Migration in Africa

Shifting Patterns of Mobility from the 19th to the 21st Century

Michiel de Haas, Ewout Frankema, Michiel de Haas, Ewout Frankema

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000563320
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: African Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book introduces readers to the age of intra-African migration, a period from the mid-19th century onward in which the center of gravity of African migration moved decisively inward. Most books tend to zoom in on Africa's external migration during the earlier intercontinental slave trades and the more recent outmigration to the Global North, but this book argues that migration within the continent has been far more central to the lives of Africans over the course of the last two centuries. The book demonstrates that only by taking a broad historical and continent-wide perspective can we understand the distinctions between the more immediate drivers of migration and deeper patterns of change over time.

During the 19th century Africa's external slave trades gradually declined, whilst Africa's expanding commodity export sectors drew in domestic labor. This led to an era of heightened mobility within the region, marked by rapidly rising and vanishing migratory flows, increasingly diversified landscapes of migration systems, and profound long-term shifts in the wider patterns of migration. This era of inward-focused mobility reduced with a resurgence of outmigration after 1960, when Africans became more deliberate in search of extra-continental destinations, with new diaspora communities emerging specifically in the Global North.

Broad ranging in its temporal, spatial, and thematic coverage, this book provides students and researchers with the perfect introduction to age of intra-African migration.

Part One Slavery and Migration in the 19th Century

2 Migration in the Contexts of Slaving and States in 19th-Century West Africa

Gareth Austin

DOI: 10.4324/9781003225027-4

1 Introduction

In the scholarly literature, pre-colonial West Africa is noted for high spatial mobility, both in the positive sense proclaimed in Igor Kopytoff’s celebrated essay of 1987, “The internal African frontier: the making of African political culture,” and in the negative one encapsulated in depictions of lines of chained people being marched to market, for sale as slaves, whether their final destinations were within or without the region. Some wars produced a different kind of forced migration, where populations were uncaptured but displaced. There was also low-volume but commercially significant migration in the context of the religious and ethnic trading diasporas through which the long-distance trades of most of the region were conducted. The colonial occupation disrupted intra-regional trade, but the early years of the 20th century saw thousands of the displaced, and tens of thousands of former slaves, return home. This chapter examines the two major theories of migration, free and forced, that have been applied to pre-colonial West Africa. It does so in the context of the major drivers of change in the 19th century: the commercial transition in the Atlantic trade, from the export of captives to “legitimate commerce”; the Sufi jihads that swept over most of the savannas, establishing new states and, in the case of the Sokoto Caliphate, the largest market in West Africa; and, especially in the last decade of the century, the European colonization of the region (Liberia apart).

The substantive discussion is organized in five sections. The first enlarges the above introduction to the region and period. The second sets out four propositions, which I argue are broadly justified generalizations about the region in this period, as a framework for what follows. Two of these propositions are direct premises of the theories of free and forced migration: Kopytoff’s model and the Nieboer-Domar hypothesis. These theories are presented and considered against the evidence in the third and fourth sections, respectively. The fifth section reviews further forms of migration and considers how the emergence of export agriculture began to change the hitherto prevailing “Nieboer-Domar conditions.” It thereby points to a fundamental change in the nature of the predominant form of the labor market, and thereby of migration, that was to proceed further during the early decades of the 20th century.

2 The 19th century in West Africa: notes on times and spaces¹

The 1807 British abolition act was the effective beginning of the end of the Atlantic slave trade from West Africa (as distinct from West-Central Africa) (Lovejoy 2012). That left the trans-Saharan slave trade, which is thought to have been at its most intense during the 19th century, declining only near the end of the century (and not yet stopping completely), after the French conquest of the Sahara.² Over the century as a whole (1801–1900), the best estimate is that nearly 2 million enslaved people were sold into either the Atlantic or Saharan trades from West Africa, the latter constituting 31.6% of the total (Austen 1979; Eltis et al. 2019). Just under a million of the 1,356,872 estimated to have been shipped from West Africa during the century departed after 1807. The last embarkations from the Windward Coast and Gold Coast were in 1840; the last of all from West Africa were from the Bight of Benin in 1863 (Eltis et al. 2019). Thus, the commercial transition from the export of human captives to that of agricultural commodities such as palm oil and groundnuts was protracted and locally varied (Hopkins 1973/2019, ch. 4; Law 1995; Lynn 1997; Swindell and Jeng 2006; Inikori 2009). The other great change of the early and middle 19th century came not from the coast but from the interior: a wave of Sufi jihads across the savanna and Sahel, which reached its greatest territorial and demographic extent in that period (Lovejoy 2016).

It is important to emphasize that, in West Africa, not only the period of the commercial transition, but the 19th century as a whole, was mainly pre-colonial. For nearly three-quarters of the century European territorial control in West Africa was confined to a few towns or small territories, on islands or on the coast. Even in Sierra Leone, which became a British colony in 1808, colonial authority was not extended to the hinterland until 1896. The first extension of British control beyond pinpricks on the coast had come in 1874, with the declaration of a protectorate over approximately the southern quarter of what is now Ghana. France had consolidated its control in the Lower Senegal Valley during 1854–65, by a mixture of trade, diplomacy, and force. But it was not until 1879 that the mechanism of interactive imperial aggression accurately described as the “Scramble” began, with the French setting out from their existing possessions in Senegal on a march of invasion eastward which eventually challenged their rivals to either join the land grab or see their trading interests fall under French sovereignty. Even so, the great majority of the people of West Africa, including “Nigeria” (Lagos excepted) and the other three-quarters of “Ghana,” were free of colonial invasion until the 1890s. Indeed, John Hargreaves noted that “only in the 1890s did the gravity of the threat to African independence become generally apparent” (Hargreaves 1987, 405). The Borno kingdom and the Sokoto Caliphate, comprising what became Northern Nigeria, were conquered only in 1902 and 1903, respectively. At the conquest Northern Nigeria had probably at least a quarter of the whole population of West Africa, as it did when censuses became relatively reliable. When colonial occupation began, for most of the territories and even populations concerned, it was thin. Until well into the 20th century, for instance, the part of Gambia north of the river was administered by a “travelling commissioner,” who, with no permanent base within the district, would simply tour it during the dry season.

Not surprisingly, the early colonial governments did not leave historians detailed numerical data on many things; still less did the independent indigenous polities that preceded them. We have some sources, but where information on migration within pre-colonial West Africa is precise, it is usually qualitative.

3 Land and population: a framework for analyzing pre-colonial migration in West Africa

An intriguing feature of pre-colonial migration as a subject of study is that the theories applied to it, Kopytoff’s “internal African frontier” and the Nieboer-Domar hypothesis about the economics of slavery, start from similar premises yet seek to account for contrasting outcomes. This section sets out a framework for thinking about pre-colonial migration, in the form of four propositions. Proposition I is that average population density was low in West Africa until well into the 20th century. Proposition II, related but different, is that labor was scarce in relation to land (as well as to capital, as is true almost by definition in all but the most prosperous of pre-industrial societies). Thus, at least within a given year, the expansion of output in the major economic activity, agriculture, was constrained by the availability and cost of labor rather than of cultivable land. Proposition III is that the natural environment, while offering many possibilities for land-extensive methods in both arable and pastoral farming, offered major obstacles to land-intensive agriculture. To define the distinction, intensive agriculture involves high ratios of capital and/or labor per unit of cultivable land; extensive agriculture is the opposite. Proposition IV is that the first three conditions combined to make political centralization hard – though not impossible – to achieve. The first two of these propositions are explicitly given as premises of one or the other theory. The other two propositions reinforce the logic of the first pair.

All these propositions are broadly justified, I would argue. On the first, Patrick Manning has recently revised his estimates of population in African history, arguing that numbers were higher before 1900 than previously recognized (Manning 2014). This view has been challenged by the alternative estimates of Ewout Frankema and Morten Jerven (2014). But even Manning’s figures imply a population density low enough to be consistent with Kopytoff’s claim, to be discussed below, that open frontiers existed within West Africa.

The second proposition, about the land/labor ratio in pre-colonial West Africa, was presented and detailed in A. G. Hopkins’ classic analysis of 1973 (Hopkins 1973/2019, ch. 2). In 2008 I reviewed it for sub-Saharan Africa as a whole, concluding that it continues to fit the evidence for the agricultural year as a whole, though I reinforced such qualifications as the availability of a labor surplus in the middle of the agricultural off-season, when labor was cheaply accessible for long-distance trading, mining, and handicraft production (Austin 2008). Again, in my view, even Manning’s revised population estimates do not alter the conclusion that the labor/land ratio was low, though they amend its scale (see further, Frankema 2019). The northern belt of West Africa is desert. But even in relation to cultivable land, the supply-side constraint on the expansion of output in the region was labor. For instance, I have argued elsewhere that the “vent for surplus” models, which posit that the labor inputs that made possible the rapid growth of export agriculture during the early colonial period came out of a reserve of leisure, emphatically do not work for most of tropical Africa: with one notable exception, the labor inputs were re-allocated from existing activities (Austin 2014a, 2014b). The exception was the oil palm belt of southeast Nigeria, where, judging from Susan Martin’s study of Ngwa district, the labor requirements of export agriculture were modest enough to be met from underemployed labor (Martin 1988). But one assumption of the “vent for surplus” models that does apply in most of early 20th-century West Africa, including the oil palm belt of southeast Nigeria, is that there was some sort of land surplus (Austin 2014a, 2014b).

The third proposition refers to a range of constraints that the physical environment imposed on economic activity in West Africa in this period. These included animal diseases, especially trypanosomiasis (the animal form of sleeping sickness), transmitted by the tsetse fly, which was present throughout the forests of West Africa, while fly belts occupied shifting portions of the savannas. Where the fly was present, large animals would die: hence cattle keeping tended to be limited to small, resistant breeds, and over much of the region animals were not available to pull plows, or as a means of transport. That increased the pain of the shortage of navigable rivers, at least until mechanized transport began to be introduced early in the colonial period. Finally, soil fertility was largely concentrated in a very thin layer of topsoil, most of the fertility actually being embodied in the vegetation. Soils were therefore very vulnerable to erosion, which ruled out the heavy plow, even had there been animals to pull it. Most West African farmers of this period had to be content with hoe agriculture, which they adapted effectively to their ecological and economic conditions, for example, by multi-cropping and avoiding clear felling. The limited opportunities for intensive agriculture limited the scope for food surpluses, but the abundance of cultivable land offered potential for land-extensive agricultural innovation.³

The fourth proposition, that centralizing political power – forming states, still mo...