Since the early 1960s settlement patterns throughout the southern African region have been profoundly affected by forced displacement caused by widespread warfare and politically related governmental programmes. Millions of refugees fled wars in Angola, Mozambique, Namibia and Zimbabwe to crowd border villages, designated rural settlement areas, small towns and cities in neighbouring countries. Even more people were internally displaced within Angola, Mozambique, Namibia and Zimbabwe by warfare and by official villagisation (or concentracao) programmes that were instituted to contain anti-colonial forces. Additional millions of people were forcibly displaced within the Republic of South Africa by its programmes to channel or stop political change by territorially separating racial and ethnic categories.

The Mozambican, Namibian, and Zimbabwean wars are over, and the long-anticipated political transformation within South Africa is underway. The last remaining major war in southern Africa, the civil war in Angola, appeared to have ended, but flares up intermittently. The cessation of warfare is also associated with widespread changes in settlement patterns. All of the countries in southern Africa are experiencing some form of demilitarisation, postwar population movement, reconstruction and reshuffling of priorities. Postwar population movements include the demobilisation of soldiers and the return of many refugees and internally displaced people.

Policy makers and scholars are turning their attention to the problems and features of these new movements. This is a good time to try to understand some of the lessons learned from the study of the earlier flight into exile of millions of refugees in southern Africa. This chapter addresses these lessons by focusing on the flow of refugees out of Angola from 1961 to 1992 and the settlement of these refugees in the host countries of Zaire and Zambia. After documenting the waves of refugees, where they went, and how they settled, the chapter analyses the general structural characteristics of refugee populations, the relevance of examining the concept of refugee, and the varying attractiveness of repatriation to long-term refugees.

DATA

Annual reports from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) are the primary source of statistics in this chapter on the long-term movements of Angolan refugees into Zaire and Zambia as they are the only sources with the necessary time depth.