The burgeoning interstate relation between China and Nigeria is in fact hiding the vulnerable condition of transnational Chinese petty entrepreneurship. Small-scale Chinese entrepreneurs in Nigeria are faced with everyday corruption practised by both Nigerian authorities and ordinary Nigerian people, the dominance of self-interest over cohesion and mutual support among the Chinese compatriots, and variations in state policies due to dynamic and changing interstate relations. To overcome their position of weakness, small-scale Chinese entrepreneurs strategize their interactions with both Nigerian and Chinese nationals. Informality is a characteristic of such interactions. Economic informality is primarily embodied in the documentation service businesses that are indebted to those popular corrupt practices in Nigeria; while social informality takes place in cyberspace. Interaction via the Internet among Chinese involved in Chinese–Nigerian businesses helps small-scale Chinese entrepreneurs to cope with fluctuations in interstate links at the macro-level and to develop a sense of community.

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Based on a case study of Iyana Ipaja, one of the largest transport hubs with a spacious motor park and the most vibrant markets in North Lagos, we elaborate on the nuances of interactions between commercial actors and various forms of infrastructure in the spatial and temporal senses. In terms of materiality and mobility of their businesses, commercial actors are categorised into three types, shopkeepers, stallholders and hawkers. They have extensive interactions with the objects with which they are attached (shops, stalls and goods), the physical infrastructures (vehicles, roads, bus stations and motor parks), and ‘people as infrastructure’ – a term coined by Simone – including drivers, passengers, passers-by and government agencies. We suggest that a modification to the concept of ‘peoples as infrastructure’ should help to articulate interactions among differently positioned actors. We argue that the localities and mobilities of commercial practices manifest spatial conviviality among peoples as infrastructure. The temporality of their commercial practices is embedded in the urban rhythm of Lagos and remediates the flows of people and vehicles through the spaces of Iyana Ipaja. The focus of commercial actors provides a new perspective to rethink grassroots spatial politics of motor parks in Nigeria. Moreover, this case study critically engages the theory of relationality of ‘people as infrastructure’ in urban Africa.

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In the emerging Africa–China studies, ethnography has been employed to demystify the monolithic Chinese presence in Africa. Drawing on recent concerns about “discourse” in ethnographies of Chinese migrants in Africa, this article recommends the exploration of “discursive ethnicities”: a term coined to frame a conceptualization of ethnicity that, while embedded in migrant experiences, is embodied through discursive practices. Based on inductive analysis of ethnographic fieldwork with Chinese migrants, we propose a framework of discursive ethnicities in the discursive field of “the Chinese” in Nigeria, in which specific subethnicities (Hongkongese, Taiwanese, Fujianese, etc.) emerge, change, or are dismissed, alongside other-ethnicities that are embodied in narrating Nigerians in specific ways as mirrors of Chinese individuals’ self-ethnicities. We also discuss how both embedded and disembedded experiences contribute to embodied discursive Chinese ethnicities. The article concludes that “discursive ethnicities” provides a nonessentialist means of understanding the cognition of ethnicity and discourse in migrant experiences.