Tracing the Early Origins of Africa’s Migration Transition: From Precolonial Times to the Present

Accelerated global migration from sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has become a headline-grabbing and highly politicized issue in recent decades. The idea that African migration is on the rise is consistent with migration transition theory (MTT), which postulates that as poor regions develop, migration rates first rise and later decline after surpassing a certain development threshold. SSA is widely seen by scholars, pundits, and policymakers as the region where migration rates have only just begun to mount this upward slope. Adopting a long-run historical perspective, we aim to revise this image in three respects. First, although migration out of SSA has recently risen, Africans overall have not become more migratory since colonial times. Voluntary migration within the region experienced a substantial increase as early as the late 19th century, as a consequence of the abolition of slavery and the uneven commercialization of the African countryside. Second, we argue that migration was widespread under colonial rule. Much of this mobility was voluntary rather than coerced, and converged not only on mines and plantations, but also on regions where cash crops were exported by African small-scale producers. Third, recent iterations of MTT express migration rates as a function of people’s aspirations and capabilities to migrate. However, the most important migrant-sending regions were characterized by extreme deprivation and poverty when voluntary mobility to rural and urban destinations in the region became widespread. We re-examine more recent trends in African migration in light of these deeper historical transitions and argue that the recent surge of extra-continental migration reflects a shift in destinations that is better studied and understood as a relatively late stage in a much longer migration transition, rather than as a recent phenomenon.