Rethinking Refuge: Processes of Refuge Seeking in Africa; An
Introduction

George N. Njung, Marcia C. Schenck

Africa Today, Volume 69, Numbers 1-2, Fall/Winter 2022, pp. 1-13 (Article)

Published by Indiana University Press

For additional information about this article

[ Access provided at 20 Sep 2022 20:20 GMT from Indiana University Libraries ]

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/864866

Rethinking Refuge: Processes
of Refuge Seeking in Africa; An
Introduction
George N. Njung and Marcia C. Schenck

“Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make
it the definitive story of that person,” explains Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie,
a Nigerian author. Eloquently articulating “the danger of the single story”
in her homonymous TedTalk (2009), she cautions how the single story, cre-
ated by power, not only stereotypes and flattens people’s lived experiences,
but emphasizes how those people are different from or are part of others. To
understand the principle and role of nkali (an Igbo word, which she loosely
translates as “power”) in the telling of stories, we must consider how the
stories are told, who tells them, when they are told, and how many of them
are told. We have aimed in this special issue to have contemporary African
refugee and migrant stories told and understood as multiple stories, rather
than one single story. In so doing, we were attentive to how we wanted the
stories to be told, who should be involved in telling them, how many of them
should be told, and what the frames for them should be. This aim is reflected
in the nature of the articles contained in this special issue, written by scholars
from across continents, countries, institutions, and disciplines, all of whom
remained conscious of the historical complexities of the stories they had set
out to tell. Collectively, these articles demonstrate that rather than being an
aberration, African migrant and refugee experiences are more embedded in
global historical and contemporary events than the world has cared to admit.

This special issue, “Rethinking Refuge,” therefore dives into the history
of refuge seeking by Africans on the continent and beyond and, interestingly,
of Europeans in Africa, precisely to offer counternarratives to the single-story
mediatized depictions of African refugees to which we have become accus-
tomed. In so doing, it adds complexity to refugee studies in three ways. First,
Africa emerges as a producer of refugees but also as a sanctuary for people flee-
ing war and repression in Europe. Second, Africa emerges as an emancipatory
site, where refugees emerging from the chaos of decolonization and the postin-
dependence era are hosted by young, independent nations like Tanzania, but
limits to pan-African solidarity become apparent as national politics trump
commitments to refugees over time, not only in Tanzania, but also in other
African countries. Third, refugees themselves emerge as diverse groups of

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people with multiple identities, one of which might for a time come to encom-
pass that of a refugee, an asylum seeker, or a refuge seeker outside of official
categories: refugees in the Africa of the 1960s were understood to comprise
“refugee students” (meaning those seeking secondary or tertiary education),
“urban or professional refugees” (meaning those possessing a professional
background in blue- or white-collar professions), “rural refugees” (meaning
those with agricultural backgrounds), and sometimes also “freedom fighters”
(meaning those who took up weapons for the cause of independence). Over
time, we have forgotten about white flight to Africa and pan-African commit-
ments to liberation struggles from which emerged several refugees. We have
thus reduced the refugee to a person in need of food, shelter, and protection.
The fact is that a historical inquiry aids us in telling more diverse, complex,
and ambiguous stories about refugees’ history and experiences in Africa.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), as of
March 2022, found in Africa about “30 million internally displaced persons,
refugees[,] and asylum-seekers,” almost one-third of the world’s refugees.
In 2021 alone, millions of new displacements occurred as conflict flared
up in Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Central African
Republic, South Sudan, and Nigeria. Many more Africans are on the move
within the continent than are trying to make their way to Europe, but Fortress
Europe has been enacting physical barriers. This new iron curtain largely
reflects the collapse of communism and socialism. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the
former Secretary General of the United Nations, has aptly remarked that with
the collapse of socialism, the iron curtain moved southward, to the middle
of the Mediterranean, where it seeks to divide Europe from Africa (1999,
24–25). Subsequently, African migrants have been demonized as a security
threat and a burden on the welfare state. They must prove their refugee status
in an atmosphere of suspicion. Europe’s closure of its doors to migrants and
refugees from the South costs lives and reduces their humanity to a sort of
nothingness. Its attempts to prevent immigration from sub-Saharan Africa
by building more walls and using other mechanisms of identification and
prevention have led to further African deaths (Mbembe 2021).

Hostile responses to refugees from the South are perpetuated not
least due to the nature of international media and public discourses in the
Global North. Indeed, international public discourse—by which we mean
the way in which politicians, policymakers, stakeholders, representatives
of international institutions, media houses, and members of the civil soci-
ety talk about migrant and refugee issues across borders—overwhelmingly
stigmatizes and stereotypes Africa and Africans, effectively reducing their
stories to a single story. Like much of the Global South, African refugees
and migrants, whether staying within the continent or fleeing it, are usu-
ally rigidified and simplified into fitting the simplified narratives of either
victims or perpetrators or deserving or undeserving migrants (Spohnholz
2021, 1). Discussions in the Global North often fail to recognize that most
refugees from the South are indeed hosted in the South, placing the burden
of refugee hosting on developing economies in the South.

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For far too long, studies of refugee history have been profoundly
Eurocentric (Peterson 2017, 217)—a situation that has shaped the image of
the refugee from outside Europe, especially concerning Africa. This focus
seems to suggest that “refugee history can be continentally compartmen-
talized: that the history of refugees in Europe need not be informed by the
history of refugees in the [African] colonies” (Shadle 2018, 168). As some
papers in this special issue show, the histories of refuge seeking in Africa
and Europe, especially during the colonial and the immediate postcolonial
periods, are interwoven, with events in Europe causing refugees from there
to arrive in Africa. The special issue therefore speaks to the contention that
“we cannot understand refugee history through national or continental
terms” only (Shadle 2018, 168).

Too often, politicians and policymakers ignore the historical processes
that produce refugee crises and focus merely on crises at hand. This myopic
understanding of a refuge-producing context simplifies a complex issue
by implementing stopgap solutions that cannot sustainably address it. We
broadly argue in this special issue that migrant and refuge seeking in the
past several decades has been part of the global historical processes that pre-
ceded and extended well into the twentieth century. Some of these processes
include nationalism and nation building, colonialism, decolonization, civil
wars, wars of resistance and decolonization, international terrorism, racism
and racial tensions, and identity politics and politics of belonging. Paying
more attention to global injustices and the systems and historical processes
that have given rise to migrant and refugee issues is imperative if we hope
to find ways in which to shape the future in the acknowledgement that
movement is a constant in human history. The absence, until recently, of
historical scholarship in migrant and refugee studies has resulted in miscon-
ceptions and misunderstandings of African experiences.1 Without a historical
perspective, we cannot fully understand how the present African migrant
and refugee experiment is part of a global experiment and how it comes to
be that certain bodies are freer to trespass the globe than others.

Our emphasis on a historical approach to understanding Africa’s
migrant and refugee experiences responds to a historiographical and dis-
ciplinary shift in the field of refugee studies. Recently, two special issues
have appeared on the subject. In 2020, the African Studies Review pub-
lished a forum contribution titled “African Refugee History,” edited by
Christian Williams, consisting of articles focusing on Biafra, Namibian
exile, Zimbabwe, Liberia, and the role of the supernatural among African
refugees (Williams 2020). The Canadian Journal of African Studies followed
up with the publication of a special issue of nine contributions in English
and French edited by Meredith Terretta and Philip Janzen (2021). Titled
“African Refuge / Refuge africain,” it adopts a historical approach to pres-
ent a comparative and transregional assessment of displaced populations
in Africa. Despite this work, we are only beginning to scratch the surface
of the unexplored vastness of refuge generating and seeking in Africa in
ways that not only accommodate the internal and external forces of history

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but showcase Africa as historically hosting refugees and migrants from
Europe and the outside world. Aligning with these new interests on Africa’s
refugee experiences, therefore, this issue joins the aforementioned issues in
expanding our understanding of refuge seeking in Africa through a mainly
historical lens. Aiming to draw attention to the historical realities of refuge
seeking in Africa, it focuses on displaced people in and from Africa and their
cross-national, regional, and intercontinental migration trajectories. It thus
subscribes to the proposition that we should rethink the history of refuge
seeking in Africa more broadly and away from strict adherence to legal cat-
egories (Shadle 2019), which a historian must recognize as the product of a
specific time and place.

The special issue responds to Maria Grosz-Ngaté’s appeal and advocacy
for epistemically decolonizing knowledge production about Africa, which
includes realizing publications in mainstream publishing outlets in the
North that result from collaboration between North-based and Africa-based
scholars.2 Evoking V. Y. Mudimbe on the relationship between knowledge
and power, she has observed how the dominant Western epistemological
order uses Western discourses and images of African societies and peoples
without taking account of Africa-based epistemologies, resulting in the
construction of Africa as “a paradigm of difference” and otherness (2020,
691). A similar observation can be made for refugee studies, which, being
rather Eurocentric, have contributed to constructing refugees as Others. The
publication of this special issue is therefore intentional, but how well does
it accomplish this objective? First, one of the guest editors is a Europe-based
scholar and of European origin, while the other is an Africa-based scholar of
African origin. The former comes at this project with a scholarly interest.
The latter had once been a refugee / asylum seeker in the United States,
and he remembers that as a legally admitted asylee/refugee in the United
States, he could not obtain a passport because the embassy of his country
of origin in Washington, DC, had determined that by asking for refuge and
protection in another country, he had disgraced his country and forfeited
his right to its passport. Whereas his chapter is on child refugees during the
Nigerian civil war, his personal experiences inform how he views and ana-
lyzes African refugee experiences. Second, of the eight contributors, three are
Europe-based scholars of European origin, four are Africa-based scholars of
African origin, and one is both an Africa- and North America–based scholar
of African origin. And very importantly, two of the African authors are
engaging with research to which their personal stories and experiences are
central.3 To dispossess a people, says Mourid Barghouti, a Palestinian poet,
the simplest way is to tell their story and, according to Adichie, “to start it
in a particular way.” But Adichie adds that a people can rectify their history
and change their story into a complete story by telling it themselves (2009).
By having African refugee authors who are telling the stories of the environ-
ments in which they find themselves firsthand, this special issue contributes
to centralizing different forms of African agency in the emerging diverse
African refugee histories. The challenges faced by refugees and migrants

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are real. So, too, is the agency they possess, including their skills, talents,
resilience, resourcefulness, and achievements. Together, these account for
multiple stories and experiences of refugees, as individuals and as a collec-
tive group of people.

The road to this special issue began with an academic workshop in
Berlin on June 6–7, 2019, organized by Marcia C. Schenck and sponsored by
the Forum Transregionale Studien and the Max Weber Stiftung. It brought
together fourteen scholars from across continents and institutions, who
intensely debated each other’s preliminary ideas, leading not only to this
special issue, but also to the publication of a blog series titled Histories of
Refuge, edited by Madina Thiam on Africa Is a Country, and an H-Net net-
work, African Refugee Crossroads.4 Six of the contributors here trace their
origins to the workshop, while the other two—Gerawork Teferra and Muna
Omar—were brought in to enrich the issue with stories that revolve around
research inspired by their personal experiences in East Africa and the Middle
East. Thus, the themes of this special issue extend from colonial times to
decolonization, nation building, and nation governing in the postcolonial
period. The articles tend to build from or coalesce around the themes that
preoccupied discussions at the workshop.

Structure and themes

The articles are grouped in a way that they speak to each other and explore
issues that attest to the diversity and complexity of migrant and refugee
experiences. By way of chronology and geography, two of the authors (Jochen
Lingelbach and Lazlo Passemiers) focus on white refugees in Africa during
the late colonial and decolonization periods; three (Rose Jaji, George Njung,
and Marcia Schenck) take a comparative view of the history of refuge host-
ing across colonial and postcolonial African states in the early independence
period; while the remaining three (Omar, Teferra, and Magnus Treiber) focus
on the East African context from the second half of the twentieth century
until the present through life histories and oral-history interviews, combined
with participant-observation approaches and the integration of personal life
experiences. In the ensuing pages, we have grouped the articles in conversa-
tion with one another according to some specifically selected themes. Our
readers should be aware that the articles cover several other themes that
cut across the entire issue and address issues that have not been captured
in this introduction.

historical Context: Colonialism, Decolonization, Racism, and the
International Refugee Regime

Recent historical scholarship on modern African refugee experiences has
begun to articulate how European presence in Africa not only constituted the
roots of modern migrant and refugee movements on the continent, but also

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brought European refuge seekers to Africa (Njung 2021). Issues of colonial
and imperial racism and the politics of the International Refugee Regime
(IRR) combined to determine how Europeans sought refuge in Africa. About
twenty thousand Polish refugees were hosted in British colonial Africa
during the Second World War and its immediate aftermath. Lingelbach que-
ries the Eurocentric historiography of the IRR after 1945, and its functioning
in the logic of what he calls the “imperial order of things.” He argues how,
whereas the regime could recognize, treat, and accord an international refu-
gee status to European refugees in any part of the globe, it never extended
the same measure to African refugees. International refugee bodies, such
as the United Nations Refugee Organization and the International Refugee
Organization, placed Polish refugees in Africa within their mandates while
refusing to extend the same status to Africans and Asians around the same
time. Maintaining that such double standards could be explained by impe-
rial practices and racism, Lingelbach complicates the issue by looking to the
politics of the IRR, which emerged in a largely imperial world, signified by
a tripartition into citizen, subject, and (European) refugee. In other words,
the IRR, Lingelbach shows, was a brainchild and a tool of imperialism. Like
imperial rule itself, which differentiated between European citizens and
colonized subjects, the IRR conveniently differentiated between refugees
and national citizens (of Europe). For example, Ethiopians in Kenya had
been considered refugees by the British (Shadle 2018), and yet, as Lingelbach
shows, “the colonial administration did not take its experiences with them
as guidelines for the Poles” who arrived later (25). Often, people fleeing from
colonial domination were rather perceived as deserters.

Polish refugees were not the only Europeans seeking refuge in Africa.
About one thousand Hungarian refugees were welcomed in South Africa and
the Central African Federation in the 1950s. Moreover, South Africa became
a haven to whites from other parts of the African continent fleeing decolo-
nization. This is well illustrated by Lazlo Passemiers’s contribution, which
foregrounds how race and racism were decisive in white South African
responses to white refugee imperialists fleeing the tumultuously decolo-
nizing Belgian Congo. In a show of white solidarity, the white-dominated
South African state not only willingly accepted white refugees from the
Congo, but effectively encouraged them to enter South Africa and make it
their home. The degree of racial solidarity and preferential treatment was
such that, even though most of the Belgians fleeing the Congo did not tech-
nically qualify as refugees under the UN 1951 Convention (because they
were Belgian nationals), they were welcomed as refugees. Their treatment
contrasts sharply with that of Africans who did not have a home country
to which to return but were not welcome as refugees.

Wars, Regional and Global Connectivity, and Refugees in africa

As part of global historical processes, refuge seeking in Africa has emerged
predominantly in the context of wars, including postcolonial civil wars.

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Individuals’ choices to move under such circumstances have been deter-
mined by several factors, including available regional and global connectivity
at the time of their decisions. Treiber shows how, in the context of ensuing
wars in the Horn of Africa from the 1960s until as recently as 2016, individu-
als forced out of the region in different periods made decisions as to where
to go that were informed by the regional and global connectivity available at
different points in time. So too does Jaji, who builds on the context of armed
political conflicts, including those emerging from the process of decoloniza-
tion, to examine the ensuing refuge-seeking and refugee-hosting experiences
in Kenya and Tanzania for an extended period since the 1960s. Similarly,
Njung’s article focuses on a refugee crisis that emerged in the context of the
Nigerian civil war, especially as it affected thousands of children, some of
whom were evacuated to neighboring African countries and repatriated back
to Nigeria only after the end of the war, in 1970. Together, these articles
reveal the extent to which civil wars have been decisive in accounting for
explosive refugee crises in postcolonial Africa, but they also reveal the role
that regional and global connectivity has played in refuge seeking and refugee
hosting on the continent and beyond.

Pure humanitarianism versus Political, economic, and Other Interests?

African states have both generated and hosted their own refugees in myriad
ways. In so doing, their decisions have depended on a multiplicity of inter-
ests beyond a moral compulsion and humanitarian motivation. Humani-
tarianism is often tied up with political and other interests. Countries that
help refugees do so not only to respond to a humanitarian emergency, but
also because doing so aligns with other strategic interests in the short and
medium term. In the words of an editorial in Die Burger, the South African
National Party’s mouthpiece, quoted in Passemiers: “these people need
us, and we need them” (48). The Cold War politics of refugee acceptance
from the East in the West is one example. The acceptance of self-identified
refugees fleeing decolonizing territories back into the fold of colonial moth-
erlands is another. Yet another is the support of freedom fighters, refugee
students, and other political refugees from countries struggling for their
independence by countries that made an active involvement in African
decolonization part of their own political agendas.

Schenck’s examination of the discourse about refugee higher education
in the late 1960s demonstrates the nexus between humanitarian and politi-
cal interests leading to a hybrid form of humanitarian developmentalism.
Arguing that refugee higher education was best understood in the develop-
ment framework of human-capital theory in the name of pan-Africanist
continental development, she engages the discourses of delegates and experts
in connection with the 1967 Conference on the Legal, Economic, and Social
Aspects of African Refugee Problems. She thus sheds light on the tensions
between national policies of labor-market protection and supranational ideas
about establishing a force of skilled refugee expats. According to the ideas of

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a refugee manpower plan, returning refugee students were to contribute to
the dismantling of colonial and racial hierarchies on the continent.

When it comes to instrumentalizing refugees for nonhumanitarian
interests, not even children have been spared. Njung delineates how during
the Nigerian Civil War (1967–70), political, economic, and personal interests
remained decisive for individual politicians and countries in France, Gabon,
and Cȏte d’Ivoire that supported the evacuation of about five thousand
Biafran-Nigerian child refugees out of Nigeria to Gabon and Cȏte d’Ivoire.
These nonhumanitarian interests were less obvious during the process of
evacuation in 1968, but they revealed themselves sharply upon repatriation
when the war ended in January 1970.

Adding to the conversation about the circumstances under which African
countries have opted to host African refugees and their changing interests for
doing so, Jaji explores the historical complexities and transformation of refu-
gee policies in Kenya and Tanzania. Rationalizing refugee hosting beyond the
humanitarian nexus, she argues that countries’ policies and willingness to host
refugees emerge from an interplay of morphing domestic interests, political
philosophy, and foreign policy. She shows how economic, social, and political
forces intertwine and intersect to create inconsistencies and contradictions
in how countries react to refugees coming from various political and national
backgrounds. Thus, at various points in the history of their hosting experiences,
Tanzania and Kenya either disregarded or complied with international law by
successively embracing, begrudgingly hosting, rejecting, and even deporting
selected refugee communities. Time and context, especially economic and
political context, are crucial to countries’ reactions toward refugees.

Whereas newly independent African countries started off with excite-
ment and willingness to host refugees from their neighbors, such excitement
and willingness waned over time, on account of new economic and political
challenges confronting the host countries. Is it possible that countries simply
get tired of hosting refugees? Jaji engages this point as does Passemiers, who
evokes Sreeram Chaulia (2003) to observe that despite the show of solidarity
of South African white populations in hosting their fellow whites from the
Congo, “hosting fatigue” soon set in. This factor appears to be understudied.
We want to theorize that this state of affairs may be explained by the host
countries’ reading of most refugee phenomena as temporary; once the imag-
ined temporariness starts revealing itself as continuous and permanent, the
host country’s turnabout is to be expected. The question of transience and
permanence in refugee-hosting contexts is examined by Teferra’s contribu-
tion to this issue. He studies how the struggle of making a living, often for
decades, in a camp designed as transient results in a life marked by pseu-
dopermanence, broken and false hopes, and dreams of resettlement. Studying
the competing dynamics through the lens of lived experiences of inhabitants
of Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya, he argues that although the camp has
grown over the past three decades and in part resembles an urban space, life
for its dwellers remains precarious. Kenya continues periodically to threaten
the closure of its camps—which underlines the precarity of camp lives.

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Just how much forced migrants are at the mercy of host states and
international organizations shines through in Omar’s contribution. She
traces the migrations of East Africans to Yemen and the Arabian Peninsula
more generally from original motivations to leave home in the Horn through
violent, often gendered, experiences during their migration and upon arrival,
thereby shining an uncomfortable light on the ways the international refugee
regime and its regional and local pendants fall short of protecting (forced)
migrants and refugees when they are most vulnerable.

Writing Refugee histories: Refugee and Nonrefugee Voices

Peter Gatrell and colleagues (2021) have highlighted the need for refugee
history to center refugee voices to appreciate their polyphonous contributions
to and engagement with the refugee regime. This is a call to center the
contours and rooms of possibilities and constraints of the agency of refugees
and forced migrants in refugee history. Kate Reed and Marcia C. Schenck
(2023) invite their readers to be open to redefining what being a historian
means and to include the possibility that historians reside in refugee camps,
base their work on oral histories, and have nontraditional training. We
need therefore to consider voices from camps not simply as authentic
refugee voices, but as historians, scholars in their own right. This special
issue features voices that reflect on power and knowledge production and
the question of positionality. Our contributors not only are a combination
of those from and based in the North and those from and based in Africa
but include people who own the story they are writing about. Teferra, for
example, writes and reflects from Kakuma refugee camp, where he is still
waiting after more than ten years for official recognition of his refugee status.
His painful “experience of being in waiting” since 2011 has motivated him
to write his article (186), reflecting on the terminologies used by refugees in
Kakuma camp to move through stages of the aspired resettlement process.
Similarly, Omar has lived the realities of refugees from the Horn of Africa
to Yemen, about which she is writing herself, and reflects: “Since I am an
East African who has witnessed their struggles and lived among them, I was
entrusted with their stories and felt I had a mandate to document them and
share them with a wider audience” (194). She reminds us of the complexity
of working with testimonies: “Most survivors’ stories share some common
elements, yet each had a unique experience: each had overcome unique
obstacles and suffered unique heartaches and was harboring unique hopes”
(194). Through the voices in Omar’s piece, we learn about how refuge
seekers tell and create their histories, how they call out injustices, and
what roles different forms of migrancy play in their narratives. Njung’s
experiences mostly inform his work in a philosophical way, but for Teferra
and Omar, involvement in the environments that they research and in which
they continue to live informs their work directly. Meanwhile, others, like
Schenck, Lingelbach, and Treiber, approach the topic with more distance
from another continent and with no direct flight experience themselves.

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Individual refugee voices gathered through oral-history interviews
inform Omar’s account of migrant abuse en route to and in Yemen, as well
as Teferra’s exploration of pseudopermanence in Kakuma refugee camp. Such
ethnographic orality equally informs Treiber’s comparative work on three life
histories of Eritrean refugees from the 1960s to the present, and, to a lesser
degree, Passemiers’s study of white flight from the Congo to South Africa. Jaji
bases her study on ethnographic research conducted with refugees from vari-
ous East African countries based in Kenya and Zimbabwe, which informs her
analysis of Kenya’s and Tanzania’s history of hosting political refugees. This
offers insight into how refuge seekers have negotiated the opportunities and
constraints to their agency in various circumstances, illustrating that these
stories cannot be captured appropriately by a victim narrative or a somewhat
naive celebration of African refugee agency. While most of the authors identify
as historians, we have those trained in other disciplines, such as anthropology
(Treiber), sociology/anthropology (Jaji), and geography (Lingelbach), all of whom
work historically on the issue of Africa’s refugee experiences. Together, these
authors draw not only from oral-history interviews, participant-observation,
their own life experiences, and ethnographic approaches, but also from a
wide range of African and European archives and newspapers, as well as from
archives of international organizations, to unearth refuge-seeking and refugee-
hosting histories in Africa and beyond. We hope, therefore, to demonstrate with
this special issue that telling complex African refugee histories is an endeavor
that must draw from a multiplicity of sources, disciplines, and authors, to avoid
reducing African migrant and refugee stories into a single story.

NOTeS

1. for works that query the lack of historical scholarship on refugee studies or contribute histori-

cal perspectives, see, for example, elie 2014, forthcoming; kushner 2006; Malkki 1996; Marfleet

2007, 2013; Njung 2021; Shadle 2019.

2. Grosz-Ngaté eloquently articulated this during her November 2019 african Studies association

Presidential address in Boston, Massachusetts, and subsequently published in the association’s

flagship journal in 2020 (Grosz-Ngaté 2020; see Wiley 2022).

3. Teferra and Omar have published their work elsewhere, thereby contributing to the metadis-

cussion about decolonizing knowledge production about africa (abdalla et al. 2021). further,

their research will appear shortly in an edited volume that seeks to problematize the tendency

of refugee studies to write about refugees, rather than take refugees in camps and remote

locations outside of the academic space seriously as nontraditional scholars in their own right

(Reed and Schenck, forthcoming).

4. The blog series Histories of Refuge brings together nine entries from workshop participants, fea-

turing historical approaches to refuge seeking from around the continent. It can be accessed

at https://africasacountry.com/series/histories-of-refuge. The h-Net Crossnetwork is open for

scholars working on african refugee history broadly defined and for the interested public;

more information can be found at https://networks.h-net.org/african-refugees-crossroads.

https://africasacountry.com/series/histories-of-refuge
https://networks.h-net.org/african-refugees-crossroads

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GEORGE N. NJUNG is an assistant professor of African History at the Baylor
University Interdisciplinary Core Program and an affiliated faculty member
in the Department of History at the University of the Witwatersrand in
South Africa. His research focuses on gendered narratives of World War I in
Africa, particularly the campaign in West Africa (Cameroon) that involved
African soldiers from various British and French West and Central African
colonies as well as from Europe and India. He also focuses on historical
approaches to African migrant and refugee experiences. He has published,
among others, in the Canadian Journal of African Studies (55.3), the Journal
of Social History (53.3), the American Historical Review (125.5), and First
World War Studies (10.1). He is currently working on two books: Violent
Encounters: A Gendered History of the First World War in West Africa
(Ohio University Press) and Amputated Men: A Comparative Study of the
Struggles of Disabled WWI Soldiers in Colonial British and French West
Africa. He was most recently commissioned by Cambridge University Press
to contribute a book chapter titled “War and Peace” in the New Cambridge
History of Britain, vol. 4, to be in print in 2025. (george_njung@baylor.edu)

MARCIA C. SCHENCK, professor of Global History at the University
of Potsdam, Germany, has been investigating mobilities between Africa
and Europe through the lens of memories of labor and education migrants
from Angola and Mozambique to the German Democratic Republic. More
recently, she embarked on a study of the Organization of African Unity’s
refugee management. She has published in Africa, African Economic History,
Labor History, L’Atelier, and Stichproben. Her latest publication is a coed-
ited open-access volume, Navigating Socialist Encounters: Moorings and
(Dis)entanglements between Africa and East Germany during the Cold War.
She is the founder of the Global History Dialogues Project (https://global-
historydialogues.org) and the cofounder of the H-Net Refugees in African
History network (https://networks.h-net.org/african-refugees-crossroads). For
more information, see https://www.marciacschenck.com. (marcia.schenck
@uni-potsdam.de)

https://africasacountry.com/series/histories-of-refuge
https://africasacountry.com/series/histories-of-refuge
https://www.unhcr.org/africa.html
https://www.unhcr.org/africa.html
https://globalhistorydialogues.org
https://globalhistorydialogues.org
https://networks.h-net.org/african-refugees-crossroads
https://www.marciacschenck.com