Rewriting Kerala-Africa migration narratives: towards a women’s gaze

Somy Solomon

For centuries, Africa has lived in Kerala’s imagination through stories of trade, migration, adventure, and opportunity. Yet, when we look closely at the travelogues, memoirs, and popular narratives that shaped this connection, one pattern becomes unmistakable: most of these accounts are written through a male gaze.

The Indian Ocean world, often celebrated as a space of mobility and exchange, has been narrated largely through men’s journeys — merchants, sailors, traders, missionaries, and later, male migrant workers. Their travel writings mapped Africa as a land of labour, danger, exoticism, or conquest. Africa became a stage where masculinity was performed: the adventurous traveller, the successful migrant, the explorer of unknown worlds. But what happens when women begin to tell these stories?

Women’s gaze

In recent years, modern vloggers, tourists, and hitchhiking women travellers from Kerala and India have begun to challenge old stereotypes. Their digital narratives are breaking away from colonial-era tropes and patriarchal travel traditions.

These women vloggers are not just documenting landscapes. They are reframing Africa as lived space — full of ordinary warmth, friendship, humour, and complexity. They show markets, homes, children, food, conversations, and everyday life, offering an Africa beyond the clichés of poverty or wilderness. A new women’s gaze is emerging — one that is curious rather than conquering, relational rather than extractive. Yet, even this refreshing shift carries its own limitations.

Missing category

Despite the rise of women travellers, one vast category of women remains missing from the Kerala–Africa migration narratives: women who migrated not as tourists, but as life-makers.

These are the women who travelled to Africa as dependent migrants — wives who accompanied husbands, mothers who raised children in unfamiliar lands, women who built homes across cultures while remaining invisible in official migration histories. Their journeys were not glamorous adventures captured on YouTube. They were migrations of emotional labour, adaptation, resilience, and survival.

They did not arrive with cameras. They arrived with responsibility. Their stories rarely enter travel literature, diaspora archives, or public memory.

Who crossed ‘boundaries’

Another silenced group includes women who crossed even more unfamiliar boundaries: women who married African partners, forming intimate relationships that disrupted racial, cultural, and social expectations. Their lives challenge the neat categories of “Kerala migrant” and “African host.” They represent histories of love, negotiation, belonging, and sometimes, exclusion.

Similarly, single women who travelled independently across African countries — not for leisure, but to design new lives, careers, and futures — remain absent from Kerala’s collective narrative. These women navigated unknown terrains, often without the protection of patriarchal family structures, creating their own maps of possibility. Their Africa is not the Africa of male travelogues. It is Africa as home, Africa as becoming.

The absence of women’s migrant voices is not accidental. Patriarchal societies have long treated women’s mobility as secondary — an extension of men’s journeys rather than journeys of their own. When men migrate, it becomes history. When women migrate, it becomes family duty. Women’s experiences are buried in the domestic, the everyday, the emotional — spaces rarely considered worthy of documentation. But these are precisely the spaces where migration is truly lived.

To rewrite Kerala–Africa migration narratives, we must shift our attention from heroic travel to intimate histories. From the port and the passport to the kitchen, the classroom, the hospital, the intercultural marriage, the lullabies sung in unfamiliar languages.

A feminist re-reading of Kerala–Africa connections demands that we ask these questions: Where are the women in our migration archives? What does Africa look like through the eyes of dependent migrants? How do women narrate belonging across continents? What stories emerge when migration is seen not only as labour, but as life?

The future of Kerala–Africa historiography lies in recovering these missing voices — not as footnotes to men’s travels, but as central authors of a shared Indian Ocean world. Women are not merely accompanying migration. Women are rewriting it.

The author is the principal investigator of the Migration Profile of Keralites in Africa Project, an initiative of the Kerala Council For Historical Research and NoRKA

Published – March 07, 2026 11:13 pm IST