Introduction: (re)thinking migration memories and diasporic practices from the perspective of the African continent

Almost every day, and especially during summer, European countries bordering the Mediterranean are bombarded with radio news about boats full of migrants from Africa who have sailed from the coasts of Libya or Morocco and are seeking to reach Europe. They may be escaping from wars or persecution, looking for jobs or simply in search of a better life, but they are all portrayed as part of the entire African population that is moving towards Europe, as if this were a relentless planned invasion. European media rarely convey the information that migration within the African continent is actually the most prominent migration pattern experienced by African populations. According to the UN International Migrant Stock Report for 2015, of the 244 million international migrants worldwide, an estimated 20.65 million are from Africa, 78 per cent of whom migrate within the continent (UN DESA 2015). African migration beyond Africa’s borders therefore remains marginal in volume, as it involves about 4.5 million Africans out of a total population of more than 1.2 billion. Yet with the current European obsession with African migration, research material in the last two decades has mainly focused on population movements towards developed countries, and relatively few approaches have looked at the African continent itself.

There are a number of possible reasons for this neglect. During the last decade, the widespread use of the concept of transnationalism (Vertovec 1999; Schiller and Çağlar 2009; Glick Schiller et al. 1992) has given rise to much knowledge production about African migrations financed and developed with the very deliberate aim of implementing policies about African migrants coming to Europe. This research has therefore overlooked many aspects of the migratory processes on the African continent; the exception has been the North African part of those itineraries, which has drawn much attention since the EU’s border externalization process began in 2003. Meanwhile, transnational perspectives from below have revisited migration from the micro-perspective of migrants’ own experiences, which are often at odds with policies of control and domination by global capital and the nation state (Smith and Guarnizo 1998). However, transnational processes remain linked to and grounded in the boundaries of the nation state (Smith 2003). Furthermore, the transnational endeavour is mainly presentist, and often fails to examine the impact on specific communities of their long history and memories of migration. Long-and short-distance, forced and willing migrations within and out of Africa–not only via the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, but also across the Indian Ocean–occurred well before the construction of nation states worldwide, and followed endogenous social developments resulting from both internal and external dynamics (Declich 2016; Kaarsholm 2012; Freitag and Von Oppen 2010). Population movements of hunters, pastoralists, farmers, traders and sailors, as well as mobilities due to human or natural disasters, are reported in the mythical narrations of many African communities. Nation states served merely to impose new legal frameworks upon people who had been travelling for centuries (Ibrahim 2010: 7).

Anthropologists and historians of Africa have very often encountered migratory phenomena in their research. Yet, in many early studies, migration was seen as incidental in otherwise stable and non-mobile societies. Displaced people, as highlighted by Liisa Malkki, were not traditionally considered a proper field topic for anthropologists; this included so-called refugees, who, by virtue of their displacement, could not be identified with a place, a country or a nation. The idea that territories were to be enclosed in borders, people were to settle in one of those territories, and they had to identify with such nations in Africa, was sanctioned at the Berlin Conference (1884–85). It is this enforced idea of nation–the national order of things, as Malkki called it–that makes displacement a problem and ‘emplacement’ a normality (Malkki 1995: 516). More recently, the African continent has been regarded as a place where migration was always a legitimate way of life (Turton and Allen 1996; Turton 2003; Schlee 1989). This perspective led some scholars to see Africans, above all, as mobile and...