6 Decolonising the Afropolitan Intra-African migrations in post-2000 literature Rebecca Fasselt Studies on migration in Africa have repeatedly debunked the myth of an ‘African exodus’ to the West, emphasising the complex nature of migration into and out of Africa and the prevalence of intra-continental movements. Narrative engagement with intra-continental migration and cross-border lives is not a new phenomenon in African writing. Literary scholarship, however, has, over the past decades, predominantly focused on migratory movements from the Global South to the North and inter-continental return narratives to Africa. Negotiations of migrant subjectivities within the continent, while not entirely dissimilar, exhibit visible differences from those in the context of South–North movements. Whereas migrants’ Africanness in the West is often positioned as a marker of racial, cultural and religious otherness, migrant characters in narratives of cross-African migration frequently mobilise African identity to negotiate inclusion and assert belonging. Reading three texts from different regions published after 2000, I demonstrate that contemporary African authors reposition current debates on national belong- ing, gender, ethnicity, indigeneity, transnationalism and Afropolitanism in the context of intra- continental movements. The chapter addresses multifaceted forms of intra-continental migration such as ‘voluntary’ and ‘forced’, while being wary of totalising categories and of the porous boundaries between different forms of migration. The first part of the chapter analyses Leila Aboulela’s historical novel Lyrics Alley (2010) set in pre-independence Sudan in the early 1950s. Focusing on the author’s portrayal of the con- flictual relationship between Sudan and Egypt (one of Sudan’s colonisers), I suggest that Aboulela’s text departs from conventional narrations of pre-independence resistance. Her pro- tagonists partake in the nation-building process not primarily in response to the British colonial centre, but from the position of leading trans-border lives between Sudan and Egypt. I then read Unexpected Joy at Dawn (2004) by Ghanaian novelist, poet and playwright Alex Agyei- Agyiri as an example of forced migration and repatriation in the context of the Ghanaian Aliens Compliance Order of 1969 and the Nigerian Aliens Expulsion Order of 1983. The novel, I argue, dramatises the tension between nationhood and continental unity in the post-independence era, while at the same time defying narrow ethnic and national boundaries by constituting its characters as transnational African subjects. Binyavanga Wainaina’s literary memoir One Day I Will Write About This Place (2011), spanning East and Southern African geographies, subverts common assumptions about African migration by primarily relating intra-continental movement 75