ABSTRACT
Africa and Asia have a long history of contacts. The Indian Ocean is one centre of commercial interactions that brought Africa and Asia into contact. Besides the Indian Ocean being a commercial hub, the ocean facilitated rather than inhibited movement of people. People moved and continue to move for various reasons under different conditions. Human movement is fundamentally a way of life and a human trait. But the cartographic interventions cascading from Euro-North American modernity in the last five hundred or so years, which resulted in the drawing of continental and national boundaries, tended to seek to control human movement and even criminalise it.
