Laid to rest at home? The experiences of Sub-Saharan African migrants with death, burial, and ways of belonging in Morocco

Abstract

In this article, we examine how migrants from West and Central Africa deal with death and burial on the way to and within Morocco. Broadly speaking, existing studies on death and migration fall into two categories. They either concentrate on the integration of regular migrants in the Global North – often former labour migrants and their descendants, many of whom have Muslim backgrounds – by analysing the extent to which host country laws, regulations, and cemetery policies accommodate migrants’ religious and cultural burial practices. A second category focuses on violent confrontations between migrants and state agents at the borders between the Global South and the Global North.

In the Moroccan context, scholarship on death in migration remains limited. Where it does exist, it largely addresses the deaths and burials of sub-Saharans with irregular status at the Morocco-EU border. There is hardly any literature from the first category that focuses on the experiences of migrants who are residing away from the border obscuring important empirical realities on two levels. First, Morocco is not only a transit country but increasingly a country of settlement, with significant sub-Saharan African migrant populations residing in its interior, regardless of legal status. Second, while much attention is devoted to deaths at sea in the Mediterranean, less scholarly consideration is given to those who perish crossing the Sahara en route to Morocco – despite the scale and frequency of such deaths – and the same applies to transnational death.

As part of fieldwork conducted between 2021 and 2024 in three Moroccan cities, we carried out interviews and participant observation with West and Central Africans of diverse residency statuses, religious backgrounds, and genders. We anchor our analysis in the trajectory of one of our participants, Frank, whose experiences of death and burial unfolded across three distinct contexts: deaths while crossing the Sahara; deaths of co-migrants within Morocco; and transnational deaths that connect migrants to relatives and communities across the country of residence. These experiences do not fit neatly within the existing migration-and-death literature outlined above. We propose approaching migration – and death in migration in particular – as a “total social fact” (Sayad, 1999) that centralises the experiences of our research participants encompassing all social dimensions, instead of fragmenting individuals into separate dimensions and functions. We argue that personal preferences around death and burial intersect with conditional and hierarchical forms of belonging, shaped by political dynamics that impose multiple, overlapping conditions for inclusion. Indeed, our findings show that the question of whether individuals can be buried according to their religious and cultural traditions emerges across all three contexts and affects irregular migrants as well as regular residents. Furthermore, death and violence are not issues limited to border crossings. We observed that multiple communities play a significant role in shaping how migrants experience and manage death and burial. These include family and kinship networks, religious communities, migrant networks, host-society dynamics, and supranational actors such as the European Union. To interpret these dynamics, we draw on the concept of belonging. Following Yuval-Davis’ distinction between belonging as a personal sense of being “at home” and belonging as the social validation or rejection of that sense by a community, we show how the identification of the deceased and the communication of their passing to loved ones, dignified burial practices, and acts of remembrance (such as headstones) contribute to post-mortem social recognition and continued inclusion within a community. Struggles over inclusion and exclusion unfold across multiple social arenas and are continuously negotiated as migrants navigate family ties, religious groups, migrant networks, and the broader host society, each shaped by its own politics of belonging. Focusing on belonging thus highlights how both the subjective sense of home and its social and political recognition shape migrants’ membership, even after death.