# Returnees  
Africans and their descendants often returned to Africa, which in symbolic terms meant a return to the land of their ancestors. The return to Africa comprised different stages, reasons and circumstances. For Afrodescendants it was in fact their first trip to the continent of their forebears. There were also Africans who had been liberated from slave ships by British naval squadrons, who had never set foot outside their home, and who usually did not return  
to their place of origin. Others, liberated in similar conditions, were sent to the East African coast and the English colonies in the Caribbean. The main motivation for voluntary migration back to Africa was, some scholars argue, the desire to return to an imaginary homeland. However, many also returned involuntarily, for example to escape persecution after the 1835 Malé Revolt in Bahia (Castillo, 2017).  
According to Antonio McDaniel, the returnees constituted the first group of modern immigrants to West Africa from the Americas and other diaspora sites. They were people from different parts of Global Africa: Jamaica, Brazil, Cuba, Nova Scotia, Britain, the United States. The idea of return was also based on the belief that there was no possibility for Africans and their locally born children to be treated fairly in racialized societies (McDaniel, 1995, p. 20). Looking at the Indian Ocean region, Klara Boyer-Rossol examines the plans of the Makua in Madagascar to return to Mozambique at the end of the nineteenth century. Although, because of prohibition by the authorities of Madagascar, these projects were carried out on a small scale, they show that the Makua had a desire to return to the Africa of their imagination. The author thus corrects the misconceptions of academics (Campbell, 2008, p. 40) who suggest that the Africans located in communities on the side of the Indian Ocean had no homeland and thus had no desire to return to one.