Returning Refugees: Four Historical Patterns of “Coming Home” to Rwanda

Abstract

Over the 1990s, Western images of Africa became dominated by a social landscape of mobile people fleeing disaster. In the aftermath of the horrendous 1994 genocide in Rwanda, refugees and IDPs (“internally displaced people,” the term used for uprooted individuals within a state) were especially visible in Central Africa, but West Africa also was the locus of a series of complicated refugee movements (from Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Côte d'Ivoire, and elsewhere), and northeast Africa (Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia) generated many more. Such flight from fear, however, was not new to Africa. Many people had fled colonial extractions or had been forcibly moved for purposes of colonial labor; many more were caught up in precolonial relocations. Of course many were forcibly moved as well in the massive displacement of slaves from and within Africa, and voluntary movement was also common, for land, trade, or religious duty. Consequently, while in the West, Africa is often thought of as a continent in stasis, with the rural poor tied to their land, in fact, the historical record indicates that Africa has always been a continent of enormous mobility.