Africans in Exile

1. The essays included within this book present the experiences of political exile as fundamental to an understanding of colonial and post-colonial oppression and the history of state power in Africa. They take a broad, global look at the complexity of the experience of exile and the lasting effects it has had on the African people.

2. The topics presented in this book are important because they offer a new way of understanding the experience of African exile and diaspora. This, coupled with the book's arrangement and language style, which is aimed at use in the classroom, means that the collection could have a tremendous impact on the way scholars in future generations engage with the topic.

3. This collection offers an exciting breadth of research in the range of topics and time periods covered and in the regions under consideration.

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 that understanding within the global political landscape by considering the complexity of the experience of exile and the lasting effects it has had on African peoples. The works collected in this volume seek to recover the diversity of exile experiences across the continent. This corpus of testimonials and documents is presented as an "archive" that provides evidence of a larger, shared experience of persecution and violence. This consideration reads exiles from African colonies and nations as active participants within, rather than simply as victims of, the larger global diaspora. In this way, exile is understood as a way of asserting political dissidence and anti-imperial strategies. Broken into three distinct parts, the volume considers legal issues, geography as a strategy of anticolonial resistance, and memory and performative understandings of exile. The experiences of political exile are presented as fundamental to an understanding of colonial and postcolonial oppression and the history of state power in Africa.

CONTENTS

Foreword: Holger Bernt Hansen

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Nathan Riley Carpenter and Benjamin N. Lawrance, Reconstructing the Archive of Africans in Exile

1. "Wayward Humours" and "Perverse Disputings" / Ruma Chopra

2. From Bandits to Political Prisoners: Detention and Deportation on the Sierra Leone Frontier / Trina Leah Hogg

3. The Path of Extinction: The Double Exile of Alfa Yaya and the Penal Regime in French Colonial Africa / Nathan Riley Carpenter

4. Reforming State Violence in French West Africa: Relegation in the Epoch of Decolonization / Marie Rodet and Romain Tiquet

5. A Kingdom in Check: Exile as a Strategy in the Sanwi Kingdom, C / Thaïs Gendry

6. "As if I were in Prison" / Brett Shadle

7. In the City of Waiting: Education and Mozambican Liberation Exiles in Dar es Salaam, 1960-1975 / Joanna T. Tague

8. Amilcar Cabral and the Bissau Revolution in Exile: Women and the Salvation of the Nationalist Organization in Guinea, 1959-1962 / Aliou Ly

9. Brothers in the Bush: Exile, Refuge, and Citizenship on the Ghana-Togo Border, 1958-1966 / Kate Skinner

10. A Cold War Geography: South African Anti-Apartheid Refuge and Exile in London, 1945-94 / Susan Dabney Pennybacker

11. The French Trials of Cléophas Kamitatu / Meredith Terretta

12. Forced Labor and Migration in São Tomé and Príncipe / Marina Berthet

13. Sheikh Ahmadu Bamba and the Poetics of Exile / Sana Camara

14. The Legacy of Exile: Terrorism in and outside Africa from Osama bin Laden to Al-Shabaab / Kris Inman

15. Reconstructing Slavery in Ohioan Exile: Mauritanian Refugees in the United States / E. Ann McDougall

16. A Nation Abroad: Desire and Authenticity in Togolese Political Dissidence / Benjamin N. Lawrance

Epilogue: From Exile with Love / Baba Galleh Jallow

Afterword: Worlds and Words of Migration: Exile in African History / Emily S. Burrill

Notes on Contributors

Index