By distancing themselves from an approach favoring either the uprooting of exiles or the omnipotence of authoritarian states, the contributors to Africans in Exile renew the knowledge of African forced migration: they propose historicized case studies that highlight the political imaginations at work in situations of exile around two main ideas. First, if we consider exile as a practice of diversified mobility, both past and present, which in turn sheds light on state instability, we can reconstruct an archive of exile. Secondly, the archive that historian Arlette Farge referred to in 1989 as a ‘piece of tamed time’ offers increased documentary and heuristic possibilities, as it allows the social base of the exiles to be broadened beyond the prominent and powerful and thus to understand the condition and sensibility of individuals — a work programme set out in the general introduction to the book (4–5).Footnote ¹ Note the contributions of Baba Galleh Jallow, a former Gambian journalist who took refuge in the United States; of Emily S. Burrill, who writes of the weight of exile in African history: ‘Exiles are heroes and heroines of the lost futures of colonial independence, those who championed new directions within and without empire, but were banished from the table when the work of post-colonial governance began’ (308); and of Holger B. Hansen on the recurrent exile of opponents or former leaders in Uganda since the colonial period.

Grouped into three main thematic sections (the legal words of exile, geographies of exile, and remembering and performing exile) and covering most of Africa and its local and national cultures, the contributions often engage in dialogue with each other, including in the critical apparatus. Among other things, the section on cultures is instructive, as it reveals the communities of destiny, meaning, values, and affinities that bind individuals to each other and to their society of origin. It rediscovers, for example, the mystical poetry of Amadou Bamba as a way of rethinking his great jihad in the context of his deportation to Gabon by the French colonial administration (Sana Camara). Similarly, the critical study of poems and songs reveals the fate of Cape Verdean exiles settled in Sao Tome and Principe at the initiative of the Portuguese administration (Marina Berthet). On the other hand, the text on the influence of Bin Laden's African exile on the Somali Shebaab in Kenya would probably have been better placed in Part Two: Geographies of Exile, as it deals more with the geostrategic aspects of the fight against the state (Kris Inman).

What is the homeland and how does one identify with it? How does one deal with political and patriarchal constraints in a project of collective emancipation? Africans in Exile provides answers to these questions. Complex identity configurations can be observed, as in the case of the white people living in colonial Kenya, descendants of the British first colonists, obsessed by the prestige of the white man and who identify with this country (Brett L. Shadle). Described by Nathan R. Carpenter, the journey of Alfa Yaya, chief of canton in Guinea, shows the possibilities and limits of capturing power in a context of unequal power relations — a case of ‘imperial hegemonic transactions’ as theorized by the political scientist Jean-François Bayart.Footnote ² This type of transaction continued after independence, when we observe the situation of Togolese exiles from Ghana seeking recognition from the international community with the help of an original political vocabulary tinged with local concepts of citizenship (Susan D. Pennybacker). The same can be said of the Anyi from Sanwi, Cote d'Ivoire, a little-known case well enlightened by Thaïs Gendry: ‘[I]n choosing self-imposed exile for the entire society, the Sanwi chieftaincy demonstrated that another kind of sovereignty, sovereignty over the people, if not over the land, remained’. All the contributions remain stimulating.

Contrary to an interpretative framework based on the effects of coups d'état, war, famine, and ‘terrorism’, Africans in Exile allows us to better understand the complex journeys of exiles by placing them in their historical, political, sociocultural, and symbolic contexts. The archive of exile helps deconstruct colonial and postcolonial states’ great narratives of self-legitimization that excluded exiles, as groups or as individuals, from the collective memory: traditional chiefs, colonial subjects, citizens, activists, refugees, artists. By questioning the state order of the moment, these men and women, African or European, did not renounce their legitimacy. Their trajectory questions more broadly the links between national belonging and exile.

In the conclusion to his contribution on the Togolese exiles, Lawrance poses the question of a nation in exile. Burrill, for her part, emphasizes that migrants, subject to constraints, can nevertheless return to their country, unlike exiles. We can further deconstruct the exile/migrant couple, which does not reflect the complexity of the situations of mobility constrained at work in the field and, above all, testifies to the effects of an institutional categorization, which the authors of the book do not take on board. Many migrants have been voting with their feet for a long time, a sign of a challenge to a power incapable of offering them political, civil, and economic opportunities at home. This prompts a rethinking of the categories of exile and migrant.