The enforced removal of individuals has long been a political tool used by African states to create generations of asylum seekers, refugees, and fugitives. Historians often present such political exile as a potentially transformative experience for resilient individuals, but this reading singles the exile out as having an exceptional experience. This collection seeks to broaden […]
AIE Blog
Exile as opportunity? Tague on “In the City of Waiting.”
Jo Tague discusses her work on the history of exile and the liberation war in Mozambique. She sees exile as a way to “recreate community” in Dar es Salaam. Exile here serves as opportunity—a counter to tropes of exile as death.
An Archive of African Exile
The enforced removal of individuals has long been a political tool used by African states to create generations of asylum seekers, refugees, and fugitives. Historians often present such political exile as a potentially transformative experience for resilient individuals, but this reading singles the exile out as having an exceptional experience. This collection seeks to broaden […]
Mauritanian Deportees from Ohio: double jeopardy – ethnically cleansing two-times-over
Mauritanian Deportees from Ohio: double jeopardy – ethnically cleansing two-times-over I recently concluded optimistically that Mauritanian exiles in Ohio who had arrived between the mid-1990s and early-2000s, are struggling to overcome histories of social and racial discord in their country of origin as they create a new, American’ identity. Their children, ‘the generation born in […]
Kate Skinner on Ghanaian Exiles in Togo
Kate Skinner discusses her research on Ghanaian exiles in Togo.
Exile and the Foundation of Sierra Leone
Ruma Chopra’s chapter examines three groups of black settlers in British Sierra Leone between 1787 and 1800. She explores the motivations of the migrants as well as imperial needs that drove the government to subsidize the transportation of ex-slaves into their infant colony. Chopra argues that blacks saw the migration as an opportunity to start […]
Bandits to Political Prisoners
Chapter 2: Trina Leah Hogg, From Bandits to Political Prisoners: Detention and Deportation on the Sierra Leone Frontier Prior to 1896, the large hinterland surrounding the formal colony of Sierra Leone remained sovereign African territory. This chapter explores how colonial attempts to introduce British law against banditry on the Sierra Leone frontier produced a new […]
A Kingdom in Check
A highly political sequence of events took place at the end of World War I in the Sanwi Kingdom, an Ivorian society settled at the border with the Gold Coast. In 1917, the Sanwi population’s demands concerning reduction of forced labor and taxes, as well as local sovereignty, were officially rejected by the French colonial […]