Prison Without Walls: They Went by Force vs. They Go by Hunger

By Paul C. Udeh

There is something profoundly disturbing about a continent whose history records the forced departure of its people and whose present continues to witness the departure of its human capabilities in search of economic survival. Centuries ago, millions of Africans were captured, separated from their families, transported across oceans, and compelled to labour in economies they had not chosen. Today, another generation of Africans stands before international borders, not necessarily with chains around their ankles but with economic pressures weighing heavily upon their decisions. They carry passports instead of shackles, purchase tickets instead of being forced aboard slave ships, and travel with dreams of employment, security, dignity, and a better life. Their circumstances are historically and legally different, and they must never be confused. Yet an uncomfortable question survives the centuries: why does Africa continue to experience the outward movement of human productive capability toward economies better positioned to employ it? This is the argument behind Prison Without Walls: They Went by Force vs. They Go by Hunger. The historical captive was deprived of the right to refuse departure. The contemporary economically distressed migrant may possess the legal right to remain, yet confront circumstances that make remaining increasingly difficult. The distinction is fundamental, but so is the question it raises: what does freedom of choice mean when the conditions necessary to exercise that choice are severely constrained?

Imagine two departures separated by centuries. In the first, an African man is taken from his community. He does not select his destination, negotiate the conditions of his journey, or decide whether his labour will be exchanged for wages. His movement is controlled by people who have reduced his humanity to a commercial transaction. In the second, a young African professional sits beside a suitcase, holding an international travel document, preparing to leave the country where childhood memories, family relationships, education, and personal identity were formed. No captor has come to remove this person. The decision may have been considered for years. It may promise opportunity, personal growth, and a more secure future. Yet beneath the apparent freedom of departure lies another question: would the same person leave under the same circumstances if meaningful economic opportunities existed at home? The first departure demonstrates the absence of legal and personal freedom. The second invites us to examine the economic conditions under which freedom is exercised.

Historical evidence leaves no room for romanticizing the first experience. The National Endowment for the Humanities, drawing upon the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, reports that approximately 12.5 million Africans were forced aboard ships destined for the Americas, while about 10.7 million survived the Middle Passage between 1526 and 1866 (National Endowment for the Humanities [NEH], n.d.). These estimates represent human beings removed through systems of capture, sale, transportation, and enslavement. The difference between the numbers who embarked and those who disembarked also reveals the devastating mortality associated with the crossing. The survivors faced further exploitation within plantation and other slave-labour economies. Their movement was not a labour-market decision. It was a profound violation of human freedom organized through commercial and political institutions.

The Atlantic system also reminds us that economic development and economic exploitation can coexist. Plantation economies accumulated output and wealth through labour extracted under conditions of violent domination. The capacity to produce sugar, cotton, tobacco, and other commodities did not establish the moral legitimacy of the arrangements through which production occurred. Human beings were treated as transferable property rather than independent participants in economic life. The historical lesson is not simply that labour possesses economic value. It is that whoever controls the conditions under which labour is mobilized can exercise enormous power over the people supplying it. That question remains relevant to political economy, although the institutions of contemporary employment and migration are fundamentally different from chattel slavery.

The phrase they went by force must therefore retain its full historical meaning. Enslaved Africans were not international workers accepting unattractive contracts. They were denied basic rights over their movement, bodies, labour, and family relationships. Contemporary migration, including economically distressed migration, should not be described as equivalent slavery. Indeed, actual modern slavery remains a specific and continuing human-rights crisis. The International Labour Organization (ILO, 2022) estimates that 27.6 million people were living in forced labour worldwide in 2021. Under the ILO’s international definition, forced labour involves work or service undertaken involuntarily under the threat of a penalty. Poverty alone does not satisfy that definition. A person who migrates legally in search of higher wages is not thereby enslaved. This distinction protects the seriousness of historical slavery, the reality of contemporary forced labour, and the analytical credibility of the metaphor Prison Without Walls.

The second half of my proposition, they go by hunger, must be understood with equal precision. Hunger represents more than the immediate absence of food. It can describe the pressure of unemployment, an income insufficient to support a family, the inability to acquire adequate housing, the frustration of professional qualifications that cannot be productively employed, or the fear that another generation will inherit the same restricted opportunities. Some migrants experience literal hunger and severe deprivation. Others possess jobs and qualifications but seek substantially better economic possibilities. Many migrate for education, family reunification, adventure, professional development, or personal preference, without being driven by desperation. My argument does not erase these differences. It concentrates on those movements in which economic necessity becomes so influential that departure begins to appear less like one opportunity among several and more like the only credible route toward a sustainable future.

The difference between voluntary movement and meaningful choice is central to this reflection. A person may voluntarily accept a difficult arrangement because all available alternatives appear worse. Consent remains important, but it does not eliminate the economic pressures shaping the decision. An unemployed graduate may choose to migrate rather than remain without income. A trained nurse may accept employment abroad because domestic health institutions cannot offer an adequate position. A skilled technician may move because the equipment, industries, and productive enterprises necessary to employ that skill are concentrated elsewhere. These decisions can be intelligent and entirely legitimate. Their existence does not establish that the individuals have been coerced. It does, however, reveal that economic structures influence the practical range of choices available to human beings.

Amartya Sen’s understanding of development as freedom provides a useful intellectual foundation. Sen (1999) argues that development concerns the expansion of substantive freedoms: the real opportunities people possess to live lives they have reason to value. Income matters, but it is not the sole measure of capability. Education without employment opportunities, legal freedom without economic security, and formal rights without the practical means to exercise them can leave individuals with constrained possibilities. Applied to migration, this distinction reveals why possession of a passport cannot independently establish the fullness of economic freedom. The relevant question is whether departure reflects a genuine preference among meaningful alternatives or a response to the absence of acceptable opportunities at home.

This is where the prison without walls becomes visible. There may be no law requiring an individual to leave Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Senegal, or another African country. Yet unemployment, weak industrial demand, unreliable infrastructure, insecurity, and inadequate public services can narrow the possibilities available within those economies. The individual can remain, but remaining may mean repeatedly postponing ambitions, accepting underemployment, or struggling to convert education into income. Departure becomes an economic response to conditions that the individual did not create and cannot independently correct. The prison is not necessarily the country itself, and the migrant is not necessarily its prisoner. The prison exists in the restricted opportunity structure that makes one geographical direction appear overwhelmingly preferable to the alternatives.

Economic migration is consequently influenced by interacting pressures rather than one simple cause. The World Bank’s World Development Report 2023: Migrants, Refugees, and Societies explains that cross-border movement responds to global economic inequalities and shocks, while the developmental consequences depend partly upon migrants’ motivations and how their capabilities match opportunities in destination countries (World Bank, 2023). A person may be pushed by unemployment or insecurity while simultaneously being pulled by better wages, functioning institutions, professional advancement, or family connections abroad. The destination does not have to be perfect. It needs only to provide an alternative the migrant judges more promising than the opportunities available at home. The decision therefore reflects both the condition of the departing economy and the comparative attraction of the receiving economy.

This comparative relationship creates a troubling development question for Africa. The continent produces children, educates students, develops professionals, and supports the formation of human capabilities. Families contribute resources over many years, often at considerable personal sacrifice. Governments and institutions invest in schools, universities, professional training, and public services. Yet the economic environments required to employ those capabilities may remain insufficiently developed. A graduate can possess knowledge without access to an industry that demands it. An engineer can possess technical qualifications while the surrounding economy lacks the machinery, electricity, finance, and enterprises necessary to use those skills. A healthcare professional can be trained in a country whose health system cannot finance the employment of all the professionals it needs. The individual becomes capable of productive contribution, but the domestic economy may lack the capacity to absorb that contribution.

The World Health Organization’s State of the Health Workforce in Africa 2026 brings this contradiction into particularly sharp focus. The WHO reports that Africa has expanded health-worker training while continuing to experience severe shortages, unemployment among trained professionals, and outward migration. It projects a shortage of approximately 5.85 million health workers in the WHO African Region by 2030. The report identifies a structural failure to align education, employment, financing, and retention, rather than a problem of training numbers alone (World Health Organization [WHO], 2026). This is a profound economic paradox: societies may urgently need healthcare while qualified professionals lack viable employment within the institutions responsible for delivering it.

Consider the implications for a trained nurse who wants to remain in an African community but cannot obtain sustainable employment. The healthcare needs of that community may be considerable. Hospitals may be understaffed, patients may wait for treatment, and the population may face preventable health risks. Yet the nurse may still be unable to secure a position because the institutions responsible for employing healthcare workers face financial and organizational constraints. An overseas employer may offer a formal contract, reliable compensation, functioning equipment, and professional advancement. The nurse’s decision to migrate is understandable. The deeper developmental failure lies in an economic system that can produce a needed capability without creating an effective institutional mechanism for employing it.

This is the distinction between the existence of human capital and the productive employment of human capital. A country cannot claim that the training of a professional automatically constitutes completed economic development. Education develops potential. Productive institutions create opportunities for that potential to become economic and social contribution. When the relationship between the two is broken, human capability may seek alternative locations where it can operate more effectively. The resulting movement is not necessarily a rejection of one’s homeland. It may reflect the individual’s effort to preserve the economic value of knowledge and labour that would otherwise remain underutilized.

Yet this argument must confront a common misunderstanding: Africans do not migrate only to Europe or North America. The International Organization for Migration’s World Migration Report 2024 records that approximately 21 million African-born international migrants were living in another African country in 2020, compared with more than 19.5 million living outside the continent (International Organization for Migration [IOM], 2024). These figures are historical estimates for 2020, not current 2026 counts, but they demonstrate that intra-African movement represents a substantial part of the continent’s migration experience. Africans move toward economic opportunities within Africa as well as beyond it. The same general principle applies: human beings respond to differences in security, markets, institutions, employment, and expected living conditions.

The historical parallel must also be geographically accurate. Most Africans forced across the Atlantic were transported to the Americas and the Caribbean, not simply to the European countries that dominate some contemporary African migration discussions. The destinations, routes, legal institutions, and economic relationships were different. Therefore, the phrase they went by force; they go by hunger is not a claim that the same journeys are being repeated in an identical form. It is a moral and economic comparison between the violent historical removal of African labour and contemporary movements influenced by unequal economic opportunities. The comparison becomes valuable only when its differences are preserved.

What remains unsettling is the recurring relationship between human productive capability and the economies best equipped to employ it. Historically, enslaved Africans were compelled to contribute labour to economic systems organized by others. Today, African migrants can be independent workers, entrepreneurs, professionals, investors, researchers, and citizens who exercise rights and make substantial contributions to their destination societies. Their participation is not evidence of servitude. Nevertheless, the contemporary movement invites a legitimate economic question: why do so many capable individuals find that the infrastructure, institutions, capital, and enterprises necessary for their advancement are more accessible outside their countries of origin?

The answer must move beyond simple accusations of poor leadership or insufficient patriotism. Economic opportunity is produced through an interconnected system. A functioning industry requires finance, infrastructure, technology, workers, management, suppliers, market access, and institutional credibility. A graduate cannot create a national industrial ecosystem independently. A doctor cannot establish a functioning healthcare system merely through professional commitment. An entrepreneur cannot indefinitely overcome the absence of reliable electricity, affordable finance, and effective logistics through personal determination alone. Individual ambition matters, but its economic consequences depend upon the productive structures within which it operates.

This connects with my broader Africa Economic Development (AED) proposition that development is the construction of enduring capability, not merely the expansion of economic activity (Udeh, 2026). A nation becomes more economically capable when it can organize its resources, institutions, capital, knowledge, and labour into productive systems. When that transformation remains incomplete, the country may continue supplying human capabilities to economies whose productive systems are better developed. The migration itself is not the proof of failure. The developmental concern arises when people who wish to stay cannot find credible opportunities to contribute, or when departure becomes their principal available pathway toward economic dignity.

There is, however, a serious counterargument. Migration is not necessarily a loss to the country of origin. Migrants send money to relatives, finance education, support households, invest in property and businesses, introduce commercial relationships, and transmit knowledge across borders. The World Bank estimated in December 2024 that officially recorded remittances to sub-Saharan Africa would reach approximately $56 billion in 2024, compared with an estimated $55 billion in 2023 (Ratha et al., 2024). These were estimates rather than final audited totals, but they illustrate the economic importance of international household transfers. Remittances can improve living conditions, support domestic consumption, and provide resources for saving and investment. It would be intellectually dishonest to treat every emigrant as a permanent subtraction from national development.

Indeed, the World Bank (2023) emphasizes that migration can create gains for migrants, destination economies, and origin countries through remittances, knowledge transfer, investment relationships, and international networks. Some migrants return with professional experience and capital. Others establish enterprises that connect their countries of origin to global markets. Diaspora communities can become important participants in trade, finance, research, technology, and entrepreneurship. International mobility can therefore expand rather than diminish economic opportunity. The objective should never be to confine Africans within Africa in the name of development. That would merely create a different form of prison.

But the existence of these benefits does not eliminate the original question. Remittances are not identical to the domestic productive capacity that might have existed if more capable workers could find meaningful employment at home. Money sent to relatives can finance valuable consumption, education, health, and investment, but it does not automatically replace lost expertise in a hospital, research laboratory, manufacturing enterprise, or public institution. Similarly, the departure of a professional does not automatically produce a measurable national loss if that professional would otherwise have remained unemployed or severely underemployed. The economic effect depends upon circumstances. We must therefore avoid both extremes: celebrating outward migration as an unquestionable development strategy and condemning it as an unconditional national failure.

The stronger question concerns the balance between capability developed, capability productively employed, and capability internationally connected. An African engineer working abroad can remain economically connected to African development through investment, business partnerships, technical collaboration, and eventual return. An African entrepreneur operating internationally may build companies that create employment across several countries. A diaspora professional may transfer knowledge without permanently relocating. These possibilities suggest that migration policy should not be organized around physical retention alone. It should strengthen the productive relationship between African human capabilities and African economic development, wherever those capabilities happen to be located.

Still, the freedom to leave cannot substitute for the opportunity to remain. This is the central moral distinction of my argument. A country should not become so dependent upon the export of its people that the pursuit of a decent life increasingly requires geographical departure. A young person should be able to consider migration as an opportunity for learning, business expansion, cultural experience, or professional advancement, not simply as an escape from economic conditions that make ordinary aspirations unattainable. A parent should not have to regard the permanent separation of family members as the most credible available strategy for improving household security. A trained professional should not have to choose between contributing to a local community and securing a sustainable livelihood.

The prison without walls becomes especially visible at the point where the individual makes a decision that is legally voluntary but emotionally painful and economically difficult to avoid. A departure lounge can contain excitement and grief simultaneously. A mother may celebrate her child’s scholarship while privately mourning the distance that will separate them. A father may finance a journey because the family expects that foreign earnings will improve its prospects. A professional may feel proud of securing international employment while regretting the absence of equivalent opportunities at home. These experiences resist easy classification. They are not simply stories of escape, success, betrayal, or loss. They reveal the complicated relationship between individual aspiration and national economic conditions.

Nor should responsibility be placed upon migrants for responding to these circumstances. An individual possesses obligations to family, personal welfare, and future opportunity. It is unreasonable to demand that someone endure avoidable deprivation merely to demonstrate loyalty to a country. Patriotism cannot replace employment. National pride cannot pay medical bills. Emotional attachment cannot independently generate the productive institutions required for professional advancement. A citizen’s decision to leave does not automatically establish a rejection of national identity. A society that wishes to retain productive human capabilities must develop conditions that make remaining economically credible.

This is also why the solution cannot be coercive retention. Restricting professional movement, morally condemning emigrants, or treating departure as disloyalty would misunderstand the meaning of freedom. The purpose of economic development is not to prevent people from leaving but to reduce the circumstances that make them feel compelled to do so. A developed nation should be capable of attracting the voluntary participation of its own people, not merely enforcing their geographical presence. It should offer productive employment, institutional credibility, educational opportunity, public security, and the conditions through which citizens can build meaningful lives.

The historical and contemporary experiences therefore lead to different responsibilities. The history of enslavement demands recognition of a grave injustice against human freedom. Contemporary economic migration demands an examination of the conditions shaping individual choice and the productive capabilities of countries of origin. The first cannot be undone through economic policy alone, and the second cannot be solved by historical comparison alone. But placing them in conversation reveals why human development must be understood through both personal agency and the institutions that determine how human capability can be employed.

My argument is not that the African migrant of today is equivalent to the enslaved African of yesterday. It is that the contrast between the two forces us to confront a deeper question about the meaning of freedom. Yesterday’s captive was denied the right to determine where life and labour would be spent. Today’s migrant may exercise that right, yet find that meaningful economic possibilities are concentrated elsewhere. The distinction is enormous, but the unresolved developmental challenge is equally consequential: Africa must become capable of providing its people with substantive opportunities to choose their futures.

Prison Without Walls: They Went by Force vs. They Go by Hunger is therefore not an accusation against those who leave. It is an argument about the economic conditions under which departure becomes necessary. It asks why a continent that invests in raising and educating its people sometimes struggles to provide the institutions and productive systems through which those people can fully apply their capabilities. It challenges the assumption that legal freedom alone guarantees meaningful economic choice. And it insists that national development should be measured partly by whether citizens possess realistic opportunities to build dignified lives without being compelled by deprivation to search for them elsewhere.

The objective is neither isolation nor the rejection of international migration. Africa should participate confidently in the global movement of labour, capital, knowledge, enterprise, and technology. Its people should be free to travel, learn, invest, work, return, and maintain international relationships. But that freedom becomes more complete when staying is also a credible choice. A continent that develops its productive institutions can engage the world through opportunity rather than excessive dependence upon external employment.

They went by force because their freedom was taken from them. They go by hunger when economic necessity narrows the freedom they possess. These are not identical histories, but they confront us with one enduring question: who controls the conditions under which African human potential can become productive economic value?

The ultimate liberation is not the closing of borders or the disappearance of migration. It is the development of an Africa in which geographical departure is no longer the principal answer to economic deprivation. True economic freedom exists when a person can leave because they choose to, remain because they have the opportunity to, and build a meaningful future without surrendering either choice.

References

International Labour Organization, Walk Free, & International Organization for Migration. (2022). Global estimates of modern slavery: Forced labour and forced marriage. International Labour Organization. https://www.ilo.org/publications/major-publications/global-estimates-modern-slavery-forced-labour-and-forced-marriage

International Organization for Migration. (2024). World migration report 2024. https://worldmigrationreport.iom.int/

National Endowment for the Humanities. (n.d.). The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database. https://www.neh.gov/project/transatlantic-slave-trade-database

Ratha, D., Plaza, S., & Kim, E. J. (2024, December 18). In 2024, remittance flows to low- and middle-income countries are expected to reach $685 billion, larger than FDI and ODA combined. World Bank Blogs. https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/peoplemove/in-2024–remittance-flows-to-low–and-middle-income-countries-ar

Sen, A. (1999). Development as freedom. Alfred A. Knopf.

Udeh, P. C. (2026). Africa Economic Development (AED). Paul C. Udeh. https://news.paulcudeh.com/africa-economic-development-aed/

World Bank. (2023). World development report 2023: Migrants, refugees, and societies. https://www.worldbank.org/en/publication/wdr2023

World Health Organization, Regional Office for Africa. (2026). State of the health workforce in Africa 2026: Plan, train and retain. https://afro.who.int/publications/state-health-workforce-africa-2026-plan-train-and-retain