⋄ 2 - Reclaiming Mobility : A Pan-Africanist Approach to Migration

The spread of capital- of African migration as a problem, include the association of people ism generated new forms of labour their origins in European moder- with distinct spaces, and the uni- mobility, involving the enslave- nity, the links of this migration to versalisation and adoption of the ment, subjection, and exploitation African enslavement, and the pseu- European idea of the ‘nation-sta. [...] gration was always accompanied the forced migration of Africans, by the elimination, dispossession many of whom were moved across While independence offered the and displacement of the indigenous colonial territories as a strategy freedom to move, the barriers im- people and the settlement of their to quell uprisings against colonial posed by the new ‘nation-states’ lands (Bastos 2008; Mayblin and. [...] elites, through the UN, have sought Changing the narrative on migra- to control the mobility of refugee tion in Africa requires emancipa- In the 1960s, anticolonialism and communities, depoliticising them tory thought at the regional level, Pan-Africanism led to one of the where the political interests of the not international interventions. [...] Because the anticolonial struggles, that involve criminalisation, con- At the South Africa/Zimbabwe as in Rwanda and Burundi in the tainment and detention - perpetu- frontier, Moyo (2016) notes, the late 1950s, and the fleeing of peo- ating the dehumanisation of Afri- realities of the complex identities ple to neighbouring colonial ter- cans. [...] I., 1983, The Concept of Fakhoury, T., 2016, Securitising Frontier in the Setting of States in Migration: The European Union tions signal a shift away from the Pre-Colonial Africa, Présence Af- in the Context of the Post- national territorial focus of Euro- ricaine, Vol.