A short review of Phillip Thebe, “Can Hong Kong Be Home? Sub-Saharan African Students’ Notions and Aspirations of Home in a Global City,” International Migration (2026).
For those of us who have been thinking about African migration, mobility and belonging in Chinese cities for many years, Phillip Thebe’s question sounds immediately familiar: can Hong Kong be home?
It is a deceptively simple question. Much of the early research on Africans in China was preoccupied with precisely this issue, although usually in Guangzhou. Work by Gordon Mathews and others documented highly mobile African traders whose lives stretched between Guangzhou and cities across Africa and elsewhere. My own research on “homing Guangzhou” argued that we should not equate belonging with permanent settlement: people could develop attachments, social relations and practices of place-making in Guangzhou while simultaneously living precarious and highly mobile lives. Thebe brings these older questions into a rather different African presence in China: university students in Hong Kong.
Published in International Migration, the article draws on three years of ethnographic research conducted between 2019 and 2023, supplemented by further informal engagements in 2024. Rather than treating “home” as a place people either have or do not have, Thebe examines how African students continually negotiate the possibility of making Hong Kong home through their everyday experiences, aspirations, relationships and encounters with the city.
This distinction matters because international students are frequently imagined as temporary almost by definition. They arrive, study and eventually leave. But knowing that somebody holds a student visa tells us remarkably little about what a place comes to mean to them.
Thebe instead finds students developing forms of belonging while confronting the limits placed upon that belonging. Hong Kong offers educational and professional opportunities and can become a place of attachment and aspiration. At the same time, racialised encounters, institutional constraints and uncertain futures continually complicate the possibility of imagining a longer-term life in the city. “Home,” in this account, is therefore neither simply the African country students came from nor the place where they eventually settle. It is something continually being made, questioned and remade through mobility.
There is an interesting history behind the article too. Thebe was already presenting this research in Hong Kong in 2021, when he participated in the Chinese in Africa/Africans in China Research Network symposium “Can Hong Kong Be Home?” At the time, as an African PhD student conducting the ethnography while simultaneously living the experience he was researching, he framed the issue very concretely: could African students remain after graduation? Was it legally, economically and culturally possible? What shaped whether they could imagine a future in Hong Kong?
Five years later, the published article allows us to return to those questions with considerably more material behind them.
One of the strengths of the paper is that it also places African students in Hong Kong within a longer genealogy of research on African lives in Chinese cities. Thebe engages with research on African mobility and belonging by Mathews, Suda and others, as well as my earlier work on place-making, aspiration, emplacement and precarity among Africans in Guangzhou. These connections are important because African students in Hong Kong are obviously not the same population as the African traders around whom much of the earlier literature developed. Yet some remarkably similar questions keep resurfacing.
How much permanence do we require before we allow migrants to belong somewhere?
This is where the article becomes particularly interesting for thinking about Hong Kong itself.
Hong Kong has spent decades presenting itself as “Asia’s World City.” Universities recruit international students, institutions celebrate internationalisation, and the city’s global character remains central to how it represents itself. But being an international city and being a place where different kinds of foreigners can actually imagine themselves belonging are not necessarily the same thing.
African students provide a particularly revealing vantage point from which to examine that distinction.
It would be easy, however, to turn this into another simple story about exclusion and racism in Hong Kong. Thebe’s findings are more complicated than that. Students encounter racialisation and marginality, but they also develop attachments, pursue opportunities and imagine possible futures. Hong Kong can simultaneously offer possibilities and place limits on them. That ambiguity is precisely what makes “home” useful here: belonging does not require us to pretend that exclusion has disappeared.
For those of us who have followed African presence in China for years, there is something familiar about this tension. Much of the discussion has repeatedly been organised around binaries: Are Africans staying or leaving? Are they integrated or excluded? Is China home or merely a temporary stop?
Thebe’s article reminds us why these questions can be misleading.
A person can leave a city and still have made a home there. Someone can feel attached to Hong Kong while knowing that remaining permanently may be difficult. And migrants can simultaneously belong to several places while continuing to imagine somewhere else.
Perhaps, then, the more interesting question is not simply whether Hong Kong can be home for African students, but what their experiences tell us about the kinds of belonging that Hong Kong—and other Chinese cities—make possible.
After more than a decade of research on African mobility in China, that remains a question worth asking.
Africans in China 
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