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Abstract

This chapter draws on multi-sited research to explore why solidarities forged through the experiences of racialisation and racism in Britain struggle to translate into inclusive practices of belonging for Ugandan return migrants in Kampala, across time and space understandings of difference, hierarchies of integration, historical registers of belonging based on ethnicity and ‘race’ shift for migrants. I propose Simmel’s essay, the Stranger, as a useful framework to unpack the limitations of multi-directional social remittances within place-based socio-political and cultural realities. Despite migrants’ iterative coming, going, and settling again someday, social distance endures, embedded in colonial and postcolonial ontologies of alterity that choke pathways to belonging. Harsh inequalities, visible and invisible divisions persist to striate the Kampala cityscape thus undergirding obstacles to equitable belonging.