This book is a labour of friendship. It would not exist without the generous help of those who have seen me through first the process of writing the French original and then the similarly daunting task of producing a belle infidèle in English – an entirely updated and reworked version, purged of (almost) all of my beloved Gallicisms and the scoriae of half-baked thought. In France, Olivier Nora, my publisher at the helm of Grasset, and Ronald Blunden, the head of communications for the Hachette Group (who even made ‘detours’ to my home in North Carolina), have been inexhaustible sources of excellent counsel. In the United States, T. R. Goldman and Sam Fury Childs Daly – a fellow journalist and a fellow Africanist at Duke – have done yeoman’s service to standardize my idiosyncratic English (I grew up speaking German with my mother and have lived outside the US, in Europe and Africa, for forty-five years). In England, Mark Huband – with whom I wrote joint dispatches out of Monrovia in the early 1990s, when the Liberian capital was besieged by Charles Taylor – also offered more than one welcome suggestion. And, finally, Jeremy Harding, a contributing editor of The London Review of Books who lives in southwestern France, went through the final draft and laid it all to rest. I owe him more than any words of thanks could convey. In the end, of course, I am solely responsible for the content of this book. Alas, it is less perfect than the support I received, including from my new friends in the making at Polity Books, John Thompson and the entire team.

Further, I want to acknowledge my debt to Richard Cincotta, the director of demographic studies at the Stimson Center in Washington DC, to whom I owe my discovery of the ‘human geography’ of Africa. With kindness and patience, he introduced me to the complexities of his world.

My thanks also go to Charles Piot and Achille Mbembé. Together, we organized two international migration conferences at Duke University, which gathered scholars from across Africa, Europe and North America. This book owes a great deal to their numerous insights.

Last but not least, I will be forever grateful to all the African migrants – in Africa, Europe and the United States – for their trust in sharing their life stories with me. They sent me on the journey that eventually led to this book.