Population Movements in Pre-Colonial Africa

Migration is often considered a phenomenon that particularly characterizes the modern globalized world, resulting in transformations-and crises-of identity among those who work or settle away from their community of origin (^{De Haas, Castles, and Miller 2020}). However, migrations are as old as human history itself, and most of the problems and experiences associated with migration in Africa today can be found in the earliest historical records (^{Rossi 2018}). The papers in this collection look at aspects of migration in areas of Portuguese influence in Africa which show not only the extreme diversity of this experience but also its historical roots. These areas are particularly suited to long-term perspectives, owing to the availability of primary and secondary sources from the mid-1400s from European states, such as Portugal, bordering on the Atlantic, which were located at the center of global commercial networks for the next four centuries, giving rise to extensive migration flows. They document economic migrations from Europe to Africa, the Americas, and Asia and forced displacement of Africans to the Americas, as well as movements from Brazil to Africa. These migrations saw Portuguese and other Europeans settling islands such as Madeira and the Azores, Cabo Verde, and São Tomé and Príncipe, in addition to numerous European settlements in Brazil. They signaled the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade and the expulsion of the Sephardim from the Iberian Peninsula (Alpers and Ball 2015; ^{Mark and Horta 2011}; ^{Kagan and Morgan 2009}). By the sixteenth century, different diasporas in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans had emerged with creolized identities and syncretic languages, cultures, and customs (^{Berthet, Rosa, and Viljoen 2019}; ^{Havik and Newitt 2015}). Insular locations, such as Cabo Verde and São Tomé and Príncipe, served as Atlantic hubs, mediating and facilitating the slave trade from the African mainland to the Americas, while also absorbing African slave labor for plantation agriculture.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, transatlantic migrations, mostly coercive but also spontaneous, continued between Africa, Atlantic islands, and Portugal. Most of these fluxes were made up of slaves but there was a less conspicuous movement of what might be described as elite migrants. Elite migrations involved Africans travelling to Europe and India, while Creoles from areas of Portuguese presence moved to Brazil and Portugal, well into colonial times. From the 1400s, the Padroado Real was instrumental in promoting missionary activity abroad, creating religious institutions in areas of Portuguese presence in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Members of chiefly African lineages travelled to Portugal, some as temporary migrants on diplomatic missions, like the embassies sent by the rulers of Kongo to Portugal and Rome. Others yet again went to Portugal to receive a metropolitan education and converted to Catholicism (Bethencourt 2011; ^{Thornton 1998}). Allegra Ayida’s paper gives the example of three olus (kings) of Warri in early modern Nigeria who travelled to Portugal and Angola. They received a Catholic education and also built alliances with the Portuguese that would assist trade and strengthen their internal position. Such elite migrations helped to consolidate Warri’s political, economic, and social development, which instrumentalized its connections with a creolized Lusophone world. In Portugal, embassies from the Kingdom of Kongo and from Senegal were received by Portuguese sovereigns, whilst their sons were purposefully educated at royal expense, receiving knighthoods in military orders.

Ayida’s paper confirms the importance of African agency in establishing strategic alliances and partnerships, with religious and economic dimensions. These migrations (or visits) of elite Africans had precedents in the visits of delegations of Ethiopian Christians to Europe during the Middle Ages (^{Salvadore 2018}). In the midst of a burgeoning slave and goods trade, African dignitaries bolstered their internal authority while gaining better insights into European societies and their ruling strata. By the nineteenth century, however, elite migrations involved an element of coercion, following military campaigns to subdue African resistance; the case of the collapse of the Gaza empire and N’Gungunhana’s subsequent exile on the Azores is one of the best-known examples.

The forging of linkages between Africa and Latin America, and Brazil in particular (^{Ferreira 2012}; ^{Candido 2011}), increased the dependence of African societies on intermediaries and the spoils of the trade (^{Vos 2015}; ^{Green 2011}). Processes of cultural creolization taking place in Angola were largely structured around migration. For two and a half centuries, large numbers of slaves were moved to the coast and shipped to Brazil in one of the largest forced migrations in history (^{Miller 1988}). At the same time, traders based in Angola gradually extended their commercial migrations ever deeper into central Africa. These trading diasporas established privileged relations with African societies while seventeenth-century Portuguese military campaigns encroached upon African polities (^{Rodrigues 2021}). By the nineteenth century, these commercial migrants from Angola had reached the upper Zambesi and the Barotse kingdom. Ana Rita Amaral’s contribution on the archive of a Portuguese trader-traveler, Silva Porto, discusses the presence of Luso-Africans in Angola and their relations with African societies. Many of these commercial migrants, whose passage through the country could resemble that of a well-equipped army, gained a considerable influence in local politics (^{Dias 2002}). However, the abolition of the slave trade and the transition to legitimate trade heralded a loss of power, thereby hastening the demise of influential African societies, such as the kingdom of Kongo (Vos 2015). Eventually, Portuguese military expeditions aiming to occupy these regions between 1895 and the 1910s were to undo alliances forged over the centuries, provoking large-scale migrations (^{Pélissier 2004}).

Continuities Between Pre- and Postcolonial Africa

As the relatively short period of colonial rule recedes in time, the continuities between pre- and postcolonial Africa come ever more into view. Nowhere is this more apparent than in population movements in Central Africa. Its climate is characterized by prolonged wet and dry periods, the latter often resulting in droughts that can last for years (^{Miller 1982}). This forces populations to relocate to better watered regions, while the wet periods correspondingly allow for the resettlement of the drier areas. These population movements are accentuated by the prevailing systems of shifting agriculture which make the frequent relocation of settlements essential. Central Africa has seen the establishment of large, dynamic state systems, usually characterized by ill-defined boundaries, periodic tribute-taking, and widespread popular mobility. Non-territorial forms of power and state-making left polities without effective control over their borders (^{Herbst 2000}). Permeable boundaries allowed people to move beyond the range of tribute-taking raids, colonizing frontier zones, and seeking to establish independent polities. Most of these central African states were slave-owning, and the incorporation of slaves inevitably involved the movement of peoples and their resettlement (^{Lovejoy 2000}). Central Africa also experienced the invasion and migration of relatively small and highly organized warbands who often traveled large distances, raided settled populations, and carved out new polities. Mercantile migrations involved traders and hunters who operated over long distances and whose separate identity could, with time, become a distinct ethnicity, like the Chicunda in Mozambique (^{Isaacman 1972}) or the Ambakistas in Angola (^{Dias 2002}).

During the nineteenth century, the expansion of the global economy intensified these trends. As the trans-Atlantic and Indian slave trades gradually diminished, the global demand for Africa’s agricultural crops fomented an internal slave trade and forms of coercive labor which enabled producers to build up an indigenous workforce. Thus, large scale dislocations of populations took place, including forced migrations to the coast and to agricultural zones in the interior, as production for export of rubber, coffee, cocoa, sugar, and minerals such as diamonds and gold in Angola, Mozambique, and South Africa expanded (^{Henriques 1997}; ^{Newitt 1995}). In Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau, military campaigns were waged to occupy territories on which Portugal stated claims, formalized at the Berlin Conference, provoking the uprooting of entire communities (^{Pélissier 2004}). The establishment of colonial rule divided the continent into separate colonial states with fixed frontiers. Nevertheless, despite the territorialization of power during the colonial and postcolonial periods, borders remained porous and seldom prevented the movement of people (^{Rodrigues and Tomás 2012}; ^{Nugent 1996}; ^{Kopytoff 1989}), rather acting as “creative interfaces” (^{Foucher 2020}). As the demand for labor on plantations, farms, and mines grew in intensity, a few trends emerged, each of them involving the relocation of people on a temporary or a permanent basis.

Various forms of coerced labor were introduced in Portugal’s African colonies, especially in Angola and Mozambique (^{Silva and Alexopoulou 2020}; ^{Allina 2012}; ^{Newitt 1995}; ^{Bende, 1978}); for example, state-sponsored forms of forced displacement of men and women to work for specified lengths of time on public works like road and railway construction and maintenance. Another common practice was for private employers, sanctioned by the state, to-surreptitiously-transform movements of laborers into permanent migrations. A notorious example of such coerced labor diasporas is the contract labor (or serviçais) sent from Angola and Mozambique, and also from the Cabo Verde Islands, to work in the cocoa plantations of São Tomé and Príncipe. Finally, informal and clandestine migrations of entire populations occurred from one colonial region to another to evade taxation or compulsory labor and conscription, or simply in search of better living conditions (^{Alexopolou and Juif 2017}; ^{Keese 2015}). They gave rise to internal and cross-border movements, from Angola into the Belgian Congo and Northern Rhodesia, and from Mozambique into Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland. While informal movements from Mozambique to South Africa were originally sponsored by African dignitaries (^{Harries 1994}), outmigration to the Rand mines in South Africa was organized via bilateral conventions from the early 1900s, regulating mobility, licenses, contracts, customs, and taxes (^{Newitt 1995}: 482-503).

But other forms of migration also occurred, such as the immigration of white settler-traders to Angola who became the itinerant, acculturated pumbeiros and sertanejos referred to in the diaries of Silva Porto discussed in Ana Rita Amaral’s paper. An examination of his writings on Viye/Bié, a stopover of long-distance caravans in the central Angolan highlands erected by migrants in the 1600s, which expanded with the slave trade, provides insights into the social stratification and cultural identities that emerged via commerce and the cross-cultural interactions it triggered. Above all, the archive illustrates the great social and cultural diversity of migrant diasporas that flocked to and settled in Viye and its surroundings from cities such as Luanda and Benguela, and also from the interior. A prominent feature are the African dignitaries, traders, brokers, workers, and slaves during a period of transition from the slave trade, its abolition, and the rise of legitimate trade and of internal slavery. The emergence of a Luso-African repertoire can be traced to these sketches, which introduce elements-often omitted from official sources-on the region’s African societies and bonds created with them by settler-traders. The use of the term “Luso-Africans” in the late 1800s was meant to highlight the patriotic exploits of Portuguese settlers in Africa rather than praise forms of miscegenation or cultural mixing. Its meaning changed from the 1950s onwards when Lusotropicalism was embraced as an ideology by the New State regime in an attempt to project an imaginary “multi-racial and pluri-continental nation” upon societies deeply divided by colonial rule. These propagandistic efforts were, however, undermined once the colonial wars erupted in the early 1960s, thereby challenging the myth of harmonious Luso-African conviviality in Portugal’s overseas possessions.

Human Displacement and Colonial and Postcolonial Conflict

Colonial governments generally looked with disfavor on population movements which limited their capacity to control African populations. Hence, policies were put into place to retain populations in permanent, rural locations. The indigenato system, which applied racial criteria to the colonies’ social, economic, and political organization, most particularly in Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique, was instrumental for defining labor relations in these territories. African native populations’ spatial and social mobility was restricted, whilst they could be taxed and compelled to grow crops like cotton or rice for export, or forcibly dislocated to carry out public works or work for private interests. These measures tended to conflict with long-standing nomadic pastoral mobility and seasonal migration. At the same time, metropolitan governments organized the controlled migration of Portuguese settlers to the colonies, above all Angola and Mozambique (^{Castelo 2007}). Given the history of population mobility during the colonial period, it is not surprising that population management remained an important feature of postcolonial Africa. In areas of Portuguese influence, protracted armed conflict was to have a decisive impact on populations’ mobility and states’ efforts to control them. In Angola and Mozambique, late-colonial rule and the first decades of postcolonial independence saw almost continuous warfare during colonial and civil wars, giving rise to large-scale formal and informal movements of people uprooted from areas affected by the fighting or compelled to move for security reasons. Forced resettlement programs associated with anti-subversion strategies illustrated the coercive nature of colonial developmental and welfarist strategies (^{Jerónimo 2018}; ^{Coelho 1998}).

As Nikkie Wiegink points out in her paper, postcolonial development policies and programs to re-educate populations also exhibited coercive elements. Securitarian concerns dictated the Mozambique government’s construction of protected aldeamentos (fortified resettled villages): just like the colonatos (colonial rural settlements), they were framed as a means of providing rural population with modern amenities and services, whilst managing and controlling in an anti-subversion drive (^{Castelo 2020}). Large infrastructural projects such as the Cahora-Bassa dam under colonial rule and coal mining in Tete province after independence led to the forcible eviction of resident populations. Official justifications underlined improvements in the living conditions of displaced communities. In the few brief years of peace that followed independence in 1975, the FRELIMO government established aldeais comunais (communal villages), ostensibly to implement the government’s development policy but essentially motivated by notions of population control based upon a controversial ideological drive to develop and transform society, foster nation building, and re-educate populations. Although based upon different policies and ideologies, Wiegink’s paper stresses the element of continuity in colonial and postcolonial resettlement policies, in the lived experiences of uprooted populations, and in a steady stream of desertions as people preferred to leave the regimentations of the new villages and return to more unregulated, traditional life.

The civil war that raged in Mozambique between 1980 and 1992 once again transformed a large section of rural populations in into migrants as people fled war zones, moving to urban areas or seeking refuge in neighboring countries (^{Morier-Genoud et al. 2018}). When the 1992 General Peace Accords brought the civil war to an end, the FRELIMO government elected in 1994 had to develop a policy for uprooted and impoverished rural populations. Harking back to the colonial era, rural areas were divided into districts controlled by government appointed régulos (paramount chiefs) who supervised the land and resident populations (^{Kyed 2007}). However, large population movements continued as people moved in search of land on which to settle, thereby creating potential conflicts between residents and new arrivals (^{Newitt and Tornimbeni 2008}). Moreover, the disturbed political conditions in Zimbabwe at the time resulted in migrants crossing the border into Mozambique to seek secure places to settle.

Owing to the period of instability following the peace accords, government control of the rural population was precarious, so strengthening it became an overriding political imperative for FRELIMO. The revival of government-sponsored village settlements in the early 2000s, owing to mining operations and a succession of disastrous floods, was once again dressed up with promises of access to electricity, modern housing, health services, and education. While this resettlement policy was being pursued in the mining concession areas, illegal mining operations of a highly speculative nature were attracting large numbers of migrants. But informal gold and ruby mining also spread uncontrolledly in frontier and northern areas, causing authorities to expel the illegal miners. As Salvador Forquilha and João Pereira show in their paper, this enabled the al-Shabaab movement to recruit fighters from among the displaced miners in the Cabo Delgado province, close to the Tanzanian border. At the same time, economic migrations, again extending back to colonial times, enabled the movement to gain recruits from sections of the population who felt little loyalty to the existing order (^{Bonate 2022}). Indeed, it was across this border that FRELIMO had recruited and infiltrated fighters during the struggle for independence (^{Bonate 2013}).

During the post-independence period, a common ethnic identity between Makonde speakers on both sides of the border enabled continued movements of migrants in both directions, facilitating the movement of contraband goods. This porous border region and the absence of an effective frontier allowed Islamic fighters to operate freely in northern Mozambique and embark on the Cabo Delgado insurrection in October 2017. The interviews recorded for the paper in this dossier underline the importance of migration, particularly among the young and unemployed, as a key factor in the Northern insurrection. These developments are a reminder of how pre-colonial and colonial-era subsistence and survival strategies informed migrations in search of new pastures, hunting, fishing, trade, and remunerated employment. Informants’ narratives also called attention to the religious tensions in northern Mozambican Islamic communities, as well as to local discontent with FRELIMO governance and the lack of economic opportunities and the historical importance of seasonal outmigration.

Transnational Migrations and Diasporas

Seen in a broader perspective, cross-border migrations and their transnational dimensions are particularly evident in the history of insular locations like the Cabo Verde archipelago. They are best understood as migrations in the longue durée, involving Portuguese and European settlers, New Christian exiles, and the forced migration of slaves from the African mainland who contributed to the formation of the archipelago’s Creole society (^{Santos 1991}, 2000, & 2001). Over time, the economy of the islands became dependent on regular inward and outward movements of people. Slaves were brought to the insular Atlantic hub for onward shipment to the New World, but also to work the plantations on the islands. Mercantile migration also saw Cabo Verdeans engaged in slave trafficking on the Guinea coast, and later in the 1800s as settlers on seasonal farms with the groundnut boom (^{Carreira 1977}). Serving onboard American whalers became a common activity for Cabo Verdeans in the 1800s, resulting in discharged crews establishing themselves in the United States, later to be joined by family members.

By the early twentieth century, there was a growing Cabo Verdean community in the U. S., which is currently host to the single biggest Cabo Verdean diasporic population. Soon, Cabo Verdeans trained in the Colonial School were serving in the Portuguese colonial service in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau, forming a mid-level African administrative elite conditioned by their Creole status (^{Keese 2007}; ^{Batalha 2004}). At the same time, a sizeable Cabo Verdean diaspora formed in São Tomé and Príncipe as large numbers of the poorer strata on the islands were also recruited for the São Tomé cocoa and coffee plantations, or roças, which experienced an upsurge in the 1800s (^{Nascimento 2007}). Emerging in part out of destitution and poverty caused by drought and famine, these migrants ended up being locked in permanent debt, unable to return home (^{Akesson 2016}b).

During the colonial period, Portuguese authorities did little to develop the Cabo Verdean economy, which continued to suffer from periodic droughts causing widespread hunger, leaving emigration as the only resort for large sectors of the population (^{Bigman 1993}; ^{Patterson 1988}). Successive periods of drought and famine during the twentieth century-such as the severe 1947-1948 famine which killed more than 10,000 inhabitants-further accelerated emigration movements, despite late colonial economic development programs (^{Keese 2012}). Whereas the educated could find jobs in the Portuguese colonial service or in Portugal itself, other emigrants established communities in the U.S., in South America, and in neighboring Senegal and Guinea-Bissau. Once Cabo Verde became independent in 1975, its emigrant communities already equaled the number of people still resident in the islands, which was thus to play a crucial role in terms of the insular economy owing to the volume of remittances. Over the last few decades, the islands’ economic development has drawn migrant flows from the African continent, for example from Senegal and Guinea-Bissau, which served as destinations for economic migrants from Cabo Verde in colonial times (^{Rocha 2017}; ^{Jung 2015}).

Postcolonial developments have underlined the importance of national belonging as a key narrative of transnational connections. Two of the papers in this collection focus on the postcolonial importance of Cabo Verde’s global diaspora. Marilla MacGregor discusses the way in which education and information policy since independence have been affected by the existence of overseas migrant communities. Although the Cabo Verdean government has invested heavily in education, the islands remain highly dependent on outside influences, in large part coming to it via the emigrant community. Many Cabo Verdeans still travel abroad for further training and education and rely on sources of information reaching them from foreign sources. This elite migration has roots that extend back in history and contribute to the complexities of identity for Cabo Verdeans located, as they have been, and still are, between Africa, Europe, and the Americas. However, many Cabo Verdeans work in lower-skilled jobs in high-income countries, investing their social capital in coping strategies, relying on informal networks to communicate with each other and to glean information on their home country. The emergence of digital platforms by and for Cabo Verdeans strongly promoted by the U.S. diaspora has facilitated connections with other diasporas and with the archipelago in online affinity communities (^{Melo 2008}).

As MacGregor demonstrates, on the islands themselves, official educational and information sources such as libraries have been slow to develop, remaining dependent on information models developed in Europe and the United States. The fragile library systems currently in place-which differ little from those of other African countries (^{Mchombu and Beukes-Amiss 2015})-seem to suggest that they are ill-adapted to Cabo Verdean society and fail to correspond to islanders’ needs. The strong Anglophone influence stemming from the U.S. diaspora has to some extent bolstered competition with the official language, Portuguese, which is the second language spoken in the islands, with the archipelago’s endogenous Krioulu (with a Portuguese lexicon). While maintaining Portuguese as a curricular language and investing in higher education, recent projects to better equip school libraries to facilitate a “working relationship with information,” remain insufficient to break the cycle of reliance on Europe as the matrix for sourcing knowledge.

The political dimensions of the role of the Cabo Verdean diaspora are discussed by Aleida Mendes Borges, who examines in detail how the emigrant community influences island politics. During the last century of the colonial period, Cabo Verde already formed part of a wider international community owing to its diasporic connections, which the independent state sought to maintain. While other African countries, including all Lusophone African states (Países Africanos de Língua Oficial Portuguesa, PALOP), have voting provisions in place for non-resident nationals, in Cabo Verde, the state actually endeavored to strengthen contacts with the diaspora, partly because many expatriate Cabo Verdeans maintained family connections with the islands and intended to return to settle upon retirement. In addition, remittances of expatriates were and are a crucial asset for the islands’ economy and for bolstering families’ living conditions in a country with few strategic resources. Borges demonstrates how Cabo Verdean transnationalism permeates its political system as the state engages with “non-resident residents beyond remittances” through the emigrant vote. Although the relative weight of the vote is limited, she shows that in at least two of the presidential elections, the diaspora vote has had a decisive influence on the outcome. By promoting the participation of its global diaspora in the political life of the islands-which has in some instances been decisive for the outcome of elections-Cabo Verde has effectively elevated the relevance of external citizenship while effectively challenging “territorially bounded notions of the nation-state.”

Reinforcing the relationship between diasporas and national politics by facilitating their participation in presidential and legislative elections implies embracing the notion of external citizenship. Given the numeric significance of non-resident nationals, safeguards were put in place to prevent them from dominating the isles’ political system. Nevertheless, 8.5% of seats are reserved for the electorate in the diaspora, the highest percentage among PALOP countries. As second and third generations of emigrants have access to Cabo Verdean citizenship, the potential pool of voters is considerable. Being consistently higher than on the islands, the turn-out rates of voters in the different emigrant constituencies illustrate the diaspora’s strong sense of belonging and dedication to the exercise of external citizenship.