This is a much-needed volume exploring African mobility over the last two hundred years from an historical perspective. It offers a refreshing focus on movement within the continent, which is so often neglected in academic and policy discussions. As the introduction reminds us, there is a much more to say about African migration beyond the horrific history of slavery and the more recent hysteria about irregular migration of Africans towards Europe. The volume's chapters expose the critical role of intra-African mobility in shaping socio-economic and political change across the continent. What is more original is its argument that the changing patterns of intra-African migration have long been an intrinsic part of global migration dynamics, feeding into and responding to shifting opportunity structures. Moreover, it challenges the idea of “traditional” migration giving way to more complex and diverse patterns of “modern” migration across Africa; the history of intra-African migration has much more profound roots. This makes the volume an important corrective to the huge volume of literature that discusses contemporary African migration in somewhat apocalyptic terms – as if it is occurring at unprecedented levels and represents a crisis – and often focuses on Africans moving outside the continent.
Most of the subsequent chapters add depth to these over-arching arguments and I offer a brief overview of them here. The first section looks at different aspects of the movement of enslaved peoples across the continent. It opens with an interesting analysis of the political economy of pre-colonial mobility in West Africa of the nineteenth century. Austin argues that the abundance of land and limited availability of labour created the conditions for the movement of populations across new frontiers and powerful incentives for elites to enslave people to secure labour. Saleh and Wahby show how the African slave trade operating across the continent – especially the trans-Saharan trade – was intimately linked with the trans-Atlantic trade. The section also introduces important but little explored aspects such as the movement of porters that were essential to the operation of the European slave trade and established new patterns of settlement (Pallaver – Chapter Four).
The next section discusses how mobility was related to the establishment of institutions and practices that continue to shape the continent today. For example, Håkanasson argues that the growth of pastoralism in East Africa from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries was related to the trade in ivory, for which African communities demanded payment in cattle. Drawing on evidence from Southern Africa, Keeton and Schirmer show that between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries relatively benign free movement across abundant land in response to changing environmental factors gave way to more aggressive patterns of raids in search of resources and subsequent flight of those under attack. They suggest this fundamental change in patterns of movement created the conditions for state formation. Staying in South Africa but shifting the focus to the European settlers, Fourie delves into the history of his ancestors’ migration into the interior of the continent, both as a form of resistance to the encroachment of the colonial state and in search of better economic opportunities. He notes these Afrikaner “treks” were an important element in the migration story that created the flux of contemporary South Africa.
The third section focuses on the colonial attempts to control the mobility of Africans in order to secure the labour required to sustain their colonies’ enterprises and administrations. The formal abolition of slavery in British East and West Africa gave rise to many different policies, such as the hut tax, to draw African's into the labour market. Okia explores how these altered migration patterns, as people moved towards attractive opportunities or fled from attempts to coerce them into providing labour. By contrast, Ribeiro da Silva and Alexopoulou show how the Portuguese continued with an intricate system of forced labour in its African colonies. This both discouraged the immigration of Africans into Lusophone territory and also encouraged labour migration from Angola and Mozambique towards the mines of central and southern Africa, generating an important income stream for the colonial state. These mines relied on this circular labour migration system but over time, the colonial mine owner sought ways to create a more stable work force. The issue of labour stabilization generated different many conflicts between the economic interests of the mines and political concerns about the creation of a permanent (urban) African population. Juif outlines the different responses in Belgian Congo, British Northern Rhodesia, and South Africa.
The volume then takes us forward to the twentieth century to show how migration has continued to shape social and economic change across the continent. De Haas and Travieso offer a counterview to the idea of migration shaped by colonial incentives. They show that Africans moved to new areas to take advantage of opportunities to grow cash crops, but they often confounded colonial policies by going to work on African small holdings rather than European-owned plantations. This rural free movement in search of economic opportunity helped set the scene for the later movement towards the cities. Frederick and Van Nederveen Meerkerk look more closely at the different patterns of settlement of rural–urban migrants, contrasting the rapid emergence of a permanent urban population in the Belgian Congo with the prevalence of circular migration in British Southern Rhodesia. Selhausen casts the net even wider with a broad comparison of trends in migration and urban settlement in East and West Africa. The latter is much more urbanized and the historical starting conditions, with many more precolonial urban settlements in West than East Africa, are one of the critical explaining this difference.
After these largely chronological sections, the fifth part steps back to look at war and conflict as a driver of migration from the nineteenth century. It starts with a very interesting chapter on migration associated with military service in colonial armies in both World Wars (Killingray). It reminds us of the scale of movement of African men (and it was almost all men) – the largest out of the continent since the slave trade – and the impacts of the new experiences, skills, networks, and horizons that it opened. This includes identification with the colonial territories by which they were grouped helping to sow the seeds for anti-colonial nationalism. Frankema looks at the other more-explored side of migration associated with conflict, outlining the twists and turns of policies in response to refugees in post-colonial Africa, in particular the shift away from their integration towards repatriation as the most outcome desired by states.
In the penultimate chapter of the volume, Manning presents a useful overview of migration patterns based on demographic data up to the present day. This sets the scene for readers not already immersed in the continent's contemporary migration story. This is a valuable precursor to De Haas and Frankema's epilogue, which reflects on the historical material presented through the volume to raise some challenges to theories linking migration to development. First, the extent of pre-colonial and colonial migration counters the theoretical claim that migration is lowest from the poorest regions and will rise with development. Moreover, in the post-colonial period, increased welfare has not been associated with higher levels of migration but a decline as opportunities shrank. Second, the challenge the idea that Africans are underrepresented in international migration; there has always been plenty of (international) movement within the continent. Third, they point to the challenge of Africa's very late demographic transition. This is generating a larger African population to move, but it is faced with many more restrictions on mobility than the progeny of the earlier European or Asian transitions who were welcomed as labour overseas.
This volume covers a huge amount of ground. In general, the pieces are well-written and engaging and it holds together well (which is by no means guaranteed for an edited volume). This suggests the editors have done a good job in working with authors and made good use of the three writing workshops. Their hard work has paid off. It is also excellent to see that this has been published as an open access volume, which will make it so much more accessible to scholars and students around the world.
Inevitably, the volume left some important gaps. The introduction stresses the importance of agency, countering the all-too-common view of African migration driven by crisis, violence, poverty, and desperation. Given this claim, it is a pity that the starting point for the main chapters is enslavement and throughout, we hear most about how African mobility is shaped by powerful forces. There is a counter to the idea of colonial powers and states as the only agents, but little sense of African individuals and families choosing their own directions. Of course, this may be more a reflection of the historical sources, with little in the way of social histories to give us insights into the experiences of individuals on the move.
The book reminds us that African migration is nothing new and highlights some of the important historical precedents that are echoed in contemporary patterns of mobility. Most chapters focus on how and why people move across the continent. However, there is much less said about the historical process of settlement in new places. This seems an important omission given the growing debates about immigration around the world. In Africa, this feeds into long-standing concerns about indigeneity and autochthony, which, in some parts of the continent, have fomented conflict and violence. A historical analysis of how Africans have moved and settled in different parts of the continent, could provide a valuable reminder of the role of mobility in creating what contemporary identifications seen in chieftainships, language groups and nationalities across the continent. It could also tell us much more about the emergence of rather rigid notions of citizenship across the continent that make it extremely difficult for migrants to naturalize as citizens and almost impossible for refugees to do so. Such issues are raised in the epilogue, but they deserved more attention in the main chapters.
No doubt the arguments made here can, and will, be contested by historians going forward. It is impossible to assess them here. They are necessarily abridged to fit into the demands of the volume and most refer to much more detailed work. The critical value of the book is that it opens up these historical questions to a new audience.
All of the chapters provide a lot of valuable information, so Migration in Africa can serve as a source book for those who lack the historical sources or expertise to marshal historical data in such a well-structured way. Not all the material can be original or make original arguments and some of the chapters are rehearsing reasonably well-trodden paths for those immersed in African migration research. However, most take us further by unpicking assumptions or critically engaging with ongoing debates.
