Índice

• Editorial (pág.5)
• Migrações inter-africanas - debates recentes e obstáculos
  
  • Adebusuyi Isaac Adeniran, Abiola Ruth Adimula, Nuraini Yusuf and Akinwale Ojomo - Cross-border Women Shuttle Traders Operating within the Frameworks of AfCTA in West Africa (pág. 9)
  • Bisharo Ali Hussein - Afro Feminism and 21st Century Migration Process: Enabling Women’s Rights and Gender Equality Advancement in Kenya (pág. 19)
  • Gilbert Bienda - Le Droit Communautaire Cemac face aux expulsions des camerounais de la diaspora en Guinée Equatoriale et le Gabon (pág. 29)
• Dinâmicas migratórias em áreas regionais - África Ocidental  
  
  • Abdoulaye Ngom - La diaspora guinéenne au Sénégal: stratégies commerciales et investissements dans leur pays (pág. 43)
  • Elieth Eyebiyi e Flore Nobime - The Mobility of Medical Specialists: a Socio-historical Case Study of Neurosurgery in Benin (pág. 55)
  • Meshach Ofuafor - Urhobo Migrants and Tin Mining in Jos, 1940-1970 (pág. 69)
• Dinâmicas migratórias em áreas regionais - África Central 
  
  • R.R.L. Kana Etoundi - Integration Strategies of the Chadian Student Diaspora in the Context of Vocational Training: The Case of the Free Auditors at the École Normale Supérieure (Cameroon) (pág. 83)
  • Arlette Etoa Ndendé - Les migrations internes des populations africaines entre communautarisme, ethnicité et intégration au Cameroun: étude de genre des sénégalais en contexte diasporique (pág. 93)
  • Frank Cypriany Djiomwo Nzinkeu - Diáspora sénégalaise: entre tradition migratoire, recomposition sociale et dynamisme économique au Cameroun (pág. 107)
  • Ada Djabou - Femmes immigrées et stratégies d’insertion socio-économique dans la ville de Maroua (Extrême-Nord Cameroun) (pág. 119)
  • Prince Nico Tchoudja - Migrants nígérians et commercialisation des pièces de véhicules a Mvog-Ada au Cameroun (pág. 129)
• Entrevistas  
• Kabran Aristide Djane (pág. 145)
• Mbaye Baye Masse (pág. 155)
• Omololá Olarinde-Olomola (pág. 157)
• África em debate
  • José C. Curto - O arquivo paroquial de Muxima: inventário e considerações sobre uma fonte arquivística quase perdida (pág. 165)
  • Carla Delgado - As redes sociais e os conflitos em África: o Twitter como fonte de análise do #EndSARS (pág. 181)
• Resumos (pág. 193)
• Legenda das ilustrações (pág. 177)

Editorial

Internal migration in Africa

With the obvious exception of the slave trade (the Atlantic and the Islamic ones), all African migrations, across time and space, have reflected internal tendencies irrespective of external stimulators.

Pre-colonial mobilities of Africans, often enabled by rife intra-tribal conflicts and the urge for establishment and/or expansion of kingdoms via land grabbing, were limited to the confines of Africa. Even long after slavery, trade remained the guiding principle and the main lever that, in one way or another, explained the displacement of populations.  One might think that  colonisation, due to the construction of borders, would have slowed down the internal movement of populations. Still, in spite of various control mechanisms, colonisation also favoured the establishment of many internal diasporas, and their swarming through the importation of labour, soldiers and clerks. Recently, in addition to the slow migrations that have been established over several centuries and whose main fuel was trade, there are forms of violent migration born of wars, crises and political instability (in the CAR, Rwanda, etc.). To these layers are now added displacements linked to the vagaries of nature (climate refugees), to the exploitation of mines or just to seasonal migrations, etc. Within different communities, another important entity also emerges. It is a form of ‘diaspora of the diaspora’. In other words, people who leave their country of origin and settle elsewhere for 10 or 20 years.

As reported in the International Organization for Migration (IOM) World Migration Report (2024), 70 % of migration expeditions of Africans do take place across internal borders of Africa. This affirmation further buttresses the earlier declaration of the Human Development Report of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) (2009) on preference of Africans for migrating within Africa relative to transcontinental migrations. Apparently, the internal nature of most of African migrations has continued to be sustained due to inherent desires of Africans to simultaneously connect with their initial points of departure despite making the move. It clearly aligns with the notion of “transnational simultaneity”. Such extent of ‘dualistic’ subsistence has often a regional outlook. In this regard, the great majority of migrants from all parts of Africa conceive and implement their migratory intents within the confines of their respective subregional configurations. As case references, a significant proportion of illegal miners in South Africa are shuttle migrants from Mozambique, Zambia and Zimbabwe; most of cross-border shuttle and long-term traders in Benin, Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana are of Nigerian origin; so also, the situation with Somalian and Ugandan seasonal/ shuttle migrants in Kenya. Conversely in the North African case regional cross-border mobilities have been largely unpopular when compared with their routine preference for cross-Mediterranean movements towards Europe and the Middle East.

While relative activeness of the free movement protocol of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) has been central to seeming popularity of crossborder engagements, non-recognition of most of modern-day borderlines by citizens across the borders, and  sustenance of pre-modern migratory routes have been implied for acceptability of regional migratory tendencies by Africans across all sub-regional configurations, such as within the Southern African Development Cooperation (SADC), the East African Community (EAC) and the Central African Economic and Monetary Community (CEMAC). Undue categorization of most cross-border engagements by Africans has now led internal migrations in Africa to assume irregular tendencies in most cases. For instance, smuggling-of-migrants, trafficking-in-persons and cross-border labour exploitation are now widespread. Therefore, regional diasporas and constant movement within the continent, unfortunately, do not always work harmoniously. For several decades we have seen a form of xenophobia developing in African countries (South Africa, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Tunisia, etc.) against migrant communities. African women are now actively involved in different cross-border trading activities, which usually reflect shuttle tendencies. Ostensibly, such budding migratory capabilities of the womenfolk in Africa could be adduced to the impacts of modernity and acceptance of vagaries of information and communication technology (ICT) in Africa. There is no doubt that these factor have had profound multiplier effects on the economic empowerment of African woman, impossible to achieve in the pre-colonial African societies when all strands of mobility were characteristically dominated by the male gender.

Despite the importance and complexity of this phenomenon, academic studies - not to mention political rhetoric mainly in Europe - have neglected Africa’s internal migrations in relation to the flows leaving the continent to settle in Europe, America or Asia. The articles of this Africana Studia file, which focus on African inner migrations, result from two international conferences: one organised in September 2023 at the Las Palmas (Casa de Africa) and specially the one of May 2025 in charge of the Centre de Recherche Afrique Contemporaine (GRUMAC). This larger conference took place in Douala, Cameroon, and it was the third of a series  organised by the Research Group Internal Change and Foreign Policies of African States, a network which, in addition to GRUMAC, includes the Institute of African Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IAS) and the Centre for African Studies of the University of Porto (CEAUP). In the final phase of this publication, we were pleased to be able to count on the collaboration of the Obafemi Awolowo University of Ile-Ife, Nigeria.

With special thanks to all the institutions involved but especially to the team of Douala who organised the meeting on which this editorial project builds upon, we hope that this publication will provide a better understanding of African migrations. A process that, for the foreseeable future, will continue to take an internal outlook for obvious cultural interconnectedness.

Adebusuyi Isaac Adeniran (OAU),

Dagauh Komenan (CEAUP),

Dmitri Bondarenko (IAS),

Emmanuel Tchumtchoua (GRUMAC),

Maciel Santos (CEAUP).

Nº de registo: 124732
Depósito legal: 138153/99
ISSN: 0874-2375
DOI: https://doi.org/10.21747/0874-2375/afr
DOI Africana Studia n.º 41: https://doi.org/10.21747/0874-2375/afr41

Editor/Entidade proprietária: Centro de Estudos Africanos da Universidade do Porto -
FLUP, Via Panorâmica s/n – 4150-564 Porto
Email: Este endereço de email está protegido contra piratas. Necessita ativar o JavaScript para o visualizar.
NIF da entidade proprietária: 504 045 466
Este trabalho é financiado por fundos nacionais através da FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P, no âmbito do Projeto UIDB/00495/2020
Diretor: Maciel Morais Santos (Este endereço de email está protegido contra piratas. Necessita ativar o JavaScript para o visualizar.)
Secretariado: Carla Delgado
Revisão gráfica e de textos: Henriqueta Antunes
Sede da redação: FLUP, Via Panorâmica s/n - 4150-564 Porto

Tiragem: 200 exemplares
Periodicidade: semestral
Design e impressão: António Cruz & Filho, Lda.

Conselho Científico/Advisory Board: Ana Maria Brito (FLUP); Augusto Nascimento (FLUL); Dmitri Bondarenko (Instituto de Estudos Africanos – Moscovo); Eduardo Costa Dias (CEA-ISCTE); Eduardo Medeiros (U. Évora); Emmanuel Tchoumtchoua (U. Douala); Fernando Afonso (Unilab/CEAUP); Jean Gormo (U. Maroua/CEAUP); Joana Pereira Leite (CESA-ISEG); João Garcia (FLUP); José Carlos Venâncio (U. Beira Interior); Malyn Newitt (King’s College); Manuel Rodrigues de Areia (U. Coimbra); Manzambi V. Fernandes (Faculdade de Letras e Ciências Sociais de Luanda)/ CEAUP); Michel Cahen (IEP–U. Bordéus IV); Mohammed Nadir (CEAUP); Nizar Tadjiti (U. Tetouan/CEAUP); Paulo de Carvalho (Faculdade de Letras e Ciências Sociais de Luanda); Philip Havik, (IHMT); Suzanne Daveau (U. Lisboa) e Roland Afungang (CEAUP).

Conselho editorial/Editorial Board: Aicha Janeiro; Abdifatah Abdi; Alexander Zhukov; Carla Delgado; Celina Silva; Flora Oliveira; Francisco Topa; Maciel Santos; Manuela Barbosa; Mourad Aty; Thomas Wilkinson.

Venda online: http://www.africanos.eu/ceaup/loja.php
Advertência: Proibida a reprodução total ou parcial do conteúdo desta publicação (na versão em papel ou eletrónica) sem autorização prévia por escrito do CEAUP.
Africana Studia é uma revista publicada com arbitragem científica.
Africana Studia é uma revista da rede Africa-Europe Group for Interdidisciplinary Studies
(AEGIS).

Capa: Campo de refugiados em Toukra Dassa. Chade, janeiro de 2023. Foto: Carmo Matos.

Para leitura integral: https://ojs.letras.up.pt/index.php/AfricanaStudia/issue/view/948