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Call for proposals. Return(s) to Africa

Joint call for the journal Sources. Materials & Fieldwork in African Studies and the Revue d’histoire contemporaine de l’Afrique (RHCA)

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General information

Coordination

Giulia Bonacci (Migration and Society Research Unit [Urmis], IRD, France), Céline Labrune-Badiane (Associate Researcher, Institute of Modern Texts and Manuscripts [ITEM], France).

Calendar

  • 15 March 2025: publication of the call (French, English, Portuguese)
  • 15 May 2025: deadline for submission of proposals at the following addresses: giulia.bonacci@ird.fr and celine.labrunebadiane@gmail.com
  •  June 2025: Selected proposals notified to authors.
  • 15 October 2025: deadline for submitting articles
  • October 2026: publication of the Sources / RHCA double special issue

Submission of proposals

Proposals for articles should be original, no more than two pages long (with a selected bibliography), in French, English or Portuguese, and accompanied by a short biography of the author(s) in a single document (DOCX, DOC or ODT format) including the e-mail address. This abstract should include a precise presentation of the sources or materials.

Articles should be on average 45,000 characters long (including spaces, bibliography, abstract and keywords).

RHCA: The journal also accepts interviews (35,000 characters) with people who could talk about their return experiences with historical depth, as well as reviews of books related to this theme (5,000/15,000 characters).
Instructions for RHCA authors can be found here: https://oap.unige.ch/journals/rhca/consignes.
Articles will be published in French.

Sources: Texts may be published in French, English or Portuguese, and full or partial translations into other African languages are possible on a case-by-case basis. Please consult the Selection of Texts and Publication Requirements:
https://journals.openedition.org/sources/383,
and the Guidelines for Authors: https://journals.openedition.org/sources/382.

Presentation

At a time when the African Union has placed the year 2025 under the banner of “justice for Africans and people of African descent through reparations,” and when African states are discussing and adopting laws to facilitate access to nationality for Afro-descendants, including Benin very recently, it seems important to centre an often implicit and little-documented dimension of these mobilisations, that of the migration of Afro-descendants to Africa, commonly referred to under the expression Back to Africa.

African states have become key players in these “returns.” In so doing, they have taken over from social, political, religious and cultural groups in the diaspora—such as the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), founded in 1918 in New York by Marcus Garvey—which had long been demanding the right to return to Africa. Indeed, the idea of returning to Africa is closely associated with that of reparations for slavery and colonialism. Its study therefore contributes to current debates on the aftermath of the injustices caused by the Atlantic slave trade, colonisation and systemic racism in post-slavery and post-colonial societies (Araujo 2017; Beckles 2013). In fact, the right to return is one of the ten points of the plan for reparations, promulgated in 2014 by the CARICOM, the organisation of Caribbean states. This is why return is as much a matter of historical relations between Africa and its diasporas as of very contemporary, more global political issue. This double special issue of Sources and the Revue d’histoire contemporaine de l’Afrique invites to study and discuss the idea and practices of return to Africa, from and to different territories, since the end of the 18th century. The aim is to contribute, on the basis of theoretical and empirical data, to reflection on the ongoing reconfiguration of links between the African continent and African diasporas around the world.

Brief presentation of the journals

Sources. Materials and Fieldwork in African Studies
Published in open access, the journal Sources aims to make accessible the texts, images, sounds, interviews, field notes and all kinds of documents that constitute the materials on which researchers base their analyses. The articles published may come from a diversity of disciplinary fields (anthropology, literature, political science, history, geography, etc.) and constitute archives of field research, while offering analyses of the contexts in which these materials are produced and circulated, as well as reflections on the issues involved in accessing sources in Africa, particularly textual, iconographic, cartographic and ethnographic sources. The authors are expected to mention explicitly, when submitting their abstract, the documents that will be shared (public or private archives, local written productions, interview extracts, field notes, maps and sketches produced by the researcher or his/her interlocutors, audio and/or visual recordings, etc.). For each paper, the journal editorial team will help authors to prepare their materials for open access and ensure that they comply with the FAIR principles (making materials “findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable”), with the aim of reducing asymmetries in access to knowledge.

Revue d’histoire contemporaine de l’Afrique
The Revue d’histoire contemporaine de l’Afrique (RHCA) is an open-access journal of African history that focuses on the contemporary history of the African continent, asserting the richness and complexity of its trajectories through works that focus primarily on contemporary dynamics, particularly from the 19th century to nowadays. Far from constituting any kind of “disciplinary,” linguistic or cultural withdrawal from the study of the dynamics of the African continent, the journal focuses on more or less recent events that shed light on current dynamics, without ignoring their more ancient origins. Certain chronological divisions structure our imaginations more than others, and our ways of understanding historical realities. The colonial period in particular, from the“conquest” phase to independence is one of those. But rather than being an intangible political reality, the conventional periodisation of African history—pre-colonial, colonial, post-colonial—is also the fruit of a scientific construction that needs to be questioned. The challenge is twofold. On the one hand, we need to think critically about the mechanisms—economic, political, institutional and disciplinary—that make it possible to think beyond traditional chronologies. We need to move away from methodological nationalism and contribute to multifold narrative strategies of events and to a history of processes, whether completed or not. On the other hand, we need to reconsider our geographical divisions, and stop thinking of Africa in isolation from a more global context. We need to pay attention to the regional and international dynamics that place the continent at the heart of complex, multiple and interconnected recompositions.

Defining the return(s) to Africa

The idea of a “return” to Africa has long been mobilised in many ways in areas marked by the history of the Atlantic slave trade and embedded in colonial and post-colonial geographies. This idea translates occasionally into mobilisation, social and cultural practices, and mobility towards the African continent. While differences exist according to time and place, what “returns” to Africa have in common is that they are not simply a physical return; they are also part of a political process and reflect a desire to reappropriate an ancestral African heritage, regardless of the ideological and institutional framework (Redkey 1969; Jenkins 1975; Prah 2009; 2012). Confronted with realities of African societies, “return” raises other questions, such as the status of foreigners and economic issues, and helps redefine political and cultural projects that are simultaneously local and transnational. Often not very visible because it involves a small number of people (a few dozen to several hundred, depending on the place and the period), the return nevertheless captures ancient imaginaries that are affected by the contexts of departure, in post-slavery societies, and by the contexts of arrival, in colonial and post-colonial states in Africa. At the dawn of the 21st century, these dynamics are changing, particularly under the influence of more recent African diasporas, who narrate their “return” to their homelands with other tools, languages and media.

  • 1 Here, the term “African-American” refers to black populations in the United States, while the term (...)

This double special issue looks at the history of the ideas, practices, stakes and shapes of return over the longue durée, in areas affected by the history of the slave trade and European colonisation. It aims to grasp the political and social transformations that have led to their evolution: what differentiates or connects experiences of return conducted over different times and spaces? Is the “return” of an African-American Garveyite activist1 (Gaines 2008, Meriwether 2002) comparable to that of a West Indian or Guyanese colonial administrator in the French colonies in Africa (Hélénon 2011)? In her novels, Guadeloupean author Maryse Condé recounts the incongruity of her “return” as a teacher in the context of cooperation between France and its former African colonies (Labrune Badiane 2019). This ambiguity can also be found among Haitians in the Congo (Kuyu 2006) or Cubans in Angola (Hatzky 2015). What characterises the “return” of a Jamaican Rastafarian to Ethiopia (Bonacci 2010) or Tanzania (Bedasse 2017) from that of a “repat,” professional or investor born of Ivorian parents in France and settled in Senegal (Quashie 2024)? What networks, social formations, business ventures and administrative arrangements emerge in the wake of “return”? What role do post-colonial African states play in these diasporic returns? What individual or family statuses, careers and identities are (re)defined by the experience of “return”? What happens once the “land of origin” – which is not always the case – is met with? Joy, fear, disappointment, wonder… what emotions are aroused by the arrival on the continent and, more broadly, by the encounter with Africa? What happens when imagination, expectation and reality collide?

We invite contributions documenting and reflecting on the political, social and cultural history of the return to Africa from the 19th to the 21st century. While the first demands and mobilisations in favour of a return to Africa were expressed and produced in the slave societies of the Americas as early as the 18th century, we will focus here on the practices of the modern period. We also centre the shape and evolution of the terms, ideas and social practices associated with return to Africa in their wide variety – as suggested by the use of the plural in the title of this call for papers.

The return and African studies

It is significant that this call is lead by two journals specialised in African studies. While the study of return to Africa has long been confined—wrongly—to the Americas, our initiative aims to help “connect” African history with that of the diaspora in order to think through a shared history between these spaces. Return or “repatriation” is of course already a subject for the social sciences: war-displaced people, refugees, migrants and exiles, in Africa or elsewhere, share the (im)possibilities of resettlement in the territory they left behind. Nevertheless, the returnees that interest us in this double special issue find the origin of their first uprooting in the matrix of Atlantic slavery, a historical experience that sent about 12 million enslaved Africans to the Americas over several centuries. Return to Africa is thus one of the constant—albeit often marginal—ideas that structured black political, religious, social and cultural thought in the Americas. While numerous works in history, anthropology and sociology studied these black communities in the Americas in all their diversity, the field of study of the African diaspora opened up in the mid-1960s, in order to grasp the global dynamics linking Africa and these Afro-descendant populations in the Atlantic world and beyond (Shepperson 1993; Harris 1993; Gilroy 1993). In the historiography dealing with the definition or characteristics of the African diaspora, the “return to Africa” is a special topic because it directly informs the nature and form of these diasporas (Butler 2001; Zeleza 2005). However, while there are “returnees” in many African societies, they often remain overlooked by academic research. As if our local, regional or national lenses prevent us from seeing and recognising these necessarily transnational mobilities, returns, diasporic commitments in Africa, and perhaps more broadly, the impact of black internationalism on the continent.

Adressing the theme of return in the field of African studies, and consequently linking it with the study of African diasporas, we need to make a methodological shift. To the idea of return (focused on the Americas), we are adding its social practices (focused on the continent), and tracing trajectories in their totality, from home societies to the host societies. This shift necessarily involves new sources and contexts, grounded in African societies, and therefore fits with the journals, Sources and RHCA. The aim of this double special issue is to strengthen the dialogue between African studies and diaspora studies, which is still slowly emerging, particularly in the French-speaking world. Both journals invite articles written in different languages (French, English, Portuguese), translations are possible, including into other languages of the African continent where relevant (Sources journal).

Main themes

While the idea of returning to Africa has been documented since the early days of the Atlantic slave trade, it was in the 18th and 19th centuries that settlements of freed British and African-American slaves developed in Sierra Leone and Liberia (Campbell 1993; Clegg 2004). “Liberated” Africans also settled on the Kenyan coast (Harris 1987) and descendants of slaves in Brazil, the Agudas, returned to Benin, Togo and Nigeria (Yai 1997; Prah 2009). Did the abolition of the slave trade and slavery in the 19th century contribute to the emergence and reformulation of the desire to return? How did colonisation, decolonisation and the birth of modern African states in the 20th century transform the conditions under which “returnees” were received? Finally, we will examine more recent mobilities, in particular that of the “repats,” in the light of the historical experiences of return to Africa.

Expected contributions may relate to history, anthropology, sociology, geography, literature and political science. Materials coming from non-English-speaking areas, which are less well documented, are particularly encouraged, as well as studies on regions other than West Africa, which is often over-represented. Four axis are suggested to guide and organise proposals of articles.

1. Imaginaries and ideologies of return

To counter the inevitable oblivion of the land of origin as time goes by, social imagination has developed and produced representations of Africa, new African filiations and claims for the right to return. We invite papers questioning the imaginaries revealed by these claims, as well as the major political, intellectual, cultural, social and religious frameworks within which they are embedded, such as Ethiopianism and Pan-Africanism. What role do artistic, musical and literary creations play in the transmission and dissemination of these social imaginaries? How is the long-standing idea that Afro-descendants have a special responsibility for the “regeneration,” “rebirth” and development of Africa being reformulated in changed contexts, and what political projects stem from this? How do states deal with a desire to return that expresses a radical critique of post-slavery and post-colonial societies, where Afro-descendants are still subject to racism and discrimination? What sources and archives inform the issues raised by the desire, the possibility or the project of return?

2. Mobilities and practical experiences

This theme invites to explore how these returns are carried out in practice, from and to various places, and how the actors define their experiences. The aim is to determine the practical steps involved in these returns from the places of departure, particularly the resources mobilised in preparation for the move, as well as the role of associations, programmes, forums or companies that aim to facilitate settlement in Africa. This is all the more relevant in the absence of any international agreement, legal apparatus or financial instrument dedicated to the return of descendants of Africans. What sources can be used to understand the motivations of these migrants, and how can they be identified once they arrive in Africa? We also invite papers reflecting on the importance and difficulties of accessing these voices to document the return. Indeed, the radical dimension of this mobility, often the product of a racial and political consciousness that goes against the grain, and the illegality in which these “returnees” sometimes find themselves, can complicate the collection of their stories.

3. Reception of returnees in African societies

The role played by host societies is equivocal, stretching from local relations at “ground” level, to local and transnational intermediary bodies and to the structure and tools of the state. Papers could explore the relationships that “returnees” forge with African societies, the ways in which they are perceived by populations that are often subject to very strong migratory pressures, the representations that emerge on both sides, and the reconfigurations of identity and race that these encounters produce. In particular, we might ask how “returnees” are welcomed outside the framework of the State, for example on the initiative of churches or civil society organisations and associations, and how these can be defined. For the most recent periods, has the irruption of return, staged on new social networks, transformed its forms and its social impact? The various legal statuses proposed by African states also require documentation: are they linked to the development of policies towards their national diasporas? What political and economic uses do African states make of diasporic commitments? What are the initiatives and public policies established by states on the African continent to welcome members of their diaspora? How can we grasp this African perspective on return?

4. Epistemologies of return

Studying the dynamics and challenges of the return to Africa sheds new light on the historical relations between Africa and its diaspora over the long term, and provides a glimpse of their possible futures. This field has not yet been explored much by social sciences. On the one hand, those who study the diaspora in the Americas often consider return as a rejection of the hybridity that characterises Creole societies. On the other hand, it is sometimes considered insignificant in African studies because of the limited scale of the phenomenon. However, by focusing the analysis on return, a dense and rich interface emerges, located at the meeting point between Africa and its diaspora, at the intersection of major cultural and transnational areas. This raises a number of methodological questions: how can we document these transnational trajectories, which may remain “under the radar” as the status of returnees is often not recognised by African countries? How can we gain access to the voices of those who experience return and those who welcome returnees? How can we create a dialogue between materials from different sociolinguistic and historical contexts? How can sources from African societies contribute to understand the African diaspora? And conversely, to what extent can taking diasporic experience into account inform the knowledge produced about Africa? How can central concepts in the history of return, such as race, nationality and sovereignty, be deployed in spaces marked by a variety of socio-historical experiences? How does the discussion between the study of the African diaspora with the study of Africa contribute to the redefinition of identities, borders and territories in Africa? Where does the issue of returning to Africa fit within the public and international debates surrounding reparations for slavery and colonialism, and the restitution of objects looted from the continent? To what extent do these questions shape the future of the ongoing reconfigurations linking the African continent and the world?

Bibliography

Araujo, Ana L. 2017. Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade. A Transnational and Comparative History. London: Bloomsbury.

Bedasse, Monique. 2017. Jah Kingdom. Rastafarians, Tanzania, and Pan-Africanism in the Age of Decolonization. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press.

Beckles, Hilary. 2013. Britain’s Black Debt, Reparations for Caribbean Slavery and Native Genocide. Kingston: The University of the West Indies Press.

Bonacci, Giulia. 2015. Exodus! Heirs and Pioneers, Rastafari Return to Ethiopia. Kingston: The University of the West Indies Press.

Butler, Kim D. 2001. “Defining Diaspora, Refining a Discourse.” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 10, no. 2: 189–219.
https://doi.org/10.1353/dsp.2011.0014.

Campbell, Mavis C., ed. 1993. Back to Africa: George Ross and the Maroons: From Nova Scotia to Sierra Leone. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.

Clegg, Claude A. 2004. The Price of Liberty: African Americans and the Making of Liberia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Ebron, Paulla. 1999. “Tourists as Pilgrims: Commercial Fashioning of Transatlantic Politics.” American Ethnologist 26, no. 4: 910–32.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/647237.

Gaines, Kevin K. 2008. American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press.

Gilroy Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. New York: Verso.

Harris, Joseph E., ed. 1993. Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press.

Harris, Joseph E. 1987. Repatriates and Refugees in a Colonial Society. The Case of Kenya. Washington D.C.: Howard University Press.

Hatzky, Christine. 2015. Cubans in Angola. South-South Cooperation and Transfer of Knowledge 1976–1991. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press.

Hélénon, Véronique. 2011. French Caribbeans in Africa: Diasporic connections and Colonial Administration, 1880–1939. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Jenkins, David. 1975. Black Zion: The Return of Afro-Americans and West Indians to Africa. London: Wildwood House.

Kuyu, Camille. 2006. Les Haïtiens au Congo. Paris: L’Harmattan.

Labrune Badiane, Céline. 2019. “‘Afrique où es-tu?’ : L’expérience africaine de Maryse Condé.” In Mélanges en l’honneur de Maryse Condé, edited by Laura Cassin, 163–77. Pointe-à-Pitre: Presses universitaires des Antilles.

Shepperson, George. 1993. “African Diaspora: Concept and Context.” In Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora, edited by Joseph Harris, 46–53. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press.

Prah, Kwesi K., ed. 2009. Back to Africa, volume 1: Afro-Brazilian Returnees and their Communities. Cape Town: CASAS.

Prah, Kwesi K., eds. 2012. Back to Africa, volume 2: The Ideology and Practice of the African Returnee Phenomenon from the Caribbean and North-America to Africa. Cape Town: CASAS.

Quashie, Hélène. 2024. “De la minorisation raciale en France à la blanchité sociale au Sénégal. Paradoxes postcoloniaux de l’articulation classe-race dans les circulations privilégiées de la diaspora noire.” Critique internationale, no. 105: 107–30. https://doi.org/10.3917/crii.105.0107.

Yai, Olabiyi B. 1997. “Les ‘Aguda’ (Afro-Brésiliens) du Golfe du Bénin.” Lusotopies, no. 4: 275–84.
https://www.persee.fr/doc/luso_1257-0273_1997_num_4_1_1100.

Zeleza, Paul T. 2005. “Rewriting the African Diaspora: Beyond the Black Atlantic.” African Affairs 104, no. 414: 35–68.
https://doi.org/10.1093/afraf/adi001.

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Notes

1 Here, the term “African-American” refers to black populations in the United States, while the term “African-American” refers more broadly to black populations in the Americas. The term “Afro-descendant” may also include descendants of colonial and post-colonial African migrations.

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