As we all know, the historic African diaspora in the United States is the result of the European slave trade, which resulted in millions of people being taken from Africa. Dei and Asgharzadeh correctly point out in this issue that this population and its descendents constitute a portion of the original African brain drain. Often, consideration of the causes of, problems of, and solutions to the African brain drain ignore this population and place most of the emphasis and research on the contemporary African diaspora. This may have to do with conclusions in some of the research contending that this historic diaspora lost all linkages to Africa. However, there is a vast body of literature that supports the claim that the institution of slavery did not totally sever social, cultural, economic, and political linkages.

Migrations from the South to the North are sometimes seen as representing civilizational counterpenetration, revolutionary cosmopolitanism, and cultural transnationalism. The culturalist biases of these perspectives tend to ignore a fundamental feature of international migration, that more often than not people migrate to sell their labor power and that the patterns of migration, labor procurement, and utilization are conditioned by the dynamics of capitalist development, expansion, and accumulation. Not only is international migration tied to the changing dynamics of capitalism as a world system, it constitutes a critical element of the international division of labor.

Africa’s brain drain to the North is part of a much larger story of the capacity-building challenges facing the continent. During the past 20 years African economies struggled through what are often referred to as the “lost decades.” The region’s economies have been characterized by dependence on economic aid and technical assistance. It is surmised that there are more expatriate “experts” in Africa now than at any time since independence. Technical assistance rose from US$1 billion in 1971 to US$4 billion in 1995. Africans themselves have, as the epigram suggests, taken the back seat, and the skilled ones among them have increasingly migrated abroad.

The migration of highly skilled or qualified personnel in large numbers has a long history. It can be traced back to the era of the Greek philosophers and has continued up to the 21st century, with the technocrats who have transferred their skills across geographic boundaries. Economic opportunities, political change, cultural interests, and global capitalism have narrowed boundaries, bridging hitherto separate worlds. Intellectual migration around the globe has indeed become common. Trends indicate continued migration, calling for more inquiries into the phenomenon. Those interested must ask not only why migration occurs, but also how it occurs and who participates in it.

The flight of human capital is a phenomenon that has been of concern to academics and development practitioners for decades. Termed the brain drain, it represents the loss of highly skilled professionals from a source country to a recipient country. Migrants leave one country for another as a result of strong attractions associated with differentials in living conditions, opportunities for professional advancement, and the existence of an environment that is conducive to peace and security. The term brain drain gained currency in the 1950s. Then it referred to emigration of scientists to the United States from countries such as Britain, Canada, and the former Soviet Union. Today, the concept is used to denote the flight of highly skilled professionals and academics from developing to developed countries.

Defined primarily in terms of the exodus of the highly talented from the Southern countries to the North, the phenomenon known as “brain drain” has gained in importance during recent decades and years. Changing global conditions, unprecedented developments in information and electronic technology, globalization, and widening of the gap between the South and the North have focused attention on the brain drain. We begin this article by discussing the nature of the brain drain, briefly noting that it occurs in three settings: internal, regional, and global. Our argument here is that brain drain occurs in almost all societies, initially from poorer and impoverished rural areas to relatively rich and developing urban centers within national boundaries and later (or sometimes concurrently) to more developed and wealthy regions and neighboring countries.

The processes of globalization have accelerated the exodus of the highly skilled from the collapsing modernization project. This article suggests that the flight of the educated elite is linked to the relative strength of the nation-state and both the length and intensity of internal conflicts. It is also suggested that the “skills exodus” may represent a major disruption in the political and social development of Africa, leading to further marginalization and affecting Africa’s capacity to revive development or envision an alternative development path. The emphasis is on Sudan’s unprecedented massive skills exodus during the past three decades, suggesting that this one case is extremely relevant to the rest of the continent, given the country’s favorable situation at the time of its independence in 1956.

According to endogenous growth theories, human capital is a major determinant of economic growth and development. Human capital refers to the educational qualifications, skills, and experience that individuals possess. Educational institutions, in general, and universities, in particular, are most instrumental in developing and enhancing the quality of human capital through capacity building involving training, research, information dissemination, and knowledge management. These institutions should be not only firmly established and maintained but also continuously empowered to meet the current and evolving needs of their countries.

This article argues that the roots of the Malawian medical brain drain lie in colonial and postcolonial historical, economic, medical, political, social, racial, and class factors. Also involved are the image and expectations of doctors themselves and the culture of medicine in Malawi. Reversing this brain drain, therefore, requires tackling factors in all these domains.

During the past three decades Ethiopia has been noted for political turmoil, drought, and famine. The country’s 63 million people, the second largest population in Africa, have a per capita income of $110, one-fourth the average for the continent. At all levels, it has the lowest school attendance rate in the world: 30 percent at primary, 13 percent at secondary, and less than 1 percent at the tertiary level. The country’s health sector, too, is in no better condition: health expenditure between 1990 and 1995 was 1.7 percent of GDP. Life expectancy at birth is 49 years. The country also has one of the highest HIV-AIDS infection rates in the world (9.3 per 100 adults).

Since the late 1970s, scholars, organizations, pressure groups, conferences, and governments have examined the brain drain phenomenon in Africa. More recently, brain gain, the antithesis of brain drain, has also attracted considerable attention. The focal point of the brain gain across the continent has been postapartheid South Africa, which has witnessed a large influx of professionals from other regions. Considering Africa as a whole, except for South Africa, the extant literature has overemphasized the debit side of the brain drain.

Often, for many analysts theorizing the brain drain, producing macrolevel statistics is considered enough to demonstrate the significance of the concept. Furthermore, nationalist and internationalist theories and perspectives have shaped the discussion of the brain drain, each seeking to determine whether the brain drain generates an economic loss for the country of origin or a gain for the welcoming country.

In an article titled “Paris on My Mind,” writer Abdourahman Waberi, born in Djibouti and a resident of France, maps the path of his protagonist’s migrations: “Of course, he will leave Paris with all his family. His wanderings will widen forever. The migration will continue. Let us follow his itinerary, year after year: Lusaka, Lagos, Nairobi, London, Denver, Philadelphia ... “ The migration pattern of Waberi’s protagonist is all too common and real. After short returns to African soil, many Africans make their final move to the United States.

When W.E.B. Du Bois wrote of the “double consciousness” of Africans in America, he was reflecting on the complex identities of the “talented tenth,” the educated minority of a minority like himself who felt alienated because of their awareness that their qualifications meant little in a racist society. Though written in reference to the African American intellectual, this duality, this sense of “two-ness,” is even more acute for African exiles today because they have fewer social and cultural ties to the West than African Europeans and African Americans. The exiles are much closer to the African “soul” Du Bois referred to and are less prepared for the pervasive racism and second-class status that they have to overcome in the West.

Brain drain is a global phenomenon and has always been so. It is a problem confronting and threatening development in Africa and other developing world regions. A study by Carrington and Detragiache concluded that there is an overall tendency for migration rates to be higher for highly educated individuals. Brain drain can therefore be seen as one of the more detrimental implications of organizational decline and crisis. Skilled migration, taking the form of brain drain and movements of professionals and job transfers, has become an important component of contemporary migration.3 Typically, in a historical context highly skilled migration involved the forced movement of professionals as a result of political conflicts, followed by the emergence of the “brain drain” in the 1960s. In the current situation highly skilled migration represents an increasingly large component of global migration streams.

Common wisdom suggests that the migration of people with a high level of human capital is detrimental for the country of emigration. In other words, the loss of skilled human resources will ultimately have a grave effect on the economy and jeopardize development programs of the country experiencing brain drain, as the brain drain is a negative externality on the population left in the source country. However, as Mountford has shown, when educational decisions are endogenous and if successful emigration is not a certainty, a brain drain may increase the productivity of a developing country. There is also sufficient evidence to show that the migration of talent from the South to the North does not always mean that developing countries lose out.

I began this essay after an energizing meeting with a bright young scholar on starting a new journal for africaresource.com. The journal, we agreed, would address the knowledge concerns of a politically conscious generation engaged in transformatory critical scholarship. Its distinguishing feature would be the New Afrikan perspective that would offer radical readings of texts and cultural phenomena. Just as our discussion drew to a close the critical question came: So what exactly does africaresource.com stand for? The question was clearly prompted by histories of subversions of progressive initiatives that have made members of marginal communities wary of ventures that seem to owe their existence to shadowy financiers.

The aftermath of September 11, 2001, may certainly be on its way toward affecting the “brain drain” from Africa. The 19 dead Arabs who were accused of having blown up the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and of hijacking the fourth plane were all cases of the brain drain from their own countries in one way or another. The effect of September 11 on immigration policies in the Western world appears to be greater scrutiny and reduced Western hospitality. There was a time when high scientific and technological qualifications were regarded as attractive credentials for immigration into the West.