LAUSR

“Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person,” explains 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