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The history of refugees and displaced persons in East Africa is extraordinarily complex. It is a history made all the more complicated by changes in humanitarian law in the mid-20th century pertaining to how the international community defined a “refugee” and what kinds of rights and protections refugee status conferred upon the displaced. There were certainly significant refugee flows in East Africa throughout the many centuries leading up to the mid-20th century, but the sizes of those refugee populations pale in comparison to many of the refugee crises in East Africa since the second half of the 20th century. Whereas in 1964 there were an estimated four hundred thousand refugees on the African continent, by 2019 there were approximately 6.6 million—the second-highest number of displaced persons in the world. Of that number, the vast majority of refugees either came from or sought refuge in East Africa. Five conflicts in particular have produced massive, protracted refugee situations for the region: the Mozambican Civil War, the 1983 famine in Ethiopia, the Somali Civil War, the Great Lakes Refugee Crisis (which includes the Rwandan genocide), and the civil wars in Sudan.

From 1960 to 1990, tens of thousands of people fled Southern Africa’s white minority regimes for exile in neighboring, decolonized countries. Although some of these exiles were scattered across the globe, the vast majority remained in Southern Africa, residing in camps administered by liberation movements representing their countries of origin until their eventual repatriation. It follows that liberation movement camps differed from what in the early 21st century is commonly thought of as “refugee camps”—camps administered by a host nation and/or transnational humanitarian agency on behalf of a community of people whom the United Nations and the international community recognize as “refugees.” At the same time, they were not strictly “military camps,” for even camps designed to train and deploy guerrilla soldiers in wars of national liberation often accommodated children, women, older adults, and others with no military training seeking refuge with a liberation movement. Rather, liberation movement camps were hybrid spaces that defy labels commonly used to categorize camps globally in the early 21st century. And they have cast a long shadow, shaping nationalisms and international relations that span Southern Africa and mark a unique, regional history.