all migrant parents not only provided a solid ground on which to build strategic alliances with other migrant groups, it also invoked a narrative that Greek parents and those sympathetic to children could be moved by. […] African women were also reminding Greek society that they are more than domestic workers, prostitutes, victims of trafficking and exotic Others.

(Zaphiriou-Zarifi2019, 28–30)

In general, the campaign’s ability to build alliances was essential to its success. Between 2005 and 2009, the campaign managed to sustain a high level of energy through its demonstrations, cultural activities, speeches, open discussions, meetings with members of parliament, grassroots lobbying, and media and social media interventions. One political move that stands out was the campaign’s cooperation with progressive mayors (e.g. in the municipality of Kaisariani) who were willing to symbolically register children on municipal rolls (UAWO 2009a, 2009c). These symbolic public registrations represented a small initial victory and made a breakthrough in the public debate, raising awareness of the gaping hole in the country’s legislation and attracting wide publicity, even in the conservative press (Kathimerini 2009).

Afolayan was in his mid-20s when the campaign started, and he participated from day one, ‘holding the megaphone at the first demonstrations’. He confirmed the decisive role of the UAWO, which he described as ‘totally devoted to the cause’. Music proved to be a powerful tool for the campaign’s attempts to appeal to young people of immigrant origin.¹¹ As Afolayan explained, even though they faced the same problems, it was difficult to bring young people of different origins (Albanian, African, Filipino etc.) together, and music offered a common ground for collaborative action. In this regard, Afolayan highlighted the importance of a musical concert that took place in Kypseli, central Athens, in December 2006.

The concert poster merits special attention (Athens Indymedia, 2008). An image of a young skateboarder above the word ‘racism’ was accompanied by the names of bands that mainly comprised ‘second-generation immigrants’ and ranged in genre from hip hop to dub and reggae. Compared with the Benetton-style poster used for the initial protest one year earlier (Athens Indymedia, 2008), the design of the concert poster suggests that it hoped to reach a different group of people. The concert was a pivotal moment for the campaign, attracting many hundreds of young people, spreading its key messages, and establishing a communication channel with ‘second-generation immigrants’ and young people more broadly.¹²

Regarding the composition of the campaign’s young participants, Afolayan noted that the most active were youth of Albanian origin.¹³ He added: ‘They are white, and it was always easier for them to move around and do things’.¹⁴ Further, Afolayan noted that although many hundreds of ‘second-generation immigrants’ had participated in some of the campaign’s events, no more than a dozen had participated in the organising meetings. Nonetheless, for those involved, the campaign constituted a space of politicisation, networking and capacity-building activities: ‘By participating in the campaign and representing it in meetings and public debates, I learnt how to structure and defend my argument’s position, how to think and act politically and strategically’. Asked about the difficulty of persuading secondary school students of immigrant origin to engage more actively in the campaign, Afolayan commented:

During secondary school, children are not always conscious of the problem. They don’t see themselves as ‘second-generation immigrants’. They might hear about the problem and ignore it. Even when they realise it after they finish secondary school, it is something they want to forget as soon as possible. It is a burden.

Afolayan considered the processes of identity formation to be open-ended. In their everyday realities, the children of immigrants mostly feel that this identity (‘1.5’, ‘second’ or ‘third’ generation) is imposed on them to deprive them of their rights. However, when it is connected to political, cultural processes and collective action, publicly self-identifying as a ‘non-status’ youth of immigrant origin seems to be a source of pride. This again illustrates the ‘hybrid’ identity behind the term ‘second-generation immigrant’ and the serious implications this identity has for collective action:

After so many years being rejected as Greek, I feel proud I am a ‘second-generation immigrant’. […] I was schooled here, I love this place, but this country never accepted me as citizen. I cannot come to terms with that. […] Until now, I don’t have the right to vote. […] It’s not their recognition that matters. We were born here; we live here, and we want equal rights. This is what matters.

Conclusion

This article has explored two cases related to Black feminist organising and Black youth struggles for citizenship in Athens in the second half of the 2000s. These life stories shed light on two leading activists’ rationales for and experiences of social activism, illuminating their early political formation, the conditions under which they operated, and how they framed and engaged with the issues at stake.

Macauley’s story reveals that African women skilfully led the struggle for citizenship and helped to build inclusive alliances – a major achievement in the process of constructing the ‘unity of the diverse’ (McNally 2015). In addition, they were capable of challenging dominant frames, even mobilising the ‘mother stereotype’ to reach wider audiences. Activist motherhood was part of the broader intersectional practice of ‘sisterhood and struggle’ embodied by the UAWO, which involved learning from and contributing to Black and Afro-feminist traditions. The UAWO’s collective action provides a good vantage point from which to see the relationship between intersectionality and citizenship struggles. To return to Emejulu and Sobande’s (2019, 6) pithy phrase, we can summarise the story of the UAWO as ‘radical counter-storytelling about whose knowledge counts, whose politics matter and who gets to be part of the “European story”’.

As Afolayan’s story shows, a few ‘second-generation immigrants’ found ways to claim their own voice as part of the ‘No to racism from the cradle’ campaign. Protests, public discussions and music offered them a platform for expression, communication and activist engagement. Considering that processes of politicisation and identity formation among young people – let alone young people of immigrant origin – are always complicated, our article has drawn attention to the ‘hybrid’ identity behind the term ‘second-generation immigrant’ and highlighted its contradictory implications for collective action.¹⁵

The ‘No to racism from the cradle’ campaign demonstrates that under certain circumstances, the struggle for the right to citizenship can trigger creative and radical enactments that challenge the existing social and political order. This brings us back to the transformative potential of struggles based on claims to citizenship (McNevin 2013) and the notion of acts of citizenship. As Nyers explains:

To publicly self-identify as ‘non-status’ is to engage in a political act, or better – an act of political subjectification. […] The claim ‘I am non-status’ is not just a moral plea. It is rather a declaration that is generative of a political subjectivity. In a deeply paradoxical way, to self-identify as a non-status person is to engage in an act of citizenship.

(Nyers 2010, 129)

Was the ‘No to racism from the cradle’ campaign successful? The answer depends on what success and failure mean in this case. Most importantly, the campaign had an impact on policymaking. Following the 2009 elections, the new government (PASOK) brought forward new legislation. Citizenship Law 3838/2010 introduced elements of jus soli into Greek legislation, paved the way for immigrant children born or schooled in Greece to acquire Greek citizenship and gave third-country nationals the right to vote in local elections (Mavrommatis 2018; Triandafyllidou 2015).

However, in February 2013, the Plenary Session of the Greek Council of State (Decision 460/2013) declared Citizenship Law 3838/2010 to be ‘unconstitutional’ (Christopoulos 2013a, 2013b; Red Network 2013). This decision has been heavily criticised by a great number of jurists as a far-right ideological-political manifesto rather than a judicial text (Christopoulos 2013b), since the Council of State invested jus sanguinis with the status of a constitutional principle, claiming that its violation would lead to the ‘degeneration of the nation’ (Papapantoleon 2013).

Although the ‘No to racism from the cradle’ campaign and the broader anti-racist movement did not remain silent in the face of these legal developments (Kathimerini 2013), their responses were not enough to achieve long-term policy change at the time.¹⁶ Nonetheless, debates around the constitutionality of Citizenship Law 3838/2010 tended to overlook the significance of the activism that had taken place prior to that decision and what we might learn from it. The notion of success or failure is thus a complicated one, considering the various ways in which social movements may have consequences.

Overall, this article demonstrates the campaign’s resourcefulness in expanding communication skills and transforming public debate through alliances, grassroots lobbying, and creative moves such as the public registration of immigrant-origin children on municipal rolls. According to Macauley, the involvement of young people constituted an important win for the campaign in and of itself. Indeed, the young Black activists who were involved in the campaign played key roles in several initiatives over subsequent years, including youth magazines, human rights organisations and cultural centres. Afolayan was among the founding members of Anasa,¹⁷ a cultural centre for African art that opened in 2010 and, more recently, he is playing a leading role in the Nigerian Community of Greece.

The UAWO also continues ‘the struggle within the struggle’ (Bassel, 2014), addressing intersectional oppressions of class, race, gender and national origin, and empowering African women as active, visible and vocal subjects – in sharp contrast to what Nyers (2006, 45) describes as ‘an expectation of displaying appropriate qualities associated with “refugeeness”: speechlessness, placelessness, invisibility and victim status’. Τhe story of the UAWO attests to the alternative possibilities activism always offers, as opposed to representations of victimhood that portray women as ‘firmly fixed into positions of fatalistic and inescapable subordination’ (Zavos 2014, 196).

Taken together, these cases of Black activism add a much needed and largely unexplored dimension to migration scholarship in Greece. Most significantly, along with the many other stories of migrant activism in Greece and beyond, they demonstrate that the drive for collective action repeatedly prevails over fear, despair and individualism.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Those who were both born and raised in Greece are sometimes regarded as ‘second-generation immigrants’. They are distinguished from those who were not born but only raised in Greece, who are regarded as ‘1.5-generation immigrants’. For reasons we shall explain later in the article, we deploy quotation marks whenever the term ‘second-generation immigrant’ appears, and we use the term to refer to all young people in Greece of immigrant origin.

2. She particularly criticises the work of Agamben and some scholars using the ‘autonomy of migration’ approach (McNevin 2013, 193).

3. Blee and Vining (2010) emphasise ethical concerns about the legal, emotional, financial and social vulnerabilities to which activists may be exposed when they are interviewed about their involvement in social movements, drawing attention to cases where interviewees are under official scrutiny.

4. The interviewees were further consulted on their consent to be named in an international journal publication.

5. The title of this section is inspired by a series of events in autumn 2019, organised in Athens by the UAWO in collaboration with the European Network of People of African Descent. Held in connection with the UAWO’s ongoing study of Black and Afro-feminist traditions, the events centred on the theme ‘Sisterhood and struggle: Writing Black women’s political leadership’ (UAWO 2019).

6. For more information about the political situation in Sierra Leone in the 1970s, see Press (2012).

7. The GFM is a network of migrant organisations and communities in Greece. It was founded in September 2002 and functions as a union body. Its membership today comprises around 40 communities and organisations.

8. Bassel draws on Collins’s (2000) idea of intersectionality and on the work of Madjiguène Cissé, who became the symbol of undocumented migrants’ struggle for regularisation and justice in France in the 1990s.

9. Along with other well-known Greek MCs, Afolayan recently participated in Every single day, a documentary about the history of the Greek hip hop scene (Gerousis 2017).

10. It is striking that the name of the crew, as Afolayan explained, was inspired by the 114 Movement. An expression of young radicalism and a source of hope, this mainly youth movement campaigned for democracy in Greece during the 1960s, only a few years before the coup d’état that brought the military junta to power (1967–1974).

11. For further analysis of this topic, see Onyebadi’s (2017) book Music as a platform for political communication, which provides the latest scholarly perspectives on the delivery of political messages through musical platforms and venues.

12. While we do not address the issue in this article, it is noteworthy that ‘second-generation immigrants’ participated en masse in more disruptive forms of activism such as the December 2008 youth uprising following the police killing of teenager Alexis Grigoropoulos in the Exarcheia neighbourhood (Kotronaki and Seraphim 2012, 168) – ‘perhaps one of the biggest cases of street fighting in a European capital since May 1968’ (Sotiris 2012).

13. Children of Albanian immigrant parents comprised the large majority of Greece’s approximately 200,000 ‘second-generation immigrants’.

14. It is striking that racialisation as a dynamic is also present in the context of migrant activism, in terms of not only hierarchies among migrants but also vulnerabilities vis-à-vis mainstream culture and contact with the authorities, especially around the visibility of migrant status (e.g. Black migrants cannot pass for Greek in the way that white migrants can). By contrast, and as mentioned above, being a Black rapper in and of itself is grounds for respect on the Athens hip hop scene, pointing to the paradoxes of signification and the different organisation of cultural and political practices.

15. A deeper understanding of Black youth activism also requires a further analysis of processes of racialisation, as well as Blackness as a political identity.

16. The reasons for this cannot be fully addressed in this article: there are no easy explanations, and the general constraints and difficulties of crisis and austerity during the 2010s should be carefully considered. It is also worth noting that the next turning point in the right to Greek citizenship came in 2015, when the new Syriza government introduced a new Citizenship Law (4332/2015). This was a soft version of the 2010 law, a compromise that took account of the Council of State’s former ruling (Mavrommatis 2018).

17. Anasa means ‘breath’ in Greek and ‘happiness’ in Swahili.