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Migration marks Africa’s history and will continue to shape Africa’s future. From trans-Saharan networks that surrounded empires across the world, to colonial streams of labour, to students, traders, and professional migrants today, mobility has always existed within African societies. It is part of the economic bloodstream, cultural energy, and political history of the continent. Widespread “crisis” narrative obliterates all this richness.
It is a privilege to be part of JICA TICAD9 2025 in Japan. I am grateful to my host, Makiko Itoh, Seifudein Adem, and other staff members of the JICA Ogata Sadako Research Institute for Peace and Development. Their efficiency and competence are superb. Yoichi Mine, the executive director of the Institute, demonstrated exemplary leadership.
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“African migration crisis” is a phrase frequently heard over the last years, in many debates, conferences, and even waves of indignation on social networks. The images of the Mediterranean Sea, with overloaded boats full of people offer a story of desperation, which is usually presented, almost exclusively, as the irresistible “wave” of African immigrants that is about to inundate Europe. These images do not tell the whole story nor the spirit of migrations.
Migration is not new and it is not necessarily “crisis-like” in Africa. African patterns of migration are centuries old – older than the colonial borders that have divided the continent, older than the theory of “push” and “pull” that has reduced it to crude economic simplifications, and far older than the Western media have imposed a siege mentality on African movement.
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In trying to acknowledge African migration, we need to eschew the politics of fear and appreciate it for what it is: a venerable, unbroken-over-time, and often dignified human practice. Movements in Africa were prior to the emergence of modern states. People moved from place to place throughout time by land and sea and for commerce or defence. The Sahel experienced nomadic pastoralism for centuries. Cairo and Timbuktu were connected with each other through commercial caravans for ages before the colonial period. Fishermen populations made seasonal movements along the central sea currents.
The concept of “home” in many African societies has been nomadic long enough, linked to kinship networks, religious terrains, and business circuits, rather than geographical boundaries. Flahaux & de Haas in Comparative Migration Studies note that even now, most of African migration remains intra-continental, often between neighbouring states. Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria, South Africa and Kenya are powerful magnets for regionally migrant populations, along the lines of a history of precolonial and colonial labour systems. It is not the political definition of migration that has changed, nor the reality of it, i.e., in the case of Europe.
Why does the “crisis” discourse persist, then? Colonial imaginings of Africa as bewildered and dependent continue to inform the discourse. The pictorial rhetoric of migration reporting, fences, deserts, and boats, reduces the migrants to mobs without faces and strips them of agency and context. In European political discourse, to evoke this imagery is to legitimise securitised immigration policy…
Colonialism had cut short Africa’s natural patterns of migration. The European colonial powers arbitrarily drew borders at the Berlin Conference of 1884–85, dividing individuals, disrupting networks of trade, and initiating new patterns of territorial control. History reminds us that the majority of today’s migrants are simply traversing borders drawn arbitrarily over them and not under their control; borders which tend to divide ethnic groups, kinship groups, and communal ecological spaces. Colonial labour regimes also formalised migration as a means of economic exploitation. The managed movement of labour supported East African plantations, South African mines, and West African railway projects. This commodification of mobility provided an entry point for postcolonial states to govern, and sometimes politicise migration in the interests of elites.
African migration to Europe has been increasing since the 1990s, but it is not quite the “invasion” as portrayed every time. Education and income, a development measure, tend to increase in parallel with greater capacity to travel across borders, therefore “more migration” is more likely to equal development, not its demise.
Why does the “crisis” discourse persist, then? Colonial imaginings of Africa as bewildered and dependent continue to inform the discourse. The pictorial rhetoric of migration reporting, fences, deserts, and boats, reduces the migrants to mobs without faces and strips them of agency and context. In European political discourse, to evoke this imagery is to legitimise securitised immigration policy, offshore detention camps, and militarised border patrol service.
Migration is an “issue” to be addressed as a natural cycle of human existence. In African Diaspora: Slavery, Modernity, and Globalisation, I argue against reductionism, as Africans have been world actors, not mere “flows” to be contained. Therefore, to re-imagine African migration, we should read it as an exercise in agency. It is worthwhile to consider how migration restarts cultural creativity, from music to food to the political imagination. The migrant is neither a vessel victim nor an instrument but a self-making agent working within limits and potentialities. Regardless of the corridor – rural Côte d’Ivoire to urban Mali, or Italy to Eritrea – individuals and families balance risk, pursue their future, and assert their right to travel. It is also for dignity, the same as in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, an assertion of the right to leave and return to their country.
To appreciate African migration as a continuous, two-way, and much more often positive process requires a mental shift among policymakers, the media, and the public towards the subject. Rather than conceiving mobility across borders as an omen of instability or economic catastrophe, the reverse should be the case, i.e., that it is a natural occurrence in African history and a force bringing about social and economic exchange. Africans have been traversing rivers, deserts, and colonial boundaries for millennia in search of opportunity, knowledge, and security. It has disseminated language, agricultural practices, artisanal practices, and culture. It is to misunderstand its role in shaping the continent’s history to regard such mobility as a “problem.”
…African migration is an act of persistence, ingenuity, and self-respect. It’s how you get education, a living, and a future with no borders. It creates cultural interchange, value to transnational networks, and fuels prosperity in the economies of reception and sending. The problem is not, then, how to stop migration but how to shape political, legal, and social arrangements to maximise its greatest dividends that are responsive to migrants’ rights.
The most pragmatically effective way of welcoming as many as possible is by securing and making easier regional regimes of mobility, such as the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) free movement protocol. This agreement, through which people from member countries can move about, reside, and work on the continent visa-free, is a model for how Africa will provide good, secure, and positive migration. There are other frameworks, such as that of the Southern African Development Community (SADC), used for other regions of the continent, but which are politicised, inefficient bureaucracies, and under-financed. Strengthening and deepening such deals has the potential to ease pressure on illegal migration trails, enhance cross-border trade, and promote greater regional integration.
The second highly crucial challenge is in making it easier for the transfer of skills among return migrants. The majority of Africans abroad are employed or in study and gain skills, expertise, and connections, which can be a game-changer for their home country. However, since there are no institutionalised reintegration programmes, these spill-overs are never realised. Governments and aid organisations can roll out programmes to link return migrants with industries that need high-level skills, provide entrepreneurial opportunities, and provide the potential for mentorship, whereby return migrants mentor others. By reframing return migration positively, not as a failure but as a chance of rejuvenation, African countries are well-positioned to use mobility as a development resource.
A change of tune involves undercutting and deconstructing poisonous media rhetoric, stripping migrants of their faces and threatening them with “waves.” The media, mostly the Western media, overemphasise suffering, filled boats, detention centres, and border battles, at the expense of much more widespread stories of successful integration, economic contribution, and cultural exchange. Journalists, educators, and politicians need to re-focus definitions with the human story of migration, the aspirations that drive it, and the real ways that it enriches us. The shift in narrative is not just semantics; it has implications in policy, influences popular opinion, funding, and global cooperation.
Migration marks Africa’s history and will continue to shape Africa’s future. From trans-Saharan networks that surrounded empires across the world, to colonial streams of labour, to students, traders, and professional migrants today, mobility has always existed within African societies. It is part of the economic bloodstream, cultural energy, and political history of the continent. Widespread “crisis” narrative obliterates all this richness. It boils millennia of responsive, cautious, sometimes calculative mobility down to a single hysterical story. It vomits panic instead of prudence, reaction instead of reflection.
In brief, African migration is an act of persistence, ingenuity, and self-respect. It’s how you get education, a living, and a future with no borders. It creates cultural interchange, value to transnational networks, and fuels prosperity in the economies of reception and sending. The problem is not, then, how to stop migration but how to shape political, legal, and social arrangements to maximise its greatest dividends that are responsive to migrants’ rights.
Toyin Falola, a professor of History, University Distinguished Teaching Professor, and Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities at The University of Texas at Austin, is the Bobapitan of Ibadanland.
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