In this essay the experience of migration and the identitary challenges and transformations it entails is analyzed from a gender perspective, focusing on four novels by African women writers that explore different angles of the migration experience, namely Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood, Fatou Diome’s Le ventre de l’Atlantique, Mariama Ba’s Une si longue lettre, and Amma Darko’s Beyond the Horizon. The displacement of their female protagonists (from the countryside to the city, from Africa to Europe) results in an ambiguous experience implying both uprooting and transformation, liberation from traditional roles but falling into new forms of economic, laboral or sexual or sexual exploitation.