Mobility Makes States: Migration and Power in Africa 9780812291292

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Chapter 1. Mobility Makes States
PART I. CHANNELING HUMAN MOBILITY
Chapter 2. Portuguese Empire Building and Human Mobility in São Tomé and Angola, 1400s–1700s
Chapter 3. ‘‘Captive to Civilization’’: Law, Labor Mobility, and Violence in Colonial Mozambique
Chapter 4. Victims, Saviors, and Suspects: Channeling Mobility in Post-Genocide Rwanda
Chapter 5. Channeling Mobility Across a Segregated Johannesburg
Chapter 6. Policy Spectacles: Promoting Migration-Development Scenarios in Ghana
PART II. MOVING CONCENTRATIONS OF POWER
Chapter 7. Kinetocracy: The Government of Mobility at the Desert’s Edge
Chapter 8. Decolonization and (Dis)Possession in Lusophone Africa
Chapter 9. Moving from War to Peace in the Zambia-Angola Borderlands
Chapter 10. Recognition, Solidarity, and the Power of Mobility in Africa’s Urban Estuaries
Notes
List of Contributors
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
Z
Acknowledgments

Citation preview

Mobility Makes States

For Malcolm Cook, Craig Meer, Gavin Mount, Wynne Russell, and Tianbao Zhu

MOBILIT Y MAKES STATES Migration and Power in Africa

Edited by

Darshan Vigneswaran and

Joel Quirk

U N I V E R S I T Y O F P E N N S Y LVA N I A P R E S S PHIL ADELPHIA

Copyright 䉷 2015 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data ISBN 978-0-8122-4711-4

Contents

Chapter 1. Mobility Makes States

1

Joel Quirk and Darshan Vigneswaran

PART I. CHANNELING HUMAN MOBILITY

Chapter 2. Portuguese Empire Building and Human Mobility in Sa˜o Tome´ and Angola, 1400s–1700s

37

Filipa Ribeiro da Silva

Chapter 3. ‘‘Captive to Civilization’’: Law, Labor Mobility, and Violence in Colonial Mozambique

59

Eric Allina

Chapter 4. Victims, Saviors, and Suspects: Channeling Mobility in Post-Genocide Rwanda

79

Simon Turner

Chapter 5. Channeling Mobility Across a Segregated Johannesburg

104

Darshan Vigneswaran

Chapter 6. Policy Spectacles: Promoting Migration-Development Scenarios in Ghana Nauja Kleist

125

vi

Contents

PART II. MOVING CONCENTRATIONS OF POWER

Chapter 7. Kinetocracy: The Government of Mobility at the Desert’s Edge

149

Benedetta Rossi

Chapter 8. Decolonization and (Dis)Possession in Lusophone Africa

169

Pamila Gupta

Chapter 9. Moving from War to Peace in the Zambia-Angola Borderlands

194

Oliver Bakewell

Chapter 10. Recognition, Solidarity, and the Power of Mobility in Africa’s Urban Estuaries

218

Loren B. Landau

Notes

237

List of Contributors

285

Index

289

Acknowledgments

295

Chapter 1

Mobility Makes States Joel Quirk and Darshan Vigneswaran

We are living in an era of increasing African mobility. Spurred on by steady economic growth in many parts of Africa and global revolutions in transport and communication, migrants of African origin have increasingly spread across both continental Africa and the world at large. While emigration to countries in Europe and North America has attracted the most attention among both policy makers and researchers, these movements have been outpaced by sustained increases in shorter and circular patterns of intracontinental mobility. Migrants in Africa have been moving between rural and urban areas in substantial numbers, contributing to the rapid growth of sprawling cities and fostering new patterns of urban settlement. Indeed, the UN Human Settlements Programme (UN Habitat) observes that ‘‘between 2005 and 2010 Africa experienced the highest urban growth rates in the world—an annual 3.3 percent average—and the pace is expected to remain relatively high over the next 15 years.’’1 The issue here is not simply an increase in overall volume. Human mobility takes place in the context of a diverse range of conditions and capabilities. Toward one end of a broad spectrum, we have large numbers of refugees, internally displaced persons, and ‘‘survival migrants.’’ These overlapping groups move for reasons largely beyond their control and often end up being ‘‘warehoused’’ in camps, temporary protection zones, and detention centers. At the other end of the spectrum, we have transnational economic elites, international tourists, and workers in the aid and development industries who are able to swiftly and routinely parachute in and chopper out of even the most remote areas of the continent.

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In keeping with earlier historical precedents, these voluminous and diverse patterns of human mobility are strongly linked to the operations and ongoing evolution of political institutions and authorities across Africa. Scholars and commentators have most commonly approached the relationship between the state and mobility in terms of government efforts first to prevent and then—when official efforts prove ineffective—to cope with unwanted movements across sovereign territorial borders. While we have no doubt that this is an important part of a larger equation, the heavy concentration on state efforts to exclude international migrants has tended to overshadow a range of other important considerations and connections. As will become apparent over the course of this book, human mobility has long played a foundational role in determining what states look like as spatial and political entities, how they accumulate power and resources, what types of policies and strategies they pursue, and how they relate to their peers and other political, social, and economic actors. In short, mobility makes states. This formula captures the primary goal of this volume, which is to move beyond the conventional notion that preventing and managing human mobility constitutes one among any number of state functions. The main problem with this familiar point of departure is that it treats mobility as an external aberration or intrusion that (preexisting) states must address, rather than a key ingredient in the constitution of state authority in the first place. Mobility has long been the historical norm, not the exception, yet theories of political authority have too often started with the misleading image of a static, sedentary, and homogeneous population over whom state power is exercised.2 In the analysis that follows, we begin to develop an alternative perspective that focuses on the central role of mobility in shaping the way states in Africa are constituted as political and legal entities and also the way these states intervene in everyday life. In pursuit of this overall goal, we have divided this opening chapter into four main sections. In the first section, we briefly introduce our main objects of analysis: ‘‘human mobility,’’ ‘‘the state,’’ and ‘‘Africa.’’ Having defined our key terms, the second section goes on to introduce our central argument regarding the foundational role of human mobility in shaping state institutions and activities. The nuts and bolts of our central argument are then considered in more depth in sections three and four. In section three, we argue that states have been strongly shaped by their efforts to ‘‘channel’’ human mobility: preventing some forms of movement while

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simultaneously promoting others. In section four, we argue that human mobility has long played a central role in shaping how state power and authority are distributed and concentrated across space. These two sections also contextualize the chapters in the collection in light of our core arguments.

The State and Mobility in Africa: Defining Key Concepts Our overall approach draws upon a number of key concepts, which depart from established categories and conventions in several important respects. In our view, conventional approaches to migration and the state in Africa tend to suffer from three main shortcomings: (i) an inordinate focus on movements across fixed sovereign borders, with special emphasis on immigration out of Africa;3 (ii) a too often uncritical attachment to the ‘‘modern’’ state and the degree to which states in Africa ‘‘fail’’ to satisfy Eurocentric criteria of statehood;4 and (iii) a tendency to approach Africa as an exotic ‘‘outlier’’ or ‘‘exception’’ that deviates from European norms.5 Before we can go farther, we need to introduce briefly our preferred alternatives, starting with our case for favoring the term ‘‘human mobility’’ over ‘‘migration.’’ Human mobility is here broadly defined as the short- or long-term movement of people from one place to another.6 In this context, our specific concern is how and why various forms of human mobility have come to be regarded as either essential to the promulgation and preservation of state power or as risky and threatening for the same. This means casting a wide net that includes short-term and circular migrations, everyday commuting, forced migrations, emigrations, diasporic communities, and the mobility of agents and officers of the state. International immigrants undoubtedly remain relevant here, but we believe that they should be understood as one of many types of mobile populations, rather than as a singular and separate concern. Similarly, we would argue that a ‘‘conventional’’ model of immigration control—one that rests on core principles of sovereignty, citizenship, free movement within national jurisdictions, and exclusion of unwanted migrants at international borders—can be best understood as a historically recent and geographically specific component of a larger story of state efforts to channel mobility in various directions and for various ends.

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Unlike ‘‘human mobility,’’ ‘‘the state’’ is a very familiar concept with a venerable pedigree. Yet, on this occasion, it is difficult to escape the old adage about familiarity breeding contempt. How do we intend to make use of a concept that has been so widely maligned in African studies and development studies, not to mention the social sciences at large? At this juncture, it is important to recognize that recent critiques of the state have chiefly focused on a particular iconography of the ‘‘modern’’ or ‘‘Western’’ state, which has tended to reduce states in Africa to the status of poor imitations of their European counterparts, rather than focusing analytical attention on their actual competencies and characteristics.7 We aspire to release the category of the state from its long-standing captivity to European experiences and expectations. Drawing on Jeffrey Herbst,8 we favor a more expansive approach that applies the concept of the state to a variety of political formations that have been more commonly described in terms of empires, kingdoms, tribes, polities, political communities, or cabals. Much of the literature on the state in Africa is structured around a logic of subtraction, which means taking the ‘‘modern/Western’’ state as a key benchmark and then documenting the various ways in which political formations in Africa have fallen short.9 Our alternative uses a logic of addition, wherein we start with a series of core attributes that are held to be broadly common to all states and then think in terms of how and why various elements and ingredients have been added to this core in various historical and contemporary settings. The basic idea here is that we should start with what all states can do, rather than what some states cannot do. Accordingly, we propose that the state can be minimally defined as an institution with the capacity to administer justice (however imperfectly); to extract resources from a significant and identifiable population through taxes, tariffs, and other economic arrangements (including predation and tribute); to receive some form of recognition of their standing as states from their relevant peers (without necessarily requiring equal recognition of status); to maintain continuous and independent military capabilities, administrative processes, and policing functions; and to channel human mobility. From this vantage point, ‘‘modern’’ states can be regarded as a recent variation on a larger theme or as a subcategory that sits alongside many other subcategories. Many contemporary states in Africa that might otherwise be condemned as ‘‘failures’’ have little difficulty satisfying these overall criteria. Much the same can be said of their precolonial and colonial counterparts, although the

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ways these specific criteria end up being satisfied have varied greatly in relation to factors such as modes of production or administration.10 Like all definitions, our preferred approach comes with its own limitations and complications. One problem is that our definition becomes increasingly strained when it comes to patterns of decentralized governance (Rossi, this volume). It is not difficult to identify numerous states in precolonial Africa, such as Abomey, Ashanti, Kongo, Luba, Lunda, or Oyo, but alongside these states we also have a number of cases where governance was highly decentralized, resulting in a discussion of ‘‘stateless’’ societies.11 In such cases, it can be very difficult to determine when and where states begin and end. Since not all social and political arrangements can be plausibly described as states, there will invariably be times when it becomes necessary to treat the state as a key component of—but not necessarily synonymous with—larger questions of governance, governmentality, and social organization.12 Having introduced our two key concepts—‘‘mobility’’ and ‘‘the state’’—we now need to say something about the location of this project in sub-Saharan Africa. Let us begin by stating what we are not trying to do. We have no intention of treating African states as ‘‘boundary’’ cases or ‘‘outliers’’ that test the explanatory limits of models derived from Europe. Nor are we searching for an African ‘‘essence’’ that sharply distinguishes African experiences and institutions from their counterparts in other parts of the globe.13 Instead, our approach builds on the proposition that subSaharan Africa represents an important site from which to reflect upon larger global patterns and processes, both historical and contemporary. On this front, a useful provocation comes from Jean and John Comaroff, who have recently argued that many of the attributes that have been more commonly used to paint African politics and societies as ‘‘backward’’— corruption, unbridled capitalism, widespread criminality, inefficiency, patrimonialism, religiosity, symbolic authority, anarchy, parochialism, and fragmentation—are in fact emblematic of well-documented and emergent contemporary global trends. Hence, ‘‘while Euro-America and the south are currently caught up in the same all-embracing world historical processes, it is in the latter that the effects of those processes tend most graphically to manifest themselves.’’14 This is not a new theme. Prior to decolonization in Africa, some of the most radical experiments in modern policy making—racial differentiation, segregation, punishment, immigration, labor regulation, the genocide of

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‘‘inferior’’ peoples, private indirect governance, urban planning—emerged in colonies in Africa, not in the metropole.15 Moreover, scholars such as John Thornton16 and Bernard Bailyn17 have demonstrated that Africa and Africans have played a fundamental role in both making and shaping the modern world long before the colonization of Africa. This history of crosscultural exchange often makes it difficult to sharply separate developments in Africa from parallel developments in Europe and beyond.18 Accordingly, states in Africa should not be viewed as being ‘‘behind the curve’’ or as operating on the margins of an increasingly globalized world. When it comes to thinking about how and why the relationship between the state and mobility has evolved over time and how it might in turn evolve further in the future, the different experiences and trajectories that we observe in sub-Saharan Africa have much to teach us about broader global patterns and processes.

Mobility Makes States: Perspectives from Africa Our main aim in this volume is to develop a small number of arguments and heuristic tools that can help us better understand various aspects of the relationship between human mobility and the state. Our starting point is the observation that all states—historical and contemporary—have consistently made sustained efforts to legitimize, condition, discipline, and profit from human mobility. It is our further contention that these efforts, successful or otherwise, have been of a sufficient scale and significance that it is necessary to treat mobility as a central factor when it comes to both the constitution and everyday operation of state authority. Building on this general observation, we aim to both develop and defend the central premise of this collection, which is that mobility makes states, both within Africa and across the entire globe. As some readers might have already guessed, this formula owes a debt to the seminal work of Charles Tilly, who famously declared that ‘‘war made the state, and the state made war.’’19 There is obviously far more to Tilly’s argument than this aphorism, so it is necessary to outline briefly how his ideas can be related to our own. In a similar vein to the definition of the state offered above, Tilly’s work also incorporates many different types of states,20 but his argument chiefly focuses on processes of state building and national state formation in European history. Placing war at the heart

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of his story, Tilly identifies a series of mechanisms that relate to the imperatives and effects of warfare, such as coercion, capital, war making, state making, protection, and extraction.21 Over the course of this volume, we aim to advance a similar type of argument regarding the central role of human mobility in shaping the accumulation, distribution, and projection of state power. This broad thesis rests on two subsidiary claims. In the first instance, we maintain that ‘‘mobility makes states’’ because states have consistently sought to augment their power and resources by promoting and channeling human mobility. Contrary to the idea that states are solely concerned to mitigate or prevent the risks and threats inherent to mobility, we demonstrate how and why states have consistently sought to balance this approach with efforts to capitalize on the opportunities and benefits that mobile populations generate. In the second instance, we maintain that ‘‘mobility makes states’’ because the movement of people has consistently shaped how and why state power has come to be distributed and concentrated across space. In a reversal of the conventional notion that the fixed and even territorial jurisdiction of the state provides the primary referent for categorizing and problematizing mobility, we argue that the movement of state agents and civilian populations has consistently defined the spatial extent and temporal duration of state power. Human mobility shapes state behavior at multiple levels. Despite having been frequently described as a key component of state ‘‘failure,’’ mobility actually constitutes a key arena where contemporary states in Africa regularly exercise a significant degree of power and authority. At the level of grand strategy, at least some of the authority of the state stems from its prerogatives to formulate and apply legal criteria (re)defining and certifying the parameters of legitimate movement and civic membership. However, we also encounter numerous settings where official efforts to control and condition human mobility have little to do with grand political and legal strategies and instead have more to do with everyday experiences and expectations, with mobile populations interacting with officials in contexts where laws and procedures are either mediated or marginalized by informal interventions, unequal negotiations, and sometimes highly exploitative and coercive exchanges. These everyday experiences are one of the main ways in which mobile populations come into contact with state officials, and these encounters similarly play a key role in establishing the state as an ongoing presence in their lives, no matter how capricious, unhelpful, or

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even destructive this official presence might end up being. In some cases, this is a question of states extracting rents from populations that are on the move for various reasons of their own, but there are also numerous cases where the state has an interest in setting people into motion.

Preventing, Promoting, and Channeling Mobility States have many different interests in facilitating, frustrating, or (re)directing human mobility. These interests are not always realized in practice, since mobile populations invariably have interests of their own, but even ineffectual and counterproductive schemes can have important long-term consequences. To help make sense of the issues at stake here, we start by identifying and analyzing two main orientations toward mobility: ‘‘prevention’’ and ‘‘promotion.’’ This is followed by further analysis of what we describe as ‘‘channeling processes,’’ which refer to the various ways in which state actors and institutions seek to balance competing logics associated with promotion and prevention. As a consequence of this enduring balancing act, human mobility can be said to play a foundational role in both (re)making and empowering states. Preventing Mobility: Stopping People in Their Tracks

The first and most familiar orientation is prevention, which refers to state efforts to create and maintain legal, sociological, and physical obstacles that negatively impact the capacity and inclination of humans to move. Prevention has long been a core aspect of state power and a key branch of legal authority. Most obviously, prevention is essential to the defense of the realm. States throughout history have sought to prevent the movement of people who are believed to be a threat to state and society, whether this involves capturing and quarantining the lone carrier of contagion or stopping an enemy battalion at the gates of the capital. Prevention also applies to efforts to constrain the movements of populations over whom the state exercises jurisdiction. In feudal and slave societies, for example, states frequently sought to develop forms of ownership, obligation, and constraint that would effectively prevent large portions of the population from moving away from designated locations without express permission. Furthermore, we also have numerous historical settings where social subordinates, such as household

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servants, were strongly attached to privileged elites and thereby had their movements heavily circumscribed by their bond with their master. Modern discussion of prevention has inordinately focused on efforts to prevent illicit movements across international borders, but prevention tends to be most common when it comes to movements within political boundaries, rather than movements between different jurisdictions. In more recent political systems, one of the core goals of the state has been to uphold property rights, and this has necessarily required the consistent enforcement of laws of trespass designed to prevent various mobile groups from encroaching on private lands. Even more recently, and as has been well documented by Michel Foucault, Western European societies have developed a particular interest in various forms of incarceration—prisons, barracks, hospitals, poorhouses, and insane asylums—in which the ‘‘deviant’’ few have been prevented from mixing with the ‘‘normal’’ remainder of the population.22 Thus, throughout history, prevention has taken many forms and the legacies of these various forms of control appear in many institutions of contemporary politics, from defense to discipline and from privilege to property. Despite this history of variation and change, recent theorizing about the state and mobility has been overwhelmingly concerned with one specific type of prevention, which in turn primarily stems from a specific historical and geographic context: immigration policies in OECD countries over the last four decades. During this period, there has been a significant drawdown of legal immigration regimes, the rise of populist xenophobia and rightwing anti-immigration parties, and considerable increases in state expenditures on border controls, documentation systems, workplace inspections, and detention and deportation measures. The content and consequences of these preventive efforts have been extensively documented.23 What is important for our purposes is the degree to which these recent developments have dominated the formulation of contemporary theories of the state, helping create and sustain the impression that efforts to hinder, limit, and prevent international mobility represent the essence of the state’s control over mobility. One of the main problems with this orthodoxy is that it tends to reduce human mobility to the status of a problem, threat, or risk to be managed or mitigated, thereby marginalizing the various opportunities and benefits that mobile populations routinely generate. The image of a state whose primary goal is to prevent mobility has been cultivated through a series of anterior claims, causal arguments, and

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uncritical assumptions regarding an underlying and enduring relationship between immigration policy, sovereignty, and territorial control. Building upon a series of popular yet nonetheless problematic assumptions about immigration as an alien intrusion into the lives of a long-standing and territorially defined citizenry, the rise of immigration controls has most commonly been approached as a logical and all but inevitable expression of central goals of state building and identity (re)construction. These goals have, in turn, been tied to the defense of ‘‘traditional’’ autochthonous cultural values and social norms, the maintenance of labor and welfare standards, the defense of national military and security interests, and the protection of territorial borders.24 Once prevention in defense of state and society comes to be regarded as a core political goal, then practices and policies that go against the ‘‘norm’’ of prevention, such as the rise of sanctuary cities or the advent of free movement zones, come to be (re)framed as novel exceptions or unusual deviations within a political and institutional landscape still dominated by the goal of border control. If preventing immigration constitutes a dominant goal, then the free flow of persons across borders, both formal and informal, must mean that states are ‘‘losing control.’’25 This focus on the control of unwanted foreigners at international borders in no way exhausts the scale of preventive policies and strategies in sub-Saharan Africa. While in most cases states in Africa adhere to the international right of citizens to leave their country of origin, many have also developed a range of policy mechanisms to prevent certain categories of nationals from leaving their shores, whether this is in the interest of preventing capital flight or of limiting ‘‘brain drain.’’26 More complex and difficult to read are the various forms of prevention that take place in the refugee camps that dot the Great Lakes region, where foreign migrants are regularly prevented from moving freely across state territory. Here a more subtle mix of humanitarianism, othering, planning principles, and aid dependency helps explain why states seek to prevent refugees from moving into and across local residential, agricultural, and commercial spaces.27 Prevention efforts are not always efficient or effective, to the point where it may seem difficult to identify any form of core logic or objective behind the practices of prevention that occur as part of immigration control regimes. Take, for example, the forms of prevention that have been observed at the Lindela detention center in South Africa. In defiance of the

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apparent official policy objective to remove unwanted migrants from its territory, detainees in Lindela tend to languish in detention for extended periods, prevented from resuming their life in South Africa, yet also prevented from going home.28 In that context, migrants are certainly prevented from moving, but the reasons for such prevention seem to depart significantly from the central aims of policy makers and legislators. The moment when we begin to peer beneath the surface, to examine the actual practices of immigration control, we begin to see a more diverse range of prevention logics at play. Prevention practices are less defined by monolithic objectives of keeping national populations apart and instead involve a more diverse range of discouragements, disincentives, and efforts to slow, quarantine, and reverse movement patterns. The upshot of this argument is that prevention cannot be reduced to the simple act of cutting off mobility at the border. This picture is further complicated once we begin to examine where immigration control ranks alongside the variety of other prevention objectives of states in Africa. In many African contexts, state power and revenue remain heavily dependent on mining and farming, so states commonly devote far more energy to curtailing trespass on a small number of isolated properties than to paying attention to whomever might be crossing their external borders.29 In a continent where, in part due to colonial legacies, ruling elites have been heavily concentrated in a small number of urban areas, political authorities have often been more concerned with the objective of preventing the mobility of rural populations to the city and less interested in the national origins of those who arrive.30 This very different topography of state power and authority means that the border may play a far less significant role in determining how sovereignty is constituted across space. Is state sovereignty in Africa dependent on the extent to which states can prevent movement across international borders, or is it more heavily dependent on—as in the Nigerian case—who can prevent incursions into oil fields or—as in the case of Congo—who can prevent enemy forces from marching on Kinshasa? Furthermore, we need to recognize that in both examples prevention efforts have not been entirely successful. Nigerian oil fields have been regularly raided. Kinshasa was easily conquered by Laurent Kabila in 1997. Human mobility is so powerful and ubiquitous that we should not be overly surprised that prevention efforts are often inadequate. As we shall see below, much the same pattern applies in relation to promotion.

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Promoting Mobility: Moving Bodies Along

One of the major contributions of this volume is to make the case for placing ‘‘promotion’’ alongside ‘‘prevention.’’ The image of a state that promotes rather than prevents mobility may strike some readers as counterintuitive. We tend to think of the state as a territorially defined entity and international migration as an inherent transgression of the status quo. This starting point has too often overshadowed the equally significant activities of the state in promoting certain types of movements and migrant populations through either direct compulsion or indirect facilitation. Some of the most prominent and obvious examples of state promotion involve historical migrations associated with slave, indentured and forced labor in precolonial and colonial Africa. While these examples help establish the scale of mobility promotion as a political phenomenon, they are not necessarily representative of promotion as a whole, since we also have many examples of state agents promoting mobility on a smaller and sometimes less overt scale, such as (re)settlement schemes, transport and settlement projects, military conscriptions, economic ventures, and employment regimes. Whatever their overall scale, promotion efforts typically involve the targeting of a specific population, ranging from slaves to tourists, for the purposes of facilitating their movement from one place to another in order to advance larger political, social, or economic agendas. Moving from one place to another can range from short trips and circular journeys to permanent relocation across different continents. Like prevention, promotion routinely takes a variety of forms. These forms can be usefully located on a continuum that ranges from structural reforms to direct acts of capture and coercive transportation. At one end of the spectrum, we have indirect and long-term measures to facilitate and/or regulate otherwise largely independent movements. At the other end of the spectrum, we have brutal measures defined by sustained levels of violent coercion, where states force people into motion. When states take steps to promote—and thereby profit from—mobility, they do not necessarily ask those involved whether they want to move or whether movement is in their best interests. If people have taken a decision to move of their own accord, states may nonetheless seek to benefit from their mobility in several ways that are not in the migrant’s best interests. Consequently, promotion has been regularly defined by violence and abuse and should, therefore, not necessarily be regarded as more favorable than prevention. Promoting

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mobility should in no way be confused with ‘‘free’’ movement, since promotion tends to be a highly selective exercise. In the analysis that follows, we consider a number of different theoretical explanations that help explain why and how states throughout history have devoted massive resources to promoting human mobility. These theories are not necessarily complementary, since they have sometimes been designed as competing approaches, but these underlying differences are not especially important for the purposes of this discussion. Our main interest here is to explain the various logics and rationales associated with promotion as a key form of statecraft. In pursuit of this overall goal, we call upon liberal images of the state as a promoter and defender of free markets and commercial interests, historical accounts of the nexus between coercive migration and labor market dynamics, materialist accounts of the state as the handmaiden of capital, and Weberian accounts of the state as a form of monopoly. Let us begin with theories that start from the premise that many states have sought to both promote and defend market dynamics (‘‘modern’’ liberal states) and economic and commercial interests (states and other corporate actors more generally). In the case of liberal market dynamics, we need to recognize the relative historical novelty of our understanding of the concept of the ‘‘market.’’ Traditionally, the term ‘‘market’’ referred to a local place—usually situated on the banks of a river or in the center of a village or town—where people physically exchanged goods and currency. By contrast, the ‘‘market’’ in contemporary political economy refers instead to a (presumptively) free-floating economic structure that consists largely of the operation of a single pricing mechanism across the distances that separate a large number of traditional marketplaces. It has long been recognized that this second type of market requires sustained forms of state intervention if it is to shape economic behavior.31 From a liberal standpoint, the historical evolution of the state as a promoter of mobility can be chiefly traced to the fact that pricing mechanisms cannot operate when the costs of communication and transport between separate markets are so high that changes in supply and demand in one traditional market cease to have an impact on the price of goods and services in another. Key writers in the European canon such as Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill envisaged a state that played a role in helping markets function effectively by allowing traders to access territories, guaranteeing their safety in their native jurisdiction and foreign jurisdictions, and supporting and resourcing communication, transport, and local taxes that

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would enable pricing mechanisms and market forces to work effectively across distance. While these liberal theories have never been entirely realized in practice, they have nonetheless had a profound influence in shaping hugely expensive state projects to promote and facilitate the mobility of goods, persons, and capital across territories. This has found expression in the construction of transport networks, the elimination of localized tariffs and trade restrictions, the introduction of legal measures to uphold the sanctity of contracts as widely as possible, the protection of traders against predation and theft, and the standardization of weights and measures. Crucially, these projects have not been confined to measures to reduce transaction costs within an already existing ‘‘market’’ but have extended to official efforts to foster new ways of creating and spatially extending markets by ensuring that mobility between traditional markets is unimpeded, continuous, and as inexpensive as possible. It is not necessary to be a liberal theorist to recognize that promoting certain types of mobility is likely to result in certain political advantages and economic returns—albeit not necessarily for every participant in a market or environment. While liberal theorists tend to value mobility as a general economic good, it is rare to encounter an economist, politician, or military tactician who does not recognize that at least some selected and specific forms of mobility are extremely valuable, particularly in relation to transport infrastructure projects that enable certain types of goods and people to move faster over longer distances. In this context, the promotion of human mobility quickly emerges as an essential precondition for the realization of all kinds of other state goals. Take, for example, the relationship between promotion and warfare. Effectively moving and provisioning military forces are essential to the successful conduct of war. To pay for war, it is also necessary to extract resources by way of trade, taxation, and transportation. Without effective transportation and regulation, empires of conquest could never have been established or maintained, especially once multiple continents entered into the political equation (da Silva, this volume). While Tilly would argue that the imperatives of war have played a key role in incentivizing activities such as promotion, we are not necessarily convinced that war should always be placed ahead of mobility when it comes to state building, since mobility tends to be a precondition for the conduct of war. As the above examples begin to make clear, many efforts to promote human mobility have involved parochial, self-serving, and often mercantilist strategies, rather than efforts to promote human mobility as a general

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‘‘public good.’’ One prominent example of this larger dynamic revolves around the operations of state-sanctioned chartered companies, which played foundational roles in both the precolonial and colonial histories of many regions in Africa, such as Uganda, Nigeria, and Mozambique (see Allina, this volume). The operations of these companies consistently went against most contemporary market principles, as their goal was more often to monopolize and exploit than to compete freely, but they nonetheless played a central role in promoting various forms of mobility—of goods, labor, and capital—as a consequence of their economic goals (da Silva, this volume). This pattern also holds for colonial states in general, where European, African, and sometimes Indian or Chinese migration was promoted by the state to help develop colonial projects and profits. In contrast to the liberal image of the state as an institution that has sought to promote free and efficient mobility, other works have focused on the manner in which the state has sought to ‘‘expropriate’’ the productive and sometimes also reproductive power inherent in human mobility. There are different versions of this overall approach. From a historical standpoint, expropriation has often been viewed in terms of official efforts to compel people and populations who might have otherwise remained sedentary to migrate—either temporarily or permanently—to support various state projects. One good example of this dynamic involves a widespread pattern of forced recruitment and forced labor involving vast numbers of porters and workers under colonial rule, which regularly involved moving their subjects from one place to another. This relationship between coercion and migration can be at least partly traced to a perceived need to employ coercion and other devices to increase the available pool of (relatively) cheap and reliable labor via forced migration and further restrictions on movement following relocation. On this front, a useful point of departure comes from Herman Nieboer, who pioneered an influential line of argument that maintains that there is an enduring relationship between the historical prevalence of slavery and other forms of servitude, such as serfdom or pawnship, and settings where there is an abundant supply of land and a relative shortage of labor.32 Nieboer’s main insight is that political elites have historically turned to servitude in settings where laborers (or, more generally, subjects) have been in short supply while land remains relatively cheap and accessible. These land/ labor ratios give laborers an advantage when it comes to negotiating their terms of service, an advantage that can only be overcome by turning to

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forms of servitude that dampen potential wage demands through the use of direct compulsion. By primarily exercising control over people, rather than control over land, political and economic elites are said to be able to more effectively maintain and defend their various prerogatives and interests. While Nieboer’s argument is chiefly concerned with determining why servitude is prominent in some settings and less prominent in others, it also helps explain why states have consistently resorted to coercive migration schemes to increase the available supply of labor on relatively favorable terms. When laborers are in short supply and able to bargain effectively, then prices are likely to rise beyond what potential employers are prepared to pay (although this general relationship takes the form of a rough tendency, rather than an absolute axiom). Adding large numbers of slaves to the labor market via forced migration therefore represents an attractive strategy for ensuring cheap and reliable labor. This logic helps explain why millions of African slaves were forced across the Atlantic Ocean to labor on colonial projects in the Americas, where labor was scarce and land abundant.33 It also helps explain the widespread use of indentured laborers from China, India, and Africa both within and beyond sub-Saharan Africa once maritime slave trading was legally abolished in the nineteenth century. Some cases of indenture were little more than disguised slavery, with the Portuguese and French buying slaves in Africa and disingenuously rebranding them as indentured laborers, while other cases of indenture were similar but not necessarily directly equivalent to slavery.34 Compelling laborers to move to new locations to work on various colonial projects was also fundamental to patterns of colonial settlement more generally. In all of the above examples, various states played long-term roles in promoting the movements of millions of people at tremendous human cost with the goal of supplementing available labor supplies while reducing wages and other expenses. This theme also extends to the history of slave trading and slave raiding within sub-Saharan Africa. There is one important difference, however, in that historical patterns of forced migration within Africa need to be understood in terms of both productive and reproductive considerations.35 As a number of scholars have documented, women were in particularly high demand in slave markets in many parts of precolonial Africa, as female slaves were valued not only as laborers but also as prospective mothers of new dependents. While individual experiences could differ, it is nonetheless possible to identify a general trend where ‘‘Men with enslaved women

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distributed them to individuals with superior status, to ‘host’ kin groups, or to political authorities,’’ while ‘‘the men who took these slave women as ‘wives’ incurred no obligations to in-laws, since these women, as slaves, had no relatives or other protectors.’’36 While some of these transactions involved limited movements, others saw female slaves transported extended distances to be inserted into new social orders. Political and economic elites were thus able to increase their power and status by expanding their circle of dependents by procuring new slaves from other parts of Africa. While the overall prevalence of coercive migration and other related practices within Africa has declined in recent times,37 the tremendous scale of these long-term efforts to both promote and profit from human mobility needs to be recognized as a central theme of state building in Africa. Another major approach to state efforts to ‘‘expropriate’’ movement involves the shaping and conditioning of existing patterns of movement and migration to suit preferred state designs, core constituent interests, and social formations. A key exponent of this overall approach can be found in John Torpey’s work on the state’s monopolization of legitimate movement.38 Torpey presents mobility in much the same light as Thomas Hobbes represented violence in the era prior to the rise of the sovereign state. Mobility is figured as an endemic practice of all human societies that has on occasion been socially organized and patterned, but that should nonetheless be best understood as essentially anarchical in terms of lacking a single arbiter or authority to distinguish between its legitimate and illegitimate forms. Torpey argues that there has been an identifiable trend since the nineteenth century that has involved states building a set of institutions—identification systems, immigration protocols, immigration laws, border management procedures—that have allowed them to monopolize the capacity to decide what forms of movement are legitimate. Much like any other monopoly, states have increasingly extracted a series of rents through the exercise of this exclusive capacity to legitimate cross-border movement. States have been able to treat the right to move as a commodity of sorts because persons wanting to move have been willing to pay in various ways for the privilege. Their ‘‘payments’’ consist not merely of the fees for passports and visas but also in acts of compliance with state security and health procedures, in acts of supplying the state with information about themselves, and also in acts of remaining ‘‘visible’’ to the state, by dutifully reporting their presence and location. Crucially, while states possess other means of extracting or enforcing these obligations and

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dues, their capacity to use mobility as a commodity is held by Torpey to constitute a particularly effective means of extraction. Equally significant is the fact that this dynamic, while resting in part on the state’s capacity to prevent movement, ultimately tends to be augmented by increasing human mobility. This is evident in immigration control systems, where, by virtue of standardized visa processing fees, increasing numbers of international travelers help fund the operating budget of immigration departments. However, the dynamic is perhaps most patently evident in mobility enforcement operations characterized by systemic corruption, where state agents face strong incentives to promote mobility as a means of generating personal wealth.39 As we shall see below in more depth, state power over mobility becomes especially concentrated in contexts involving the allocation and/or withdrawal of legal permissions to both move and reside in particular territories. In contrast to Torpey’s tendency to frame mobility as a commodity, various other theorists have sought to explore the specific function of mobility in relation to historically constituted forms of social production. In this scenario, expropriation and monopolization appear less as the rentseeking act of modern sovereigns and more as a key dimension of the way societies have come to organize work and social order. One exponent of this approach is Nicholas De Genova, who interprets deportation from a broadly materialist perspective.40 De Genova argues that mobility can be usefully interpreted as a component part of the broad category of activity we describe as ‘‘labor’: ‘‘a necessary premise for the free and purposeful exercise of creative and productive powers.’’41 From this standpoint, movement is a core feature of any process of work, and mobility is a constant feature of any society that features a geographically patterned division of labor. In this sense, state efforts to promote movement can be seen as part of a broader social project to organize production in a way that most effectively contributes to the process of capital accumulation. This perspective shares some features in common with the liberal image of the value of promoting free movements of goods and people, yet offers a different diagnosis of the reasons states might have an interest in promoting certain types of mobility and not others. It is widely recognized that state efforts to prevent human mobility have frequently had limited or qualified success, and that whatever limited success has been achieved has sometimes come at the price of unintended and unexpected consequences. Much the same can be said of promotion. People

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do not always move according to the grand designs of state planners and policy makers, but have instead frequently resisted promotion efforts in all kinds of ways. In cases involving direct compulsion, such as slavery and forced labor, resistance has occasionally involved violent rebellions, but the most common option has tended to be flight, with individuals making efforts to evade recapture and establish new lives in alternative locations (Allina, this volume). In cases involving indirect facilitation, such as institutional and market reforms designed to promote movement, we also regularly encounter countervailing interests in favor of different policies and/or the previous status quo. Furthermore, promotion can sometimes be ineffective or inefficient, with direct resistance being less of an issue than poor implementation or limited state capacities. From this standpoint, promotion must be regarded as an aspiration or agenda that frequently ends up being compromised and contested, rather than a straightforward and clearcut exercise of state power. One of the most significant issues here is that people frequently move in the ‘‘wrong’’ types of ways and/or in the ‘‘wrong’’ types of directions, since promotion is necessarily a selective exercise and people invariably have their own ideas about when, where, and how they should move.

Channeling Mobility: Balancing Prevention and Promotion

It is essential to recognize that prevention and promotion should not be regarded as separate mechanisms, but can instead be best understood as different aspects of a larger whole. State actors and officials are rarely consumed by the risks and threats associated with mobility or utterly driven by the potential for maximizing opportunities and benefits. Rather, we would suggest that they are consistently mindful of both potentialities and attempt to develop plans, policies, and procedures to address both. By making efforts to promote human mobility, states have invariably sought to maintain control, but control through continual conditioning and directing, rather than a uniform aspiration for exclusion or prevention. Similarly, it is necessary to understand official efforts to prevent movement as part of a larger concern with fostering productive, acceptable, and sustainable forms of mobility—through filtering and disciplining movements according to official interests and agendas—rather than as objectives in and of themselves. We use the term channeling to capture the irregular and intermittent

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way in which states seek to determine the speed, rhythm, routes, and meaning of mobility.42 Instead of a prevention/promotion dichotomy, we find it more helpful to speak of a spatially dispersed network of channeling processes: unevenly distributed strategies of surveillance, inducement, facilitation, extraction, gating, transporting, and incarceration through which state power acts directly on mobile behavior and intentions.43 Channeling does not imply a ubiquitous or omniscient state. Instead, it forces us to examine how decision makers continually recalibrate the balance between prevention and promotion at numerous locations and settings. One familiar example of mobility channeling is the operation of immigration controls, which are tasked with both preventing unwanted migrants and with promoting and facilitating the movements of other categories of mobile persons, such as tourists or ‘‘highly skilled’’ migrants. Once we look more broadly, we quickly find that states across history have consistently promoted the movements of peoples from one place to another, but these promotion efforts have also tended to be accompanied by further efforts to prevent migrants from deviating from their designated route while in transit or on arrival. Eric Allina analyzes the characteristics and consequences of these types of schemes are analyzed in more depth later in this volume. His empirical material focuses on central Mozambique, where colonial agents responsible for organizing forced labor programs consistently sought to balance their primary objectives of mobilizing recruits with the difficulties involved in ensuring that workers did not escape en route to their workplaces. Drawing upon the work of Giorgio Agamben, Allina argues that the violence and coercion that colonial administrators deemed necessary to sustain this delicate balance between mobilization and incarceration can be best understood in terms of a series of legal absences that were specifically designed to create vulnerability among mobile African colonial subjects. Similar tensions between promotion and prevention defined processes of colonization and settlement. Most European empires sought to extend their power through emigration programs that were designed to populate new territories with metropolitan peoples, but then subsequently curtailed the movements of colonists upon their arrival. This dynamic was not simply evident in the heyday of segregation programs in the nineteenth century, when racial boundaries proscribed strict limits on the places where colonists could go and with whom they could mix (Vigneswaran, this volume), but can also be found in the earliest days of European imperial

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ventures in Africa, such as the Portuguese conquests of Luanda and Sa˜o Tome. Here, at the very moment when colonial officials were promoting Portuguese migration to Africa, they also sought to limit the risk of imperial ‘‘interlopers’’ intruding on company and Crown claims and/or creating unwanted conflicts in the poorly understood diplomatic worlds of the interior. In her chapter in this collection, Filipa Ribiero da Silva argues that, while the Portuguese state was never highly successful in fulfilling these desires for control, it nonetheless sought to monopolize legitimate movement by way of a delicate combination of prevention and promotion. This suggests the need for significant refinements to Torpey’s thesis on monopolization, which does not trace this historical process further back than the eighteenth century or talk about its roots in far-flung imperial projects. The idiosyncrasies of channeling can sometimes be best observed up close, in everyday encounters between state agents and mobile populations. When officials do not confront people as mere categories for whom there are relevant sets of rules and procedures, but as real people, their power as channeling agents and deciders of ‘‘who gets to move’’ comes into view. This power and these practices have been most commonly documented in the immigration enforcement system, where various studies analyze how border guards decide the fate of would-be immigrants.44 It is important to recognize, however, that channeling frequently occurs a long way from the border. This is particularly an issue in relation to sub-Saharan Africa, thanks in part to a widespread history of internal segregation. The police are the most prominent example of this larger phenomenon. In many African states, the police roadblock is an amorphous channeling tool, randomly popping up suddenly on transport routes to place forms of mobility into question by means of temporary surveillance and control. Roadblocks are most commonly understood as barriers that prevent movement. Yet, if we look closer, we discover that they are also a technique of capitalizing on human mobility. The roadblock creates a legal opportunity to place private citizens under interrogation, thereby triggering a situation where people feel vulnerable because they are in transit and far from home, and it can also generate a form of ‘‘corruption demand’’ wherein the roadblock facilitates bribes that are offered to secure access. Consequentially, the art of policing the roadblock does not lie solely in the physical strength of the officer to prevent the flow of traffic but also in her capacity to channel mobility judiciously through the border post, extracting information, obeisance, and rents as she allows certain people through on selective terms.

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The power to channel mobility lies not only in the use of legitimate violence to stand in the way of mobile persons. In this volume, Darshan Vigneswaran explores how state officials often encourage people to move where they belong by strategic nonintervention: withdrawing from incidents where they have the right to intervene. He examines how the police in post-Apartheid Johannesburg refuse assistance and/or protection to civilians they view as being outside their relevant residential domains. These strategic withdrawals help sustain and reproduce long-standing segregation boundaries whose legitimacy had been challenged from 1994 onward by the new democratic regime. Channeling is not something that only occurs at the proverbial ‘‘coalface’’ of administration and policing, but also extends back to high-level policy makers who attempt, like railway switch controllers, to manipulate broader patterns from afar. Harnessing and channeling mobility have never been easy. While much contemporary theory, particularly that of a Foucauldian persuasion, presents contemporary states as increasingly sophisticated documenters, counters, and analysts of mobile populations, powerful patterns of human mobility consistently escape their purview.45 There is no better example of this than the current efforts to build on the increasingly popular migration and development discourse, which has seen many African states seek to channel their overseas migrants in ways that are economically productive for the state. The characteristics and consequences of these types of development schemes are analyzed in more depth by Nauja Kleist later in this volume. Focusing on recent efforts by the Ghanaian state to mobilize the Ghanaian diaspora for development purposes, Kleist argues that the state proved unable to count, map, or even visualize its diaspora, let alone understand its overseas migrants’ motivations to stay where they were, remit, or return. How can African policy makers successfully channel mobility in line with developmental agenda when ‘‘seeing like a state’’ entails groping around in the dark, trying to find the population one is supposed to control? Here, as elsewhere, channeling can be best understood as an aspiration and agenda, which frequently proves difficult to translate into desired policy outcomes. It is important to note that channeling can also play an important role in both constructing and classifying where particular categories of mobile population fit within the prevailing social and political order. In his chapter on the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, Simon Turner illustrates how mobility has given rise to unique forms of political ‘‘community,’’ in which

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the contemporary Rwandan state has attempted to govern and classify populations who have either left the country or recently returned from abroad. Despite an official discourse of national unity and equality, the individual citizen’s position in society depends on his or her migration history, creating and sustaining de facto forms of layered citizenship in which some categories are promoted while other forms of belonging are circumscribed and prevented. Turner argues that the Rwandan genocide not only provides the basis for a biopolitical ethos of national unity and reconciliation, but also defines who should be included in the new Rwanda and how they should behave. Crucially, these determinations are predicated on an ordering of the population according to histories of mobility: in flight, exile, and return, with state power being concentrated at the point of classification. In this context, channeling occurs retrospectively, with power being vested in classification. This brief introduction to the volume’s empirical examples of channeling processes should give our readers a sense of the diverse institutional settings in sub-Saharan Africa where the politics of mobility takes place. As we have seen, state efforts to balance the goals of promotion and prevention are not only evident in the decisions of immigration policy makers to permit or refuse immigrants’ entry. Our contributors demonstrate that channeling can be found—at a minimum—in the efforts of colonial governments to mobilize workforces and colonize newly acquired lands, in the way national development agencies attract their diaspora home and redefine the political community, and in the way police officers mark out urban territories. In pointing toward this institutional and everyday diversity, we have also done some important groundwork for the second thread of our ‘‘mobility makes states’’ argument: that human mobility shapes the spatial distribution and concentration of state power and authority. Our contributors challenge the image of a fixed and static state that is concerned only with stopping foreign migrants at its border, and instead direct our attention to the diverse range of locations and settings—including colonial hinterlands, workplaces, camps, foreign countries, and city streets—where gatekeepers push and pull mobile populations in different directions and in the service of various ends. In doing so, they challenge us to think about the state less as a unitary container of populations and more as a more variegated, incomplete, and dispersed network of order and control. In the next section, we build on this point to explore how and why human

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mobility determines where state power is concentrated and where it is more dispersed. In doing so, we move on from the question of why states seek to control human mobility to consider how human mobility constitutes the state itself.

Concentrations of Power and State Portability Like butter on toast, state power and authority can be spread across space in many different ways.46 We believe that this variability can be usefully described in terms of changing ‘‘concentrations of power.’’ In locations and settings where power and authority are heavily concentrated, the state tends to be the main referent point for collective decision-making processes. In locations and contexts where power and authority are more diffuse or erratic, the opposite is the case. To further develop this line of argument, we need to unpack the basic idea that states can be understood as spatially malleable entities. Most historians in our audience will find these opening remarks unremarkable. Histories of empires, city-states, absolute monarchies, nomadic peoples, and federations take it for granted that past forms of the state were more capable of achieving their objectives and influencing outcomes in particular locations and time periods and less capable of doing the same in others. This point becomes more controversial when considered in light of more contemporary scholarship on the state. The fiction that the state possesses an evenly distributed and unchallenged authority across a contiguous and unitary jurisdiction has powerfully shaped modern political science and international law in particular, and much of the social sciences more generally. This is despite the fact that even a cursory glance at the empirical reality of state power—in Africa and elsewhere—reveals a far more differentiated picture. Power varies across the jurisdiction of modern states: being relatively more secure in capital cities, military installations, and government offices, but far more contingent in relation to private property, gated communities, urban ‘‘estuaries,’’ some rural settings, and/or rebelheld territory. Uniform territorial control is not an empirical reality, but an aspiration that has only ever been partially, unevenly, and episodically realized in practice. This point can be developed by briefly reflecting on the character of historical states in Africa. As is well known, many precolonial states in

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Africa did not necessarily rule over either clearly defined or territorially demarcated areas (although boundaries could sometimes be created, especially via geographic features such as rivers, mountains, and oceans). Relations among political elites were frequently organized on the basis of complex webs of patronage, lineage, and dependency, rather than sovereign equality, thereby making it often extremely difficult to distinguish firmly between ‘‘inside’’ and ‘‘outside,’’ since vassals and allies were sometimes difficult to tell apart.47 This has most commonly been described in terms of a core and periphery model, with strong state power consolidated at the center or capital and fading away into lesser/uneven degrees of influence in more peripheral regions. Instead of exercising authority on the basis of exclusive control over fixed borders, precolonial elites in Africa frequently —but by no means uniformly—exercised personalized authority on the basis of ‘‘rights in persons,’’ or control over people, rather than uniform control over a clearly demarcated territory.48 The late nineteenth-century conquest of Africa introduced a new and very different doctrine of sovereign state authority, which was most famously articulated in terms of the ‘‘effective occupation’’ of demarcated territories, yet the implementation of this doctrine consistently fell short in all kinds of ways. Territorial control was uniform in theory but tended to be uneven, incomplete, or episodic in practice. Moreover, evolving patterns of colonial penetration were bound up in complex interactions and arrangements with local elites, some preexisting and some newly minted, and a variety of private actors and corporate interests, thereby creating cross-cutting webs of political prerogatives and patronage.49 Consequently, there were many occasions where territorial, political, and legal demarcations within colonies had far more tangible effects than similar demarcations between colonies. As we have already intimated, the uneven and episodic distribution of state power has not gone unnoticed, although much of the relevant literature is European in focus. Take, for example, the works of Hendrik Spruyt and Benno Teschke, who have individually explored how varying political configurations in early modern Europe generated different spatial configurations—city-leagues, city-states, and feudal lordships—which in turn eventually lost out to the ‘‘more evenly spread’’ modern state.50 Working from a broadly constructivist perspective, Darshan Vigneswaran has argued that these political variations may be better understood as the product of ‘‘mental maps’’: shared understandings of the nature and purpose of

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the social and political landscape.51 For his brand of research, concentrations of power are first conceived in political theory and public discourse and then rather imperfectly applied in practice. Working from a somewhat different starting point, contemporary political geographers have offered a decidedly physical take on the link between space and power, supporting the proposition that the distribution of state power is chiefly decided by the distribution of physical infrastructure—including border walls, government offices, armed vehicles, surveillance devices, and information technology—across space.52 Finally, we have the recent work of Catherine Boone, who has highlighted the central role of ‘‘uneven institutional topographies’’ in (re)shaping different balances of power between central and regional elites within various postcolonial African states. According to Boone, it is essential to take into account ‘‘the spatial dimension of institutional variation,’’ which is in turn closely related to the ‘‘concentration and deconcentration of the government apparatus.’’53 While arguments of individual authors differ, the overall picture that emerges is one in which state power ends up being more relevant and consequential in some spatial settings and configurations than in others. We are strongly supportive of this overall picture, but we also seek to introduce an additional element into the heart of this story: the way in which patterns of human mobility determine the distribution and duration of concentrations of power. Here, we think it is useful to introduce the concept of state ‘‘portability.’’ ‘‘Portability’’ refers to the movements of both state agents and civilians and the implications of their movements for the exercise of power. The simplest way of stating this argument is as follows: state power is exercised by, between, and over people, so when people move, so too does the state. It is worth emphasizing here that this claim—which emphasizes how power tends to be spatially distributed via mobility—also builds on an emergent theme in the extant literature. In this respect, we pick up on ideas that have been strongly emphasized in the study of feudalism, which demonstrates why premodern states focused their resources on processes (campaigns, colloquia, ceremonies, and such) that compelled the members of the elite to congregate.54 In these works, the movement of people was essential because it allowed potential allies to engage in bonding rituals that symbolized their allegiance to one another and shared acceptance of a given hierarchy. Looking to more recent work, we seek to build on some of the literature that has been inspired by Foucault to study how state power is

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generated in, through, and over human bodies.55 However, whereas this literature has often tended to depict state authority as totalizing and ubiquitous, we emphasize how the mobility of human bodies makes for a highly variable and geographically differentiated relationship to the state. The most straightforward variant of our portability argument pertains to the movement of what we might call state ‘‘agents’’: people who are formally sanctioned and empowered representatives of the state. State agents are assigned certain prerogatives and capacities on the basis of their institutional standing and then end up exercising their rights on the basis of their presence in—or absence from—specific locations. Roadblocks, raids, military expeditions, official delegations, public inspectors, and many other forms of state intervention can be usefully conceptualized in terms of portable concentrations of power and authority. Let us try to develop this point through illustration. One key example of portability takes the form of the movements of military forces, which have the capacity to project power over new territories by way of conquest and to consolidate state power over existing territories by concentrating troops in specific sites, such as potentially rebellious regions. Another key example involves the movements of diplomats and the establishment of diplomatic missions. Diplomats provide an excellent example of state portability because they carry the authority of the state with them as they move throughout the globe. As these examples begin to make clear, state portability is bound up in the often temporary and contingent exercise of power over space via the movements of state agents with vested authority. It is important to recognize that the language of contingency can speak to fleeting and limited influence as much as to strength and capacity. If military forces are withdrawn, for example, then state authority diminishes as a consequence. The basic idea here is that when state agents are absent from a specific location or region for an extended period, and/or lack sufficient capacities to effectively shape events within their immediate environment, it becomes necessary to think in terms of the spatial dissipation or absence of state power and authority. The authority and power of the state will wax and wane over time, and the presence, absence, and capacity of state agents help us understand and explain these processes. To understand this point better, it is necessary to reflect on a much larger relationship between political status and human mobility. The main point at issue here is the way in which the status that particular individuals

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acquire as a consequence of their assigned position within state institutions plays a major role in shaping how and why they move. Some obvious examples here are the movements of soldiers and police, but this dynamic also extends to all kinds of state officials, from heads of state and senior judicial officers to health care providers, regional governors, public inspectors, and financial agents. When state officials move, their status and authority tend to move with them, thereby contributing to state portability. It is important to recognize, moreover, that this dynamic often extends to the capacity of the state to invest private agents with various types of political and legal status via ‘‘private indirect governance,’’ which in turn helps facilitate the mobility of various corporate actors, private security forces, and representatives from the aid and development sectors.56 As Boone has convincingly demonstrated, aspirations to state centralization have been regularly complicated and compromised by countervailing power and authority exercised by local and regional elites, so it does not automatically—or even regularly—follow that the movements of state officials generate the desired institutional results. To better understand this relationship between official status and state portability, we need to look a little more closely into theories that purport to explain the internal workings of states in Africa. On this front, a number of influential scholars have pointed to the enduring significance of various forms of patron-client relations, state predation, diversionary nationalism, informal networks and allegiances, external rent seeking (or extraversion) and sometimes even the criminalization of the state.57 While individual scholars employ different frameworks to highlight specific dynamics, all these approaches can nonetheless be loosely grouped together around the general notion that evolving forms of communal membership and personal allegiance have regularly trumped formal rules and expectations when it comes to how individuals perform their official functions and that these allegiances have, in turn, often resulted in state officials placing themselves and their compatriots over the more general interests of the state and its citizens. To understand why and how state institutions and officials behave in the ways they do—or so this general line of argument goes—we need to recognize that formal structures tend to be inhabited by individuals who tend to operate on the basis of complex webs of personal obligation, strategic self-interest, ethnic identities, and family origins. This literature on informal networks and patrimonial ties is especially relevant because it highlights the actions and outlooks of the specific

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individuals who populate state institutions, rather than treating the state as a unitary actor or monolithic entity. Moreover, it also helps us understand some of the calculations and relationships that shape the behavior of these individuals, with informal bonds of membership, interest, and allegiance regularly overshadowing formal rules and procedures. This helps explain why state portability in Africa tends to be implicated in a variety of problematic activities, with corruption, predation, and even ethnic cleansing all being directly enabled by the mobility of state officials. When political relationships between core and peripheral regions are relatively tenuous, which is the case in a number of countries in Africa, then movements backward and forward between regions become central to statecraft. As a consequence, state portability in contemporary Africa has most relevance to the mobility of state agents and institutions within sovereign territorial boundaries. This does not necessarily mean, however, that state portability conforms to a singular logic or pattern. As is usually the case with such matters, many different institutional configurations are possible. The manner in which state power can become concentrated and then dissipate over time is vividly depicted by Oliver Bakewell’s account of the management of human mobility across the Angola-Zambia borderline. During the Angolan conflict, central administrations had not been primarily concerned with staffing the border and a more fluid set of borderland interdependencies began to develop. However, as war gave way to peace, the centralized state apparatuses of both states began to reassert themselves, making the borderline a more prominent marker of local identities, movements, and livelihoods. This was not merely a matter of national governments dictating terms but a story of the way various actors began to incorporate the borderline into their local political projects and designs. In addition to the mobility of state agents, we also need to take into further account the various ways in which civilian populations and related private interests—which are themselves frequently mobile—can serve to facilitate or frustrate the capacity of official state agents to exercise political authority in specific locations. States do not operate in a vacuum, but in rich social and economic contexts made up of a diverse array of potential fellow travelers and opponents of state projects and designs. This point is made abundantly clear in the chapter by Darshan Vigneswaran, which explores how the capacity of the police to achieve outcomes in inner-city Johannesburg waxes and wanes as they traverse that city’s deeply segregated terrain. In one case, he demonstrates how a rowdy group of junior police

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officers are reduced to the role of meek security guards when they enter the wealthy neighborhoods of Johannesburg, where a host of private actors assume the prerogative to decide the outcomes of policing incidents. He contrasts this experience with a discussion of a police officer’s demeanor on his beat in a poorer and largely black residential area nearby, where this lone actor wields his power as violent decision maker with the surety and autonomy of the ideal-typical state agent. In both cases, the capacity of state agents to wield power depends heavily on the presence or absence of sufficiently powerful countervailing civilian interests. Whereas Vigneswaran’s chapter is primarily interested in how mobile state agents traverse different environments, other contributions to this collection are more concerned with what happens when civilian populations are themselves on the move. On this front, it is essential to keep in mind that the functionality and legitimacy of the state tend to rely heavily on various civilian contributions and related private projects. One of the strongest examples of a close alignment between states and selected civilians can be found under colonial rule in Africa, where there was frequently a fine line between state officials and European civilians, who contributed to the success of the colonial project by relocating to various locations in Africa and pursuing various private projects that greatly benefited the colonial state (da Silva this volume). These alignments were by no means perfect, since colonial states frequently sought to defray various costs and complications by passing them on to civilians (and vice versa), but it is, nonetheless, possible to speak of broad state-civilian alliances under colonial rule that saw mobile civilian populations from Europe and elsewhere play a central role in enabling and extending state power and authority. As Pamila Gupta demonstrates in her chapter in this collection, these alignments also had major ramifications when colonial rule ended. Focusing on the dislocations and spatial reconfigurations associated with the end of Portuguese colonial rule in Mozambique and Angola, she explores how decolonization resulted in both state officials and European civilians relocating from the interior to the coast and then frantically seeking to move their persons and possessions to other territorial jurisdictions. One of the key contributions of this chapter is to avoid abstractions such as a singular state or population, and instead focus on individual experiences and movements during this key moment of spatial transformation. Contemporary international migrants are a further example of the constraints and opportunities associated with evolving relationships between

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state agents and mobile civilian populations. The status of international migrants as citizens of a particular country means that states exercise certain types of jurisdiction over them—ranging from passport renewal and consular support to provisions for deportation and extradition—even when they are located abroad. As Nauja Kleist demonstrates in her chapter in this volume, this mobility presents challenges for state agents as they seek to further state interests by drawing upon the resources and expertise of their overseas citizens. Ghanaian policy makers believed that including diasporic communities in the nation’s economic development plans would allow the state to tap into a transnational stream of foreign exchange and goodwill. However, in attempting to implement these designs, the state became stretched very thinly across space, as the complex and dispersed character of international migrants of Ghanaian origin created huge complications for Ghanaian officials and thereby thwarted initial state aspirations in this arena. Two further chapters in the collection also delve into the ramifications of this connection between mobile civilian populations and state authority and legitimacy. While the empirical cases under consideration are very different, both chapters underscore the general point that mobile populations regularly generate all kinds of limitations and complications in addition to opportunities and attractions. The challenges human mobility poses for the state and its agents are particularly evident in Benedetta Rossi’s research on Niger, which explores the possibility for an intrinsic relationship between human mobility and a form of nonstate political power—or ‘‘kinetocracy.’’ In Niger, political status has long been defined in terms of different experiences of mobility, with power being temporarily concentrated in particular contexts and locations through evolving relationships between centralized states and desert-based societies. Rossi studies how political authority has been constituted and reconstituted at the desert’s edge from the precolonial to the colonial era. Human mobility involves far more than the movement of people and possessions from one place to another, but ultimately serves as a foundational axis for interactions between state and nonstate actors. In a somewhat similar vein, Loren Landau explores conditions in which human mobility is so pronounced and prolific as to make it unlikely that state authority and legitimacy can be maintained. Human mobility, whether in the form of migration, trade, or daily commuting, has always been a crucial building block of the city. Yet, as Africa enters an era of

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profound and sustained urbanization, patterns of movement and settlement are dictated by a host of nonstate power brokers, who barely recognize the authority or presence of state policy or dictates. Migrants in turn look to these other actors, and not state agents, for the provision of classic state services such as justice, welfare, and security. Landau uses the term urban ‘‘estuaries’’ to describe these areas of Maputo, Johannesburg, and Nairobi, where conventional state actors are rarely present or recognized. In these estuarial zones, the ‘‘flow’’ of human mobility creates a population with so little in common that they barely afford one another recognition as fellow individuals in a common society, let alone participants in a common political enterprise or members of a single state. In these types of settings, mobility can sometimes be said to ‘‘unmake’’ the state.

Concluding Remarks One of the main goals of this chapter has been to move past what we regard as an ongoing impasse in recent academic discussions regarding the state in general and the relationship between the state and mobility in Africa in particular. This impasse can be chiefly traced to the now long-standing veneration and reification of a highly stylized image of the state as a preventer of human mobility that only occasionally captures substantive practices, yet continues to play a preeminent role in defining the terms of theoretical and empirical inquiry.58 Over the past two decades, the disciplines of political science and international relations have given sustained consideration to the idea that the sovereign territorial state has come under increasing threat from a combination of external intrusions, such as the growing power of nonstate actors, and to internal failures, such as a ‘‘hollowing out’’ of state authority. While some important work has been done here, too much effort has nonetheless been devoted to the task of repeatedly cataloguing all of the ways in which states today are not like an idealized vision of (Western/modern) states in the recent past. A somewhat similar story applies to recent—and more empirically grounded—research in the interdisciplinary fields of migration studies and African studies, where researchers have devoted considerable time and energy to the task of documenting exactly how and where specific political institutions in sub-Saharan Africa fall short of Eurocentric expectations of statehood. In the case of migration,

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this general approach has most commonly found expression in analysis of the substantive limitations of official efforts to prevent international migration. This chapter has developed an alternative analytical framework— mobility makes states—for thinking about the state in Africa and its relationship to human mobility. As we have seen, this relationship has always been extremely diverse, so our principal challenge has been to both recognize and conceptualize this diversity without falling into the trap of reducing diversity to an aberration or exception that falls short of the standards expected of ‘‘normal’’ states. As we have seen above, practices that might initially appear as unexpected or unusual can often be better understood as examples of recurring themes. Whereas we might have once thought that a state that could not prevent cross-border migration was moribund, we have argued that large-scale human movements may in some cases illustrate the successful outcomes of state efforts to promote mobility. Where we might have once seen the state as a fixed spatial entity that is inherently antagonistic to mobile populations and processes, now we can begin to see why the state exercises uneven and episodic power and authority over mutable spatial landscapes. Grappling with this diversity can only ever be a first step. Theoretical endeavor will only be marginally successful in improving analysis if its primary goal remains typological: to identify the various forms of political and social institutions and document their operations. Genuine theory building must go one step further. In this respect, we part ways with many of our fellow travelers from the discipline of anthropology, who seem to be largely satisfied with a version of theory that primarily involves the attempt to explore difference, uniqueness, and variation and then focuses on providing this increasingly complex array of social and political forms with an array of suitable zeitgeist terms. We find these types of approaches to be particularly dissatisfying within the context of politics in Africa, where the claim that many forms of statehood are possible has never been in question but has rather always been the norm. In direct contrast, we believe that the analyst’s task should be to specify how various dimensions of statehood combine to influence concrete decision making processes and shape the topography of state power. To help in this regard, we have encouraged our contributors to this volume to talk about the way that state decisions to channel mobility are made in specific policies and interactions between officials and mobile populations. We have also introduced the concept of concentrations, to help

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our researchers map state power. As should be clear from our introductory remarks above, each of the case studies in this volume has used these concepts as invitations to drill down into specific examples of states and their means of controlling mobility in Africa, charting out diversity within the context of recurring patterns.

PA R T I Channeling Human Mobility

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Chapter 2

Portuguese Empire Building and Human Mobility in Sa ˜o Tome´ and Angola, 1400s–1700s Filipa Ribeiro da Silva

On July 10, 1638, skipper Cornelis Pietersz Croeger and pilot Pieter Tamesz arrived in Sa˜o Tome´ with the Alkmaar. The ship had been freighted by Jacob Pietersz de Vries, merchant in Amsterdam, and was manned by a Dutch crew. Yet she was traveling with ‘‘passes and licenses’’ issued by the city of Dunkirk in France. Following the arrival of the ship, these documents were presented to the Portuguese royal governor for inspection, who expressed doubts about their authenticity. As a consequence, the ship, crew, and cargo were held in Sa˜o Tome´ for more than six months, while the governor consulted with representatives of the Portuguese Crown in Iberia regarding how to proceed.1 Like the Alkmaar and her crew, the movements of other ships, sailors, merchants, and passengers were routinely subject to similar regulations and permissions whenever they entered ports in Europe, Africa, the Americas, and beyond. Much like modern airports, these ports were key sites where state power was concentrated and where the channeling of mobility took place. While this particular story is chiefly concerned with the policing of mobility, there were also numerous occasions and settings where the European rulers of expanding empires, be they Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, French, or English, also made sustained efforts to promote the longdistance movement of both people and goods. In an era where maritime

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travel was central to the expansion, security, administration, and profitability of overseas imperial possessions, state building was inevitably bound up in the portability of state agents and institutions, such as the role and person of the governor mentioned above, and in the success or failure of efforts to harness and channel mobility toward various political, economic, and social ends. In the following pages, we examine how early modern states with extended overseas territories sought to promote, prevent, and channel mobility and the effects of these only partially successful efforts on state and empire building. Building an overseas empire required sustained efforts to promote the movement of people and goods to help develop settlements and economic projects in new colonial spaces. However, maritime enterprise and colonial settlement also regularly threatened to escape metropolitan control, so states were obliged to take measures both to prevent and police the mobility and activities of suspect individuals. By transplanting and adapting metropolitan models to new territorial settings, states such as Portugal were able to concentrate power successfully at specific locations in many corners of the globe. Here, we will be looking at Portugal and two of its settlements in sub-Saharan Africa: Sa˜o Tome´ and Angola. We will start by looking into the debates surrounding the process of state building in an early modern imperial context. We will then proceed with a brief examination of the nature of the Portuguese Crown and its project of state building on the eve of maritime expansion. This will be followed by a study of the various groups of people moving within imperial domains in African regions, paying special attention to differences in regulation concerning Portuguese subjects, foreigners of European origin, Eurafricans, and Africans. In the closing section, we will analyze the difficulties faced by the Crown in its efforts to channel mobility through its network of possessions and institutions. To do so, our analysis will focus on three key historical moments for Portuguese settlement in this region and its impact on African communities. In the case of Portuguese empire, the aforementioned process of colonial formation and consolidation may be divided into three main periods, during which different policies regarding human mobility and political authority were advanced by the Crown. The fifteenth century saw early expansionary efforts linked to official efforts to promote the movement of private actors to new colonial areas brought under the sovereignty of the Crown. The following century was marked by several attempts on the part

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of the Crown to gain greater control over colonial spaces, their inhabitants, and the flow of people and products within the empire. This was achieved by a two-part strategy, which saw the Crown create a more sophisticated bureaucratic machine at home while simultaneously transferring several royal and political institutions overseas to guarantee a more effective presence. This system of royal representation overseas was key to overseas governance, the exercise of justice and military power, and the partial regulation of mobile products and people within imperial spaces. Due to growing competition from other European states with imperial ambitions, the Crown introduced additional measures to reinforce its control over the flow of people and products within the empire during the seventeenth century, but these efforts often had limited success.

States and Mobility in Historical Perspective In The Invention of the Passport, John Torpey argues that European states have primarily shown ‘‘great interest in identifying and controlling the movement of their subjects/servants’’ in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.2 According to Torpey, it was during this period that states came to effectively monopolize the legitimate means of movement and exert control over subject populations and related patterns of mobility across internal and external borders. His study, therefore, chiefly focuses on the contribution of mobility controls to the formation of nation-states from the nineteenth century onward. With this focus, Torpey leaves the study of mobility and the state in the early modern period only superficially explored. Drawing on examples such as France, England, Prussia, and Russia, which are here primarily understood within a European context, he concludes that, in this earlier period, regulating movement was mainly an internal affair and was chiefly defined by limited forms of state centralization. This is said to have involved a twofold strategy, with one approach being to remove control over mobility from private hands, most notably the nobility and clergy, while simultaneously expanding central control over subject populations for economic purposes, such as the recruitment of a labor force for the army, navy, and other ‘‘public’’ services.3 In Torpey’s argument, control over movement in the early modern era is very much an internal European affair, so his analysis does not systematically engage with the consequences of European imperial and colonial

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expansion, which first created and then subsequently expanded discontinuous political jurisdictions that eventually stretched across oceans to connect distant territories in Africa, the Americas, and Asia. In this larger imperial context, official efforts to control and channel human mobility faced significant logistical, political, and jurisdictional challenges, with maritime networks and ports functioning as key sites through which mobility was both controlled and channeled by the state and its agents. With the notable exception of the Americas, European empires during the early modern era were often comparatively modest affairs in terms of territorial rule—at least in comparison to the conquests of the nineteenth century—yet they were nonetheless one of the main sites of political innovation and state aspiration as far as mobility was concerned. Early modern empires not only played a central role in the political, economic, and social development of states within Europe, but they also posed significant institutional and logistical challenges in relation to communications, transportation, credit, taxation and finance, technological capacity, and political, legal, and religious jurisdiction.4 State and empire building invariably required mobility, since overseas rule and maritime trade could not be conducted without movements, but mobility also regularly presented all kinds of challenges and complications to state power and authority, since far-flung mobile populations and goods proved to be difficult to channel and control. Much of the early impetus behind maritime expansion came from private initiatives and investments involving merchants, religious missions, adventurers, settlers, and migrant laborers. European states often followed in the wake of these private initiatives and were therefore obliged to find ways to (re)assert their authority over people, products, and ideas within their own empires, neighboring and rival European empires, and in relation to American, African, and Asian states. In the following sections of this chapter, we will examine how a small early modern European state like Portugal attempted to control and channel the movements of both its subjects and foreigners within imperial domains in sub-Saharan Africa. The Portuguese State on the Eve of Expansion: A Brief Introduction When overseas expansion began, Portugal was still in many ways a medieval kingdom. The king held the power to define the political, administrative,

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and financial bodies to support the government of the kingdom. The central government initially comprised the Council of State (Conselho de Estado) and the Treasury Council (Casa dos Contos, later named Conselho da Fazenda), but in the late sixteenth century, the king also established the Council of the Indies (Conselho das I´ndias, later named Overseas Council, Conselho Ultramarino) in an effort to engage more effectively with territories and trade outside Europe.5 These key political bodies were further supported by allied judicial institutions and legal codes, such as the Royal Supreme Courts—namely, the Casa da Suplicac¸a˜o and the Desembargo do Pac¸o—which proved to be key legal instruments at the disposal of the king.6 However, the administration of many territories within Portugal—both urban and rural –was also formally delegated by the king to private nobility and clergy, as well as to religious and military orders. Additionally, some urban centers were authorized to appoint their own rulers, who exercised significant autonomy over the governance of their town and its hinterland (termo). In theory, these town councils defended the interests of the common population against the abuses of the nobility, clergy, and the members of other religious organizations, who were usually the main landlords. Due to these arrangements, the power of the Crown was often limited in respect to territories under the rule of the nobility, church, or town councils. Relationships between these groupings were, in turn, mediated through a representative assembly: the Cortes (with the king exercising a right to convoke or cancel gatherings).7 As we shall see below, the circumscribed and decentralized character of the state had a direct bearing on the policies and strategies adopted in the early stages of maritime expansion. Since the Crown had limited financial and institutional resources, private initiatives and investments played a key role in relation to patterns of settlement and economic development. During the early modern period, indirect taxation was the main source of income for the Portuguese Crown. Taxes over the internal and external circulation of people and products amounted to 70 percent of Portugal’s annual revenue in the last quarter of the sixteenth century, excluding the profits generated from overseas territories.8 This meant that the Crown had a major stake in developing systems to regulate and promote foreign trade in general and overseas trade in particular. To ensure that taxes were paid, the state was obliged to pay attention to the movements and activities of settlers, merchants, and maritime vessels. In addition, all products and enslaved Africans transported between different coastal areas of the African

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continent, or from Africa to the Americas and Europe, needed to be inspected by a network of Crown officials and institutions.9 This web of officials and institutions spread throughout the empire, encompassing Portugal, African settlements, the Americas, and the Estado da I´ndia. As we shall see below, both the economic proceeds and processes of extraction associated with the Portuguese maritime empire played a key role in extending and strengthening centralized state authority from the early sixteenth century onward. During this period, the relative bargaining power of the Crown increased on many fronts, while the meetings of the Cortes became less frequent, reducing opportunities for negotiation between domestic elites and the Crown. In this sense, this chapter contributes to the ‘‘mobility makes states’’ argument by demonstrating how the regulation of mobility became a core means by which the colonial state extracted surpluses and ensured its continual growth. The Portuguese empire was developed and consolidated through a network of military and commercial posts stretching across the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans. This network primarily involved coastal sites and economic activities in adjacent hinterlands. The most successful cases of settlement and economic development involve Madeira, the Azores, and Brazil. In the Atlantic, there were other important settlements in Cape Verde, Sa˜o Tome´, and Angola and commercial posts in Senegambia, Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone, the Gold and Slave Coasts, and the kingdom of Kongo. All these posts and settlements were regularly visited by Portuguese and foreign merchants and by settlers established nearby. Here, we will pay attention to the flow of people to and in Sa˜o Tome´ and Angola, as well as the efforts of the Crown to channel mobility.

Building Empire by Channeling Mobility Portuguese expansion in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans was legitimated by the pope, who endorsed Portuguese political authority over many newly ‘‘discovered’’ territories. Translating this authority from paper to practice required numerous alliances with private actors and interests, who helped expand Portuguese empire both militarily and commercially. Through royal donations, newly ‘‘discovered’’ territories were granted to private

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individuals (donata´rios). The beneficiaries of this policy were usually noblemen, who divided the land (donataria) into a series of parcels (capitaniadonataria). These parcels were then granted to a captain (capita˜odonata´rio), usually a member of the beneficiary’s noble house.10 Together, the donata´rio and the capita˜o-donata´rio were responsible for populating these new territories and promoting their economic development via agriculture, crafts, and/or commerce. They were also given responsibility for the government, exercise of justice, and military defense of their territories. As part of the settlement process, significant numbers of migrants would also relocate to these new territories, residing under the jurisdiction of the donata´rio or capita˜o-donata´rio. The territory of Angola, for instance, was granted by the Crown to the nobleman Paulo Dias de Novais in the 1570s. The capita˜o-donata´rio was granted permission to occupy and explore thirty-five leagues of land along the coast, starting in the Kwanza River and going southward. Within ten years, Novais was expected to promote settlement and the development of agriculture covering an area of at least twenty leagues inland. These territories were to be divided into parcels and granted to free settlers, to be chosen by Novais. To develop his new colony, Novais was obliged to carry with him eleven ships, and four hundred men, including skilled workers, along with six horses. Within six years of his arrival, he was required to have a total of one hundred Portuguese families, including men, women, and children, residing within his settlement.11 Without sustained political and economic efforts to promote human mobility, settlements such as Angola would never have been viable. It is clear from historical records that attracting sufficient investors to unknown and sometimes hostile territories was not an easy task. To help develop colonial ventures, the Crown accorded certain economic privileges to private actors. Paulo Dias de Novais was accorded numerous economic privileges by the Crown, including a monopoly over fishing, the extraction of salt, and the usage of watermills. He was also awarded permission to export annually one hundred slaves tax free and to receive one-third of all taxes and duties collected in the Dande-Kwanza region during his lifetime. Finally, Novais and his successors were also authorized to collect and manage all land leases and rents in the captaincy.12 Convincing individuals to settle in these remote territories proved to be a challenge for the donata´rio and capita˜o-donata´rio. Consequently, the

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Crown took further measures to promote the process of settlement and economic development under the initiative of private actors. Individuals willing to settle in new overseas territories were granted certain fiscal exemptions as well as commercial privileges. Permanent settlers in Sa˜o Tome´, for instance, were granted commercial privileges to trade with the nearest coastal areas, such as the Gold Coast, the Bights of Benin and Biafra, Cape Lopez, the Loango Coast, and the rulers and traders of Kongo and Angola.13 By so doing, the Crown strengthened the relationship between settlers and the state and expanded the number of noble clients closely associated with the royal house. The donation system also made it possible to guarantee the occupation of territories by Portuguese subjects, which was essential to justifying Portuguese sovereignty in the eyes of rival foreign powers. Thanks to the significant private investment and input that took place, the Crown was able to develop new territories and opportunities within African territories that would not have been viable with state financial resources alone. A continuous European presence was required in order to legitimate and sustain Portuguese territorial authority in Africa. Getting sufficient numbers of Europeans to relocate to Africa, either short- or long-term, consistently proved to be a difficult task. Despite the commercial incentives mentioned earlier, Europeans were reluctant to settle due to the distance between sub-Saharan Africa and Europe, the small number of profitable economic activities, the harshness of the climate, and the high levels of mortality among Europeans in African colonies. Since recruitment was so difficult, it proved necessary to make allowances for people from different backgrounds, with both free Portuguese migrants and other free European migrants being equally accommodated. Since migrants from Europe were reluctant to volunteer in sufficient numbers—and the overall number of European migrants remained relatively small throughout the early modern period—the Portuguese Crown also resorted to forced migration schemes involving both criminals and orphans. From the perspective of the Crown, criminals and orphans were a cheap reservoir of manpower that could be easily dispatched to colonize overseas territories, to serve in the navy and army, and to construct and repair public buildings. In addition, their movements were relatively easily controlled by the state. In the early years of settlement in Sa˜o Tome´ and Angola, the Crown disposed of its orphans and exiles mainly to compensate for the high mortality rates among settlers, as well as to meet a shortage of skilled

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workers, and above all, to recruit military forces for these territories.14 In this early period, both orphans and convicts benefited from relative autonomy once they had been forcibly relocated. In Sa˜o Tome´, for example, the Crown granted each convict ‘‘permission to import goods from Portugal and to conduct slave raids in the Mina areas. . . . Each convict was [also] to be given a male or female slave for his personal service.’’15 The same policy applied in Angola. The relative autonomy initially offered to convicts and orphans during the early period of settlement later emerged as a problem for local Crown representatives as they sought to assert central authority.16 By the late fifteenth century, as the Portuguese Crown became wealthier and more powerful, these early measures to promote the mobility of free and forced settlers to colonial spaces were replaced by a new set of royal measures with a twofold purpose: to centralize administration, judicial authority, and military power; and to control the mobility of people and the flow of products.

Expanding and Centralizing State Infrastructure in Sa˜o Tome´ and Angola Throughout the sixteenth century, the Crown made sustained efforts to bring imperial spaces such as Sa˜o Tome´ and Angola under its direct jurisdiction and administration. This meant challenging the earlier donation system by (i) reducing their lifespan; (ii) shifting away from donations and toward fixed term buying, selling, and renting contracts; (iii) refusing confirmation to donations previously granted; and (iv) claiming state jurisdiction over previously donated territories. These measures were part of a general policy to shift from private to royal administration and aimed at reinforcing the central authority and power of the Crown both in Portugal and across overseas territories.17 Mobility was a key feature of this larger political transformation. Between 1587 and 1609, new forms of royal governance replaced the capita˜es-donata´rios system in Sa˜o Tome´ and Angola. At the heart of this new regime was a captain-governor who was chosen from among the members of the court (either bureaucrats or noblemen) and appointed by the king in reward for previous services. There were two distinct jurisdictions in operation. The captain-governor in Sa˜o Tome´ exercised authority over the island chain, whereas the captain-governor of Angola ruled over the

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captaincy previously donated to Paulo Dias de Novais, as well as adjacent Portuguese posts in Kongo and Benguela.18 To rule over an expanding Angolan hinterland, the Crown established administrative and military commands in key points in Kongo, along the Kwanza River, and in Benguela. These small settlements had their own governments, headed by a captain or captain-general appointed by the governor of Angola or the Crown. This royal official held administrative power to rule over Portuguese fortresses, commercial posts, and their surrounding hinterlands. Responsible for the protection of Portuguese forts, posts, and their populations, as well as for the security of neighboring regions, their fairs, land routes, and waterways, they were the most significant sign of Portuguese authority over extensive areas of the Angolan borderlands and the main gate keepers for the African internal frontier.19 Consequently, they were assigned a key role in monitoring circulation of goods and people—of either European or African descent—in these territories. In the late sixteenth century, the military and defensive functions of the capita˜es-donata´rios were formally taken over by the Crown. The captaingovernors became the highest military authority and were held responsible for the maintenance of fortresses and equipment, the recruitment of soldiers, general military organization, and defense against foreign naval attack and indigenous territorial incursions. In its attempt to organize military institutions in Sa˜o Tome´ and Angola, the Crown attempted to impose a new monopoly over the exercise of legitimate violence by developing and supervising local militias. All male settlers between eighteen and sixty of either European, mixed, or African descent were forced to serve in these militias without payment. They were compelled to take part in military training and regular surveillance exercises, be present at emergency calls, and acquire and maintain their own weapons. In an effort to centralize and regulate military defense, the Crown went as far as to determine the quality, type, and quantity of weapons and animals that its subjects—either Portuguese or foreigners—were authorized to use according to their social status and wealth.20 In Angola, the Crown took a step further, instructing the captain-governors to formalize the organization of African auxiliary troops (Guerra preta). Recruited in the territories of the Angolan chieftaincies (sobados) under Portuguese influence (the borderlands of the Portuguese presence in Angola), these free African warriors, usually members of the military forces of Angolan rulers, were organized in regiments under the command of an Angolan leader, integrated into the Portuguese military,

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and subordinated to the command of a Portuguese or mixed-descent captain-general.21 Despite not having an explicit aim at regulating human mobility, these measures were designed to bring all men physically capable under some sort of military discipline, which in turn established the Crown as a key arbiter over legitimate and illegitimate forms of movement, since militias were regularly obliged to move when and where the state required them. In Sa˜o Tome´, these measures were especially useful in preventing manumitted slaves from supporting slave insurgencies, thereby creating a further institutional barrier against the illicit movement of enslaved Africans. In Angola, the presence of Angolan warriors fighting alongside Portuguese and other Europeans was particularly advantageous, given their knowledge of the terrain, local fighting techniques, and movements of troops and war strategies. Moreover, by recruiting soldiers among the military forces of local authorities, the Crown also reduced the risk of military attacks against Portuguese settlements from within colonial domains or from neighboring borderlands, since at least some potential African protagonists were coopted into Portuguese military service. The Crown also took measures to establish a royal monopoly over the exercise of judicial procedures in these territories. First, the Crown appointed and sent judicial supervisors to inspect the exercise of justice by the capita˜es-donata´rios and municipal judges22; second, it established a new royal judicial structure. This involved replacing the capita˜es-donata´rios’ judicial authority in Sa˜o Tome´ and Angola with two judicial districts (ouvidorias) and two auditor-generals (ouvidores-gerais). The latter were expected to have a law degree certified by the Royal High Judicial Court and were appointed by the king.23 Based in Sa˜o Tome´ and Luanda, these auditor-generals exercised judicial authority over criminal and civil causes involving all permanent and temporary residents in Portuguese settlements. They were also authorized to arrest, sentence, and send to Portugal and other overseas possessions common inhabitants, royal officials, and members of the highest social strata. In Sa˜o Tome´ and Angola, the auditor-generals also had additional judicial officials under their authority (ouvidores or capita˜es-mores). Often, the captain-generals of the forts accumulated these judicial functions, with their administrative and military responsibilities described earlier. Usually, these officials were placed in areas that were more difficult to access and had a slightly wider jurisdiction.24 In Angola, the captain-generals of the

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fortresses along the Kwanza River held jurisdiction over civil and criminal cases, including the death penalty, the cutting of limbs, and fines. Under their control were all inhabitants of the forts, both civilian and military, as well as the indigenous population whenever crimes involved Portuguese subjects or other Europeans. Over time, they were also granted authority over a new judicial institution (Juı´zo dos Mocanos) established by the Portuguese Crown in the Angolan hinterland. Headed by a Portuguese judge and supported by a clerk, the Juı´zo was to solve disagreements between local African rulers and common Africans.25 These officials were supposed to have a key role in securing commercial transactions at the neighboring fairs as well as protecting circulation in the nearest land routes and waterways, leading to the fairs, forts, and/or the main ports in Luanda and Benguela. In combination with other military and bureaucratic positions, these judicial authorities helped concentrate state power in specific spatial locations within Portuguese territories. It remained an open question, however, how much these theories of rule corresponded with local day-to-day practices.26

Extracting Wealth from the Movement of People and Goods The aforementioned network of institutions and overseas officials played a central role in relation to state efforts to both regulate and promote commercial activities. Throughout the sixteenth century, the Portuguese Crown exported a series of fiscal and financial institutions to overseas territories and also legislated extensively in relation to the flow of products and people. Until 1443, everyone was free to access the western coast of Africa, its labor force, and its products. That year, the Portuguese king Joa˜o I (1385– 1433) awarded his son Prince Henry the Navigator a monopoly over the western African trade. After Prince Henry’s death in 1460, the monopoly came under the jurisdiction of his noble house and later under the direct control of the Portuguese Crown in the person of King Manuel I (1495– 1521).27 The king attempted to monopolize control over the import and export of enslaved Africans and African products. As the ruler of Portuguese domains in Africa and holders of a monopoly on western African trade, the Portuguese Crown felt entitled to restrain the access of its subjects and foreigners to these regions as well as to attempt to limit their participation in any form of trade. The Crown also felt empowered to exert control

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over the import and export of African laborers, most of whom were enslaved, within their imperial domains and beyond. Establishing commercial and fiscal agencies both at home and throughout the empire was a top priority from the mid-fifteenth century onward. To organize trade and enforce the royal monopolies over western African trade, the Portuguese Crown established an office to control the colonial trade in Lisbon—the House of India and Mina—and founded an extensive network of royal factories overseas.28 Sa˜o Tome´ and Angola, like other areas, witnessed their establishment in major ports: Sa˜o Tome´ and Luanda.29 These factories were mainly warehouses of European goods to be exchanged in the African coastal markets and a stock house of African products to be exported to overseas markets, whereas the House of India and Mina, based in Lisbon, was established as a central clearing house responsible for the freightage and equipage of ships, the provision of supplies to overseas factories, storage of imported overseas goods, supplying European markets, and collecting taxes on the imports of colonial products under the royal monopoly.30 However, the commercial monopoly of the Portuguese Crown on the western African trade was not completely closed to private individuals. From the late fifteenth century, private merchants were able to obtain trading licenses to operate in certain areas and with a specific range of goods.31 By retaining the power to inspect the loading and unloading of ships and lists of cargo, crew, and passengers, the House of India and Mina continued to exercise a degree of control over the circulation of people and commodities entering and leaving Portugal. On the other hand, in Sa˜o Tome´ and Angola the factories monitored the access of Portuguese and foreign ships calling at these regions and monitored and supervised the crew, passengers, and the type and number of slaves and products imported and exported. These factories effectively concentrated state power within specific spatial locations and institutional settings, and thereby played a key role in channeling the movement of free and forced European migrants, as well as enslaved Africans from Angola, Kongo, Loango, and the west Africa coast to the Americas, Europe, and other coastal regions in sub-Saharan Africa. However, from the 1530s onward, the king and his advisers determined that the policy of monopoly trading in combination with the supervision of private participants and trade goods was not the most efficient and cost effective way of either extracting wealth or monitoring movement. So, the

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Crown took two further measures: leasing the management of the monopolies to private businessmen (contratadores),32 and starting to impose and collect taxes over the circulation of people and goods within the empire.33 The decision to lease the management of monopolies can be traced to three main reasons. First, the Crown would receive advance payment based on the expected output of the monopoly. Second, the lease was expected to improve the efficiency of institutional surveillance and thereby reduce losses of capital from smuggling, pirate attacks, and lost ships. Finally, the lease was structured in a way that allowed the Crown to pass on to the contratadores the responsibility of paying the royal officials serving in the forts and settlements within the monopoly areas, thereby saving state funds. Between the 1530s and the 1640s, this became common practice. The different monopolies, namely Cape Verde and Guinea, Sa˜o Tome´ and Angola, were leased out to private businessmen. After the 1530s, the royal monopolies tended to be leased out along with tax collection.34 This new scenario led the Crown to transfer its fiscal system overseas. For this purpose, new customs houses were established in numerous territories, such as Sa˜o Tome´.35 These new establishments gradually took over the functions of the factories mentioned above. In some colonial areas, as in Luanda, customs houses were only established in the late eighteenth century.36 In these cases, the royal factories had their functions partially altered, acquiring supervision power over the access of ships, crews, passengers to the colony, the entrance of products into the territory, the export of Angolan products, and, most important, the hideous but profitable forced migration of enslaved Africans. In the case of Angola, Portuguese officials also claimed the right to collect taxes at fairs located at the outer limits of colonial authority. Here, the Portuguese were also able to compel a number of local rulers (sobados) to pay an annual tribute (tributo dos sobas), which was typically a fixed payment paid in enslaved Africans.37 The annual revenue from this tribute to the Royal Treasury was estimated at 6,000 re´is, almost equivalent to Sa˜o Tome´’s total annual revenue of around 6,500 re´is.38 Much like other means of extracting wealth discussed above, these tributes saw the state generate economic gains through the movement of people and goods. To support these economic and political goals, the state also heavily invested in controlling the legitimate means of movement of its subjects, European foreigners, and Africans (free, manumitted, and enslaved).

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Transferring State Power Overseas to Channel People’s Mobility Within the Empire In Sa˜o Tome´ and Angola, like in other overseas territories, the Portuguese Crown had considerable interest in monitoring the movements of both Portuguese subjects and foreigners. Both populations were targeted by legislation and institutions, regardless of the nature and reason of their travels and stay in these territories. Regulations issued concerned therefore permanent and temporary residents as well as various types of travelers. The mobility and access of Eurafricans and Africans to enter and move within areas under Portuguese control or influence also came under scrutiny, especially after the early sixteenth century. In this respect the territory of Angola is a case in point. In the early years of colonization, settlers in Angola were allowed to sail along the Angolan coast southward up to Angola and northward as far as the Gold Coast and Sa˜o Tome´. They held also permission to navigate local rivers, such as the Kwanza, Dande, and Lucala, among others.39 In regard to the Angolan inland frontier, no restrictions were initially imposed on settlers’ movement. Over time, the number and frequency of incursions into the interior increased. These incursions were chiefly characterized by slave raiding, military campaigns, and trade; consequently, they had a negative impact on commercial and diplomatic relations between Portuguese authorities and African rulers, so the Crown tried to contain independent movements in the hinterland of the colony.40 Controlling the access of European temporary migrants and travelers to Portuguese sub-Saharan Africa also emerged as a major concern because their presence could do harm to the monopoly of the Crown over the economic resources and trade in these regions and, in extreme situations, could pose a threat to the Crown’s sovereignty. Although foreign investment in the empire was allowed, from the fifteenth century onward, any individual, either Portuguese or foreign, intending to travel to or send their vessels and agents for business in Sa˜o Tome´ and Angola could only do so if he met one or several of the following requirements: (1) if he held a temporary commercial license issued by the Portuguese Crown for a specific venture to these regions, a set of voyages, or a fixed period of time;

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(2) if he had leased the management of the Crown’s monopoly over the trade with these two regions; or (3) if he held a commercial license issued by the managers of the royal monopolies over the Sa˜o Tome´ and Angolan trades.41 Besides meeting these requirements, temporary migrants had also to conform to the legislation defining regions and ports of call for commercial vessels. Usually, these ships were forbidden to call and conduct trade at the neighboring African coastal areas of Sa˜o Tome´, Luanda, and Benguela.42 Ships heading to Sa˜o Tome´ and Angola with passengers and commodities were also recommended to sail in convoy with royal fleets sailing to the same destinations.43 On arrival at the ports of Sa˜o Tome´, Luanda, and Benguela, there were a range of aforementioned procedures in place controlling the arrival and departures of ships, passengers, and cargoes. On land, however, temporary migrants had no restriction to their movement, at least initially.44 The circulation of free, enslaved, and manumitted Africans in Sa˜o Tome´ and Angola was another key concern for the Portuguese Crown. The first sub-Saharan slaves brought to Portugal by sea in the early fifteenth century were regarded with curiosity and used as exotic gifts and external symbols of wealth by Portuguese kings and powerful nobles and clergymen. The number of sub-Saharan slaves increased rapidly in Portugal and Spain within a short space of time, catching the interest of the king and his fiscal and commercial agents. The monarch’s ambition in controlling the circulation of enslaved Africans resulted from growing demand for African slave labor in Europe and the European posts and settlements in western Africa and the Americas, and rising awareness that direct and indirect participation in the slave trade, as well as control over circulation of slaves, would generate a significant revenue for the treasury. Significant investment was required to monitor and control the movements and activities of enslaved Africans. In colonial societies massively based on slave labor and ruled by small European elites, there was a great imbalance in the ratio between these two groups. This demographic profile affected both the ethnic composition and social dynamics of various colonies. Overseeing the movement and actions of slaves became essential for the general safety of Europeans in Africa. In Sa˜o Tome´, for instance, the European population was on most occasions below 10 percent, while the enslaved population remained above 90 percent. Unsurprisingly, slave

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revolts in sugar, coffee, and cacao plantations were a recurring feature of Sa˜o Tome´’s society. Portuguese local government and the municipality legislated on this matter and took practical measures to protect the European population, plantations, and urban infrastructure. Specific laws were issued defining how to deal with rebellious slaves, strategies to track runaway slaves into Sa˜o Tome´’s rainforest were established, and new judicial posts were created to patrol the jungle and prevent slave attacks—the so-called sheriff of the hill (meirinho da serra).45 In Angola, controlling the movement of Africans (free, enslaved, and manumitted) posed further challenges. As in Sa˜o Tome´, the Portuguese Crown, the local royal government and the municipalities of Luanda and Benguela legislated and used diplomacy to tackle this question. Crosscultural diplomatic agreements were negotiated and finalized with numerous African rulers, with mobility being one of the main issues under deliberation.46 These agreements typically included mutual aid in wartime against common enemies, privileged access to each other’s territories, and mutual effort to secure fairs, land routes, and waterways. By so doing, Portuguese and Angolan rulers sought to prevent their settlements and subjects from being attacked by neighboring powers, to facilitate a ‘‘peaceful’’ atmosphere for the prosperity of trade and to secure the circulation of both Europeans and Africans falling within a Portuguese sphere of influence. However much these agreements might have sounded good in theory, their practice was frequently subject to multiple violations and abuses on the part of Portuguese and violent reactions by African rulers and their subjects. Large-scale slave raiding and trading regularly implicated various areas within the Angolan hinterland that fell well outside direct Portuguese political control. These hinterlands have often been described in terms of frontiers or borderlands, since territorial boundaries or borders were not fixed but fluid, and political authority tended to wax and wane depending on the disposition of various populations and military forces. As mentioned earlier, early settlers in Sa˜o Tome´ were authorized to acquire slaves in Angola by either purchase or raid. This contributed to a situation where slave raiding was a common feature of early Portuguese Angola, along with military campaigns against local rulers adjacent to Luanda, the estuary of the Kwanza River, and Benguela. Expeditions beyond Portuguese territories to find the mythical Cambambe silver mines were also used as a means to capture slaves, subjugate local rulers, and claim control over territories and populations.47 In this fluid and uncertain environment, the control of

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waterways and land routes proved to be particularly important since they were central to the transportation of people and goods. Enslavement most commonly began with violent capture, but the transportation, trade, and control of these new captives required extensive mechanisms to forcibly move enslaved Africans large distances from the interior to the coast and from the coast to destinations throughout the Atlantic world. Promoting and regulating the capture, purchase, and transport of slaves was a major undertaking, which generated significant levels of state regulation and surveillance. These regulations went as far as determining who could be authorized to access the interior and which products should be traded. Merchants of European descent, either permanent or temporary residents in the colonies, were to entrust their commodities to local African and mixed descent traders. However, only African and mixed descent traders without visual signs of wealth were authorized to act as brokers between coastal and interior traders. These regulations proved to be extremely difficult to implement, given the limited network of institutions and officials established by the Portuguese Crown in sub-Saharan Africa. Yet Portugal also faced various other obstacles when trying to control the flow of people both within and between territories in Europe, the Americas, and Africa.

State Aspirations and Practical Outcomes The Portuguese Crown never managed to control or channel consistently the movement of people and goods within either its African territories or maritime networks. Despite the extensive network of institutions, regulations, and agents discussed above, the aspirations of the Portuguese state were at best only ever partially realized from a practical standpoint. There were two main sticking points here. First, there was the relatively straightforward issue of consistent and effective enforcement of policies and regulations across distant and discontinuous territories, particularly in cases such as Angola where the interior frontiers/borderlands were constantly in flux, with regular political disputes both within and between Africans and European elites. The territory the Portuguese claimed was much greater than the territory they effectively occupied.48 One of the main complications here was the fact that many of those who were on the move were anonymous and unfamiliar to the agents of the state. European interlocutors sometimes found it difficult successfully to navigate unfamiliar political, geographic,

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and social settings, so there was much that escaped their notice and understanding. This gap between aspiration and outcome was further complicated by the fact that some territories remained under various types of private administration for extended periods. This was, for example, the case in Sa˜o Tome´, where Prı´ncipe, Ano Bom, and Ferna˜o Po´ remained in private hands until the eighteenth century. Since the exercise of justice remained in private hands, direct Crown interference in the movement of people and products in these territories was muted as a consequence. The Portuguese were also unable to establish a monopoly over the legitimate means of violence in its African colonies. Despite all reforming measures, Portuguese sub-Saharan Africa lacked a truly professional army and navy until the mid-seventeenth century. Even in later periods, the basis of military defense continued to be local militias of settlers, manumitted slaves, and African auxiliary troops. Supplies of weaponry, ammunition, and other materials were insufficient and sent from Lisbon with delays, due to financial difficulties facing the state treasury. Naval defense was also insufficient and military efforts to protect harbors and towns proved inadequate. As a consequence, both the right and capacity to initiate violence remained with local settlers and African rulers. In Sa˜o Tome´, the state was forced to share the right to exercise violence with powerful colonists, usually owners of farms, plantations, sugar mills, and a high number of enslaved Africans, some of whom were in a position to organize private armies. Private military forces were often used to defend Portuguese territories from naval attacks by European powers and from terrestrial attacks by runaway slaves. In addition, the Portuguese state did not succeed in implementing a full monopoly over the exercise of justice because judicial authority was divided among various private and public authorities. The judicial system created by the state, both within Portugal and in overseas territories, continued to share jurisdiction with municipal judges elected by the city councils of Sa˜o Tome´, Luanda, and Benguela. In general, the exercise of justice by the state officials was considered oppressive by the inhabitants of the settlements, especially by the local elites in control of most land and profitable economic activities, and often by the municipal councils as well. However, according to the Portuguese early modern judicial procedure, in exceptional situations such as a death, the high judicial officials of the state were to be replaced by municipal judges. This fact gave municipal authorities control over the practice of justice by the state and allowed powerful local elites

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to avoid culpability for otherwise punishable actions, including smuggling people (enslaved Africans) and goods. Furthermore, on several occasions municipal judges, with the support of local elites, tried to file judicial cases against state judicial officials as well as government, commercial, and fiscal functions in the territories. Mobility remained central to patterns of wealth extraction and administration, but there were many occasions when the opportunities associated with moving people and goods largely accrued to private actors. The state failed to establish a monopoly over forms of governance, the exercise of justice, and legitimate violence. This had major implications for its capacity to effectively control and channel the movement of people and goods since key functions and locations often remained in private hands; even in cases where the state was directly involved, only part of the activities that took place came to official notice. Since specific cases of both tax collection and trade were leased out to private actors, there was ample scope for fraud, including smuggling individuals and goods in and out of the territories, issuing false or incomplete lists of passengers and cargoes, and nonpayment of taxes relating to people and products. Under these circumstances, state officials serving in factories and customs houses only had jurisdiction to oversee private activities and to denounce abuses against the state to higher government officials. However, before a complaint could reach Lisbon, both public and private actors routinely placed heavy pressure on potential whistleblowers. This pressure included bribes, threats, and, in extreme cases, murder. State officials, on their part, often accepted bribes and allowed smuggling of commodities and enslaved Africans. From low- to high-ranking officials, the agents of the state routinely made use of their posts and authority to defend their own interests. By so doing, they were indirectly benefiting from official attempts to impose a monopoly over government, justice, violence, and movement; yet their actions in turn undercut the realization of this goal. This recurring conflict of interest between the state and its overseas agents only grew more pronounced with the passage of time. As more state officials were recruited locally, their strong associations with political and economic interests of local elites had a major influence on policy and practice. Those close links reduced the power of officials to unilaterally impose policies that originated in Portugal. Resistance by local elites to metropolitan policies and regulations was evident on numerous occasions during this period. The best examples date from the late sixteenth and seventeenth

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centuries. During the 1640s and 1650s, the Council of Luanda and the merchants of the city contested a decision of the Crown to transfer the auctions of the contracts of the Angolan monopoly to Lisbon. In this document, dated April 29, 1659, the City Council argued that the farming of the Angola monopoly by the wealthiest businessmen of Lisbon did great damage to the businessmen of Luanda and the merchants operating in the South Atlantic slave trade. Whenever a wealthy merchant from Portugal won the contract, he and his associates would operate the business with their own ships and supply the required exchange goods in great quantities via their agents in Luanda. Therefore, the merchants of the city and other traders visiting the port with vessels loaded with exchange products for the slave trade, mainly Portuguese-Brazilian traders, could not do much business.49

Conclusion The evidence here presented suggests that the Portuguese Crown tried to control the movements of people and goods to advance a larger state- and empire-building project. In its attempts to advance this empire-building project, the Crown tried to channel mobile populations by adopting different strategies and measures to promote and/or prevent movement. In the early stage of maritime expansion and empire building, the limited authority of the Crown and its limited access to human and material resources made it necessary to turn to private actors to promote the mobility of people with skills and capital to ensure settlement and economic development. As the Crown centralized more power and economic resources by means of taxation, the state- and empire-building project entered a second phase. By the early sixteenth century, the Crown started to invest in the reform and consolidation of the state administrative, fiscal, judicial, and military machine to reinforce its control over the flow of people and products. Creating different types of controls over movement emerged as a key instrument of state policy. Portuguese subjects and foreigners (both of European and African descent) were subjected to control, although regulations differed from group to group. To succeed in this undertaking, the Crown transferred a series of institutions to overseas territories, with particular emphasis being placed on

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locations and settings where state representatives could attempt to monopolize the flow of people, products, and their associated wealth. However, these Crown monopolies were only accomplished in a limited way due to various contingencies, which had to do with the nature of the state, the means at its disposal (institutions and officials), and the particularities of Portuguese settlement in sub-Saharan Africa. Thus, in contrast to Torpey’s argument, the interest of the states in monitoring the movement of people across external borders did not become important only in the modern era. The data here analyzed suggest that early modern states were not only concerned with controlling internal flows of people; controlling people’s and products’ movement across the external borders of imperial domains, the borderlands of colonial settlements, and wild frontiers of unknown regions was an extremely important affair. By controlling the mobility of free and unfree individuals and the flow of products, the Portuguese Crown was able to develop its empire in early modern sub-Saharan Africa, extend the authority of the state, and extract wealth from mobility. Thus, the information here discussed also suggests that the project of state- and empire-building was, from its outset, associated with the ambition of the Crown to extract surplus wealth by way of taxation, and not only to document, register, and mobilize national populations as argued by Torpey. Mobility appears, therefore, to have been paramount not only to make states but also to shape empires.

Chapter 3

‘‘Captive to Civilization’’: Law, Labor Mobility, and Violence in Colonial Mozambique Eric Allina

This chapter explores the relationship between law, mobility, and violence in colonial Africa. Its particular concern is how this relationship affected the lives of Africans caught up in a forced labor regime in central Mozambique during the first half century of colonial rule. Though the empirical analysis is regionally focused, the conceptual argument is one that applies, to varying degrees, to many other parts of colonial Africa. To this end, the chapter focuses on the ways laws made Africans subject to forced labor, for the state or for private employers, thereby displacing them from their home communities and compelling them to work where colonial interests deemed it desirable or necessary. Of particular importance is the role of colonial labor law in targeting people’s inherent mobility, using a variety of practices to prevent them from deploying their labor where they chose and to channel their labor to specific alternative locations, where they were vulnerable to a wide range of physical violence and had virtually no legal protection. In teasing out these connections between legitimate state violence and the control of human mobility, the chapter begins the process of separating out the volume’s ‘‘mobility makes states’’ argument from its point of departure in Charles Tilly’s formulation: ‘‘War makes states.’’ Under colonial labor practices, the prevailing legal order did not reach the space most Africans occupied. This meant Africans occupied a dangerous legal terrain that resembled that produced by the state of exception

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examined by legal theorists concerned with questions of democracy and totalitarianism.1 Here, I suggest the resemblance is at least phenotypic (though it may also be genotypic), and is therefore useful in a comparative approach to thinking about the relationship between the colonial state and labor mobility. Notwithstanding differences in processes and outcomes of colonial rule across the continent, common to all was a political order in which Africans held few if any formal rights and were therefore vulnerable to various forms of forced labor and forced movement.2 Though this political order later became a thing of the past, swept away in most parts of the continent by the ‘‘wind of change’’ in the 1960s, the limited reach of the legal order it established still shapes contemporary life in many African societies.3 The literature on how contemporary African governments— authoritarian and nominally representative democracies alike—fail to secure their citizens’ rights is vast.4 Enduring inequality and exclusion, which can be at least partially traced to colonial legacies, ensure that some categories of people remain exposed to extralegal forms of violence. While the contemporary situation falls beyond the analysis here, the argument about how the institutionalized exclusion of colonialism affected the application of law may point to analogous dynamics at work today.

Colonial Law, Violence, and African Labor A considerable body of work in African legal history examines ‘‘customary law,’’ both its coauthorship by African and European authorities during the colonial period and its effect on Africans subject to its reach. Customary law, and the system of indirect rule of which it formed a part, had its particular impact on chieftaincy and other forms of indigenous authority, as well as on women and relations of gender more broadly.5 There is also important work on what Gregory Mann calls the ‘‘narrow category of colonial citizenship,’’ focused on those Africans who ‘‘assimilated’’ and acquired that legal status in the French ‘‘empire of law.’’6 Other scholarship addresses the rationality or legally framed nature of colonial governance or how legally sanctioned state violence produced a form of governance with strong corporeal dimensions, with flogging a notably spectacular form.7 Explicitly concerned with how colonial power was manifest in the expression of violence, this approach differs from those based on notions of governmentality and situations in which ruler and ruled share a rationale of

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power and control.8 The nuance and consent implied in shaping the ‘‘conduct of conduct’’ were largely if not entirely absent from the operation of colonial labor regimes. The close examination offered here, of the law itself and of its implementation as praxis, shows another way of understanding the relationship between violence, movement, and colonial law and how this relationship affected Africans. Though the analysis focuses on part of Mozambique, the explanation offered is useful for understanding other parts of colonial Africa (without falling into the dubious abstractions inherent in a singular essence of ‘‘Portuguese colonialism,’’ or British or French, for that matter). The point is not that central Mozambique can stand in for all of colonial Africa or even for all of Mozambique. Rather, it is that the similarities between central Mozambique and some other parts of colonial Africa, irrespective of the national origin of the colonizer, reveal useful comparisons that speak to broader conceptualizations of how violence figured in the exercise of colonial authority and mobility. The focus here is on labor law, specifically Portugal’s indigenato, which governed nearly all Africans in Portugal’s colonies (except those with ‘‘assimilated’’ states). As others have noted, the indigenato was central to how Portugal aimed to answer both the ‘‘native question’’ and the ‘‘labor question.’’ Bridget O’Laughlin has argued against the dualism implied in the two questions, suggesting that ‘‘forms of local governance . . . were rooted in the labor question.’’9 I would perhaps go farther: in some parts of colonial Africa (including but not limited to central Mozambique, the case I examine here), there was little meaningful difference between the two questions. European rule over Africans—imposition of authority, creation of law, levying of taxes, control of populations—revolved around the goal of making African labor available in abundance and at low cost. Moreover, owing to the demand, both economic and political, to make African labor available where settler or business interests judged it desirable, the labor question invariably implicated ‘‘native’’ mobility. In areas subject to Portuguese rule, the indigenato specified that Africans were obliged to work ‘‘to improve their social condition.’’10 Most forms of household, rather than market-oriented, labor were judged not to contribute to this sort of improvement, thus providing a legal justification—no matter how thinly veneered—to relocate African labor forcibly, making it more readily available to colonial interests. Labor law as practiced aimed to make Africans ‘‘captive to civilization.’’11 In displacing workers geographically and forcing

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them to where colonial authorities deemed it necessary, labor law placed them in a legal space that left them dangerously vulnerable. In this sense, the goal of ‘‘promoting’’ mobility was both central to the formation of the institutions of the colonial state and in determining its different implications for the various groups targeted for control. Africans who lived under colonial rule had scant representation in the political realm and no standing before the law in their relations with Europeans. Initially ordered in the aftermath of conquest, this situation became routinized under the bureaucratic, administrative regime of colonial rule.12 The ideology of colonial rule, with its premises of African inferiority and incapacity, combined with imperatives to make empire pay and political pressures to serve colonists’ interests, undermined legal provisions that might otherwise have protected Africans. Settlers and others who relied on African labor shared those ideological premises, which—especially where African economic activity offered alternatives and, to varying degrees, presented a challenge to settler economic success—were often infused with a virulent racism that limned their treatment of African workers. The outcome was a logic of governance that inverted the law as written: actual practices surrounding African labor were not necessarily described by standing legal regulations but rather by their negation. As a consequence, workers received not food in a ‘‘perfect state of conservation’’ but rather moldy or insect-infested maize meal; far from ‘‘hygienic’’ housing, workers’ quarters compared unfavorably with pigsties or stables; employers were not constrained from beating their workers but instead relied on violence as a means of communication.13 Even after serving a full six-month labor contract hundreds of kilometers from home, if sufficient replacements could not be found, forced laborers might be detained even longer or, having returned home, be immediately (and illegally) forced off again. Lest this argument be misread as an innovation on the idea of Portuguese exceptionalism (pace Perry Anderson),14 consider the parallels between the indigenato and the corresponding French colonial policy of the indige´nat. With roots in the occupation of Algeria, the indige´nat was a legal regime that spanned the French empire, distinguished in French legal terrain in that it created ‘‘new offenses and new penalties’’ all under the purview of administrative (rather than judicial) authorities.15 While some studies focus on the tendency of the indige´nat toward ‘‘proliferation of political statuses,’’ especially related to the French policy of assimilation, recent work by Gregory Mann and Isabelle Merle highlights its importance

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as a coercive administrative tool and its tendency toward arbitrary violence.16 Like the indige´nat, Lisbon’s indigenato made provision for admitting Africans to a different legal order, defining an ‘‘assimilated’’ status for Africans who ‘‘adopted the public customs and practices of Europeans,’’ by which they could gain the same civil status and rights as Europeans and, most significantly, gain exemption from forced labor. Impressive as such rights may have seemed in principle, in practice they were within the reach of a tiny fraction of locals.17 Africans were thereby subject to a legal regime that defined offenses that ‘‘by definition, only ‘natives’ could commit,’’ and conferred on officials nearly unbounded discretion in designing and imposing sanctions.18 Under the indigenato, merely being insufficiently abject in recognizing colonial authority could result in exile to Sa˜o Tome´ as a forced laborer.19 Like the indigenato, the indige´nat contributed to the ‘‘normalisation of state violence.’’20 By authorizing coercion, only hazily defining the boundaries of what might be judged compliance, and leaving prefectural authorities to impose sanctions at their will, violence and its threat suffused the colonial situation. Much like the indigenato, the degree to which practice differed from what was written in law is not evidence of dysfunction or rogue action. As Merle puts it, ‘‘the imprecision and opacity of investigations, disrespect for procedure and law, the fanciful nature of eligible offenses and penalties were not the result of negligence or incompetence, but well and truly a means of governance for an administration that intended to rule unchallenged over a native population.’’21 Or, as Justin Willis has written of Kenya, Britain’s ‘‘men on the spot’’ were free to make up ‘‘local policy,’’ a seemingly oxymoronic term that illustrates just how far freelancing local administrators exercised an improvisational discretion in enforcing colonial authority. Willis suggests that ‘‘more important than . . . legal measures were the extra-legal or sometimes illegal measures that were euphemistically referred to as ‘encouragement’ or ‘administrative pressure.’ ’’22 Moreover, as Frederick Cooper has pointed out, officials in Kenya knew that ‘‘obtaining labor from a chief for the benefit of white settlers ‘depended on how far he could be induced to exceed his instructions.’ ’’ Cooper remarks that coercion was routine, if unacknowledged, in this practice: ‘‘No written instruction was ever addressed to administrators on their conduct in this matter.’’23 The result of these localized, if systemic and often institutionalized practices, was the opening of a ‘‘new legal space’’ exclusively inhabited by Africans.

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Taxonomically, this legal space has more than an incidental link to the state of exception in which a political sovereign suspends the standing legal order.24 Most scholarship on the state of exception examines dictatorship, state of emergency, wartime conditions, and the threat to constitutional democracy posed by creeping executive authority. Colonial rule represents a different political context, but for Africans the distinct legal status imposed on them created a political and legal condition with more than passing resemblance to the state of exception. As Merle notes, some of the penalties of the indige´nat had their origins in wartime powers. Similarly, Mann points out that colonial administrators used the metaphor of conquest as a touchstone for the exercise of a discretionary power that regularly verged on the absolute; indeed, district-level administrators ‘‘bore many of the characteristics of sovereigns.’’25 A critical difference, of course, is that this colonial legal condition was anything but exceptional: to the contrary, it was ordinary. In this, ideas about the state of exception are useful only in part for thinking about the colonial quotidian. Agamben describes a state whose power is so refined that those who exercise it can afford to be almost parsimonious in doing so, limiting the application of its exclusionary violence to a select few. In contrast, the indigenato (and the indige´nat) applied to nearly all Africans, and colonial regimes in Africa did not practice the same austerity in using violence, believing it would lead to a loss of control. This distinction in power and its application as violence marks the limit of how far the state of exception illuminates colonial situations. Within that limit, however, there is a resemblance between what Agamben dubs a ‘‘nonspace with respect to law,’’ what Mann calls the ‘‘domain of non-law’’ of the indige´nat, and how the indigenato as a state practice placed many Africans outside the realm of the law as written.26 What the operation of these systems of governance share is a lacuna in the relation of law to reality, what Agamben calls ‘‘an essential fracture between’’ principle and practice. With that fracture comes an ‘‘opening of a space’’ that reveals the distance between the principles expressed by laws on the books and their practice in the hands of state agents.27 For Africans who lived under colonial rule, that space was gaping and full of danger. Mobility, Labor, and Colonial Rule in Central Mozambique Human mobility links a general physical capacity to move to specific ideational impulses: ambition, fear, or attachment, among others. Various

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genres of movement—emigration, migration, flight, marronnage, and others—can arise in response to particular historical, political, or economic conditions. Although applications of law can, if and when the state chooses to commit the necessary resources, severely limit any specific form of mobility, the human capacity to be mobile remains. The key, for the colonial state, was to be able to promote certain types of mobility while proscribing others. Promotion often had pronounced gender dimensions, with early labor laws coercively promoting male mobility, while either ignoring or seeking to limit women’s movements.28 Africans normally preferred to retain control over their labor power (whether produced by their own bodies or those of their social subordinates). They also regularly settled in areas that did not suit the interests of European conquerors. This meant that the labor regime in central Mozambique, similar to others elsewhere on the continent, developed a varied mix of incentives and strictures designed to move African workers to fixed locales. Within this landscape, most Africans aimed either to remain in their home communities, where they could pursue economic activities on their own account, or instead to pursue various opportunities for wage labor, near and far. The state depended on the mobility of African workers; otherwise, it would have been unable to channel labor where settler and other interests demanded it. The core of the indigenato was Lisbon’s 1899 labor code, which established the principle that all Africans living under Portuguese rule ‘‘were subject to the legal and moral obligation to acquire through work the means of subsistence and to improve their own social condition.’’ The law stated they had ‘‘complete liberty to choose how they might meet this obligation, but if they failed to meet it in some fashion, public authorities would impose it upon them.’’29 This principle, set out in the code’s first article, underpinned the forced labor system for which Portuguese colonial history is so well known.30 The law defined Africans’ obligation to work, exempting women, men over sixty or under fourteen, the disabled, chiefs and other African authorities, or those serving in police or military forces.31 Modified cosmetically in 1911 and 1914, the labor code underwent more extensive change in 1928—largely in response to international criticism and pressure on Lisbon and to League of Nations action—limiting labor coercion to situations of ‘‘urgent public interest,’’ guaranteeing forced labor would be paid, and banning its use for private employers.32 Yet these alterations had limited impact; other articles in the code walked back the apparent reforms: Africans still had the ‘‘moral duty . . . to procure through

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work the means of subsistence, thus contributing to the general interest of humanity,’’ with the state ‘‘reserving for itself the right to incite [Africans] to work for themselves, as much as might be reasonable to improve their livelihood and social condition, and to oversee and inspect their work under contract.’’33 The indigenato and its filial forced labor system were abolished only in 1961, when Portugal found it impossible to maintain in an era of independent African states.34 The law was the product of a commission’s work but heavily influenced by Anto´nio Enes, former royal commissioner of Mozambique. His writings in the years before the code’s publication reveal the importance he placed on ‘‘native’’ labor. According to Enes, Africans were ‘‘big children,’’ for whom ‘‘work is the most moralizing of missions . . . the most disciplining of authorities . . . the education that can transform beasts into men. The savage who takes up work makes himself captive to civilization; it is that which might discipline him.’’35 Beyond the pan-European belief in the value of colonial rule’s civilizing mission and the post-abolition faith in the moral value of labor, he also expressed concern that the apostles of abolition had gone too far, teaching that Africans should have ‘‘the freedom not to work, the freedom to continue to live in a state of savagery.’’36 Worse still, if the state did not act otherwise, ‘‘in a few years, it will be the natives who would want to make Europeans work.’’37 The three decades between the passage of Enes’s law and the indigenato saw further and progressive institutionalization of control over African labor and mobility. While the labor code was, grosso modo, Lisbon’s attempt to satisfy imperial and abolitionist imperatives alike, the code’s enactment in Mozambique was also a response to the regional landscape of work. Decades before Portugal established the ‘‘effective occupation’’ expected of colonial powers, Africans from the Zambezi Valley southward had been engaged in longdistance migration, some more freely than others, as a southern African economic sphere began to take form.38 By the end of the nineteenth century, from the Great Zimbabwe plateau to the Indian Ocean, the region was traced by multiple arcs of migratory movement. The southern reaches saw the early emergence of long-distance circular labor migration, with many young men traveling south to work in Natal’s sugar fields, established by British settlers from as early as the 1850s. Those same men soon fell within the gravitational pull of the South African mining industry, with the discovery of diamonds in 1867 and gold in 1886. From the 1890s onward,

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adolescent boys and men from central Mozambique were among the thousands who tramped southward in search of employment, part of southern Africa’s paradigmatic long-distance labor migrancy.39 Farther north, in the vast Zambezi watershed, large-scale plantation agriculture (primarily sugar) created strong local demand for thousands of African workers; these African societies had a well-established tradition of labor service to powerful local elites, the legacy of the prazos, large estates Portugal created in the early eighteenth century.40 In much of the west-central area between the Zambezi and the Save River, Africans had had little prior experience with either foreign overlords or wage labor. For many communities, the transition to colonial labor relations, primarily for small-scale settler farmers and miners, came with conquest. Rounding out the labor market topography, the port city of Beira, founded in the 1890s, created urban labor demand, with an international settler population, busy dock works, and vibrant commerce. In central Mozambique as in much of the rest of the region, establishing the ‘‘effective occupation’’ imagined at the Conference of Berlin did not begin in earnest until the early to mid-1890s.41 Colonial authority came in the form of the Mozambique Company, which in 1892 received a royal charter to govern a 62,000 square mile territory with near-sovereign authority.42 In return, Lisbon received 7.5 percent of all net declared profits and could claim, more or less credibly, to noisy nationalist boosters of empire that the area remained under Portuguese control.43 Settlers and resources soon poured into the company’s territory, with many seeking to exploit what they hoped would be a ‘‘second Rand’’ and others eager to straddle a strategic gateway to the vast British hinterland that would become the Rhodesias and Nyasaland. The company had its counterparts in the imperial pantheon, but none enjoyed powers as extensive or ruled for as long.44 Operating as a commercial entity with powers of state, the company set about creating the infrastructure and institutions that would guarantee its rule, which lasted until 1942.45 Conquest was accompanied by demands for annual tax payment and labor service. Tax payments were important as an acknowledgment of company authority and an important source of revenue, but it was labor service that dominated people’s experience with company rule. The territory’s physical infrastructure had to be built out of whole cloth, and, together with the settler and commercial influx, the early years saw a widely varied

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and almost unceasing demand for African labor. Two factors gave the company an unusually powerful interest in supplying labor to the area’s fledgling economy. First, the company often held a minority stake in the private enterprises that existed in the territory. Second, the company had deliberately chosen to avoid direct participation in most economic activities. Instead, it granted numerous subconcessions and aimed to earn revenue from its state-like powers to collect taxes, levy customs duties, and charge fees.46 Its profit, derived from what might typically be thought of as the public functions of the state, depended directly on the successes of others. Without African forced labor and forced movement, no one—including the company’s investors—would earn anything. In its earliest years, tax revenue extracted from Africans established an immediate cash flow, though its secondary, if no less important, effect was to drive Africans into the labor force since anyone who lacked the cash payment could be forced to work.47 The European settlers who came to the territory brought virtually no capital for investment and depended mightily on company-supplied forced labor.48 For nearly the first two decades of its rule (1892–1910), forced-labor recruitment and distribution was piecemeal and reactive. When demands for workers exceeded the number that could be taken from the local population, a district administrator would write to the governor who would, in turn, forward the request to another district administrator (typically one located in an area of low local labor demand) with an order to send the workers demanded. These exchanges would then set forced laborers in motion, as they retraced the path of the correspondence. It is difficult to overstate the importance of forced mobility to the overall fortunes of both the colonial state and company rule. The labor regime built in central Mozambique from 1911 onward was a response to the failure of an earlier scheme to shift toward a model of private recruitment. Prior to the creation of a Native Labor Department in 1911, the company had attempted to shed its role as mobilizer and distributor of forced laborers, issuing a contract to a private agency to take on this crucial role. This alternative approach lasted only months, failing miserably, as Africans recognized neither the authority of private recruiters to force them out of their home communities nor, once they were sent off, to keep them at work. The men that recruiters attempted to mobilize either stayed at home or, once at work, fled for home. Their mobility completely undermined the scheme, with white settlers so enraged that some called into

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question the legitimacy of a state that could not supply them with African workers when and where they demanded them.49 For the colonial administrators involved, it was a lesson well learned, leading directly to the foundation of a state infrastructure designed to channel African labor mobility successfully. Following this debacle, the company designed a new regime, replacing the district-based system with a new, centralized Native Labor Department. The labor department bureaucracy created the administrative infrastructure to identify, locate, conscript, transport, and oversee tens of thousands of African laborers every year. District administrators became at once government representatives and overseers of labor conscription. Local administrators drew up maps showing the location of each chiefdom and village in their district, indicating in each the number and age of the men, women, and children, and the number of boys and men ‘‘fit for labor.’’ Twice yearly, district administrators sent police out on fixed dates that replaced the surprise labor raids of the past. As each forced laborer entered the system, the company recorded a wealth of data: name, village, and chiefdom; length of contract, advance payment if any, and wage rate; dates of departure from and arrival to the sites of conscription and work; name of employers, type of work, and location; salary paid at work, illnesses, injuries (including compensation for work-related injuries or death), sick days, and salary due upon return home; and instances of flight, death, or ‘‘re-enlistment.’’50 One of the main strengths of the post-1911 system was its success in enlisting chiefs in conscription operations, both during the initial seizure of forced recruits and over the length of their ‘‘contracts.’’ Chiefs were enlisted through payments for each conscript taken from their chiefdom, creating an incentive for chiefs to cooperate in conscription and to help hunt down those who fled.51 Local administrators regularly crisscrossed their districts, seeking out chiefs to ensure they would follow orders and record the numbers of men in each chiefdom considered eligible and ‘‘fit’’ for forced labor. In making its agents mobile, the state aimed to overcome its generally limited resources (human and financial), and the routinization of local administrators’ movement was a form of state portability. An important goal of establishing such regular contact with chiefs was to make them the local extension of colonial authority and co-opt them into its service.52 The devolution of a measure of responsibility for forced labor mobilization onto these local authorities demonstrates an additional dimension of state portability, as the colonial administration succeeded, if

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only in part, in reshaping the spatial distribution of those who wielded state power. The result was a dispersal of state power and authority: spatially, throughout territory; and institutionally, beyond the ranks of formal colonial officers. Chiefs were, for the most part, no more willing participants in the system than their followers were, but those who refused to realign themselves with the company put their status or even their liberty at risk, especially when their reluctance impeded police labor sweeps. Uncooperative chiefs were as vulnerable as their followers, at risk for beatings with the palmato´ria, a wooden paddle whose perforated surface reduced human flesh to a bloody pulp. At the height of the department’s operations, the director’s annual report made manifest the extent to which its bureaucracy blanketed the territory’s rural population, with a 142-page list of African authorities, naming more than eight thousand chiefs and village headmen —one for every thirty-five Africans in the territory—and a tally of population figures for each chiefdom, including the number of male residents considered ‘‘fit for labor.’’53 Bureaucratic administration, with its capacity for rapid communication, decentralized decision making, and easily dispersed resources, put the power of the modern state, broad in reach and intense at point of contact, behind labor exploitation. The company maintained its system, with occasional changes, through the Great Depression and into World War II, with a steadily growing extent and intensity of servitude.54 Officials continually refined their efforts to conscript the African population, deploying the power of its bureaucratically organized state administration to reduce Africans’ scope for action and forcing tens of thousands of Africans annually into labor service. In developing a coerced labor mobilization regime along these lines, the company multiplied the portability of its power. Notwithstanding the absolute scarcity of formal state agents—the so-called ‘‘thin white line’’ of colonial administration—the Native Labor Department bureaucracy was highly effective and, if not all-powerful, still highly capable of broadcasting its power.55 The period of enforced labor slowly increased over the years. The 1911 regulations that established the company labor department had left unchanged Africans’ original statutory vulnerability (the ‘‘legal and moral obligation to work’’), which the law had fixed at four months. Subsequent amendments introduced a six-month standard, and in 1920 this was doubled to require up to a full year.56

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Backing up its contracts were a set of measures designed to promote certain dimensions of mobility and to circumscribe others. Leaving the company’s territory without authorization qualified as ‘‘clandestine emigration,’’ an offense punishable by a sentence of up to two years ‘‘correctional labor.’’57 Moreover, even those African men who sought work outside their home district, voluntarily moving to areas where their labor was demanded by settlers or other interests, had to request permission to leave. As early as 1911, forced laborers were required to carry a pass bearing their name, fingerprints, and an identification number; chiefdom, district, and date of conscription; length of contract, name of employer, pay rate, sick days, and employers’ comments on their abilities and conduct.58 Between the wars, the state began requiring all male Africans over fourteen to carry a pass book. Sold with a tin carrying case and worn on a lanyard around the neck, the pass book included a photograph and recorded the bearer’s identity, occupation, wage history, record of labor contracts, tax payments, and place of residence.59 If the pass book showed that the bearer had not paid the annual hut tax or had not met the obligation to work or if a person was simply unable to produce a pass book for inspection by police or colonial officials, he or she could be sent off for forced labor. The system was highly successful, in that most men did have the document, carrying with them the information state agents could use to lay hands on their labor. Yet some found ways to undermine the identity card’s controlling function, securing pass books in false names, in effect using the state’s own infrastructure to mask themselves and limit its capacity to track their movements.

Colonial Labor Practice: A History of Fictions Essential to how this history affected Africans living in central Mozambique is the manner in which law was transformed into practice: implementation relied on fictional devices that camouflaged the coercion underlying the labor regime. These fictions were, in some respects, the continuation of a tradition of dissembling that had its roots in the last decades of the slave trade. In the second half of the nineteenth century, slavers who hoped to circumvent abolitionist enforcement (and armed naval patrols) referred to the African slaves they shipped from southeast African ports as engage´s or emigre´s libres, as though they had come voluntarily, rather than captives

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taken by force. Prior to embarking, often destined for sugar plantations on Indian Ocean islands, they were asked—perhaps in coastal Swahili, a language foreign to people of the distant hinterland—whether they objected to serving a five-year stint of plantation labor; unable to understand the question, their consent was assumed, and they were shipped off.60 Colonial officials recycled such linguistic circumlocutions as they aimed to mask wholesale coercion behind a fac¸ade of compliance. In some respects, the legal framework surrounding the colonial labor regime was ‘‘so´ para o ingleˆs ver’’—‘‘just for the English to see,’’ a reference to the historically English (or English-speaking) critics of anemic Portuguese abolition efforts and, later, labor practices.61 It would be a mistake, however, to regard the company’s labor legislation (and the indigenato from which it was derived) as wholly an effort to pull the wool over the eyes of outside observers, for it was much more than strategic misdirection. Developing governance structures met important internal demands, satisfying Portugal’s self-image as a modern, effective colonial power. Moreover, official efforts to channel mobility helped establish and maintain internal order among competing constituencies—small-scale settler farmers and miners, medium-size firms, and larger corporations, some with foreign backing—especially with respect to labor demand. The formal language of the law concealed actual practice. The activity by which local officials conscripted tens of thousands of Africans annually was called ‘‘recruitment,’’ though it amounted to nothing more than mass seizure, either at the hands of armed police or the threat of their deployment. Those conscripted were said to have been ‘‘contracted’’ for work. That the workers never saw, much less signed, a written contract made no difference, nor did the fact that only a tiny fraction of those seized for work would have been able to read a contractual document had one been given to them to read and sign. The linguistic misdirection suggested an agreement freely entered, covering the coercion actually used. African forced laborers were referred to as recrutados (recruits) or contratados (contracted). Not until Africans were held to have broken a law (for example, for not paying taxes, ‘‘clandestine’’ emigration, flight from work) and openly sentenced to unpaid labor as punishment was there any direct reference to coercion in administrative terminology, with such workers labeled compelidos (from compelir, to compel). In explaining how the system worked, one local official in the company’s bureaucracy wrote plainly, ‘‘Naturally, in all the Territory the

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recruitments are composed of servicaes compelidos.’’62 Seventy years later, elderly African women and men in central Mozambique recalled the days of forced labor—‘‘Forced, let’s get going. He who wants, he who doesn’t. Let’s go’’—speaking of it not with the term chibaro, commonly used throughout other parts of Mozambique and Zimbabwe to mean forced labor and a referent to earlier local forms of unfree labor, but rather as mtrato, a borrowing of contrato (contract) into the local Shona language.63 Only when company officials felt compelled to distinguish between everyday unmentioned force used to recruit workers and exceptional force used at times of especially difficult ‘‘recruitment’’ did they expose the normal practice, acknowledging the violence necessary to carry out what were dubbed ‘‘extraordinary recruitments,’’ conducted out of cycle or over and above the number of workers typically taken from a given district.64 The focus on the language used shows that the inversion of law in practice operated at the level of first principles; even before a single African went to work in this system, the terms of his or her engagement were, strictly speaking, illegal. This overarching departure from the law saw subsequent and multiple iterations in nearly every aspect of Africans’ experiences as forced laborers. The regulations governing Africans’ work were exhaustive in specifying the conditions employers had to meet: on standards for worker housing and food; limits to work week and length of work day, including periods of rest; prohibitions on corporal punishment and physical restraint; bans on fining workers or imposing wage deductions. While some employers respected these requirements, the volume of reported violations, consistent in their regularity and severity over a period of decades, point to a systemic and institutionalized praxis that fell outside the law.65 The labor code specified that the work day ran from ‘‘sun to sun,’’ yet some farmers drove their workers into the fields before dawn and kept them ‘‘bent over their hoes’’ into the dark of night.66 Similarly, the law specified that worker rations must be in a ‘‘state of perfect conservation,’’ but some found their meal consisted of rotten maize meal or of nothing at all, instead being told to scrounge for wild-growing tomatoes.67 Some employers provided no housing, leaving workers to sleep without shelter, even during the rainy season; others flouted the regulation requiring ‘‘hygienic housing’’; instead, workers had lodging one administrator described as ‘‘miserable, unsuitable even for housing animals,’’ located sometimes next to pigsties or in marshy areas prone to flooding.68

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Corporal punishment was prohibited by law but was nonetheless commonplace. One Manica farmer beat his workers with such regularity that his farm came to be known to workers as ‘‘Chigodore,’’ a name derived from the Shona ideophone godo, ‘‘of striking on the head with a stick.’’69 The inspector general acknowledged as much in 1901, but, noting that employers’ continued access to African labor was ‘‘very much to be desired,’’ he wrote it might be ‘‘convenient to turn a blind eye toward certain excesses of severity.’’70 One settler, who held a concession to collect wild rubber, saw a clear logic for the place physical violence should occupy, asking the local administrator to beat his workers with the chicotte (a hippohide whip) rather than the flesh-ruining palmato´ria, ‘‘which would spoil their hands for work.’’71 Colonial officials were well aware of employers’ reliance on violence yet did little to enforce its legal prohibition. In one rare letter, an official wrote to an employer, ‘‘I hope also that on your part you might stop beating our workers which, as you know, is expressly prohibited, leaving you subject to a fine, which could become disagreeable.’’72 Many people arrived at their workplaces weakened from a long journey. Until the later 1920s, when motor or rail transport became more common, forced laborers had to walk hundreds of miles, with meager rations and makeshift shelters on the way. One employer, aghast at the condition of workers who arrived for work on maize farms, described them as ‘‘true human rags.’’73 Moreover, the conditions under which Africans worked were often deadly. In the region’s gold and copper mines, the inherently risky business of high explosives hundreds of feet under the earth, combined with underinvestment in safety measures and inevitable human negligence, meant that mining contributed significantly to on-the-job death and injury, as reported to the Native Labor Department. Mining’s prominence as a dangerous occupation was, however, partly due to its status as a highprofile industry and, moreover, to the hazards involved. When a worker was killed or injured in an explosion or in a fall down a mineshaft, crushed by falling rock, or run over by an ore cart, it was difficult to camouflage such incidents as anything other than work related. The same was not the case for maize farming, of distinctly lower profile and less obviously risky. During the hottest and wettest months of the year, hundreds of conscripts flooded the hospital. Between 1911 and 1926, the years during which the company kept the best records, an average of 17 percent of the workforce required hospitalization during the summer months, the period of

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peak agricultural labor demand.74 It was also the time when ‘‘employers constantly policed their workers, seeking to extract the greatest amount of labor they could produce.’’75 Correspondingly, workers were most likely to flee at that time, with the numbers surging during October, November, and December, when the burden was highest and the pace of work most furious. Over the same period (1911–1926), worker flight averaged 5.4 per 100 in the months of July through September (the relatively slack period in the annual agricultural cycle). From October through December, when workers in the fields ‘‘suffered the most, exposed to the season’s fiery sun and the torrential rain,’’ the rate nearly doubled, to 9.5.76 In the ‘‘Extraordinary Occurrences’’ section of monthly labor reports, administrators seldom remarked on worker deaths. When they did, the notation most often read death ‘‘due to natural causes,’’ an astonishing claim for men judged ‘‘fit for labor’’ only months earlier.77 After harvests failed in many rural communities in 1912 and conscripts arrived at work in a famine-weakened state, maize farms became killing fields, with 117 workers perishing in one district between October 1, 1912, and March 31, 1913—a fivefold rise in mortality over the previous year.78 The district administrator carefully recorded the figure but offered no explanation. Even this number may well have been an undercount, since it would not have accounted for deaths among the unconscripted part of the workforce, nor would it have recorded the deaths of those who fled for home (a total of 272 are recorded) and died on the way or after reaching their destination.79 There were times, however, when administrators determined that death deserved discussion. In February 1920, correspondence between districtlevel officials and the central administration recorded an unusual exchange regarding the death of a man named Mimbazala. A forced laborer from the Zambezi Valley district of Tambara, Mimbazala was taken for agricultural labor in Chimoio, a maize-belt district several hundred kilometers distant.80 Having been posted to guard a maize field from animal intruders, Mimbazala did not—or was unable to—prevent a bush pig from entering the field and gorging on the ripening mealies. The incident itself was not uncommon: as the Native Labor Department agent for the district remarked, ‘‘such incidents occur constantly [in this area], where those animals abound.’’81 Perhaps somewhat less common was what happened following Mimbazala’s error; the farmer’s son, having been left in charge in his father’s absence, blamed Mimbazala for the damage to the field and beat him so severely that he died.

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What was most unusual was the ensuing discussion between company officials following Mimbazala’s murder; the labor department agent wrote to the district administrator, suggesting that the death might be considered a work-related accident, making Mimbazala’s family eligible for compensation. The district administrator, unwilling to act on the suggestion, instead referred the case farther up the hierarchy to the secretary general, who, in turn, consulted with the director of the Native Labor Department and then the company’s general counsel. The director suggested Mimbazala’s family was indeed eligible for compensation (the labor code provided for payment of 50$00 reis, about £12, to surviving family members of an adult male worker), while the general counsel gave the opinion that the death was not a work-related accident but rather a criminal offense. As such, any compensation would require a formal request via the court system; for the officials involved, that was the end of the matter, and their correspondence went no farther. Whether Mimbazala’s family, from their home 350 kilometers from the court at Beira, ever filed such a request is unknown, but it seems unlikely.82 There were few avenues out of the dangerous space created by the indigenato and other colonial labor regimes, though mobility, in its physical and social senses, offered the possibility of moving out of that space or at least to one of its less dangerous corners. People could, quite literally, move: taking to one’s heels—to avoid conscription or escape a forced labor assignment—was always an option, at least in the abstract. Long-term migration or permanent relocation to another jurisdiction held out the prospect of haven in a less oppressive place. Anything short of these radical moves, however, was but fleeting or episodic respite. Bush hiding was impractical for agricultural communities; flight might lead to eased conscription activity, but only temporarily. One company administrator, commenting on requests for a higher level of ‘‘recruitment,’’ wrote, ‘‘I don’t think there will be an exodus from the Territory, but it is not convenient to put the screws to them now, when the natives have to deal with their own farms.’’83 The degree to which administrative authorities could reach down to the village level also complicated flight as a potential option. Knowing they would be held responsible for wayward workers (or potential recruits), chiefs exerted pressures that discouraged evasion. Additionally, company police routinely kidnapped the female relatives of the men they sought to conscript. A district administrator reported in 1911 that, when men fled

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the labor sweeps he conducted for the newly created Native Labor Department, he dispatched police to pick up their wives and mothers and hold them at district headquarters until the worker quota had been met. Then the women were released and ‘‘shown the bad behavior of their sons and husbands.’’84 Two decades later, administrators described detaining women at the district headquarters as ‘‘a very old practice,’’ with ‘‘the chiefs themselves acknowledging the necessity of detaining and bringing to headquarters the women of those who are well known as dead beats.’’85 Pressure tactics such as these reduced the strategic value of shorter-term movement. Strategies to exercise mobility in its metaphoric dimensions, especially in social terms, were more enduring. Best known were the steps Africans could take to acquire privileged status as an assimilado (under the indigenato) or an ´evolue´ (under the indige´nat), which eliminated entirely the threat of forced labor, though in practice only a tiny number of people could achieve this sort of exit from the dangerous legal terrain. A less complete relocation could come from securing designation as a commercial farmer, a protective label that in some jurisdictions brought exemption from forced labor. Becoming socially mobile in this fashion was attainable to a greater number of people, at least in areas where infrastructure gave market access, although the protection it offered was contingent on agricultural production, always fraught with uncertainties and irregularities.86 These strategies, somewhat paradoxically, depended not on becoming mobile, but rather on staying in place, becoming socially embedded in ways that protected them from the dangers of the indigenato.

Conclusion The preceding examples should leave no doubt that labor law was routinely violated, often egregiously. Especially in colonial southern Africa, where migrancy dominated the landscape of work, such violations were particularly perilous. Often working far from home and for employers who did not always recognize even a ‘‘human rights minimum,’’ Africans were gravely exposed and, cut off from social networks, could not easily call on the protective cover of mutual obligations.87 For this, hindsight is not necessary; contemporary critics of colonial labor practices, especially in Portuguese Africa, were well aware of it and launched vigorous and public attacks on what they saw as official unwillingness or incapacity to enforce the law.88

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Working with the benefit of hindsight, historians have often been content with these explanations. This line of argument rests on two ideas about colonial governance: that legal breaches were inevitable, due to limited state capacity and (or) to official support for such breaches. Neither explanation is convincing. The scale, intensity, and longevity of the forced labor system that existed in central Mozambique put the lie to the canard about the weak (if brutal) colonial state.89 While official support was necessary, alongside it was a striking degree of dissent and criticism, presented by state actors themselves, of the very system they helped operate, which suggests that their participation, if necessary, was ambivalent.90 Gregory Mann, noting the odd relation of the colonial indige´nat to the metropolitan legal order, suggests that the indige´nat possessed an indeterminate nature, being ‘‘neither law nor its opposite.’’91 Close examination of the indigenato suggests a different variety of indeterminacy: it was both law and its opposite. A wholly semantic analysis might confirm that transgression is ‘‘already inscribed into the law as a hidden possibility’’; the history explored here shows how, in Portugal’s labor code, written in the context of abolition, the violence associated with enslavement foretold the colonial legal space, in which the labor code’s prohibitions and protections were predictive of their violation.92 Like Mann’s characterization of the indige´nat as a black hole that ‘‘ordered the space around it,’’ the indigenato shaped the colonial situation with overpowering gravitational force, sending Africans into places—legally and literally—where their ‘‘native’’ status left them dangerously vulnerable. Against that obscurity, the history of colonial labor regimes and the intertwined arcs of human mobility that swirled around them shine a light into this space, highlighting its peril for the Africans who occupied it.93

Chapter 4

Victims, Saviors, and Suspects: Channeling Mobility in Post-Genocide Rwanda Simon Turner

Rwanda is a country that is most known to the outside world as the site of one of the worst crimes against humanity of the twentieth century. The 1994 genocide left around 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu dead in the course of three months. The present government has gone to great lengths to distance itself from what it terms ‘‘genocidal mentalities’’ and to promote unity and reconciliation among a population where no family was untouched by the killings that took place all over the country and often between family members and neighbors. Rather than explore whether these attempts at creating national unity and reconciliation ‘‘work’’ in terms of removing genocide mentalities or creating a sense of justice and reconciliation, ultimately preventing such a thing to happen again,1 I will explore the kind of statecraft that is at stake. More precisely, I explore how the government discourse of national unity creates categories of citizens and how these categories of citizens are not only ethnicized and related to positions during the genocide but also linked to histories of mobility. While the postgenocide state is born out of diasporic return and promotes mobility in terms of return, it also governs and channels mobility by linking specific trajectories of mobility to specific groups that are perceived to be in need of specific modes of governing. Official state policy is to welcome back the Hutu, who fled the country after the genocide, despite their complicity in the genocide. Likewise, the Rwandan state is actively encouraging the Rwandan diaspora to be engaged

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with the home country. The definition of the diaspora, and hence of who qualifies as a member of the nation, is very broad, signaling an inclusive citizenship definition. Meanwhile, I will show in this chapter that the state narrative in post-genocide Rwanda rests on various categories of ‘‘actors’’ that play different ‘‘roles’’ in relation to the project of creating a new postgenocide nation. First, there are the survivors of genocide who are portrayed as victims. Second, there are the saviors who saved these victims and who saved the nation. These are primarily Tutsi who had been in exile in Uganda and who have been labeled the ‘‘59ers’’ because they left Rwanda after the Hutu revolution of that year. Third, there are the perpetrators of the genocide and the potential perpetrators. This group is obviously slippery in terms of categorization, and I will argue that the sovereign power of the state lies in the ambiguous task of defining this group. On the one hand, the group is to be included in the new nation that does not distinguish between ethnic groups and is willing to forgive. On the other hand, the state is defined by its specifically antigenocidal ideology and its need to distance itself from any person or group that ‘‘harbors genocidal mentalities.’’ The creation of the three categories is fundamental to the narrative of a new Rwanda and relates to issues of ethnicity, territory, and mobility in the sense that it is only individuals of a certain ethnicity and who were in a certain place at a certain time who fall within these categories and, hence, fit the national narrative. In this chapter, I demonstrate that state power is based on the categorization of the citizenry into victims, saviors, and suspects. However, the categorization of the population (into us and them, citizens and subjects, polis and bare life) is not in itself what concerns the art of governmentality nor what creates the basis (and the potential downfall) of sovereign power. I argue that it is in the careful management of the borderline and overlapping cases that sovereign power emerges. Concretely, this means that all Hutu are potentially part of the polis, while they are also potential ge´nocidaires, or suspects. Likewise, there are a number of Tutsi who are neither victims nor heroes and certainly not perpetrators. These are the majority of Tutsi who returned from Burundi and Congo after the genocide and who could neither claim the victim position of those who had remained in Rwanda nor the heroic position of the saviors from Uganda. In other words, while the state promotes mobility and while it attempts to channel and, hence, govern mobility by creating the three categories, there are patterns of mobility (and even immobility) that do not fall neatly into the national script and evade governmentality.

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The genocide has become a ‘‘founding moment’’ for the post-genocide regime in Rwanda, and the ruling elite, strongly supported by a guiltplagued international community, is concerned with creating a new nation, a new state, and, ultimately, a new people. Although the present government wants to distance itself from the genocide, the genocide remains a founding moment, not in the positive sense but more as a negative specter that needs exorcising. Concretely this reveals itself in a national narrative where the population is defined in relation to the genocide as victims, suspects, or saviors. However, they are not just created through narrative but also manifest themselves in very concrete governmental techniques such as the Survivors Fund that gives financial support to relatives of Tutsi victims of the genocide; the ingando solidarity camps that are meant to transform prisoners, refugees, and other outsiders into new citizens; and the Commission for the Fight Against Genocide that seeks to eliminate any traces of ‘‘genocidal mentalities’’ in the population. In other words, the genocide leaves an imprint on society in very concrete forms, creating new insiders, outsiders, and in-betweeners. Second, I argue that the newly created hierarchies of belonging are managed according to mobility. Political and ethnic tensions in Rwanda have historically caused displacements of large sections of the population, who, in turn, have had serious impacts on the political and ethnic tensions in the country. Hence, mobility and political struggles of belonging and defining the nation have gone hand in hand for decades, which means that migration biographies are important signifiers of belonging. Belonging in this sense is not simply about belonging to a certain place but rather about belonging to a certain political constellation of nationhood. Third, I argue in this chapter that the governmental techniques that generate these new mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion are often quite benevolent and mostly concerned with the well-being of the citizens of the new, inclusive Rwanda. Although the responsible institutions often formally belong outside the state, they help create state effects2 and imaginations of the state.3 This is a state that rules through biopower, nurturing its citizens, but it is also a state that is sovereign, deciding who belongs and who does not.4 This chapter contributes to our theoretical understanding of the relationship between state and mobility by exploring a case where large-scale violence has resulted in an attempt to create a new constellation of space, citizen, and state. Much has been written since the 1990s on the relationship between nation, space, and identity and how mobility both challenges and

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strengthens this relationship.5 It is generally agreed that the constellation of people, place, and identity,6 and similarly of citizen, state, and nation,7 produces residual categories, what Bauman has termed the ‘‘stranger,’’8 a Derridaean supplement that both threatens and consolidates the order of things. Recent debates on sovereignty, inspired in particular by Agamben’s revival of Schmitt9 have similarly shown how a (bio)political order relies on the exclusion of bare life or naked life and a violent founding moment of political order—the state of exception. In this chapter, I draw on these debates when exploring the ways in which the state emerges as sovereign through a mixture of practices that at once create citizens through biopolitical care and through categorizations while also creating residual categories beyond the reach of biopolitics. This chapter explores what happens after a traumatic event such as the Rwandan genocide when the state attempts to cleanse itself of old exclusionary practices and explores what new exclusions may emerge. While the Rwandan case may seem extreme—in terms of both the scale of the violence and the displacement and the radical break the new regime is attempting to make—I argue that similar challenges of state formation and reconfigurations of mobility practices exist across the continent, in particular after war, massive violence, and radical change. In this sense, the study explores how the massive process of violent removal of a population entailed by genocide might not simply scatter populations and disrupt enduring political relationships and institutional arrangements but can become the cornerstone of an entirely new state-building enterprise. To phrase this observation in the terms proposed by the editors of this volume, the Rwandan case suggests that countergenocidal governance of mobility may also make states.

Creating National Unity for Everyone The Rwandan state has been characterized as a strange hybrid between a dictatorship and a neoliberal, modern, and transparent system.10 Rather than simply critique the present regime for double standards or for window dressing and for using the ‘‘genocide credit’’ to blackmail the international community into supporting an increasingly despotic regime and turning a blind eye to the serious human rights violations taking place,11 I prefer to explore the means by which the Rwandan state works on its own premises. How do these apparently contradictory aspects of the state go hand in

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hand? I was myself puzzled by the Maoist style reeducation camps, the ingando, that were established, first, to reeducate and reintegrate excombatants from the genocide and, later, to broader sections of society.12 How could the donor darling13 of Western democracies like the UK and the United States create such institutions? Much of the answer is to be found in the role that the genocide plays in present-day Rwanda’s nationalist discourse, since it may be argued that the Rwandan state defines the Rwandan nation as the antithesis of the genocide. After the catastrophic events of 1994, there was an urgent need to rebuild the infrastructure, the economy, and, first and foremost, the social fabric. For this to happen, it was necessary to rebuild the state. The new state should help get the country back on track in terms of development and economic growth, and it should help the population regain their trust in one another and in the state that had so terribly let them down and broken their trust.14 Therefore, it became important to create a state that was radically different from the one that had led to genocide. There was a need to create a new nation and to redefine the citizenry, a nation that was cleansed of the stain of genocide and cleansed of ethnicity. Emphasizing again and again a policy of national unity, the Rwandan state tries to go beyond what are perceived as the destructive forces of ethnicity. The new Rwanda is defined as the opposite of the old Rwanda, the latter being defined as tribalist, ignorant, corrupt, and neocolonial. Hence, the proposed cure is, on the one hand, to rid the nation of everything related to the old Rwanda and, on the other, to create a modern, antitribal society that is focused on development, education, information technology, and good governance.15 This is confirmed in the foreword of the government’s development plan, the ‘‘Vision 2020’’16: The Vision 2020 is a reflection of our aspiration and determination as Rwandans, to construct a united, democratic and inclusive Rwandan identity, after so many years of authoritarian and exclusivist dispensation. We aim, through this Vision, to transform our country into a middle-income nation in which Rwandans are healthier, educated and generally more prosperous. The Rwanda we seek is one that is united and competitive both regionally and globally.17 However, the present government is also concerned with a revival of the customary,18 as has been the case in many African states since the 1990s.19

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The gacaca courts, itorero (informal education system to discuss national unity and social problems), imidugudu (villagization), umugando (community work), and ingando are examples of these attempts to revive modified forms of precolonial institutions in an attempt to revive an authentic national identity as it was before it was affected by colonialism’s policies of divide and rule. Central to the project of creating a new Rwanda is the National Unity and Reconciliation Commission (NURC), which was established in 1999, with the vision to strive for ‘‘a peaceful, united and prosperous nation.’’20 It is supported financially by the UK Department for Iinternational Development, UNDP, UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), and EU, and it mainly tries to achieve its goals through various forms of civic education, as well as monitoring what is perceived as genocidal mentalities. In its mission statement, it emphasizes, among other things, Preparing and coordinating the national programs for the promotion of national unity and reconciliation; Educating and mobilizing the population on matters relating to national unity and reconciliation; Carrying out research, organizing debates, disseminating ideas and making publications relating to peace, national unity and reconciliation; Denouncing and fighting against acts, writings and utterances which are intended to promote any kind of discrimination, intolerance or xenophobia.21 We see here a balance between spreading information about unity and reconciliation, on the one hand, and monitoring and ‘‘combating’’ ideologies and actions that go against unity, on the other. The concluding chapter of a report by the NURC on ‘‘The Causes of Violence After the 1994 Genocide’’ comments on what it calls ‘‘wickedness’’ as a cause of violence, whether the violence is against genocide survivors or domestic or sexual violence. This kind of wickedness is caused by ignorance, the report claims, and continues: It should be recognized however that this wickedness as well as the ethnic hatred have been accentuated by the practices of the political powers that ran the country since 1919 until 1994. They have been cunningly reinforced, instrumentalized, or even deep-rooted in the minds of some of Rwandans by colonization, history, education,

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speeches, political actions and programs, media, religious confessions as well as by massive involvement in atrocities of the 1994 genocide. All these facts contributed significantly in nothing but socializing and spreading wickedness in Rwanda like an infectious disease. It has become a mentality, a sub culture peculiar to some of Rwandans. It cannot be uprooted at once, as by a stroke of magic wand. It requires for the long-term efforts that must be led to several fights by very wide-ranging actors.22 In other words, NURC claims that the post-genocide violence is the continuation of a long history of violence and the result of a massive socialization process that has resulted in a specific mentality and subculture. The objective for NURC then is to ‘‘uproot’’ this mentality bit by bit. The means to do so are primarily to re-educate the masses and to combat the divisive ideologies of the old regimes. Concretely, NURC has several so-called reconciliation tools to achieve these goals; prominent among them are itorero and ingando.23 Officially, the post-genocide state is committed to including all Rwandans in the Rwandan nation—whatever their ethnicity and wherever they may be. The state even has established a Diaspora Directorate General within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to reach out to the diaspora in various ways,24 and the embassies are keen to establish good links with the diaspora.25 This inclusive approach does not just go for old caseload Tutsi returnees. The Rwandan state has gone out of its way to encourage the return of Hutu refugees who had fled in 1994, not only through coercion, as when the government attacked the refugee camps in Zaire in 1996 with the purpose of forcing the Hutu refugees to return, but also through assisting in recuperating the land that had been occupied by 59ers while they were abroad.26 As van Leeuwen observes in relation to a state program of villagization, ‘‘The program was thus in line with the reconciliation message, advocated by the new government, that the country had enough resources to sustain all Rwandan people, and that every Rwandan living abroad was welcome to repatriate.’’27 Such policies stand in stark contrast to the old regime’s signals to Rwandan exiles that the country could not take more population pressure. Despite the attempts to be inclusive, reconciliatory, and unified, various groups and categories emerge. Or rather, it is the national narrative of unity and reconciliation that inavertedly creates these groups.28 Other groups are

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not mentioned in the national narrative but are created, nevertheless, as de facto leftovers. As Buckley-Zistel mentions, different experiences of the genocide create different groups.29 Nigel Eltringham and Saskia Van Hoyweghen30 also show how what they term ‘‘the genocide framework’’ has created categories of citizenship, distinguishing between rescape´s, old caseload returnees,31 and new caseload returnees.32 These are the only officially sanctioned categories in post-genocide Rwanda where mention of ethnic affiliation is not allowed. Helen Hintjens operates with the following groups as the only officially sanctioned groups: survivors, old caseload refugees, new caseload refugees, and suspected ge´nocidaires.33 In practice, she argues, new caseload refugees tend to overlap with the final category ‘‘suspected ge´nocidaires.’’ As can be seen from these official categories, categorization is based no longer on ethnicity but on mobility history—old and new caseload returnees—and on relation to the genocide: survivors and perpetrators. These seem to be the structuring principles of identity and of citizenship in the new state, and no other identity positions are officially available. I have chosen three categories: genocide survivors, saviors, and suspects. They are the actors in a broader national narrative about the new unified Rwanda that is the bedrock of state legitimacy. There is interdependence between the three categories; each category relies on the existence of the other, and there is no room to act outside this officially sanctioned script. In the following I explore how these categories are made and how they relate to the state. I also explore how they create whole populations who do not fit into these categories and who might be forced into a category, such as suspected ge´nocidaires, or simply left off the radar. I explore this concretely by investigating how the various programs and institutions that are purposed to create national unity shape the population according to different positions in the genocide and, hence, according to mobility histories. I will show how these governmental techniques emerge and categorize. Apart from this discursive analysis, I will briefly touch on the sociological consequences of such classification and hint at those who are left outside the categorization—effectively leftovers in the new constellation of the nation-state—for instance, the Hutu who never left the country and who did not take part in the genocide or the Tutsi who were victims of interahamwe (Hutu militia) violence but in Congo in 1997 rather than Rwanda in 1994, and many other such anomalies in the official classification. Such

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leftovers are essential for governmental techniques, as they become the reason for yet more refined classifications and state interventions into the hearts and minds of the citizens in the name of creating a new Rwanda. In other words, a dialectic process is taking place; while the sovereignty of the state emerges through the governmental practices of categorizing the population according to trajectories of mobility, certain groups slip between the categories. This, in turn, compels the state to refine its categorizations, reifying state sovereignty.

Genocide Survivors Very visible in state discourse are the so-called genocide survivors. Special tribute is paid to these survivors at the countless genocide memorials,34 just as there are numerous survivor associations. In 2003, the government of Rwanda set up a survivor’s fund that accounts for 8 percent of the annual budget.35 Being a survivor gives access to certain privileges, such as scholarships, just as a number of international development projects target this specific group. By creating this category, the state is giving recognition to some of the people who have suffered most due to the genocide (although others might have suffered similarly but at the ‘‘wrong’’ time).36 Since the state is built on the genocide as its negative founding principle, along the international slogan of ‘‘never again,’’ it is extremely important to have genocide survivors as the living evidence of the genocide. Similarly, memorials have become increasingly important over the past years because people’s memories of the genocide fade away, and, without the memories of the genocide, the present states’ claim to legitimacy may also fade. Despite using the term survivor rather than victim—very much in line with trends in the international human rights consensus—the genocide survivors are objectified as victims, as a category of people that need help, morally and materially, and the state emerges as able and willing to provide this support. Technically there are clear limits to who merits the status of a genocide survivor. Tutsi who were inside Rwanda during the genocide and who lost relatives qualify as survivors. This interpretation was confirmed in 2011 when the government changed the official term for the genocide to ‘‘the genocide against the Tutsi.’’ Hutu who did not take part in the genocide and who lost close relatives during the genocide do not qualify, despite the

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fact that it is widely acknowledged—also by the Rwandan state—that socalled moderate Hutu were explicitly targeted. The reason is that Hutu—as a group—were not targeted due to their ethnicity. Likewise, Tutsi who lost close relatives outside Rwanda and/or before or after April–July 1994 cannot claim survivor status. This includes the large numbers of Tutsi targeted by the interahamwe and other Hutu groups during the war in Zaire/Congo, 1996–99. During my fieldwork in 2009 and 2011–12 I found that these limits were the cause of much concern among many Rwandans who found them to be unjust. However, I do not intend to criticize the government for such ‘‘failures’’ as many other scholars have done.37 Rather, I want to point to the fact that the very existence of such a group is fundamental to the narrative of a new Rwanda and that it relates to issues of ethnicity, territory and mobility in the sense that it is only individuals of a certain ethnicity and who were in a certain place at a certain time who fall within this category and hence fit the national narrative. The narrative therefore unwittingly creates a number of leftover groups who do not fit the narrative, such as the Hutu who survived the genocide and the Tutsi who were in the ‘‘wrong place’’ at the ‘‘wrong time.’’ Genocide survivors are the objects of a caring state that provides them with material and moral support in various ways. And while the state produces them as objects of statecraft, the state itself comes into being in the process: namely, as the caring state that is concerned with the well-being of its citizen-subjects.38 As has been argued in the literature on governmentality,39 governmentality does not necessarily have to be carried out by the institutions of the state itself. In Rwanda, the governmental state operates through institutions such as Ibuka, an umbrella organization for survivor organizations in Rwanda. Although nominally a nongovernmental organization, it operates in a manner that objectifies survivors as a certain category of citizen-subjects and that has state effects. The sovereignty of the state relies therefore not only on the negative power of the law but equally on the decision as to who are worthy targets of ‘‘care’’ and, hence, objects of governance. The question then is how survivors are objectified and what kind of citizenship is created. As victims of the genocide that is the founding moment of the new Rwandan nation, they are central to keeping the memory of the genocide alive and therefore a cornerstone in the construction of the new Rwanda. However, they are simultaneously construed in state discourse as helpless victims that are in need of assistance. This assistance

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may come from the benevolent state or from one of the organizations that the state has accepted as trustworthy.40 In this case, the state becomes the active agent, while survivors are bereaved of agency. Furthermore, the survivors play an ambiguous role in the new Rwanda, due to their links to the past. On the one hand they provide the link to the founding moment of the genocide; on the other they also create a link to a past that the state wants to rid the new Rwandan nation of. This ambiguous relationship is also traced in the official narrative that it was the advancing Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) troops who stopped the genocide. In other words, the survivors were not able to defend themselves during the genocide and were dependent on the returnees from Uganda to save them from annihilation. In sum, the survivors are central to the myth of the new Rwanda because they embody the horrors of the genocide that is so central to the creation of the new Rwanda. However, rather than being perceived as active creators of this new nation, they are objectified through national narratives and through concrete governmental practices as helpless victims who need the assistance of others. According to this narrative, anyone who was in Rwanda before and during the genocide is potentially responsible for the genocide or at least perceived to have been too weak to prevent it. Seeing as no one who was inside the country was able to prevent it from happening, an actor from outside—someone unstained by the past—was needed. This was the returning diaspora.

The Saviors With the genocide as the founding moment of the present state, a specific group stands out as the ‘‘founding fathers’’ of the new nation. In the narrative of the new nation, they are the agents who caused the new Rwanda to emerge, and it is therefore also seen as their responsibility to prevent Rwanda from slipping back to what it was before the genocide.41 This group I have chosen to call ‘‘the saviors’’ is thus bestowed—according to official narratives—with the ability to change history, an ability that entails a responsibility toward the nation and toward those who are less endowed— such as the survivors—to administer this power justly. When interviewing Tutsi who had returned from Uganda and Tanzania shortly after the genocide, I would often be told that ‘‘We were given a country’’ and that ‘‘This country was in ruins and we had a responsibility to rebuild it.’’ The core of

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this group is the RPF, who, according to their own accounts, put an end to the genocide and liberated Rwanda. By association, it includes all the Tutsi who returned from abroad. And although this, in principle, includes the hundreds of thousands who returned from Burundi and Zaire, in practice, it means those from Uganda, as it was the ‘‘Ugandans’’ who made up the core of the RPF.42 As mentioned above, the survivors are objectified as victims who were unable—even unwilling—to protect themselves and the nation, and it fell upon the diaspora to liberate the nation. It is common for diasporas and those who remain to perceive of the diaspora as active agents of change, due to separation from the homeland, exposure to other kinds of knowledge, and to hardship.43 This may be in terms of business, development, or politics. Peter Hansen has, for instance, elegantly demonstrated the gendered nature of the diaspora–homeland relationship in Somaliland,44 the diaspora being associated with masculinity—strong, hard, active—while the homeland is perceived as feminine—soft, fertile, passive. Return migration and diaspora engagement are often, he argues, coined in gendered images such as penetrating virgin soil.45 My interviews with Rwandan returnees confirm this picture of active agents that are making use of virgin territory: that Rwanda has a great development potential, but it needs the courage and the knowledge of the returning diaspora for it to flourish and bear fruit. Similarly, the survivors are feminized as passive victims who are in need of help from the active, masculinized returning ‘‘warrior-diaspora.’’ It is not surprising in this context that most programs to help survivors target women and children. Widows and orphans are defined by a lack; they lack the father/husband, and through the survivor programs the state is able to fill this lack, symbolically taking the place of the caring and protective husband and father.46 Rwanda is an extreme case of diasporic influence. Only rarely has a country been so thoroughly affected by an incoming diaspora group.47 Helen Hintjens uses Robin Cohen’s term ‘‘victim diasporic nationalism’’ to describe Rwandan nationalism, claiming that it is based on the ‘‘myth of diasporic Tutsi victimhood.’’48 Eltringham and Van Hoyweghen argue that the present regime is claiming victimhood by creating continuity in history between 1959 and 1994.49 In that sense, the ‘‘old caseload returnees’’ can claim to be victims of genocide by proxy,50 and a single category of victims is created, namely, the Tutsi. In this sense, ethnicity is reintroduced, and Hutu, as we shall see shortly, become suspects by default. Certainly, it may

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be claimed that the ideology of the returning diaspora has its roots in the idea that the Tutsi have been victims of pogroms since 1959 that forced them into exile and, furthermore, that they experienced hostility as a group in Uganda.51 However, I would argue that the claims to victimhood are more complex because, while the Tutsi returning from the diaspora may draw on the victim position to make claims to recognition, they also constitute themselves as willing and able to act. This is different to the pure victim position of the survivors who are left without any public agency.52 The real life experiences of the two groups could hardly be farther apart from a sociological standpoint. They have grown up in different countries, one as an ethnic minority, the other as refugees. One never had political influence, while the other was very close to the political leadership in Uganda for a short while. They have very different educational backgrounds and do not even speak the same languages.53 Finally, and most significantly, their experience of the genocide was as different as it could be. While the survivors experienced the genocide first hand at the receiving end and were unable to escape the country, most of the 59ers were in Uganda during the whole genocide, while a small faction of RPF soldiers experienced the genocide as the backdrop to their victorious battle against the government army. So, while the survivors need the saviors and the saviors certainly need the survivors, their only commonality is their ethnicity—which officially does not exist. There is, in other words, a slippage between categories in official discourse. On the one hand, survivors are elevated to a position where they incarnate the new Rwandan nation, due to their victim position in the genocide. Likewise, the returning diaspora also claims victimhood and association with the survivors. On the other hand, I would argue that it is important to take note of the strong distinction that is drawn between these two groups as passive victims of history and active agents of change, respectively. It may be argued, following Purdekova´, that the RPF nation- and statebuilding project in Rwanda ‘‘appears to be an ‘‘imported,’’ ‘‘brewed in exile’’ recipe for a permanent escape from the past and attainment of an alternative future.’’54 In other words, the only Rwandans able to create a new Rwanda without any contamination from the past are those who were outside the country during the ‘‘dark years’’ of the Hutu republics. Those who had remained inside the country, whether victim, perpetrator, or bystander, are construed in this discourse as being stained by the past in

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one way or another, while those who had been in exile remained pure.55 ‘‘It is the interstitial/liminal (Rwandan refugees in Uganda) that overcomes ‘relations of dominance’ and comes to the center.’’56 First, it takes a movement from outside to break the internal relations of power and dominance. Second, in order to start from scratch, a radical break with the past is needed. The Tutsi returning from Uganda were in the right position for both these tasks and were adamant to pursue creating this new nation through a tightly controlled process of modernization and enlightenment. This is indeed an enlightenment project where everything that is new in Rwanda is juxtaposed with what was the ‘‘old Rwanda.’’ The old Rwanda was marred with ignorance, which explains—according to the present narrative—why so many ordinary Rwandans took part in the genocide. They were ignorant and uneducated and, hence, easily manipulated by a cynical elite. According to government discourse, Rwandans are one people, and the terms Tutsi and Hutu are a colonial invention, which means those who killed in the name of ethnicity either were cynically manipulating false identities or were the victims of such manipulation due to ignorance. Not only was Rwanda marked by ignorance and a belief in ethnicity, but the population was generally superstitious and the government incompetent and corrupt. Therefore, it is the aim of the new state to bring enlightenment in all straits of life. The question then is where this enlightenment should come from, if everyone in Rwanda was either ignorant or malevolent. Who should be the benevolent harbingers of light and progress? This is where the returning diaspora enters the picture. Seeing as they had not been subjected to the indoctrinations of the first and second republics, they were able to see through the manipulation. Furthermore, they had achieved education and experience while in exile.57 In this case, there is the added twist that they actually stopped the genocide by defeating the Rwandan army on the battlefield in the months between April and July 1994. Who belongs, then, to this group? In the course of six months in 1994, 600,000 ‘‘old caseload’’ refugees, the new term for Tutsi who had fled in the 1960s, returned from Uganda, Tanzania, Burundi, and Zaire; in the following years, the figure reached an amazing one million.58 It was from the ranks of the returnees from Uganda that the new elite would emerge, due to their positions in the RPF, and the trade and personal networks they had with the remaining Tutsi diaspora in Europe, North America, and East Africa.

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The term ‘‘old caseload returnees’’ is misleading. There are great divisions in both the experience and the present position of the returnees in terms of class and in terms of where they were refugees before 1994. Although there have been no serious studies of the numbers of returnees from different countries or what their position in society is today, it seems sure to say that the Anglophone returnees from Uganda dominate the upper echelons of society, whether in government or civil society. There are obviously also returnees from Uganda who do not occupy such positions due to their class position. The leftover categories are, in particular, the Tutsi who returned from Tanzania, Zaire, and Burundi. A number of Tutsi had succeeded in getting high education and positions in Tanzania. When they returned, they joined the state elite while the majority simply moved across the border with their significant herds of cattle. The two other groups are more problematic, as many held high positions in exile and feel marginalized due, among other things, to the dominance of English and the marginalization of French and due to the fact that they did not contribute to the war effort against the previous regime.59 Because the Anglophone returnees dominated the RPF rebel movement, they now dominate the upper echelons of the state, NGOs, and the private sector. And because they won the war and stopped the genocide, they are able to position themselves morally and politically as the creators and defenders of the new Rwanda and have become the incarnation of the new citizenry upon whom state sovereignty rests.

Suspects Another large group of people who have returned to Rwanda since the genocide are the hundreds of thousands of Hutu who fled during and immediately after the genocide and who returned only reluctantly when forced in late 1996. These refugee returnees are not accused en masse of being perpetrators of genocide, but they are all potentially perpetrators by default. I am not concerned with the usual critique of the government that it is implicitly accusing innocent Hutu of being ge´nocidaires. What concerns me more is the ways in which perpetrators are constructed as a category— not only of individuals who have committed crimes in the past but, more importantly, as a potential within every Hutu. While this potential is suspected to be latent in every Hutu, state discourse assumes that it takes

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indoctrination for it to come to the fore, and it is the task of the enlightened and benevolent state to control and prevent ‘‘genocide mentalities’’ to protect the population—Hutu as well as Tutsi—from ethnic violence. A number of precautions have been taken by the Rwandan state to combat genocide mentality. In 2001 a law against sectarianism was passed60; in 2003 a law was passed to prevent the spread of genocide mentalities, divisionism, and ethnic ideologies61; and in 2007 the National Commission for the Fight Against Genocide (CNLG) was established. This well-staffed institution, based in new buildings on the outskirts of Kigali, has the task of monitoring what might be perceived as expressions of ‘‘genocide denial,’’ ‘‘revisionism,’’ ‘‘divisionism,’’ and ‘‘genocide ideology.’’ The assumption is that ideologies circulate—often from sources in Europe—and may affect the mentalities of vulnerable groups such as the Hutu youth. It is, therefore, also important to teach the youth the true history of the country and the real causes behind the genocide.62 In the words of a young man, teaching school children about the genocide at Kigali’s Gisozi Genocide Memorial, ‘‘It is necessary to remove the bad mentalities of the youth and put some good ones in instead.’’63 The most visible evidence of this concept of feeding the ignorant Hutu with knowledge about the truth of the genocide is the ingando camps. When the NURC was established, it formally developed ingando as a tool to build coexistence within communities. The first beneficiaries were excombatants from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The program later expanded to include school-going youth and students at secondary and tertiary levels. By 2002, the training was extended to informal traders and other social groups, including survivors, prisoners, community leaders, women, and youth. Topics are covered under five central themes: analysis of Rwanda’s problems; history of Rwanda; political and socioeconomic issues in Rwanda and Africa; rights, obligations, and duties; and leadership.64 The camps are a mixture of boot camps with Boy Scout-like exercises and Maoist reeducation camps where the participants are taught subjects like history and conflict resolution. The ingando camps act as the ritual camps of rites de passage, making sure the transformation from one status to another happens in an orderly manner. They make sure that the national narrative of the victorious group is disseminated to all sections of society. Demographically and sociologically speaking, there are hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people living in Rwanda today who do not fit into the categories survivor, savior, or suspect. What is important here is

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not whether the categories are relevant for the lived experiences of all and every Rwandan, but how the categories become means of disciplining the population and of creating citizens and, hence, the state. Ingandos are particularly illuminating in this sense because they certainly are about nation building through disseminating the hegemonic narrative about the new Rwanda, while they also are tools through which the state is involved in the most intimate spheres of the individual: their mentalities. The potential ge´nocidaire exemplifies this process of categorization of populations and the production of citizens very well in the sense that even the term ‘‘potential’’ reveals that this is a question not of classifying populations according to what they are or what they do but according to what it is suspected they might do.65 Because the state is operating with potential actions, it is necessary to reeducate and police large sections of the population. Concretely, the category of suspects leads the state to reeducate ever larger sections of the population through ingando and a number of other reeducation schemes, such as itorero, in order to create proper citizens of the new state. Simultaneous with this mechanism of inclusion—or rather producing new citizens—is another mechanism that is driven by security concerns, where the state puts ever larger sections of the population under surveillance. These surveillance mechanisms, exemplified by the CNLG, attempt to detect and remove tendencies that go against the new Rwanda. This is, in other words, an example of modern statecraft that, on the one hand, is based on what Foucault has termed ‘‘productive power,’’ where the exercise of power produces new categories and identities, while, on the other hand, the state relies on what he calls negative or sovereign power. And while Foucault saw these two types of power in a historical succession,66 Agamben and others have argued that they are mutually constitutive.67 This balancing act between a caring biopower and more sovereign measures of surveillance and exclusion results in identifying citizens while creating groups that are excluded from the nation. More importantly, it creates a state that has the power to make the decision on who belongs and who does not. The fact that large segments of the population fall outside either category only strengthens the power of the decision. In particular, the threat of falling into the category of the enemy, namely, the ge´nocidaire, allows the state to focus on security and control as a supplement to its project of creating an inclusive state of empowered citizens. The Rwandan state is, in other words, not as hypocritical as many critics would argue. Rather, it seeks in the name of the people to protect the citizens from

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the dangers of genocide mentalities and therefore combines discourses of biopower and securitization. From these analyses, we see that the Rwandan government is keen to create a new Rwanda that breaks radically with the past. We also see that past mobility biographies influence the position of Rwandans in the present nation-state. In the following, I uncover the creation of the pre-genocide Rwandan nation because it has implications for what the present nation is trying not to be. While the present state manages mobility through promoting certain types of migration and by carefully civilizing those whom it deems in need before including them in the new Rwanda, the pre-genocide state governed mobility through prevention where the relationship between state and territory followed a more conventional autochthon/allochthon script.

Creating the Hutu Nation It is common knowledge that European missionaries and colonial administration exacerbated the existing ethnic divisions in Rwanda and Burundi, creating racialized identities and splitting the population in to what Mamdani has termed natives and settlers.68 The 1959 Hutu or social revolution, where Hutu intellectuals, backed by Belgian officials and the Catholic Church, was however, not just about a historically oppressed ethnic group violently seizing power from the ruling ethnic group. It was also about redefining the nation and its people. The events leading to the Hutu social revolution and the ideologies that it expressed have been analyzed extensively elsewhere, most notably in relation to attempts to explain the 1994 genocide.69 I will focus here on the ways in which the state created insiders and outsiders—both in terms of belonging to the Rwandan nation and in terms of territory and mobility. In other words, the 1959 Hutu revolution created new ways of imagining the sovereign state and new perceptions of belonging as either citizens or subjects, breaking radically with colonial constructions of race, ethnicity, and belonging in some senses, while reproducing them in others. The Hutu revolution and the First Republic (under Gregoire Kayibanda’s presidency) were based on the idea that Hutu and Tutsi were different races and that the Hutu were the autochthonous race who had inhabited

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the Great Lakes region since time immemorial, while the Tutsi were portrayed as foreign invaders of an alien race, who had immigrated to the region from the north only four centuries ago. In 1959, Kayibanda expressed it thus: ‘‘Our movement aims at the Hutu group. It has been offended, humiliated and despised by the Tutsi invader. We must illuminate the mass. We are here to return the country to its owners. It is the country of the Bahutus. The small Mututsi came with the big.’’70 By an ironic twist of history, this vision of the racial composition of the Great Lakes region dates back to the early European explorers and missionaries who—preoccupied with modern theories of race—explained the fact that they encountered well-organized kingdoms in the middle of ‘‘savage Africa’’ with a theory that the Tutsi were not really Bantu and that they had migrated to the region bringing civilization from the north. This theory was coined the Hamitic thesis and used by the colonial administrators to privilege the supposedly more intelligent Tutsi in education and government positions, while Hutu were expected to remain peasants. The colonial system of indirect rule backfired nastily in 1959 when disgruntled Hutu intellectuals, educated in missionary schools, not only expressed their discontent with the social injustices of the colonial order but did so by using the Hamitic thesis—only turning it upside down and arguing for the rights of the autochthons. In the racialized ideology of the First Republic, the Hutu were the nation, which meant that the Tutsi were aliens. This ideology was accompanied by anti-Tutsi violence in 1959–61, 1963–64, and 1973. The violence caused hundreds of thousands of Tutsi to leave the country.71 It is estimated that by 1990 between 400,000 and 600,000 Tutsi and their descendants lived in the Great Lakes region as refugees.72 According to UNHCR figures, that cover only registered refugees and do not take account of the large numbers of self-settled refugees, the majority (266,000) lived in Burundi, while 82,000 lived in Uganda, 22,000 in Tanzania, and 13000 in Zaire. It is estimated that the figure for Uganda is more like 200,000 refugees.73 These populations, who had been branded alien and stripped of their citizenship, would later play a central role in the emergence of Hutu power and the genocide in 1994 and also in the post-genocide state. This understanding of the nation and the people changed in 1973 when Juvenal Habyarimana came to power and declared the Second Republic. His calls to reconcile the Hutu and Tutsi were not simply a question of being more ‘‘moderate’’ or less nationalist than Kayibanda. They also

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reflected another understanding of state and citizenship. According to Mamdani, ‘‘Habyarimana spoke of the Tutsi as an ethnic group, not a race, as a Rwandan, not an alien, minority.’’74 While the Hutu were the nation and the nation was the Hutu under the First Republic, Habyarimana adopted the concept of ‘‘the democratic majority,’’ whereby the Hutu, due to being the ethnic majority, also were the democratic majority.75 However, Tutsi were once again citizens of Rwanda rather than strangers76 and focus was on development and progress for the masses, rather than on ethnicity and politics.77 However, while the state was reconciliatory toward the Tutsi inside the country, it was official policy to deny the refugees the right to return to their home country.78 Coined in developmentalist and Malthusian terms, the government argued that population pressure and the resulting environmental degradation of the land did not permit return of Banyarwanda living outside the country’s borders.79 With one of the highest population densities in Africa, the government argued that the steep hills that already were under agricultural pressure simply could not take any more. Due to pressure from international agencies, from refugees in Uganda and from neighboring governments, several commissions to solve the refugee problem were established, but these commissions never functioned in practice.80 In other words, while the state had become more inclusive in terms of granting citizenship to Tutsi, it relied on new forms of exclusion, now excluding those who had been forced across the border to neighboring states. The criteria for belonging had shifted from race to territory. However, as the war from 1990 to the 1994 genocide would later prove, the territorybased exclusion of the Tutsi also affected the Tutsi inside the country who, by racial association, were classified as potential aliens and enemies of the state.81 Hence, the principle of territorially based citizenship was still affected by—and continued to affect—citizenship based on blood and race. The developmentalist discourse of the Second Republic constructed a state that was internally multiethnic while territorially sovereign, as it had the right to exclude mobile populations who might challenge the territorial integrity of the state. While Habyarimana’s regime framed its position on exiled Tutsi in technical terms of economic development and ecological pressure, it may be argued that the discourse was never able completely to avoid ethnic and racial terms of blood and heritage. This is not to say that it was simply ‘‘window dressing.’’ On the contrary, it would be difficult to understand the ethnopolitics of Rwanda at the time without understanding

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the broader politics of progress, order, and modernity. In other words, the politics of ethnic exclusion were part and parcel of an attempt to create a modern, developmental state, which was able to liberate the masses from precolonial feudalism and colonial divide and rule. During the First Republic, the racial categories of colonial rule were adopted and turned upside down in order to defend the Hutu nation against Tutsi feudalism. The Second Republic tried to break with the precolonial and colonial orders by moving beyond race. In this case, the perceived threat of slipping back to the old feudalist order came from exiles who not only were Tutsi but, in the Ugandan case, often were of royal stock and had belonged to the colonial elite. The state was in other words no longer defending the Hutu race but progress, liberation, and democracy against feudalism and neocolonialism. When the RPF attacked the northeastern part of Rwanda from bases in Uganda in October 1990, the state came under pressure to redefine itself away from ethnic reconciliation and economic progress toward a discourse about existential threats to the nation itself. At this point, the Tutsi refugees transgressed the limits of legal and technical discourses on development and threatened the state at the core of its values—territorial integrity—by crossing the border and by breaking the state’s monopoly on violence. As a consequence of this turn, the Tutsi outside the country were cast as the enemy, while the Tutsi inside the country were put in a precarious position because they—by virtue of their ethnicity (and, hence, their blood)—were assumed to be potential collaborators with the RPF. The RPF was formed as a reaction to being denied the right to become fully accepted as citizens of Uganda, despite being born in Uganda and having been pivotal in Yoweri Museveni’s National Resistance Movement and his rise to power.82 The RPF was, in other words, created as an attempt to be recognized as citizens of the Rwandan state instead. However, rather than being accepted as Rwandans, they were treated as Tutsi who wanted to take over the country and reintroduce monarchy. In sum then, the independent Rwandan state had been established on preventing mobility. Mobility was perceived as the root of all evil in the first place because the Tutsi were perceived to be strangers who had invaded the country centuries ago. There were, however, shifts in linking mobility, territory, and ethnicity from the 1960s to the 1970s and 1980s and back again in the early 1990s. In the first period, Tutsi were generally treated as strangers—whether inside the country or not. In the second period, the state attempted to distinguish between Tutsi inside the country and those

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outside. The former were treated as a minority but not integrated, while the latter were simply denied access to the nation. Although race and ethnicity were downplayed in this period, both categories still played a defining role, and the state contained within itself an inherent tension between defining itself as one nation while maintaining ethnic quotas. When the RPF launched attacks from Uganda in 1990, this tension could no longer be contained, and all Tutsi were immediately perceived as strangers—and in racial terms. It would be wrong to search for one cause behind the genocide in 1994. However, the positioning of the Tutsi—whether inside the country or not—as foreigners who did not belong to the Rwandan nation and actually threatened the stability between nation, state, and citizens certainly played an important part in the process.

Conclusion Statecraft is often about controlling borders,83 marking territory, and deciding who should be allowed to transgress these borders.84 However, statecraft is a never-ending process, and sometimes the internal tensions cannot take the strain, which ultimately may lead to its collapse. The 1994 genocide definitely brought the old order to an end, and the massive movement of people in and out of the country called for a reconception of state and citizen. In 1994–96, the field stood open to new interpretations of statehood and belonging. After 1996, a new order emerged, based very strongly on being what the old order was not. It was an order that preached national inclusiveness and a move away from policies of race and ethnicity. However, even such orders create insiders, outsiders, and leftovers. In this chapter, I have explored how statecraft is exercised in a situation of radical rupture, when nation building, reconciliation, and defining a new beginning for citizens become of great urgency. I have shown how, in the Rwandan case, the genocide has become a founding moment, acting as a point zero from where everything can be measured in positive terms and as a year zero from where the new Rwanda begins. This new Rwanda is defined as everything that the old Rwanda was not. References to the genocide and to the old Rwanda that led to the genocide abound in the nationbuilding process undertaken by the present state because they confirm what the new nation is not. A central aim of this new Rwanda is to rid the nation of any remains—however small or hidden—of divisionism and ethnic

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thinking in order to create a nation of unity and equality. However, despite the rhetoric of inclusion, unity, and a common identity for all Rwandans, the nation is perceived to have enemies that want to prevent these objectives. This enemy is defined as genocidal mentalities that are supposedly remains from the old regime and the genocide. They are assumed—in national discourse—to be hosted by Hutu in exile, while ignorant Hutu inside Rwanda are perceived to be vulnerable to such propaganda. The state sees it therefore as its duty to protect the nation and the people—of all ethnic groups—against such mentalities through education and surveillance. Obviously, the most vulnerable group is the Hutu—in particular, those who returned from exile after the genocide—and special attention is given to reeducating these groups through ingando. Another category that is believed to be vulnerable is the category of survivors. Whereas the returning Hutu are vulnerable to adopting genocidal mentalities, the survivors are vulnerable in the sense that they were the targets of genocidal violence and hence perceived to be in need of protection from the effects of such mentalities. The survivors are made up of the Tutsi who remained in Rwanda throughout the genocide and are objectified as victims who were not able to protect themselves and in need of protection now against a possible replay of the genocide. In terms of national identity, they are important because they link the present nation to the events of 1994 as pure victims—something that neither Hutu nor returning Tutsi can do. Mobility plays into this script of nation building and statecraft in various ways. First, Hutu who have been abroad are positioned as potential traitors to the nation because they are suspected of being involved in the genocide and allegedly have been exposed to divisionism and genocide denial in exile. Second, the Tutsi who remained inside the country are portrayed as weak because they were unable to see clearly and act appropriately during the genocide. Finally, the Tutsi who returned from Uganda were untainted by the genocide as either victims or perpetrators and were able to position themselves as the saviors of the nation. Their diasporic position allows them to take the role as saviors of the nation, while they are dependent on the survivors as those who need protecting and on the suspects as those who need controlling and educating. Mobility is, in other words, a resource according to the state script for the new Rwanda, but it is perceived as a Janus-faced resource: it may contribute equally to bringing enlightenment, development, and unity as it may contribute to bringing

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tribalism, divisionism, and violence, which means that the state has to carefully govern the various types of mobility in order to harness the positive resources and remove the negative ones. While the state in pre-genocide Rwanda sought to control the destabilizing effects of mobility by preventing mobility, the present state more subtly channels mobility. Where does this staging of the nation-building process leave the state, then? The state is pivotal in nation building, in particular in a case where the nation is constructed not around strong political ideologies of ethnicity and autochthony but rather around technocratic and managerial dreams of development and progress. Through its concern with efficiency, education, and security, the Rwandan state creates citizens, defining what a good citizen is in terms of unity, reconciliation, and economic rationalities. And in the process of defining these citizens, classifying them into survivors, suspects, and saviors, as well as taking care of them, surveilling them, educating them, and punishing them, the state emerges through statecraft as state effects. Although an explicit objective of the new Rwandan state is to break with the old state’s narrow definition of citizenship and belonging, exclusionary practices take place on a daily basis. These are not necessarily linked to race or even to the borders of the national territory but to who is considered a good citizen and who is not, which, again, is defined in relation to the roles mentioned above—survivor, suspect, savior. Because large segments of the population fall outside these categories, the state becomes all the more powerful in its role of policing the categories and deciding who fits where. State practices of exclusion are rarely spectacular or violent and mostly take place through mundane, quotidian practices of care, control, and surveillance. State sovereignty emerges in its ability to decide who is worthy of care and who should be subject to control and surveillance. It is in this endless categorization that its sovereign power lies. While the Rwandan case is an extreme one due to the scale of the genocide, many other states across the continent are also emerging from war, violence, and state failure, trying to clean the slate and start from scratch. Each of these states has to deal with reconciling victims and perpetrators and most often deal with large populations living abroad. Questions of who belongs to the nation and what constitutes a good citizen are central to these processes of state formation. Most often, diasporas gain a new and positive role in these new postconflict states while also posing a potential threat to status quo. The Rwandan case demonstrates the complexity of

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relations between mobility and state formation in a postconflict situation and how mobility may be encouraged while being carefully governed, just as unity may be encouraged while creating new categories of differentiation among the citizens. These processes of governing mobile and immobile sections of the population in relation to their positions during the genocide have proved central to the sovereignty of the state in Rwanda, and, although handled differently in other counties emerging from violent conflict, state sovereignty in these cases depends equally on the state’s ability to govern mobility, whether through prevention, promotion, or channeling.

Chapter 5

Channeling Mobility Across a Segregated Johannesburg Darshan Vigneswaran

Planned segregation is one of the main ways states in Africa have channeled mobility. Colonial African states used considerable energy to control the movements of ‘‘native’’ peoples both to and within cities. While many forms of cross-border movement were rarely enumerated and frequently unregulated,1 the movement of black populations (and sometimes Indian, Arab, and Chinese populations) into and within urban areas was often regarded as deeply problematic and threatening. Colonial states routinely segregated settlements to appease settlers’ fears of miscegenation, respond to pseudoscientific theories of disease management, and assuage security paranoia. In the process, these governments developed a range of regulatory mechanisms, including arrests, raids, detentions, demolitions, and mass removals to halt, limit, and channel ‘‘native’’ movement to the city.2 In this chapter, I explore the evolution of this form of state channeling of human mobility in the postcolonial era. Racial segregation policies and laws largely died out with the collapse of European empires because postcolonial governments in Africa were largely nationalist in orientation and, therefore, abjured state-planned and -enforced racial and ethnic segregation. There have been cases where governments have staged antimigration crackdowns or slum clearances in an effort to illustrate their abiding capacity to confront seemingly chaotic processes of urban development and change,3 but these are now widely regarded as exceptions, not the rule. The sort of politically mandated and totalizing segregation program that was

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taken to its illogical extremes in Apartheid South Africa has become, it would seem, largely a thing of the past. In this sense, South Africa’s transition to democracy in 1994 represented a belated return of the continent to an international community that, particularly since the desegregation movement in the southern United States in the 1960s, has largely upheld the idea that, within state borders, systematic controls on movement of people should be abjured. Did the end of Apartheid spell the end of a period in which the state in Africa engendered and enforced urban population divides? Much of the literature would lead us to support this conclusion. Patterns of residential segregation are seen as either mere hangovers from the past or the product of housing-market dynamics and ethnic chauvinism. The ‘‘politics’’ of segregation—let alone the concept of ‘‘the state’’—rarely feature in these studies. Departing from this position, this study seeks to explore the role that state officials in Africa continue to play in engendering and enforcing urban population divides. While state agents are no longer empowered by laws and policies to channel populations to designated areas, they may shape where people move in public space in a variety of more subtle and informal ways. This divisive brand of governance is evident in the activities of those groups that exercise the core responsibility of the ‘‘state’’ vis-a`-vis legitimate violence. The state-funded police—usually in conjunction with a range of semipublic and private security actors—possess the resources to halt, arrest, and remove people from public spaces. While these actors are no longer mandated to evict unwanted outsiders from ‘‘group areas,’’ they often police spaces in ways that (a) inform population groups when they are ‘‘in the right place’’ or ‘‘out of place’’ and (b) discourage these groups from moving out of their designated zones. The background for this observation is the recognition that the police have a long history of involvement in urban segregation in Africa and elsewhere. Much of the everyday practice of public order policing (as opposed to investigative, bureaucratic, and operational work) is not the exercise of violence per se, but (a) the observation of and encounters with civilians moving through public spaces and (b) the determination of who ‘‘belongs’’ in what place by means of profiling and interrogation.4 Invariably, this practice is strongly influenced by deep social norms and criteria that criminalize particular groups and identities and identify certain groups and individuals as ‘‘outsiders’’ in particular parts of the city. Police stops are often

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carefully coded territorial messages, designed to inform certain categories of ostensibly free civilians that they are ‘‘out of place.’’ This type of police territoriality has been most commonly identified in the literature on racial profiling. For Albert Meehan and Michael Ponder, ‘‘racial profiling is inextricably tied not only to race, but to officers’ conceptions of place, of what should typically occur in an area and who belongs, as well as where they belong.’’5 In this chapter, I want to suggest that this type of informal policing of segregation partly helps explain why, despite the decline of segregation policies and laws, cities in Africa continue to be deeply divided. Urban populations cannot be easily sorted into designated areas through violence alone. Governing institutions must first differentiate the populations that they confront into insider and outsider groups and encourage these various groups to accept and adopt specific notions of legitimate residence and occupation. As John Torpey argues in his account of the development of the modern passport, this involves the ‘‘embrace’’ of the population by the state apparatus.6 In the early twentieth century, governments sorted the world’s population into national, territorial groups by using the passport to register mobile groups, separate them into national groupings, and encourage them to abide by state laws regarding who belonged where. Given that the police in African cities lack passports that clearly identify who belongs where, how do they engage in this population-sorting exercise?

South Africa: Segregation and Securitization After Apartheid This chapter seeks answers to this question through an in-depth case study of inner-city Johannesburg. Johannesburg is an ideal site to study continuities in state-enforced segregation in Africa. When the African National Congress (ANC) assumed power in 1994, it announced an intention to desegregate South African cities. However, since 1996, the government has emphasized infrastructural investment, service delivery, and improvement in personal living conditions in previously disadvantaged areas, but not active desegregation.7 As a result, South African cities remain deeply segregated fifteen years after the formal end of Apartheid.8 As race has declined as a legitimator of social segregation, a language of crime control has risen in its place. South Africa has a very high level of violent crime. South Africa’s homicide rate ranks seventh on the list of

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reporting countries, at 36.5 per 100,000 population for the period 2003– 2008.9 These crime rates have reinvigorated old patterns of securitized segregation and given birth to new forms of spatial exclusion.10 After a brief flirtation with a human rights-oriented policy,11 the South African Police Force has redeployed the spatially oriented approaches to public order policing that were the hallmarks of the Apartheid era. The police use a range of enforcement powers mandated to them under immigration, traffic, vagrancy, trespass, trade, and alcohol consumption laws to restrict movement across the urban landscape.12 The police are not alone on this ‘‘beat.’’13 South Africa has witnessed a dramatic growth in the private security industry. In 2007, the industry was worth approximately R14 billion, employing a total of 300,000 active security officers, outnumbering the police by approximately two to one.14 These figures do not include the vast array of private investments in insurance, high walls, electronic security and surveillance systems, anti-hi-jack systems, vehicle tracking devices, firearms, and self-defense training. This increased investment in private security is changing the morphology of South African cities. Inner-city zones have been increasingly commandeered by privatized development corporations who explicitly promote the removal of poor people as a development ideal.15 On the urban fringe, we see the rise of gated communities, either through the new construction of private walled developments or through the ad hoc and often illegal process of ‘‘boom-gating’’ previously open suburbs.16 Poorer South Africans are also privatizing security, albeit in different ways. There are a range of nonstate groups, ranging from community policing forums, to self-defense communities, to run-of-the-mill vigilantes who provide protection for poorer communities in townships and inner-city ghettoes. Spatial claiming and ethnic closure are often the raison d’eˆtre of such groups, as has often been witnessed over the past five years, with the rising incidence of vigilante and mob attacks on foreign nationals and other South Africans who are seen as outsiders.17 Segregation in South Africa has never been a static geographical phenomenon. It is a social structure that must be consistently enforced and reconstituted. In a contemporary context, this is partially to do with the historical legacies of Apartheid. Apartheid was a system based on complete racial residential segregation, but partial racial integration of the urban economy. Put in its most simple terms, black South Africans constituted an essential labor supply for a largely white-owned economy. Black South

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Africans (with the exception of domestic workers) commuted from their residences in black townships to white urban and suburban areas to work and then commuted back again at nightfall, after which they were not permitted to walk the streets of white areas without a valid permit. This commuter lifestyle has remained a pervasive feature of all South African cities and in particular of black South African life in cities like Johannesburg. The majority of the black population travel long distances and long periods to and from work, consistently coursing through white areas, traveling across public spaces and into private domains of white and wealthy populations.18 This litany of minor territorial incursions and transgressions consistently poses questions for belonging and association in everyday life. Who has a right to be and remain in particular areas and for how long? How are people to be treated when they move out of their areas into other residential and commercial domains? Which actors have the authority to determine these issues? Apartheid’s laws answered these questions with finality and in elaborate legal code, defining who was a first-class citizen in what area, when and where people could move, and who had responsibility for enforcement. In the post-Apartheid era, these issues are more open in that there are no strict segregation laws. Nonetheless, a broad range of actors compete to fill the void to decide these issues, and in so doing define the new contours of control.

Hillbrow, Johannesburg: Boundary Contestation and Transformation These dynamics of contestation and change are strongly evident in innercity Johannesburg. Taking figures from the census of 2001, the dissimilarity index rates the highveld cities of Johannesburg (85.7) and Pretoria (82.7) as significantly less segregated than their coastal counterparts of Durban (89.6) and Cape Town (91.3).19 Crucially, segregation in Johannesburg is absolute in some areas but more ‘‘gray’’ in others. While the former township areas remain uniformly black, other parts of the city are more mixed, and patterns of segregation are still being determined and negotiated.20 The precinct of Hillbrow, where this study is based, is precisely this sort of area. Hillbrow precinct partially covers eight neighborhoods: Berea, Braamfontein, Joubert Park, Killarney, Parktown, Riviera, WITS University, and— somewhat confusingly—the smaller neighborhood of Hillbrow. While the

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Hillbrow precinct was historically designated a ‘‘whites only’’ area under the Group Areas Act, the proportion of black residents began to increase in the 1970s. In the 2001 census, 90 percent of the population identified as black African, colored, Indian, or Asian. Despite these overall changes, racial divides are being reproduced across Hillbrow precinct—between a uniformly black southern area and a more mixed population in the north–and these new contours are shaped and buttressed by the topography and built environment. The suburbs of Berea, Braamfontein, Hillbrow, Joubert Park, and WITS University to the south are both high up and high rise. They are situated on top of one of the two geological ridges that dominate the Johannesburg landscape, and they contain a large number of skyscraper residential complexes. Change in racial demography has been rapid in the south.21 For example, take the neighborhood of Hillbrow. The 1970 census recorded only a small minority of residents in the judicial area of Hillbrow as black (9 percent).22 By 1993, black African residents were in the majority (62 percent).23 In the 2001 census, the population was uniformly (99 percent) black African. The picture looks significantly different in the low-density, single-occupier, valley suburbs of Killarney, Parktown, and Riviera to the north. These suburbs have significantly lower proportions of black Africans. In 2001, black Africans were still in the minority in Killarney and Riviera. Stark and visible divides between the northern and southern parts of the precinct hide a complex and increasingly contested landscape. Take, for example, recent shifts in conventional correlations between race and class. Across all of South Africa, race is strongly correlated with educational achievement and occupation, with black Africans tending to have less education and fewer jobs while being more working class. In Hillbrow precinct, these patterns are being challenged in at least two ways. First, black students are now able to attend WITS University, on the western side of the precinct. As a result, the southern suburbs of WITS University campus and Braamfontein both have high proportions of unemployed black African residents but also possess high proportions of residents with tertiary qualifications. Another important factor has been the opening up of employment and residential opportunities for black South Africans around Johannesburg General Hospital in Parktown and the private hospitals of Parklane, Brenthurst, and the Donald Gordon Medical Centre. Following the traditional occupational patterns of Apartheid, the majority of the black population resident in the suburbs of the North are employed in the domestic

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services (domestic work, security and office work). However, census 2001 figures show that a quarter (28.5 percent) of the black African population of Parktown are health professionals. Alongside these significant changes in the precinct’s demographic makeup, we have seen the emergence of a new way of talking about crime. Hillbrow has become renowned as the center of criminality in Johannesburg and regarded as representative of all the problematic dynamics driving South Africa’s high-crime rates. Indeed, Hillbrow has often been regarded as the national icon of criminality. Newspaper reports emphasize other precincts’ rising levels of ‘‘dangerousness’’ by giving them the moniker of this most infamous precinct. For example, Sea Point in the Western Cape has been dubbed ‘‘Hillbrow by the sea.’’ Quigney in the Eastern Cape was labeled the ‘‘Hillbrow of East London.’’ Sunnyside in Pretoria was called ‘‘Hillbrow No. 2.’’24 The story of the demise of the once highly prized highrise apartment complexes and the entertainment precinct that lie at the heart of Hillbrow suburb has become one of the ways in which Jo’burgers narrate and lament the advent and expansion of the city’s crime and grime dilemma. This story about Hillbrow is not simply a contrived representation of black in-migration as criminalization. Hillbrow precinct does have a high crime rate and high rates of violent crime. However, as one might expect, the narrative is partially independent from changes in crime statistics. Hillbrow’s crime rate peaked in 2001 and has subsequently steadily declined, but these changes are not reflected in destigmatization of the suburb or increased willingness on the part of the broader public to visit or commute through the area. Residents of the suburb experience and relate to these security questions in a more intimate and specific way. In the southern high-rise suburbs, residents have sought to establish a number of self-help security schemes. These range from formal involvement in community policing forums to street patrol committees to employment of security agencies that aim to take back control of the high-rise buildings that have become both derelict and home to a range of criminal activities, from off-license ‘‘shebeen’’ bars to brothels, drug dens, and headquarters for armed gangs.25 In the wealthy northern suburbs of the precinct, security is also privatized. However, reflecting the housing stock and the increased wealth of its residents, it is also more individualized. Residents of large single-stand homes have built high walls with electric fencing, security cameras, and guard dogs, and they deploy security companies who provide personal guards and armed

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response vehicles. Meanwhile, the up-market apartment complexes in these northern suburbs are ‘‘gated’’ with strictly regulated vehicular and pedestrian entry points. The Hillbrow police must work across these racial and class divides and either with or against these patterns of securitization. In some respects this has involved mere redeployment of Apartheid era tactics. In the past, Johannesburg police possessed a single, catch-all response to crime: identify people—primarily black African people—who are ‘‘out of place,’’ arrest them, and send them back where they ‘‘belong.’’ During our research with the Hillbrow police, this study discovered similar patterns of policing on both sides of the ridge. To the north, police officers spend their time assisting security guards to locate black and lower-class pedestrians who appear ‘‘out of place’’ walking the leafy suburbs that have been specifically designed for exclusively vehicular traffic. To the south, the Hillbrow station has focused its attention on the black African immigrant community, squatters, and homeless people, using a series of heavy-handed tactics to remove them from the area, in the hope that crime rates might subside. So, in some respects, the story of policing and segregation is a simple matter of ‘‘old habits die hard’’ or, as I have argued elsewhere, of the police finding new targets for their old policing strategies.26 Yet forced removal strategies, the deliberate and violent territorial policing of space, is only part—one particularly obvious part—of police involvement in the enforcement of emerging contours of segregation. The police are also consistently involved, in more subtle ways, in a broader process of conveying the meaning of territorial spaces to civilian populations. More specifically, the violence that the police wield is consistently evoked to dramatize and display the consequences of spatial transgression across the geographic ridge that divides the precinct into north and south. In order to unpack this claim, the chapter will now move away from broad generalizations of precinct demography and crime patterns and attempt to look at how the police encounter ‘‘out of place’’ people on either side of the precinct. Here, I draw on an extensive period of ethnographic field research with police officers at the Hillbrow Police Station from 2009 to 2012. This research involved spending time at the charge office in the station, riding along in the back of patrol vehicles, observing interactions with members of the public, and using these observations as the basis for more extended conversations and interviews about policing practice with individual officers. From this research, I have selected two ‘‘ethnographic moments’’ that

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appear emblematic of everyday police interactions on either side of the ridge to develop my central argument.

Dealing with the Displaced 1: The Problem of the Black Itinerant The first case involves a motorcycle accident near one of Johannesburg’s most fashionable malls in Killarney: a neighborhood on the northern side of the ridge. On the morning of the incident, I was working with a group of four twenty-something black African male constables. At the beginning of the shift, we patrolled the neighborhoods to the south of the ridge. There, the officers were boisterous, exchanging stories about their sexual exploits of the previous night, and waving at pedestrian colleagues and friends. They had not been involved in any ‘‘police work’’ as such. After two hours or so, we crossed the ridge through Houghton and into Killarney. The officers spotted a traffic accident (see figure). A motorcycle courier was lying on his back, clutching his leg, while trying to rest his head awkwardly on his helmet. A civilian motorist was parked directly behind him.

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The four constables got out of the vehicle and approached the scene. Officers 1 & 2 interviewed the motorist and the rider. They quickly determined that the motorist had not hit the rider but had merely stopped to call an ambulance. They also surmised that the rider’s leg was seriously injured. With this cleared up, Officers 3 & 4 headed into a nearby mall. The motorist also left. However, Officers 1 & 2 didn’t check with the motorist whether an ambulance was coming or which ambulance provider he had called. A possible cause of the accident soon became evident. A construction company, working on a new addition to the mall, had opened a large gash in the road in order to repair the power lines underneath, but had failed to deploy any protective coverings that would allow cars and bikes to safely cross the gash. After a couple of minutes, a tow-truck driver arrived. He asked the officers whether an ambulance was coming. Officer 1 said yes, but he couldn’t say which company was sending the ambulance or when they might come. Five minutes passed. The tow-truck driver began to get impatient and decided to call another ambulance service. In the meantime, the rider started to wiggle around, to see if he could find a more comfortable resting place. Officer 1 was chatting with the tow-truck driver, and didn’t notice the rider’s movements. I began to worry about his condition. From my little first-aid knowledge, I knew that, in order to minimize the risk of spinal injury, the rider should try to keep still. As we waited for a second ambulance, two workers from the construction company arrived and began to inspect the scene, taking photos from various angles. This new scene attracted a secondary crowd of onlookers: passing drivers peering out of car windows and pedestrians staring at the rider. Several workers from the mall took up vantage positions along railings of the multiple-story car park opposite us. Then the rider’s boss called on the rider’s cell phone and he passed the phone to me. I explained that his rider had had an accident. The boss asked whether he had hit a pot-hole or whether it was his own fault. I told him that the ambulance was on its way and he promised to send someone down to collect the bike. Then the construction workers began to take command of the scene, asking the officers questions and, despite having not seen the

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accident, reciting a story of the accident out loud: that the rider had tried to ‘‘cut the corner’’ behind a traffic cone and in so doing had ridden across the gash and fallen over. I asked Officer 1, ‘‘Should we take some photos in case the rider might want to make a claim of some sort?’’ He smiled in reply: ‘‘This is an accident not an incident so we don’t need to open a docket.’’ About five minutes after the tow-truck driver had called, an ambulance arrived. Another five minutes passed and the ambulance workers had comforted and immobilized the rider, diagnosed a broken leg, removed his shoes with a pair of scissors, placed the shoe on his chest, placed him on a stretcher, obtained payment approval from his boss, taken photos of the scene, carried his stretcher to the ambulance and left. After the ambulance left, Officers 3 & 4 returned with a 2 litre bottle of coke. The construction workers then began to make adjustments to the scene, laying the protective covers over the gash, moving the warning traffic cones, moving the bike off the road and taking more photos. Officer 3 opened the courier box but when its contents began spilling out he quickly shut it again. He looked embarrassed. All the officers then crossed the road back to their vehicle where they would share the drink, gossip in the sunshine and wait for the rider’s boss to arrive. About 1–1/2 hours later a new tow-truck driver, sent by the rider’s boss, arrived for the motorbike. Officer 3 informed the new tow-truck driver that no one had tampered with the bike or opened the courier box. At this point, Officer 4 informed me that the construction workers might be worried that the rider’s boss will want to sue. This is a typically Johannesburg tale of public sector incompetence, private sector professionalism, and the dubious levels of humanity shown to the members of its black working-class population. Our four constables lost control of the scene, allowing the construction company to erase evidence of its liability. The rider received good health care. However, his personal dignity and rights to potential compensation were ignored or sidelined in various ways. The reasons he was treated in this way have a great deal to do with the location where the accident occurred. When our officers moved over the ridge into Killarney, they understood, at least implicitly, that they were

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moving into a dense matrix of private interests, where the police are considerably less responsible for—and capable of exerting—command. The gregarious attitude they had displayed all morning in the southern neighborhoods was not evident in their rather obsequious handling of the scene in Killarney. Instead, they took a back seat. While the officers took over the scene from the motorist on arrival, they perhaps never envisaged holding on to this role for very long. When the tow-truck driver arrived, the constables happily relinquished their concern for the rider and only hung around for a couple of hours to ensure that the property of the courier company, the motorbike, was secured. In this respect, they became little more than security guards, rather than the embodiment of law and order. Perhaps more poignantly, despite the fact that our officers and the rider were all black and that the rider was an elderly man and in pain, the officers did not attend to him. They did not seek to ensure that his legal interests, in the form of an evidence trail, were protected. They did not attempt to ensure that his personal health was protected. They did not even attempt to provide him with comfort, taking care of cool drinks for themselves instead. This may be because our four officers were uncaring yahoos, but it may also have to do with the fact that, again, they felt as though Killarney was not only out of their zone of responsibility but also a zone of survival for anyone coming north over the ridge. Here it is workers for themselves, and they must each work out their position vis-a`-vis the corporate matrix of interests on their own. Here, it is significant that many other pedestrians also did nothing for the rider. The only person to talk to him was a black female domestic worker of about the same age who moved into his line of sight and asked, ‘‘Are you ok?’’ He answered, ‘‘No, I’m in a lot of pain.’’ At this, she winced and continued walking toward the mall. So, while our rider was surrounded by people on that pavement, in certain respects, he was also very alone, and he was alone in a very specific way, in that some of the ties of race, community, and ethnicity that we might expect to reach out to him had been suspended. Instead, he was left to a regime of accident management that had sprung into action around him. This regime was privately run and profit oriented. The tow-truck drivers were looking for a fare. The ambulance drivers were looking to see that their fees were covered. The courier company boss wanted to know if his bike was working. The construction workers were erasing the possibility of a potentially expensive lawsuit.

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Within this matrix of responsibility, the driver’s accident was rendered as a problem, but a particularly ‘‘bare,’’ in the sense used by Agamben,27 sort of problem. He was not primarily a problem with family. While several people mentioned the problem of finding his boss, who would be responsible for his bills, no one talked about contacting next of kin who might want to know what had happened to a father or a husband. He was not a problem with human emotions or dignity. Even the professional caregivers, the ambulance drivers who did such an expert job attending the scene, deploying all the techniques of eye contact, physical contact, and a calm and clear voice, regarded the rider as an abstract task. So, when they cut off his shoe in order to reposition his foot in a brace, they placed the remnants of the shoe on his chest, so that the property remained connected to the problem. Finally, he was not a problem with rights. So, when the construction company workers came over to the scene, they probably would not have predicted that the rider might sue. However, they probably did anticipate that his boss might want to recover his medical expenses. Thus they set about erasing any possibility that the rider might seek some compensation for the suffering he was very palpably experiencing—and by setting the accident up as the fault of the rider, possibly also opening a pathway for further recriminations when he eventually returned to work. If the rider had experienced the same problems on the other side of the ridge, in the neighborhoods of Hillbrow or Berea, it is unlikely that he would have received ‘‘better’’ health care. However, it is likely that he would have been the subject of a qualitatively different form of accident response. There are numerous private security companies in the southern suburbs, but they confine themselves largely to their designated properties and do not concern themselves with random accidents in public spaces. So, it is unlikely that we would have seen this regime of private interests reach out to envelop the rider, removing him from the hands of the constabulary and objectifying him as a starkly depersonalized profit-loss problem. A more likely scenario is that the police would have had to take control. It is precisely because of his physical location that the rider was clearly and convincingly informed that he was not at home.28 While there was no identifiable actor assuming the figure of decision-maker or sovereign in this process, there was a decision-making process in action: ‘‘What should we do about the rider who, in falling off his bike, has become a problem that is ‘out of place’?’’ While there was no formal process to making this decision, there were a clearly defined set of roles, and each of the actors knew what role they were expected to play.

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It might be tempting here to regard the police as superfluous: mere security guards for the rider’s bike. However, it is important that we do not miss the way their unique function, as actors capable of deploying violence, was carefully deployed within this broader matrix of acting agencies to allow all the relevant interests, meaning those of the business community, to be secured. Despite Killarney’s diverse range of security companies deployed to protect private spaces, there was no specific company or service for the specific need the rider had created: that of a deserted bike on the road. In this sense, the police and their capacity for swift reaction to unprotected property in public space were vital, concluding the problem that would otherwise have been left ongoing or incomplete. This story of policing in the privatized environment of the northern mall vividly illustrates the themes that have been developed in the literature on privatization and securitization. The agents of the formal ‘‘state’’ appear as the handmaiden of an autonomous and untrammeled capitalism, who do the job of objectifying the rider and communicating his status as an ‘‘out of place’’ problem in the vicinity of a northern mall. In the face of this matrix of corporate interests, our four police officers are reduced to playing very minor roles in the governance of the flow of populations, becoming mere supports for the various economic interests at play. This account demonstrates how such dynamics not can only reduce the seemingly powerful agents of the state to minor players in the practice of governing mobility but can cut through seemingly powerful bonds of race. In the face of this power structure, none of the black workers—including the police officers—dares intervene on the rider’s behalf.

Dealing with the Displaced 2: The Problem of the White Pioneer The same set of issues assumes a slightly different cast when brought into conversation with dynamics on the other side of the ridge, where the conditions are in some ways reversed. When white South Africans—or for that matter, any nonblack Jo’burgers—venture into Hillbrow or Berea, they also find themselves being typecast, othered, and objectified, however, in a different relationship to the constabulary. To illustrate this point, I will reflect on another drive through Hillbrow precinct. On this morning, I had been placed with Inspector Masinga, the sector manager for Berea. The neighborhood of Berea is often seen as the ‘‘little brother’’ suburb to Hillbrow,

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similar in terms of having high rises and high crime but not quite as iconic and not quite as dangerous. This is somewhat strange given that Hillbrow’s most infamous building, Ponte Tower, is actually located in Berea, and Hillbrow’s most infamous crime problem, West African drug trafficking, is also concentrated in a particular quarter of Berea. Inspector Masinga used to live in Hillbrow and had been working at the station for over a decade. He is a fairly reserved man, thin, average height, and heading into his mid-forties. He had seen the precinct go through its crime spike in the early years of the millennium and wished that people from the outside recognized that crime stats had been going down in the precinct for the last few years. In stark contrast to the tour with the young men, on this patrol with Masinga, we were repeatedly drawn into ‘‘real’’ police work. Somewhat more bizarrely, given that Berea’s population is uniformly black, the main protagonists in the events on this day were white people moving through or living in the suburb: After an hour of circling around the streets of Berea, Masinga pulled to a stop at the edge of the Joe Slovo Freeway, which many commuters use to skirt around the precinct. He lit up a cigarette and rested against his car door. As we chatted, a car accident took place on the freeway below. A middle-aged white male driving a BMW had rear-ended an older white male in a Toyota. Both drivers got out of their vehicles and walked towards one another. Mr. BMW started screaming ‘‘fuck’’ and ‘‘poes.’’ A truck drove past, obscuring our view. By the time it had passed, the scene had changed. Mr. Toyota was on his arse looking a bit dazed and Mr. BMW was back at his car, remonstrating at the guy he had just floored. Masinga yelled out ‘‘Stop it!’’ and continued smoking. Traffic began to build up behind the BMW. Other cars beeped at the drivers to hurry up. A truck driver came to a halt in front of the Toyota and the truckie got out and started telling off Mr. Toyota. Sensing trouble, Masinga put out his cigarette and made his way down onto the road. Suddenly, he looked like a different person, shoulders set, chest puffed up, voice loud and distinct. He told the truck driver to ‘‘fuck off’’ back to his truck. At this point Mr. BMW came back for more in a flailing, I’m-gonna-look-like-I’m-tryingto-smash-you-while-secretly-hoping-that-this-cop-intervenes kind of way. Masinga stopped Mr. BMW and asked him to inspect his

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vehicle. Not a scratch. Both drivers quickly headed back to their cars. When Masinga got back to the squad car he complained: ‘‘These old guys, they just want to fight. You ask them if they want to go to the station and open a docket they say no. They just want to fight, fight, fight, fight.’’ He turned the car around and headed back towards the heart of the precinct, and in the direction of Berea’s drug-dealing hotspot. Suddenly Masinga began speeding up. I thought he was responding to a callout, but he was actually trying to evade one. There was a white man standing on the road directly in front of us, next to his mini-Cooper, flagging us down. He was pretty gaunt and wearing track suit pants. If I had seen this guy in my home town in Australia, I would have surmised that he was looking to score heroin. Masinga said, ‘‘No baba, no baba, don’t stop me now.’’ But he did, and Mr. Mini-Cooper got his story out in a hurry. Apparently he had just had his cell phone stolen and the guy who stole it was somewhere nearby. At this point, a young black man, sharply dressed with a Sopiatown style chapeau, black skivvy, and brown leather jacket appeared at the window and pointed illustratively behind us, suggesting that was where the thief had gone. Masinga offered to call another vehicle, gesturing at me and saying that he’s busy, but eventually he agreed to help out. Mr. MiniCooper came around to my side of the car as if to get in, but Masinga pulled quickly into a u-turn so now we were heading back towards where the thief was supposed to be. Mr. Mini-Cooper came to the door again but Masinga said, ‘‘Run ahead and I’ll follow.’’ We drove for two blocks, with Mr. Mini-Cooper struggling to keep up, running along the road next to us. As we travelled Masinga began a slightly grumpy rendition of events: ‘‘You see these white guys come here for drugs and then they get robbed, and now they call us. What else is he here for but drugs? And then they get robbed. It is only because we were passing by that we’ve been called on. It’s coincidence. They must use that 10111 number, but they don’t think to do that.’’ Spotting nothing, we turned around again and drove back towards the Mini-Cooper, leaving Mr. Mini Cooper flailing at us to

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return. We came to a stop next to Mr. Sophiatown who had a measured exchange with Masinga, explaining that there is a guy who does petty-theft in this area but he’s long gone and nobody knows where he lives. Masinga drove and continued his tour. As we prepared to head back to the station, he drove through the northeastern section of Berea, which, unlike the high-rises elsewhere, is mostly made up of free-standing, single-storied houses. We cruised past a portly white man who, much like all the drug dealers we’ve been prowling past all day, was standing still, back up against the wall, seemingly looking out into space. Masinga says, ‘‘Oops, I’m glad that guy didn’t see me.’’ Seeing that I was baffled he explained: ‘‘You see that old white guy, yoh, if he catches you he will want to talk and talk.’’ But the man had spotted us and we pulled up in front of him. He introduced himself as Henry and a member of Masinga’s Community Sector Crime Forum. The two of them launched into a discussion about the ‘‘sector profile’’: a document prepared every so often outlining crime trends in the suburb. Apparently the secretary of the policing forum wanted to get his hands on the sector profile and Henry was lobbying Masinga to hand it over. Masinga would not concede. He said, ‘‘I’m responsible for the sector profile. I’m the sector manager and these documents must be kept in a filing cabinet in my office. When the national office people come to the station they will want to come and see the sector profile and use it in their reports.’’ Henry capitulated: ‘‘You see, Inspector Masinga, I’ve tried to tell these people that the community forum is under the SAPS [South African Police Service]. There’s no point having two heads and one head trying to tell the other what to do. The citizens are there to help the police. Not tell them what to do.’’ Masinga: ‘‘The sector profile is my baby.’’ Henry got the message and then spent another five minutes conveying his support. In some respects, Masinga’s tour is a relatively simple tale of an older officer doing his best to avoid work. Masinga had been on the beat in this precinct for a long time, and he knew how to shield himself from the neverending demands on his time. To do this, he used a subtle blend of confidence games, misdirection, and threats. So, he called Mr. BMW’s bluff,

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seeing if he was prepared to take his fight to the precinct and turn it into a war of words and paper. He expected Mr. Mini-Cooper to get the police on the phone instead of calling on the first squad car he saw to help—a telling assumption given that the latter had just lost his mobile phone. He told Henry to back off and leave the sector plan to the real cops. These are classic games police officers play. Officers who are adept enough and committed enough can spend their entire career avoiding the substantive work of policing and being largely left alone, so long as they do not overstep the bounds from mere bureaucratic obfuscation into sheer corruption and contempt-filled sloth. In this respect, Masinga’s problem is really that he is conscientious. Even though he had sorted out a nice morning’s ride with a gullible researcher and had nothing much else to do, civilians in Berea kept calling him for help, and his policeman’s sense of duty keeps saying ‘‘yes,’’ or at least ‘‘maybe.’’ But there is something more to Masinga’s practiced attempt to create this work bubble. This lies in the racial and spatial dynamics of these three encounters with white men who are ‘‘out-of-place’’ south of the ridge. Here, well before Masinga encountered each incident, he had cast each of these characters as a specific type of problem: Mr. BMW was the roadraging prima donna, Mr. Mini-Cooper was the drug-addled schemer, and Henry was the busy-body community organizer. Masinga used each of these stereotypes to determine what his largely precoded responses to their complaints might be: talking sense, leaving the scene, or asserting himself. In some respects, this is concerning but, at the same time, perfectly pragmatic. In the first two scenarios, Masinga had to make a decision, in a short space of time, that might have compelled him, a lone officer with an incompetent ride-along partner, to put himself at personal risk. In the last scenario, he was acting less on stereotypes and more on lengthy experience of Henry and his equally lengthy complaints. So, these coded ritual responses were exactly the sort of approach we should expect from Masinga, who fell back on these experientially developed tactics as part of his practiced method of surviving on the streets. Masinga’s stereotypes were also not based on thin air or mere rumor. They reproduce a scene that plays out almost every day in the Client Service Centre at Hillbrow Police Station. This game invariably involves white complainants from the valley entering the center, insisting on their rights, and expecting to be greeted by incompetence, while the mostly black constables roll their eyes, joke in Nguni languages (which the clients cannot

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understand), and think up ways to prove the complainants right. Invariably, the complainants leave with their arms in the air, having confirmed their worst expectations, and anticipating a cleansing bitch session with their friends about the problems of democratic transition. Meanwhile, the constables joke and moan about the different ways white complainants make extra work for the police. This is not an ordinary issue of service delivery but a strong declaration of the dramatic shift in power relations that has taken place over the last two decades. For those white Johannesburg residents that have not given up entirely on the new regime, the police represent both utter disappointment and a beacon of hope, an institution around which they have rallied as a potential source of protection and a vehicle of political influence. When the police at the station rebuff their appeals, this represents for many the final straw and a powerful signal that they do not have a legitimate voice in the new democracy. Masinga is somewhat different to the officers back at the station, though, in that he retains his clients’ respect. He does not simply send messages to the men he meets on the street that they are out of place. He does so in a way that continually reinforces his position of authority. More interesting than the stylized fashion in which Masinga refuses to help each man is the way he simultaneously maintains a decorous relationship with each party, while maneuvering himself into a position of rectitude, integrity, and authority. So he went and inspected Mr. BMW’s car knowing that this would lead to the latter’s capitulation and retreat. He went briefly on the wild goose chase with Mr. Mini-Cooper but forced the latter to stay on the street. With Henry, whom he knew better, Masinga was more forceful, claiming the sector profile as ‘‘his baby’ and forcing Henry to stand down and convey support. In each of these interactions, Masinga gained a little victory, without ever having to show his cards. The snide comments, complaints, and petty dismissals about each ‘‘client’’ came out in the margins, in his summary comments, which he would ordinarily keep to himself, but in this case was handing on to me. This set of subtle tricks and power by-plays have few linkages to the former Apartheid regime (which, of course, had its fair share of doublespeak and propaganda) and more closely resemble the techniques of black resistance against this high modernist monstrosity of a state. Robbed of the capacity to confront white people directly in public, some vocal South Africans found respite in the discourse of black pride. Others sought recourse in a litany of minor oppositions, workplace shenanigans, under-the-breath

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rebukes, and ‘‘innocent’’ forms of mimicry of the oppressor. In Masinga’s case, we see this same tradition woven into the practices of a much more powerful figure: that of the senior officer on patrol, combined with his hard earned nous. So, Masinga is able to puff out his chest and separate the white men on the freeway, pull a u-turn and leave the white addict to run like a fool in the street, and cruise by his white neighborhood busy-body’s house and remind him who is boss. The type of magic Masinga weaves around these remaining white residents in Hillbrow is at the same time similar to and starkly different from the all-consuming, profit-driven machine that enveloped our bike rider to the south. It communicates difference, typecasts outsiders, and explains who belongs where. Yet, it is more akin to the bureaucratic maze Josef K. wakes up in, in Kafka’s The Trial than the humanity-stripping state of exception described by Agamben.29 Correspondingly, the nature of anomie experienced by the remnants of the white population of Hillbrow is qualitatively different from that experienced by our rider: more blinding frustration and disorientation, than utter powerlessness and dislocation. What unites both these examples is that in each case the police are part of a process of channeling the population into their ‘‘own areas,’’ sifting through the various groups and informing them when they are out of place. However, they do so in a way that is rather uncharacteristic of those who wield the violent authority of the state. In both cases, we see how the representatives of various institutions of governance—both private and public— problematize the presence of the outsider group and set in train a series of administrative processes to communicate this problematic status. Crucially, however, in neither example are the instruments of violence used to displace the outside group physically. Instead, the police officers’ capacity to use—and the imminent threat of—violence is woven into a range of more subtle techniques of rule that simultaneously bring the ‘‘outsiders’’ into a process of governance while clarifying their status as foreign and unwelcome. In the first case, a range of private interests envelop the motorcycle rider in an accident-response procedure while stripping him of his rights and dignity. In the second case, Masinga offers his protection to the white men on his beat while ensuring that they will ultimately be dissatisfied by the process. In this respect, the type of state power on display is akin to what John Torpey describes as a state that embraces its subject population to differentiate between those who belong and those who do not—in this case, demonstrating who has police protection and who does not.

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Concluding Remarks This chapter has demonstrated how the state continues to contribute to processes of urban division in Africa in the aftermath of state-planned segregation programs. This may not simply be a matter of the withdrawal of the state from urban planning and development processes or ‘‘failure’’ of the state to promote social and ethnic integration. Nor is it necessarily a matter of policy makers using the instruments of violence to separate population groups spatially. Rather, this study has pointed to a somewhat more subtle relationship between political institutions and processes of social segregation. I have argued that the representatives of the state help channel the movement of people in and out of public spaces in ways that both signal which groups belong in what places and encourage population groups to conform with this demographic topography. In this particular case, it helps us understand why, despite the delegitimation of segregation in South African public law and discourse, state actors continue to help reproduce the geodemographic divides that riddle cities like Johannesburg. More broadly, the case study helps us develop the central point of this volume: that mobility makes states. In this case, the state is clearly not merely a ‘‘preventer’’ of mobility between the various parts of the city. Rather, it appears as an actor engaged in the more variegated task of channeling population groups into and out of their designated areas. Crucially, the type of channeling that we see varies across space. On the north side of the ridge, state power seemed significantly disaggregated among the various actors that contributed to the governance of the bike accident problem. On the south side, the state was more concentrated in the figure of Masinga, who brought its active judicious power to bear on the situations he enacted and concluded. Demonstrating one of our central points regarding moving concentrations of state power, the channeling processes I have described are not uniformly determined by top-down processes of policy making and law but change rapidly as state agents move across the landscape and confront different social and political orders as they go.

Chapter 6

Policy Spectacles: Promoting MigrationDevelopment Scenarios in Ghana Nauja Kleist

In recent years, there has been a reconfiguration of the relationship between states and international migrants. From a perception of migration as a problem to be solved through preventing undesired population movements, a number of international development agencies, policy makers, and academics are taking the position that migration contributes to national development—if well managed.1 This aspiration indicates the (re)discovery of nonresident citizens or diaspora groups as populations to be governed by their states of origin. During the last decade, the World Bank and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) have become patrons of this position, and it has been debated at length via a range of high-level meetings, such as the Global Forums on Migration and Development. Likewise, policy makers all over the world are now engaged in debating or actually implementing migration-development policies—especially in states with large numbers of citizens or descendants of citizens abroad.2 The shifting global rhetoric on migration and development also indicates changing notions of legitimate statecraft. While the control and prevention of population movements have long been recognized as a crucial aspect of legitimate statecraft,3 states also garner legitimacy by developing instruments to promote and channel the international mobility of their citizens. In this chapter, I explore the implications of this situation, analyzed through the lens of migration-development scenarios in Ghana. The chapter is inspired by anthropological and critical development studies on

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statecraft and public policy, approaching migration-development scenarios as a cultural and political object of study.4 Using the theatric metaphors of scenario and spectacles, I analyze actually implemented policies meant to promote migration in relation to development, as well as policy visions and debates, focusing on the underlying narratives and imaginaries of how migration and development are interlinked and can be governed. Likewise, I explore the framing and publicizing of these political efforts as spectacles, that is, as demonstrations of the state’s intentions and capacity to act.5 My particular interest is to analyze the positioning of actors and audiences in the process, with focus on their perceived roles and agency in the migration-development field and on how states attempt or desire to govern migrants through different technologies and rationalities. Or put differently, I explore the governmental effects of channeling migration for the purpose of national development—not how actual development policies are conducted on the ground—asking the following questions. How and when do international migrants emerge as agents of change whose mobility is to be promoted by states for national development purposes? What kind of agency is ascribed to international migrants and the state in such migration-development scenarios? And who are the actors in and intended audiences for these scenarios?

The Case of Ghana Ghana has a long history of migration and is one of the more proactive African states in terms of passing policies to channel migration for development. Many international migrants maintain transnational practices through keeping in touch with family members; sending remittances; investing in houses, land, and the private sector; or being engaged in diaspora associations. Likewise, an increasing number visits as tourists, stay for longer periods, or return to pursue a career, go into business, or retire. This situation has not gone unnoticed by Ghanaian politicians. Since the late 1990s, Ghanaian governments have recognized nonresident Ghanaians in (especially) Western countries as holding a development potential and initiated a range of policies and initiatives to channel migrant practices for development. As I show in the chapter, Ghanaian migration-development scenarios mainly focus on remittances, investment, and return, as well as symbolic

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inclusion into the nation. They are also characterized by being noncoercive, and both policy makers and migrants emphasize the cordial relationship between Ghana and her migrants. As a case study, Ghana thus offers a particular perspective, different from states with a recent history of civil war and genocide, highlighting development, democracy, and an articulated positive relationship between state and migrants. Likewise, having incorporated neoliberal policies since the 1980s as well as being a stable multiparty democracy since 1992, Ghanaian politics fit well with neoliberal ideals of creating a market society and liberal democracies containing differences but without irreconcilable conflicts.6 However, Ghana was also affected by economic and political crisis and conflict in the 1970s and 1980s, causing emigration of highly skilled workers as well as the establishment of a diasporic political opposition. While an impressive range of migration-development scenarios have been debated and passed, few of these have actually been implemented or taken off, and many Ghanaian migrants do not seem to care much about the state initiatives. Channeling migration for development is thus not straightforward; likewise, the relationship between the Ghanaian state and international migrants is more complicated than appears at first sight. The main argument in the chapter is that, in spite of this challenge, migrationdevelopment policies and activities have value as a policy spectacle through signaling sovereignty, state agency, and responsibility to several audiences: migrants, development agencies, and other nation-states. Hence, while policies may not ‘‘work’’ in the sense of enabling the government to ‘‘tap’’ migrant resources for national development or determining which Ghanaians go where, they may enable the government to appear as actors on the global and national migration-development stage. Migration-development scenarios in Ghana thereby have a strong symbolic and performance dimension.7 ‘‘Promotion’’ in this context thus refers to the state’s capacity to lend legitimacy to processes of migration that it is unable to prevent or govern, rather than its capacity to move people along. The chapter is based on interviews with high-level state officials from nine ministries, as well as from the Bank of Ghana, Ghana Investment Promotion Centre (GIPC), Ghana Immigration Service (GIS), the Ghanaian Embassy in Denmark, and the High Commission in the UK. The interviews focused on the notions of channeling contained in migrationdevelopment policies, as well as the interviewees’ perceptions and visions of migration and development, and were carried out between February and

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July 2008 (under John Kufuor’s government) and again in January 2010 (under John Atta Mills). Unless names are explicitly stated, all interviewees are anonymous. It is supplemented with material from 2012 and 2013. In addition, I refer to interviews with return migrants in Ghana and with Ghanaian migrants in Copenhagen in 2007, focusing on their transnational involvement and their collaboration with, or their opinions about, political authorities to discuss how the government’s migration policy is received by some of its intended audiences. I start by setting the stage through a historical outline of the changing relationships between migrants and states.

Migration, Development, and the State During the last fifty years, policy and theoretical perceptions of international migration and its development potential have revolved around the question of whether migration constitutes a potential resource for development or a symptom of crisis and underdevelopment, and, in consequence, whether migrants’ mobility and transnational practices should be promoted or prevented. There has never been full academic or policy consensus about these issues. Rather, different migration-development scenarios have dominated, offering political and theoretical repertoires and guidelines that are used, recycled, or discarded over time. After several decades where migration was seen as an impediment for national development, migration was ‘‘discovered’’ as a development potential in policy and academic circles in the 1960s, coinciding with economic growth and demand for labor in Western Europe, as well as decolonization and independence of many former African colonies.8 Guest workers and (former) colonial subjects moving to the old colonial powers to study or work were seen as development agents in their countries of origin through the transfer of remittances, human capital, and eventual return to fully realize their development potential, presumably achieved through working or studying in Western countries. Theoretically, this view corresponds with modernization theories and the belief that states can shape economic growth and development through channeling processes. Likewise, it reflects a liberal economist perspective where migration represents efficient adaptation to the economic system—for instance in the case of West Africa.9

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The migration-development optimism reversed in the following two decades, following the global oil crisis, the 1973 European immigration ban, and not least widespread economic and political crisis in Africa. Theoretically, structuralist and Marxist theories on dependency, underdevelopment, and world systems contested the idea of a development potential in migration, asserting that labor migration causes underdevelopment and suffering.10 In these views, capitalist forces exploited Africa in terms of extracting natural resources and skilled population—so-called brain drain—and migration constituted a symptom of crisis and failed policies. Migrants are seen as victims of capitalism or, in the eyes of some states, as traitors or deserters.11 The relationship between migrant and the state is, thus, conceived as nonexistent or antagonistic, with a focus on prevention. The view of migrants as symptoms of crisis—or indeed of migrants as crisis—continues to date. Yet while brain drain continues to be debated today, much policy emphasis is on immigration as a problem to be regulated and solved through migration management and restrictions at the national and international level, securitizing migration and outsourcing border control.12 However, parallel to the securitization of migration, the linkage between migration and development reemerged during the 1990s and 2000s, when researchers and policy makers (re)discovered that many migrants do not cut off relations to their country of origin but engage in transnational practices at social, economic, political, and religious levels, thereby contributing to development (and conflict) in various ways. The notion of the migration-development nexus was introduced, gaining academic and political prominence during the 2000s.13 The main policy focus is on how international migrant populations in Western countries—now often termed diasporas—fuel development in their countries of origin through the transfer of remittances, human capital, and return, much as in the 1960s. Indeed, much of the (initial) optimism of migration and development refers to the growth of migrant remittances to developing countries, rising from an estimated $85 billion in 2000 up to an estimated $401 billion in 2012.14 Remittances dwarf both official development assistance (ODA) and foreign direct investment (FDI) in many developing countries. The rediscovered interest in migration and development coincides with increased demands for skilled labor and circular migration in developed economies and neoliberal agendas in which the responsibility for development and service provision is privatized and outsourced to nonstate actors.15 For

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Ghana, as well as other African countries, this scenario implies a political focus on migrants as development agents vis-a`-vis their remittances and transfer of skills, competences, and liberal democratic values. It thus presumes the agency and responsibility of migrants, their willingness and capacity to transfer resources, and a restoration of migrants’ trust in the state. Similarly, it presumes the ability of the state to channel migrant practices to the benefit of national development.

The Emergence of Ghanaian Migrants as Development Agents In many ways, the case of Ghana constitutes a textbook example of the evolution in migration-development policies. Ghana has a long history of migration of both a voluntary and a forced nature, consisting of a mix of internal, regional, and international movements.16 Being the first African country to become independent in 1957, political and economic optimism thrived in the late 1950s and first part of the 1960s. In this period, Ghana was one of the major destinations of West African migrants, especially in relation to mining and plantation work.17 Likewise, a number of Ghanaians who engaged in education migration to Western countries were supposed to return and develop the country as good patriots. Furthermore, Kwame Nkrumah was strongly involved in the Pan-Africanist movement and called for assistance among African Americans and African Caribbeans to Ghana’s development.18 However, optimism vanished in the mid-1960s with economic hardship and political crisis, expressed in a succession of coups and the establishment of Jerry J. Rawlings’s military regime in 1981. Though originally a left-populist regime, Rawlings adopted IMF-induced structural adjustment programs from 1984, introducing neoliberal policies. Harsh living conditions and political oppression spurred large out-migration, with the opposition and the elite fleeing from political persecution and/or looking for better economic opportunities.19 It has been estimated that, after Uganda, Ghana accounted for the second largest exodus of highly skilled persons from Africa between 1970s and 1982, leaving to Western as well as neighboring countries. As a consequence, a diasporic lobby was formed during the 1980s, mainly in opposition to Rawlings.20 Skilled migration and political tensions, thus, characterized larger parts of Ghanaian migration in this period.

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The political situation changed in the 1990s, when constitutional rule and multiparty democracy was established with the Fourth Republic. Rawlings and the newly established social democratic National Democratic Congress (NDC) won the parliamentary and presidential elections in 1992 and again four years later, ruling throughout the 1990s. In this period, Rawlings promoted several tourist initiatives to attract the descendants of the transatlantic slave trade as heritage tourists through an incomegenerating strategy, but without Nkrumah’s political focus on the PanAfricanist liberation struggle.21 Concurrently, international remittances to Ghana grew rapidly, more than doubling from an estimated $201.9 million in 1990 to $506.2 million in 2000, attracting government interest in international Ghanaian migrants in the late 1990s.22 Yet most emphasis was on brain drain of health personnel,23 and in 1998 the government invested $2 million to curb migration of nurses and doctors through various efforts to promote better working conditions in the health sector.24 The following year, right of abode was granted in the new Immigration Act (Act 573), introducing a range of rights for Ghanaians holding passports of countries not allowing dual citizenship and for ‘‘Africans in the Diaspora who want to return to Ghana and set up home, business etc.’’25 On the one hand, the Rawlings government was thus continuing to promote engagement with the so-called African diaspora; on the other, the government started reaching out to contemporary Ghanaian migrants, encouraging their return, remittances, and transnational involvement. In 2000, Rawlings and the NDC lost power to the National Patriotic Party (NPP) and opposition leader John Agyekum Kufuor. In 2001, Kufuor became president, stimulating a period where migrant contributions to development started to gain policy prominence, not least in relation to remittances. Furthermore, in the Ghanaian case, the change of ruling party also corresponded with a transfer of power backed by big parts of the diasporic opposition. Building on the initial initiatives from the Rawlings’s years, Kufuor’s presidency further developed migration-development scenarios but signaled a new political departure.26 In his inaugural speech in January 2001, Kufuor explicitly addressed Ghanaians living outside the country: I must also acknowledge the contributions made by our compatriots who live outside the country. Currently, you contribute a third of the capital inflow into the country. Many of you do more than send

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money home, many of you have up kept up keen interest in the affairs at home and some of you have even been part of the struggle of the past twenty years. I salute your efforts and your hard work and I extend a warm invitation to you to come home and let us rebuild our country. . . . Those of our compatriots who have made homes beyond our shores, I make a special plea for your help; we need your newly acquired skills and contacts, we need your perspective and we need your capital. Those who have left and stayed out, only because of the military revolution or political differences, I say come back, come back home where you belong and let us join in building a new Ghana.27 Drawing on an authenticity discourse of Ghana as homeland, Kufuor articulated nonresident Ghanaians as a part of a transnational Ghanaian nation, not only emphasizing their economic assets but also their skills, contacts, and perspectives. This political statement signals a close relationship between migrants and the state as ‘‘part of the struggle,’’ forming an alliance rather than being adversaries. Migrants are characterized as successful and skillful, still belonging to Ghana, and contributing to national development. They are, thus, constituted as resourceful citizens, patriotic partners, and responsible collaborators and are thereby also positioned as a receptive audience and constituency for the president’s visions.

The Homecoming Summit The articulation of Ghanaian migrants as politically and economically engaged compatriots informs the subsequent government attempts to promote migrant engagement for development purposes. This is demonstrated in the homecoming summit in July 2001, organized by the Ghana Investment Promotion Centre (GIPC), based on the belief that ‘‘not only the multinational companies hold a potential for investing in Ghana but also our own nationals living abroad have the skills and resources to develop the country.’’28 The summit had the following three objectives: (a) to develop a process for the renewal of confidence of Ghanaians living abroad in their country, (b) to enhance dialogue and explore opportunities for productive relations between Ghanaians living abroad and their country, and (c) to

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identify the means to tap into the acquired capacities of Ghanaians living abroad for the creation of national wealth.29 During three days, 830 participants—including 572 nonresident Ghanaians and a number of local participants, representatives of international organizations, and politicians—debated how to channel and ’’tap’’ migrant resources for development. These debates resulted in a five-point action plan,30 with key policy issues and recommended actions, identifying dual citizenship, franchise for nonresident citizens, and the establishment of a Non-Resident Ghanaians (NRGs) Secretariat as well as the establishment of a comprehensive NRG database, as ‘‘it is estimated that we can easily identify one million of our compatriots whose resources and goodwill the country would enjoy on a regular and consistent basis,’’ as the half-year report optimistically stated it.31 These issues and actions, thus, reflect a belief in patriotism, the migrant potential, and, not least, the state’s ability of governing this group. Mr. Appiah, a return migrant and successful businessman and politician who participated in the summit, shared the enthusiasm, characterizing the homecoming summit as a wonderful event and as a reflection of the dedication of Ghanaian migrants to develop Ghana. He further described extensive plans for the establishment of a Privatization and Industrialization Fund—another of the stated aims of the action plan—that he and a group of other Ghanaian migrants had developed in the wake of the summit.32 The fund was to be supported by nonresident Ghanaians to provide free water to all citizens and thereby constitute a viable alternative to the privatization of the water supply in Ghana. In a written memo, Appiah described how ‘‘we, Non Resident Ghanaians, voluntarily and sustainably, [will] act like FATHER CHRISTMAS and provide support and assistance to our country’’ through worldwide monthly collections during five years.33 Appiah and his collaborators thus shared the notion of Ghana as homeland and nonresident Ghanaians as a resourceful, patriotic, and benevolent population whose engagement could be channeled for development. However, the Ghanaian government rejected the offer, making Appiah speculate why: I can only guess why the state did not go forward with it. First because we marked ourselves saying that we are against privatization of water. Secondly, I believe and suspect that the government thought that we will become too strong a pressure group, so it’s

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better to deal with us individually rather than as a group. So they let the opportunity fall down.34 According to Mr. Appiah, the homecoming summit constituted a great opportunity that the government dropped because of lack of political courage, suggesting that the involvement of collective actors was seen as a threat. Appiah and his collaborators thus transgressed the position appointed to them by the government, being too politically assertive—wanting to govern rather than be governed. This situation suggests that there are limits to migrants’ political engagement and that the invitation to return and be involved in the rebuilding of the country implies an acceptance of the alliance between government and migrants.

Ghanaian Policy Initiatives and Challenges During the 2000s, the Ghanaian government continued liberalizing the economy and promoting civil society and other so-called nonstate actors’ responsibility for and contributions to development, deepening neoliberal policies. As a state, Ghana has embraced ‘‘a particular reading of development, which is founded on entrepreneurialism and a self-help charitable ethos,’’ where family and community involvement goes hand in hand with the neoliberal emphasis on privatization of service provisions.35 While the Privatization and Industrialization Fund was not established, several of the policy initiatives identified at the homecoming summit were realized. Ghanaian policy initiatives to channel migration for development can be divided into bureaucratic reform, investment policies, extension of political rights, extension of state services abroad, and symbolic policies,36 aiming to facilitate economic and political contributions and strengthen belonging to and trust of the nation state. The most important policy initiatives since 2001 are summarized in Table 1, focusing on the three first types. At first sight these initiatives identify Ghana as a pro-active African state in terms of migration and development. However, the table also shows that most policy initiatives took place between 2001 and 2006, whereas initiatives waned in the last part of the 2000s.37 The most important bureaucratic reform was the National Migration Bureau/Migration Unit. In 2006, the cabinet decided to establish an interministerial National Migration Bureau located in the Ministry of Interior with the aim of coordinating ministries

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Table 1: Overview of Main Migration-Development Policies Bureaucratic reform 2001 Kufuor government, 1st period

Investment policies Political rights Homecoming summit (GIPC)

2002 2003

Dual Citizenship Act Nonresident secretariat (GIPC)

2004 Elections 2005 Kufuor government, 2nd period 2006

Extension of portfolio: Foreign Exchange Ministry of Tourism and Control Act Diasporean Relations Cabinet decision: establishment of Migration Bureau (Ministry of Interior)

2007 Ghana 50

Golden Jubilee Saving Bonds

2008 elections

Inauguration of National Migration Bureau

2009–July 2012 Mills government; Mahama government from ultimo July 2012.

Name change from Ministry of Tourism and Diasporean Relations to Ministry of Tourism; Name change from National Migration Bureau to Migration Unit

2010

Inauguration of Migration Unit

2012 election

Establishment of Diaspora Support Unit at Ministry of Foreign Affairs

Representation of People’s Amendment Bill (ROPAB)

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and public sector institutions working with migration, following the country’s admission into IOM. The bureau was supported by IOM Ghana and was inaugurated in 2008.38 It consists of members from a number of ministries, as well as state institutions such as the Ghana Immigration Service, Bank of Ghana, Ghana Investment Promotion Centre, Ghana Statistical Service, and National Development Committee. Following the change of government in 2009, its name changed to the Migration Unit and was officially (re)launched in 2010 with Deputy Ministry of Interior Dr. Apea-Kubi as chair. Other institutional changes include the establishment of a NRG secretariat ‘‘to coordinate all activities and serve as the center for all projects, programs and issues involving Ghanaians living abroad,’’39 launched at the GIPC in 2003,40 and the extension of the Ministry of Tourism to include ‘‘Diasporean Relations’’ between 2006 and 2008. Investment policies include the Foreign Exchange Control Act in 2006 (Act 723) and the Golden Jubilee saving bonds in 2007. Likewise, the Bank of Ghana has established closer collaboration between banks and money transfer agencies to further the use of formal remittance channels.41 Political rights consist of the Dual Citizenship Act in 2002 (Act 591) as well as the Representation of People’s Amendment Bill (ROPAB) (Act 699), passed in 2006, granting franchise to Ghanaian citizens living outside the country. There appear to be only few extensions of state services abroad though diplomatic missions have been designated to play a greater role in servicing and uniting Ghanaians abroad, such as encouraging investment in Ghana, participating in cultural and fundraising events, and liaising with Ghanaian migrant associations.42 Finally, symbolic policies include public and political statements about international migrants as part of the Ghanaian nation, such as Kufuor’s inaugural speech, as well as events and institutions focusing on belonging and inclusion. During interviews, most of the government officials were very enthusiastic about the development potential of international migration in Western countries and emphasized the positive relationship between Ghana and her migrants with characteristics as ‘‘cordial’’ and ‘‘home is home.’’ They usually also emphasized the importance of remittance, which did indeed continue to grow in the 2000s, culminating in with an estimated $1.26 billion in 2008.43 Government officials thus shared the authenticity discourse of Ghana as homeland for nonresident Ghanaians. However, I quickly realized that, with the exception of the Foreign Exchange Act, this enthusiasm was

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not necessarily reflected in the actual implementation or realization of policy initiatives. While coordination and the development of a comprehensive migration policy have been the stated aims of the Migration Bureau and later of the Migration Unit, the actual implementation of this goal was still in the preparatory phase in both 2008 and 2010. Indeed, with a few exceptions, government officials in 2008 and 2010 generally knew little about what went on in other ministries, explaining that coordination is lacking and that a comprehensive migration politics is yet to be developed.44 For instance, none of the interviewed government officials knew what had happened to the NRG secretariat that turned out never to have had its own offices, being downscaled to a Diaspora Investment Unit at GIPC in 2007.45 Likewise, the extensions of political rights to migrants have not been successful or implemented at all. Dual citizenship was only granted to 5,903 persons between January 2003 and August 2008,46 and, according to a government official in the Ministry of Interior, only twenty former Ghanaian citizens and no African Americans had obtained right of abode.47 The extension of voting rights to Ghanaian citizens abroad was not implemented for the 2008 and 2012 elections—arguably because the technology was not ready. Finally, while private remittances to Ghana grew until 2008, the government initiative of the Golden Jubilee bonds did not live up to the expectations.48 The promotion and channeling of migration for development, thus, seemed to fizzle out at the end of the 2000s. However, this political agenda resurfaced in the new decade when the third draft of a Ghanaian migration policy, with a focus on promotion as well as prevention of migration, was presented in August 2012 by the Centre for Migration Studies, University of Ghana, sponsored by the EU though the IOM. However, the migration policy draft has not, to my knowledge, proceeded any further in the political system. Likewise, a Diaspora Support Unit was established in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in October 2012 in collaboration between the ministry and IOM, initially as a one-year pilot project, including the website www.ghanaiandiaspora.com.49

Reconfiguring the State-Migrant Relationship? The Ghanaian case shows a discrepancy between the stated intentions of the government and the actual channeling processes. This can be grounded

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in institutional sluggishness and barriers within the political system, aggravated by diverging agendas and power positions between different ministries and state institutions. For instance, political interest in promoting migrant return does not necessarily go hand in hand with national security agendas and the prevention of undocumented migration. Furthermore, in contrast to immigration and the control of subjects and resources inside the national territory, migration-development policy initiatives are channeled beyond the traditional sphere of governance and sovereignty, as they target subjects outside state borders. In Levitt and de la Dehesa’s words, such initiatives are ‘‘redefining the relationship between the state and its territorial boundaries, and hence reconfiguring understandings of sovereignty, citizenship and membership.’’50 Indeed, Kufuor’s invitation to nonresident Ghanaians ‘‘to come back where they belong,’’ the homecoming summit, and the passing of the Dual Citizenship Act and ROPAB send a strong signal of inclusion of migrants into the Ghanaian nation and citizenry, in principle decoupling residence in the country of origin with membership, obligations, and rights. With inspiration from Foucault,51 such policies can be seen as efforts to render nonresident populations governable through relationships of transnational communication and the building of diaspora institutions, based around notions of an extended nation.52 The extension of rights to nonresident Ghanaians constitutes a gesture offered by the state, acting like a legitimate sovereign that grants rights to its constituencies, demonstrating its ability to separate desired and undesired parts of the (nonresident) population and promoting (certain) migrants practices as contributing to national development. The migration-development scenarios are thus demonstrations of statecraft. However, it is important to remember that the statemigrant relationship is constituted by the state as well as by migrants. Therefore, while the inclusion of migrants in the nation represents a reconfiguration of this relationship at the symbolic level, it tells us little about the government’s ability to actually change migrant behavior. Nor does it tell us whether migrants’ senses of belonging and loyalty are based on ideas of an extended nation or, more mundanely, if they know Ghanaian policy initiatives and are willing to engage themselves on these terms. When I asked Ghanaian migrants in Copenhagen about their relationship to Ghana and their opinion of Ghanaian migration-development policies, the responses were mixed. All the interviewees expressed a positive view of their relationship to Ghana, sharing the overall discourse of Ghana

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as homeland. However, when it came to government policies, it was another story. As mentioned above, Mr. Appiah had been very involved in the homecoming summit and was disappointed by the lack of government courage and commitment. Other migrants knew very little about the policy initiatives or stated that they are meant for business people and not ‘‘ordinary people.’’ Most of the interviewees were engaged in transnational practices, ranging from close contact with relatives and friends still living in Ghana, sending regular remittances, following Ghanaian news, or building houses to involvement in Ghanaian migrant associations. In spite of their involvement, none of them paid any attention to migration-development policies or found that they were relevant for them. Indeed, as many other migrants around the world, Ghanaian migrants tend to organize themselves around family obligations and local development, being guided by local affiliations and obligations, not state policies.53 This implies that transnational involvement at the local level is not an indication of migrants’ trust in the Ghanaian state. On the contrary, several return migrants in Ghana complained about state bureaucracy and corruption, especially in relation to the acquisition of land and difficulties of infrastructure. From their point of view, the policy initiatives of the government are insufficient or simply irrelevant. This situation poses a specific set of challenges to policy makers.

The Wonders of Well-Managed Migration The paradox of less successful policies but flourishing transnational involvement was admitted by the interviewed government officials, who were well aware of the family and local involvement of Ghanaian migrants. Government officials also explained that remittances and donations from hometown associations and other private actors are exactly of a private nature, that they are uncoordinated and unpredictable and, therefore, cannot be directly included in state planning or budgeting. Similarly, some government officials were aware of the difficult situation that many Ghanaian migrants find themselves in abroad and the fact that this limits their capacity to send remittances. Others again stated that Ghanaian migrants will do whatever they want to and that there is little the government can do to change their behavior. However, while some officials emphasized the challenges in crafting effective migration-development policies, blaming globalization, global inequalities, and cultural norms, almost all regarded

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the huge migrant involvement as the promise of a yet unexploited potential for national development—if well managed. A high-ranking government official explained it the following way: With the development of globalization and ICT, information is becoming more available to people, so the desire to migrate will be there. In most cases, people migrate for economic reasons, to seek better job facilities and to be able to earn enough to care for themselves and their families. . . . If there’s information about the country where you want to migrate to, you migrate orderly; before you leave, you have a job, or you know there are jobs available, what are they, the contract, welfare, where you’re going to settle, the conditions involved. So, you have all the ingredients to make an informed decision before you leave the home country. The idea is that when labor migration is managed very well, then it tends to allow win-win situations for the sending country and the receiving country as well as for the migrants. . . . The sending country is benefiting from [less] unemployment and its attendant social frictions, or whatever the case may be. The receiving country has an opportunity to upstage their shortage of labor in their country. Migration increases productivity and productivity produces money, money creating more money—and everybody becomes a winner. The migrants are exposed to high levels of technology; so they absorb these technologies and then they get the know-how, the technical know-how. And then eventually, when they come back to their home country, they are able to utilize or to introduce all these technologies.54 This statement expresses an ambivalent view of migration-development policies shared by many government officials. It presents migration as an uncontrollable and unstoppable force, powered by globalization. Free mobility is a constitutional right in Ghana (as well as in other countries that have signed the Convention of Human Rights), a point emphasized by several government officials, who explained that the Ghanaian state, in principle, cannot regulate emigration. Indeed, with the exception of the Ministry of Health where several initiatives have been established to curb the emigration of skilled health personnel, there seem to be no government regulations or objections concerning legal emigration.55 Commenting on the high level of education migration, a government official in the Ministry

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of Education simply said that ‘‘If you have your papers in order, then it’s bye-bye—nobody will stop you,’’ further explaining that migration has become a social phenomenon and ‘‘we all want to be there [abroad].’’56 This laissez-faire attitude feeds into a general understanding that prospective migrants are attracted and lured by ideas of better lives and salaries abroad and cannot be stopped. In spite of this understanding, the statement above also shows a strong belief in the channeling of migration to create win-win-win situations for the sending and receiving country and the migrant alike. Rather than brain drain, some government officials talked about brain gain and brain circulation, a tendency that also is found in policy circles.57 However, such scenarios presume not only ‘‘orderly’’ and informed migration decisions and processes but also a range of other preconditions. If migration is to mitigate social frictions related to unemployment, emigrants are assumed to be from professions characterized by unemployment rather than a shortage of labor to avoid brain drain; in addition this scenario presupposes that social frictions primarily are rooted in unemployment and not in other political, social, or economic structures. Likewise, this scenario presumes that migrants get employment that match and upscale their qualifications, are exposed to high-level technology, and finally, that they return to Ghana and are able to utilize their new skills there. Such preconditions are rarely fulfilled and are difficult to control for governments and migrants alike.58 It shows how the idea of win-win-win scenarios is based on a belief that the concept of ‘‘well-managed migration’’ in itself possesses a transformative power that enables migrants to overcome structural barriers and constraints in Ghana and abroad—and, not least, to overcome conflicts of interests between migrant sending and receiving countries.59

Biopolitical Ambitions In spite of the belief in the power of well-managed migration, Ghanaian government officials also explained that migration management is fraught with challenges—especially concerning international migrants who are by definition located outside the state’s territory. One challenge is the lack of knowledge. The number of nonresident Ghanaians is estimated to range from 1.5 to 3 million, and nobody knows the exact number, location, or skills of this group.60 Government officials were thus lacking one of the

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most fundamental dimensions of modern statecraft: detailed knowledge of the population. Indeed, according to Scott, one of the characteristics of the modern state is its attempts ‘‘to create a terrain and a population with precisely those standardized characteristics that will be easiest to monitor, count, and manage.’’61 As Scott has shown, states have engaged in the construction of visible and standardized units—such as mappings of particular populations and their division into discrete categories—to be able to govern their populations more effectively. While Scott is focusing on technologies of legibility inside the state territory, Ghanaian government officials called for statistics and databases on Ghanaian international migrants to enable better governance. An example is the visions of the then director of the Ghana Immigration Service, Mrs. Elisabeth Addei: If we leave migration as a private enterprise, where people can go anywhere they want to and just bring anything in and spend it privately, then it will not make any impact on our development. We are thinking about people who move, that their mobility [should be] tracked, recorded, documented, so we know where they are. We want to have a skills bank, so we know where people are, we know when we can invite them to make an impact and come and contribute to our economy.62 While not questioning the right of free mobility, the director did question the benefits of a laissez-faire politics ‘‘where people can go anywhere they want to’’ and do what they want. Indeed, she was an outspoken proponent of the necessity of governing and managing migration to secure development, demanding the mapping and recording of Ghanaian migrants to enable the state to benefit from their migration in an orderly way. She thereby expressed an ambition of exercising biopolitics—that is ‘‘the administration of life . . . understood at the level of populations.’’63 This requires technology to survey and thereby govern the population. The desire of a skills bank or database of migrants was widely shared among government officials and, as mentioned above, one of the tools discussed at the homecoming summit. Other suggestions include registration of all Ghanaians (including undocumented migrants) at the diplomatic missions, listings of Ghanaian migrant associations as a ‘‘bridgehead to the diaspora,’’ and, more generally, having the diplomatic missions play an active role in

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reaching out toward Ghanaian migrants. In 2008, I did not hear about any implementation of such measures, but in 2010 the Ghanaian Embassy in Washington, D.C., started compiling a database of Ghanaian residents in the United States, based on voluntary registration, ‘‘with the objective of promoting and protecting their welfare and ensuring active participation in national development efforts.’’64 Likewise, the GIS and Ghana Statistics were reported to prepare a database of nonresident Ghanaians in 2010 and the ghanaiandiaspora.com website, mentioned above, also includes a list of Ghanaian associations in Western countries. These biopolitical ambitions aim to document and track nonresident Ghanaians. They constitute visions of seeing and performing like a state in an era of mobility and globalization, mirroring a desired reconfiguration of the state’s ability to govern migrants.65 But the state still gropes in the dark. And while it seems unlikely that the Ghanaian government and its missions abroad can actually survey and map the entire nonresident population, the visions can be seen as a claim of sovereignty—or rather the desire thereof—in the sense of the state controlling subjects and resources. As Hansen and Stepputat suggest, sovereignty is an aspiration that requires constant performances, being dependent on the ‘‘will to rule.’’66 In the Ghanaian case, this is articulated in relation to national development and welfare or, in other words, with the aim to ameliorate the country and the population; it is embedded in good intentions. Yet even the best of biopolitical intentions have the potential of being harmful, being grounded on divisions between those deemed as capable or incapable of handling their freedom—or, in this case, their mobility. Indeed, the creation of a legible and governable population not only relies on an overview of persons but also of differentiating and classifying different categories of subjects.67 The GIS director stated that very directly: We have the category of unskilled people; that is the most difficult category who also wants to leave this country to go to other places in search of greener pastures. The way they do it, going across the desert, means the loss of lives and . . . you know . . . uncertainties. Ultimately it does not make them good migrants because they are not able to get [legal] settlement and therefore get returns from their migration. So their contributions to the country in terms of migration are really very limited.68

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The division between positive and negative effects mirrors a neoliberal market logic, based on whether the state investment in its population pays off—such as abundant remittances, business investment, skills’ transfer, and return. It should be accentuated that the director did not only focus on the limited economic benefit from undocumented migrants but that she also emphasized suffering and the losses of life. Nevertheless, she classified undocumented migrants as ‘‘not good’’ migrants because of their limited returns to the state—in contrast to those migrants with a more promising development potential. Both categories are objects of governance where the former are courted for their development potential, whereas the latter are subjects of education and information activities, carried out by GIS and IOM to prevent undocumented mobility. Other initiatives include the European Commission AENAS 2006 project that aimed at stemming illegal migration and developing legal migration and the European Union thematic program on migration and asylum that donated equipment to and trained officers in Ghana Immigration Service and Ghana Police Service to ‘‘effectively disrupt organized irregular migration operations’’ in relation to fraud detection, human smuggling, and trafficking.69 These projects show how Ghanaian migration policies and initiatives not only reflect efforts to strengthen national development but also are shaped by European agendas. In addition to Ghanaian migrants, other states also constitute audiences for the government. Indeed, Ghanaian government officials explained that undocumented migrants and deportations constitute an embarrassment to the government, as ‘‘the mass deportations of Ghanaians give the impression of Ghanaians as being worse than we are’’70 and the government is uncomfortable and worried about ‘‘the false and negative reputation of Ghana.’’71 This indicates that, from a government perspective, another problem of undocumented migrants is that they expose the failure of the Ghanaian government to control and govern its citizens. Their irregular presence in other countries and ensuing deportations signal to other states that the Ghanaian government’s claims and ambitions of transnational governance and sovereignty are not realized. Likewise, they can be seen as a sign of failed biopolitics: these migrants could have been used more productively by the state, and their losses of life as well as the suffering of these citizens could have been prevented. The embarrassment of Ghanaian government officials may thus also be grounded in a feeling of not ‘‘mastering’’ its population in an optimal way.

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Conclusion In this chapter, I have explored the reconfiguration of the relationship between states and international migrants, focusing on how states aim to channel and promote migration for development with Ghana as a case study. International migrants reemerged as development agents in policy circles in the early 2000s, fitting well with neoliberal policies that aim to individualize and privatize the responsibility for development and that celebrate entrepreneurialism and economic growth—in Ghana but also more generally.72 In Ghana, government attention to international migrants dates back to the late 1990s but especially takes off following the 2001 change of government with a range of initiatives, ranging from dual citizenship and franchise to the biopolitical ambition of establishing databases of international migrants. While these initiatives may look impressive, they generally have not been implemented or taken off. Furthermore, Ghanaian migrants do not seem to be interested in Ghanaian state initiatives or trust the state, being embedded in family webs of obligation and affinity, rather than patriotism. Nevertheless, migrant transnational involvement is flourishing in Ghana. The Ghanaian case, thus, cautions us against confusing stated policy intentions with actual outcomes. However, the fact that policies do not work according to the stated intentions do not make them superfluous. Rather I argue that these initiatives are attempts to symbolically include international migrants in the nation and to constitute them as a patriotic and governable population. Indeed, Ghanaian government officials expressed a strong belief in the benefits of well-managed migration, endowing migration management with a transformative power to overcome structural barriers and constraints. Government officials thereby ascribe a central role to the state in channeling international migration for national development. Concurrently, they send a signal to migrants, as well as to other states, of the Ghanaian state’s ambition to perform sovereignty in the sense of controlling subjects and resources—even if they are located outside the national territory. Migration-development initiatives therefore also function as a policy spectacle where the government signals that it is taking its responsibility as a migrant-sending state seriously, exercising legitimate statecraft. State efforts to channel, prevent, and promote mobility for national development is not a phenomenon taking place only in Africa, let alone in

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developing countries. Rather, it is a central concern in most places of the world, where states aim to govern and provide varying degrees of rights and inclusion for their nonresident citizens or diaspora groups, though these schemes will usually not be characterized in terms of migration and development in richer countries. The Ghanaian case is, thus, not exceptional but has broader implications. In addition to the distinction between different policy initiatives and extension of rights as suggested by Levitt and de la Dehasa and Gamlen,73 I call for attention to the following three aspects. First, in relation to what migration policies produce: while the stated intentions, that is, contributions to national development, may not be realized or take off in the expected ways, policies have governmental ‘‘side-effects’’ in terms of creating governable populations or demonstrating statecraft. Second, in relation to technologies: the continuing development of biometric and electronic technologies and registration creates new ways of tracking and overviewing populations for multiple purposes—not least with the introduction of biometric passports and border control in many states, including Ghana. Third, in relation to global inequalities: access to mobility is embedded in regimes of mobility that simultaneously privilege and constrain migration for certain groups at global, regional, and local scales.74 These mobility regimes, in turn, also shape how states can negotiate, promote, and channel the movements and transnational practices of their citizens.

PA R T I I Moving Concentrations of Power

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Chapter 7

Kinetocracy: The Government of Mobility at the Desert’s Edge Benedetta Rossi

The present chapter contributes to this volume’s aim to theorize the state and mobility in Africa by exploring the relation between centralized states and those nomadic societies that resisted state control by following alternative and at times antagonistic rationales of power as control over mobility, which I call ‘‘kinetocracy.’’1 The study of African governance is conceptually ill equipped to investigate forms of political rule that do not fit the state model.2 A narrow focus on the modern state has resulted in a purely negative characterization of nomadic and seminomadic societies in the desert as the state’s ‘‘exteriority.’’3 Yet desert-like environments, characterized by low population densities and the necessity to be mobile, support the development of particular governmental rationales that should be conceptualized in their own terms.4 Here, power comes to be expressed primarily as control over one’s own and other people’s movements,5 because it is through such control that access to water, food, and other assets is secured.6 In these contexts, political authority is based on three main conditions: ability to access resources and make them available to allies and dependents; ability to make others move in support of one’s economic and military purposes; and ability to hinder the mobility of one’s enemies. These conditions are achieved and retained through a combination of military might and the development of habits adjusted to the requirements of life in the desert. I am not suggesting that geographic or climatic conditions determine the establishment of particular political formations. Desert and semidesert

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regions and the societies that inhabit them have historically been integrated in a variety of political structures, including kingdoms, empires, and nation-states. In the case of Ader, which is the focus of this chapter, various political systems from the late nineteenth century to the present successively developed different strategies for coping with the desert. In Tuareg hierarchies, droughts resulted in an exchange of slaves, who needed to be fed, for cereals provided by traders from the savannah. This was one of many ways to cope with the duress of the Saharan climate. It depended on the power of Tuareg elites to trade slaves out of the desert, and freely move their own families and dependents to southern locations in times of famine. After the abolition of slavery, new governmental authorities developed alternative measures. In post-1940s colonial developmentalism, the desert came to be seen as something that could be fought against through technological means.7 Clearly, political relations influence the ways the desert is interpreted and acted upon. Yet, following Fernand Braudel, ‘‘a desert is a desert, with its requirements that never change, at the time of Abraham or David just as in our own times.’’8 At the desert’s edge, productive resources (for example, water sources, land that can be farmed, pastures) are rare and recurrently exposed to droughts and other threats. In these circumstances, securing access to scattered, precarious resources is more important than securing ownership rights over productive assets. Here, the development of intensive agriculture (or pastoralism) is limited because the risk involved in investing a disproportionate amount of resources and labor in one or more farming fields (or herds) would be unsustainable. Here power lies in the capacity to move freely to access a variety of resources and economic opportunities scattered in multiple locations. This situation is reversed in environments that support higher population densities and where stable resources produce high yields and high returns to labor. Material conditions of life have implications for the logics that govern social and political relationships, without ever determining the particular political arrangements that take place at specific moments in time. One way this chapter distances itself from the arguments advanced in the introduction of this volume is that it focuses not on the state, which is seen here as only one particular institution of government, but on governmental rationales (that inform the activities of the state and other institutions). This approach allows me to compare the rationales that govern centralized states with those undergirding other forms of political rule, such

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as the rule of Tuareg hierarchies in seminomadic societies. The latter may share some characteristics with territorial states, but they are structurally and functionally different. When they coexist with such states, giving rise to forms of legal and political pluralism extensively documented in African history, the result is a clash between different governmental logics and not merely between two sets of political elites with opposed interests (for example, a Western colonial one and an indigenous one). The state should be seen as one of many institutions whose members partake of a particular governmentality broadly defined, with Foucault, as ‘‘the conduct of conduct.’’ In Ader, the practices of agents inhabiting the state administration or other institutions have been influenced by broader historical and cultural discourses that defined certain ways of moving and controlling movement as acceptable and not others, or not for all members of society. Especially in contexts like Ader, the state does not shape the conduct of its subjects/ citizens any more than do the mosque, the school, or indigenous political institutions that, due to Ader’s marginality, remained semiautonomous from state control. I should, once more, qualify my argument. I am not supporting a culturalist interpretation that sees different culture groups (for example, colonizers and colonized) as belonging to compartmentalized worlds of knowledge. In Ader, and elsewhere, some colonial subjects—for example, native chiefs—were familiar with both the government logics of the colonial state and the kinetocratic logics that informed precolonial government. To some extent, their choices may have taken shape at a subconscious level. But they also chose to alternate strategically across different ‘‘paradigms of argument,’’9 which derived strength from different governmentalities. Government as the ‘‘conduct of conduct’ encompasses a continuum of practices ranging from the exercise of political sovereignty to relations within and across various types of social institutions, interpersonal relations, and ‘‘technologies of the self’’ governing the ways individuals manage their own bodies and persons. Thus, although the modern state and its agents may have a greater capacity to prevent, promote, and channel mobility than do other institutions and individuals, it is not the only institution capable of influencing how people move; its reach is stronger in certain regions than in others and among certain groups than others. For example, illegal migrants in the so-called informal economy eschew state controls and follow alternative rules and logics of movement.10 If we are interested in distinguishing different ways of moving, a narrow focus on the state can

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be heuristically limiting: for instance, the Western state may indeed not differentiate between the mobility of male and female citizens, but specific religious communities often regulate differently, and very effectively, the mobility of males and females, irrespective of common citizenship. We need to ask whose rationales of movement are influenced most by state rule and which ones operate autonomously, irrespective of state regulations or in antagonism with state rules. To answer these types of questions, the state should be understood less as the main source of meaning and praxis than as an important vehicle of some of the normative views of the time—not all. This chapter suggests that kinetocracy differs from the governmental logics of centralized states, which emphasize territorial control and define membership in relation to residence and fixed, calculable property that the state accesses through taxation.11 Although part of modern state power consists in its capacity to monopolize the means of legitimate movement,12 control over mobility is only one of many defining characteristics of the contemporary nation state. By contrast, it is the fundamental axiom that structures relations of power and governance in kinetocratic governments. The first section of this chapter suggests that the tension between kinetocratic societies in the desert and centralized states has been central to African politics for centuries. It argues that we need to look both at how the state has been attempting to govern mobility within the reaches of its power and at how centralized states are related to kinetocratic societies. The second and third sections discuss the case of the Ader region in the period 1885–1946. Ader lies at the southern edge of the Sahara desert. Before colonial occupation, Ader accommodated a hybrid form of governance, whereby the most mobile sections of society dominated both nomadic and settled groups. This section considers the interaction between Ader’s kinetocratic government and colonial government up to the mid-1940s. It shows that, over the course of the twentieth century, as the specialized economic functions of desert dwellers progressively lost significance and as these societies came to be seen primarily as a security concern, the balance of power in this relation shifted in favor of the state. Therefore, the focus is on how mobile lifestyles in Ader adapted to encapsulation in different political rationales and technologies of rule. The conclusion advances some final reflections on the broader theoretical implications of the ideas presented in this chapter.

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Access and Ownership: The Long-Term Tension Between Desert Life and Urban Life The desert and the particular forms of authority that develop in it pose a limit and sometimes a threat to the expansion of centralized states.13 Some studies of African governance emphasize the ways in which low population densities have hindered state power. Hence, Jeffrey Herbst suggested that ‘‘the fundamental problem facing state-builders in Africa—be they precolonial kings, colonial governors, or presidents in the independent era—has been to project authority over inhospitable territories that contain relatively low densities of people.’’14 Similarly, John Iliffe noted that ‘‘in the West African Savannah, underpopulation was the chief obstacle to state formation,’’15 and Robert Bates found that, in Africa, ‘‘the higher the population density, the greater the level of political centralization.’’16 A corollary of this argument is that the impervious conditions of the desert, while undermining state organization, support different social and political structures that pose a threat to the centralized power of states. Tension between the nomadic dwellers of the desert and urban-settled society have sometimes resulted in positive complementarities between the different economic specializations of urban, settled society, and nomadic pastoralists and longdistance traders.17 But, both in Africa and elsewhere, this tension has always retained the potential to turn into violent confrontation.18 The history of north and west Africa over the longue dure´e is marked by the opposition between on the one hand centralized ‘‘states’’ (kingdoms, empires, caliphates) supporting settled lifestyles where natural resources allow higher population densities; and on the other nomadic societies structured into segmentary lineage kinship units practicing transhumant pastoralism and stratified into hierarchies. This tension is prominent in sources covering roughly the last thousand years of West African historiography. A case in point are descriptions of the relation between the Sanhaja (and their militant offshoot, the Almoravids) and the Kingdom of Ghana. It has been suggested that defense against the former was a factor in the formation of the Ghana empire.19 Control of movement in and across the desert figures as a distinctive trait of Sanhaja social organization. Writing in the ninth century, Al Yaqubi portrays the Sanhaja who inhabit the desert between Sijilmasa, to the north, and Awdaghust, to the south, in characteristic terms: ‘‘they have no permanent dwellings. It is their custom to veil their faces

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with their turbans. They do not wear [sewn] clothes, but wrap themselves in lengths of cloth. They subsist on camels, for they have no crops, wheat or otherwise.’’20 About one hundred years later, Ibn Hawqal gives a longer description of the same society: Between Awdaghust and Sijilmasa there is more than one tribe of isolated Berbers who have never seen a settlement and know nothing other than the remote desert. Among them are the Sharta and Samsata and the Banu Masufa. The latter are a great tribe who live deep inland around inadequate water points and do not know wheat or barley or flour. There are among them some who know these things only figuratively. Their food consists of milk and only occasionally of meat, yet they are sturdier and stronger than anyone else. They have a king who rules them and administers their affairs. The Sanhaja and other people of this region respect him, because they control that route. They are steadfast and brave, good camel riders, lightfooted in running and tough. They know well the conditions and forms of the land and how to find their way over it, and how to be guided to water-points by description and discussion. They have a sense of direction which no one comes near to except those who are close to them and lead the same life.21 El Bekri’s Book of Roads and Realms belongs to a literary genre that emphasizes the contrast between stretches of travel (‘‘roads’’), often through inhospitable deserts inhabited by nomads, and urban centers (‘‘realms’’)— oases, hamlets, and towns—defined in terms of their human and material ‘‘contents.’’ His description of the rise of the Almoravids at the following of Abd Allah ibn Yacin, whose fanaticism had been shaped by desert life, evokes the theme of the potential threat of desert warriors on settled people.22 The usual topoi of constant mobility, lack of attachment to any type of settlement,23 and the habits (and foods) of farmers recur in his writing as they do in most other authors. To some extent, these are literary conventions. Entire passages are sometimes reproduced from earlier writers without acknowledging the source. Undoubtedly, these characterizations constitute discursive tropes that reflect how society was imagined by the authors of these texts.24 But recognizing their biases does not mean that these representations were not real, in the sense that they shaped people’s

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imagination and had concrete consequences for social relations between desert nomads and urban dwellers. In the second half of the fourteenth century, Ibn Khaldoun placed this tension at the center of his philosophy of history: ‘‘Civilization may be either desert (Bedouin) civilization as found in outlying regions and mountains, in hamlets (near suitable) pastures in waste regions, and on the fringes of sandy deserts. Or it may be sedentary civilization as found in cities, villages, towns, and small communities that serve the purpose of protection and fortification by means of walls.’’25 The contrast between ‘‘desert civilization’’ and ‘‘sedentary civilization’’ that permeates the Kitab al-Ibar focuses less on the difference between nomadism and settlement and more on the moral implications of urban life and life in the desert. In the desert, according to Ibn Khaldoun, social institutions are aimed at obtaining what is necessary and uncorrupted by the luxury of cities, which create dependence on superfluous pleasures. The relationship between these two domains is dynamic: Ibn Khaldoun sees desert civilization as (structurally) dominated by the urban population because of the desert dwellers’ inability to procure material necessities and the products of crafts and specialized industry in their own abode.26 Yet he views these two worlds as interdependent.27 The moral, and consequently physical, strength of desert society poses a constant threat to centralized states. When desert rulers conquer cities, they initially attempt to remain isolated from urban centers. But, in few generations, they often embrace the corrupt urban lifestyle that, without a close observance of Islamic precepts, leads to moral decadence. In the Kitab al-Ibar, the tension between desert and city life appears as the fundamental dialectic of human history.28 Yet Ibn Khaldoun avoids essentializing these two realities—in his work, nomads and urban dwellers are not represented as incommensurable ‘‘types of being.’’ Particular groups may periodically change their lifestyles as they cross desert/urban boundaries and gradually adopt worldviews that he sees as well adapted to the localities they inhabit. Ibn Khaldoun provides the most thorough conceptual analysis of this relation. However, the distinction between desert-dwelling societies and centralized states runs through most discussions of the political history of northern and western Africa. For example, writing in the seventeenth century Al-Sadi argues that Timbuktu was founded by Tuareg nomads who used it originally as a ‘‘depot for their belongings’’ and a summer grazing ground for their herds. Before it was conquered by Sunni Ali, the sultan of

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the Tuareg Akil delegated the government of Timbuktu and its settled society to a representative who acted as a settled ruler, while he himself continued to move in desert camps with his animals.29 This reveals the perceived difficulty for desert rulers to adapt to the sedentary lifestyle required for governing settled society. Conversely, other sources underline the attitude of settled rulers toward desert-based societies. Hence, Ibn Fartuwa’s account of the wars of Bornu’s sultan Idris Alooma distinguishes sharply between the defensive tactics that Bornu’s armies adopted in relation to Tuareg nomads and Hausa polities. When the former’s continuous raids were repelled, nomad attackers were scattered back into the deserts where they had originally come from. Instead, Hausa fortified cities were sieged, and their permanent defense structures challenged Bornu’s mighty army.30 The distinct habits of the ‘‘people of the desert’’ and of Sudanic settled civilization were later noticed by nineteenth-century European explorers. Colonial administrators described the different requirements of rule in the desert. For instance, French sources differentiate between circonscriptions se´dentaires and circonscriptions nomades, or sedentary and nomadic districts, respectively structured into cantons and groupements. In nomadic districts, security was maintained through the deployment of special camel corps (pelotons me´haristes).31 Changes in the technologies of trade, travel, and rule that followed colonization altered the relation between the desert and urban seats of centralized power. The decline of the trans-Saharan trade, controlled by networks familiar with desert life, altered the terms of the relation between centralized societies and ‘‘desert peoples’’ to the latter’s disadvantage.32 As the connecting functions of desert societies progressively lost relevance, the maintenance of peaceful relations with them became less necessary. Security concerns prevailed as the colonial administration saw the desert primarily as the abode of dissidents and rebels, beyond the reach of ‘‘normal’’ state power. Centralized colonial and postcolonial states governed the desert by alternating politics of noninterference with violent repression. Modern state governments could afford to ignore the different governmentality that prevails in desert regions, when these regions did not pose a threat to state power. Yet, when they threatened to destabilize central rule, states intervened on desert society through the use of exceptional measures. While states had resorted to violence to assert their power over boundary semidesert regions since precolonial times, what appears to have been new under colonial rule was the loss of incentives (which had once been primarily economic, as desert societies ensured trade) to tolerate kinetocracy in the desert.

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To summarize, mobility challenges centralized state rule. The state asserts its power by delimiting and defining space.33 It classifies and controls forms of property and labor in relation to territorialized places and resources. To be sure, nomads too have a territory34 and recognize areas of nomadization over which certain groups have priority access. But such precedence is defined by their capacity to defend their freedom of movement, ensure the safety of allies and dependents, and restrict the mobility of enemies. In deserts, the power of political rulers depends less on material wealth than on being unencumbered by possessions and yet capable to access needed resources at any time. Societies adapted to desert-like conditions tend to prioritize access over-ownership. In contexts where land and other valuables are highly vulnerable to recurrent risks, such as minor shifts in rainfall patterns, securing access to scattered resources is safer than securing exclusive property rights over volatile capital (for example, land, livestock). To be sure, essentializations of either nomadism or ‘‘desert life’’ should be avoided. Deserts may not be the only conditions where power is expressed primarily as control over movement, but they constitute the example used in this chapter. And nomadism may not be the only form of social organization informed by this rationale of government, but surely it is a case in point. With Ibn Khaldoun, ‘‘desert civilization’’ and ‘‘urban civilization’’ are not unchanging identities: they are social and political responses to environments that can carry different population densities. Desert-based groups can defeat and conquer centralized powers and arrange ways to rule over them. Or they can become encapsulated in the territorial and political boundaries of powerful empires and states. Specific forms of dependence and integration between desert and city life change over time and across regions. But control over movement is the very axiom of the government of desert-based societies—more than, and in opposition to, urban rationales of government. When centralized states attempted to impose their rule upon desert-based groups, they mostly proved unable to control the latter’s movements.

The Government and Self-Government of Mobility in Ader Kinetocracy is rooted in the longue dure´e of Ader’s history. While this region underwent major political transformations over the period considered here, the environmental circumstances of Ader imposed a particular

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rationale of government to both powerful and powerless. In its least fertile regions, Ader’s resources were ephemeral and scattered in different locations. Securing access over a multiplicity of scarcely productive sites mattered more than exercising exclusive control over any single location. In Ader, kinetocratic governmentality was in a dialectic relationship with centralized state rule. When incongruences could not be reconciled, because of a lack of incentives to establish a cooperative relation between nomadic rulers and centralized states, states attempted to impose their rule through exceptional measures. Yet those very conditions that induced kinetocracy eluded the normalization of state rule in the desert, which, from the centralized state’s perspective, would have implied integration of populations settled at the desert’s edge within its own rationales and apparatuses of rule. Centralized states, be they the Sokoto Caliphate, the Sultanate of Agadez, or the French empire, struggled to control mobility in Ader and faced resistance primarily in the form of the exit option: people at the desert’s edge resisted settlement and pressures to change their habits. They refused to settle and invest primarily in local productive resources at the expense of diversification because the risks involved would have been too high: they knew that, when they faced famine and impoverishment, distant state institutions would not have provided effective relief for their families. They never ceased to strive to retain control over their own movements, as mobility allowed them to diversify their livelihood options spatially. And they continued to be integrated in precolonial hierarchies, which progressively lost some of their former functions but still provided access to networks of support and protection, within Ader and elsewhere. This section looks at transformations in the government and selfgovernment of mobility that took place between the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the mid-twentieth century in Ader, which is in the southern half of what is today the Tahoua administrative region of southern Niger. Ader is located at the edge of the Sahara desert. In the nineteenth century, southern Ader was the northernmost extension of the Sokoto Caliphate and northern Ader fell within the sphere of influence of the Sultanate of Agadez.35 Yet Ader was relatively distant from the centers of political power of both Sokoto and Agadez. Lying, respectively, at the northern and southern margins of these areas, it was difficult to control. Ader-based elites acted as de facto rulers of the country. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Ader’s society was subjected to the power of two Tuareg

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warrior elites: the Iwellemmeden Kel Denneg in northern Ader and the Kel Gress in southern Ader.36 The rationales and practices of rule adopted by these two groups were unlike the bureaucratic administration of neighboring centralized states. These Tuareg elites did not have a fixed abode. They changed residence constantly, and their capacity to move autonomously was a direct consequence of their power. Any loss of power corresponded to decreased autonomy to move freely. Political rule and control over movement cannot be separated in Ader. Ultimately, the military might of Tuareg warlords rested on their capacity to attack sedentary populations; raid, pillage, and kidnap slaves; access and exploit scarce and scattered resources; and resist attacks by the armies of their sedentary neighbors. More vulnerable groups either obtained the protection of these nomadic warrior elites in exchange for tributes or were subdued and enslaved. Protection allowed dependents to carry out productive activities and trade without the fear of raids—in other words, it was protection to move in ways that did not hurt the interests of the warrior nobility (imajeghen). In some cases, slavery corresponded to completely controlled mobility: slaves moved (or did not move) depending on their masters’ will.37 A master could be absent most of the time, and this gave some autonomy to slaves settled in separate villages. But they only moved independently at their own risk. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Kel Gress and Iwellemmeden confederations operated in somewhat different ways, reflecting the different environments they controlled.38 Kel Gress wealth depended on caravan trade and the herding and farming on which such trade relied. A large proportion of the camels and cereals traded appear to have been their own and were reproduced through the use of slave or freed-slave labor. Their power was partly territorial, and they had to entertain good relations with powerful neighbors in Sokoto if they wanted to trade with them. The area of influence of the Kel Gress comprised many villages of former slaves whom they had liberated and turned into sharecroppers or tributary farmers. The latter owed a large part of their harvest to Kel Gress elites. Unlike slaves, they had to provide for all their needs. Yet they were motivated to produce more on lands that they perceived as their own. Iwellemmeden rule in northern Ader was different. In these arid regions at the border with the Sahara, slaves were less valuable as producers than as capital. As slaves, they did not own anything and had no rights over their

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own persons and their offspring. They merely looked after their masters’ possessions, which included their own and their children’s labor and bodies. Their villages also functioned as stations in the travels of their masters and their allies. The harshness of this system was mitigated by the fact that slaves who lived in these separate villages enjoyed a greater degree of autonomy than other slaves. They were particularly vulnerable in moments of crisis, when the elites had priority access to scarce resources and could sell the most marginal of their slaves.39 The most exposed to the threat of being sold at slave markets were slaves newly captured in raids against villages falling in enemy territory. The Iwellemmeden were desert warriors whose political supremacy was rooted in their military superiority to local farming villages and their knowledge of the desert territory.40 Because scarce resources were scattered over vast spaces, retaining the capacity to control their movements was essential to Iwellemmeden elites. Rather than investing in productive resources and therefore developing ties to the land, they asserted their supremacy over entire villages of farmers and herders and forced them to provide anything Iwellemmeden imajeghen required, at any time, in the form of tributes or casual contributions. They supplemented what they obtained from these dependents through raids and pillages targeted primarily at other Tuareg confederations. Their capacity to move unhindered in and out of the desert allowed elites to satisfy their needs without having to settle in one place and negotiate their legitimacy politically with local populations. They controlled the mobility of their dependents, and anyone entering their region unprotected exposed him/herself to their attacks. They exemplify kinetocracy more than most other groups. Ader’s Tuareg elites had established their supremacy over Hausaphone groups, who retained their own political organization and status system but were incorporated as tributary dependents in one or the other Tuareg chieftaincy. Seminomadic ruling elites camped with their families, servants, and some animals in different places throughout the year within areas of nomadization over which they had asserted their supremacy through war. Animals, mainly camels, were the main form of wealth of these Ader-based Tuareg groups. Herders followed the movements of their own and their masters’ or patrons’ animals.41 Elites would normally participate in the main transhumance cycles but were free to attend to any other business, anytime.42 They traveled light. Wherever they stopped, they were hosted by people who owed them allegiance or by allies and dependents scattered in distant regions. Slaves built tents and camps for them and carried out all

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tasks related to food preparation, water provision, and animal husbandry. Tuareg elites did not engage in productive labor directly (farming and herding). Their subordinates, of free or slave status, did all manual work for them. The most trusted among them, often of artisan status, coordinated and supervised various activities. Clashes between Tuareg groups usually took the form of raids and counterraids. Incursions on settled villages could be carried out by small groups of mounted warriors and were usually aimed at kidnapping children who would be enslaved. Larger raids against entire farming villages incremented cereals levied from dependents. Tuareg chiefs summoned dependents by playing the drum of war (ettebol). The drum resounded over a great distance, and scattered dependent groups would gather at the chief’s moving camp, from where their next movements would be planned. Ader-based nomadic rulers, Kel Gress and Kel Denneg, established their supremacy over regions that included both (semi-)nomadic pastoralist and settled farmers. The latter were more numerous in southern Ader falling under Kel Gress power. Most farming villages were inhabited by Hausaphone groups. Moreover, when Tuareg slaves were liberated, they usually embraced a semisedentary lifestyle, settling down in villages and taking up farming.43 Taking up agriculture as their main productive activity implied giving up transhumance. Yet it would be wrong to assume that farmers were wholly sedentary. In precolonial Ader, farming involved considerable mobility. Most farmers owned several fields in different locations. Given erratic rainfall patterns, this allowed them to minimize the risk of harvest failure. It was (and still is) common for some Hausaphone groups in Ader to have a wife in each of a man’s productive locations. Until the early twentieth century, new fields could be acquired by clearing the bush with the help of sons and often in association with male relatives and age peers, with the specific purpose of increasing the farmland in one’s possession. The practice of migrating seasonally to farm distant fields is called idik or edir. Farmers built temporary huts in their ‘‘region of idik’’ and stayed there (or sent an adult son) in the farming season. Hunting occupied an important place in the life of Hausaphone groups known as ‘‘Asna.’’44 Asna groups farmed, hunted, and were skilled archers. They arranged hunting trips to surrounding forests that today have been lost to the desert. Sometimes they built camps of temporary huts where they could rest in the course of hunting expeditions that lasted several days. Moreover, both Tuareg and Hausa groups contained specialized long-distance

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traders (Hausa: fatakke) who exploited Ader’s location between two ecological zones, the desert and the savannah, and price differentials for the complementary products of the north and south. The main caravan traders of Ader were the Kel Gress.45 The elites coordinated the most important cycles of trade, which was labor intensive and absorbed different categories of dependent workers. There were also more or less autonomous trade networks, such as the Isawaghen, who traded salt from Tegidda, or the Illabakan who sold magic charms.46 These groups displaced themselves in smaller numbers and specialized in the trade of specific goods. The organization of Ader’s Hausaphone trade networks was less internally diversified and stratified than that of the networks headed by more important Kano-based traders.47 At the end of the nineteenth century, Hausa long-distance trading groups from Ader would have involved about ten to fifteen trade partners traveling together. Trips from Ader to Kano or Sokoto lasted fifteen to twenty days, depending on the sites of arrival and departure.48 To summarize, in precolonial Ader farming, herding, hunting, and trade involved mobility. Movements matched the seasonality of productive activities. Freedom to choose when and how to move was a function of social status. The higher one’s status the greater the freedom to move independently and make others move. The movements of clients and slaves depended on the will of their patrons and masters. Free Tuareg and Hausa tributaries conducted long-distance trade in insecure conditions. Their trajectories ventured outside the areas dominated by specific imajeghen groups, with whom they had established economic and military alliances and to whom they paid various kinds of tributes. Their travels exposed them to the risk of raids, attacks, and enslavement. On the other hand, slaves and dependents could not move without the consent of their masters. If intercepted, they would be punished or recaptured by new masters. While some slaves escaped, escape does not seem to have been frequent.

Movement Under Colonial Rule I have discussed elsewhere the process through which colonial government limited the capacity of former elites to move freely and, by restraining the latter’s power, allowed former slaves to take control over their own movements.49 Yet, at the same time, colonial rule attempted to control and reorganize the mobility of subjects in new ways. At the desert’s edge, France

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extracted what it could and gave little in return. Ader’s hostile environment did not lend itself easily to the establishment and maintenance of infrastructure. And the limited yields of local production did not justify significant investments, which might have encouraged some degree of urbanization. French armies invaded Ader in 1900. The first twenty years of colonial occupation of Ader were characterized by ongoing raids and insecurity. ‘‘Pacification’’ was a precondition for the normalization of colonial rule, and it depended on crushing the resistance of former rulers. Repression took the form of military clampdowns and, as in Tanout in 1917, the virtual extermination of the imajeghen (see below). Dissident Tuareg elites relied on their superior knowledge of the territory, their ongoing hold over their former subjects, and the incapacity of an understaffed and underfinanced French administration to track and confine their movements. In the early years of colonial occupation, controlling the country amounted to establishing who could move freely across dry, impervious lands and who could control the mobility of local subjects. The French soon realized that punctual military victories and peace treaties were meaningless unless they could actually check the dissidents’ movements and make local people comply with the requirements of the new regime (for example, taxes, forced labor, military recruitment, progressive settlement of nomadic groups). This, in turn, depended on their capacity to move safely in the territory they had invaded. None of these conditions were even remotely achieved in the first two decades of colonial rule, and they were never fully achieved afterward. The French encountered major difficulties as they tried to establish viable routes across the country.50 Long waterless tracts of land posed insurmountable obstacles to French military administrators. Vast areas in Ader could not be controlled. Former Tuareg rulers defeated in battle by French superior military technology responded with guerrilla warfare, in which they had objective advantages vis-a`-vis the French. They knew the land and its resources and inhabitants better, and they could rely on the support of some of their former dependents. Most local groups feared the imajeghen; some also respected them. Either way, Ader’s inhabitants did not trust the colonial state enough to dare denying support to the fearsome imajeghen. Two different types of boundaries gave refuge to dissident Tuareg elites: the edge of the Sahara, to the north, was a line beyond which the Iwellemmeden felt secure and French military strategies became substantially less effective. The Iwellemmeden resistance continued to launch raids on

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settled villages and hide in the desert until 1917. In the south, the border with English Nigeria remained disputed until 1907.51 This allowed the Kel Gress to elude colonial authority in a no man’s land where power and responsibility were disputed between French and English forces.52 However, unlike Iwellemmeden elites, the Kel Gress could not abandon their territorial interests in order to elude French control. When Kel Gress imajeghen realized that they stood no chance to win against the superior French military technology, their main concern was to resume control over the production and trade that underpinned their wealth. After the defeats of Zanguebe and Galma in 1901, Kel Gress resistance ceased, and small numbers of Kel Gress were even mobilized in French offensives against other Tuareg ‘‘rebel’ groups.53 In northern Ader, the Iwellemmeden Kel Denneg resisted until 1917, when they were exterminated in Tanout.54 At the height of the ‘‘rebellion,’’ the French government declared a state of siege, which made exceptional military measures possible in what was already a regime of exception, the indige´nat. Following occupation, the French established administrative posts that had to be interconnected by practicable routes and required provisions to guarantee their normal functioning. They needed horses and camels for the functioning of their mounted armies, for standard administrative displacements across villages, to follow up village life and customary rule, to administer justice, to carry out censuses and collect taxes, and to transport building materials and other goods. Animals were acquired in several ways: they were requisitioned from rebels in the course of battles and counterraids and kept as booty; they were demanded as a peace condition in submission treaties; they were received as a form of tax in kind; and they were rented from the largest owners, such as the Kel Gress. Thus, the country had to provide the horses and camels that the French administration needed to rule. It also had to provide all the labor necessary for carrying out public works, manning the army, and servicing colonial posts and operations. Ader populations opposed a strenuous resistance to colonial exactions, forced labor, and compulsory military recruitment. They hid their livestock and horses, migrated to northern Nigeria, escaped into the mountains, and attacked the customary chiefs (chefs de canton) who carried out recruitment operations on behalf of the French administration. In the 1920s, large numbers of emancipated slaves from Ader started migrating to Nigeria. By the 1930s, this exodus was recorded by independent French and British sources as a phenomenon of great demographic

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and economic magnitude. French colonial administrators referred to this constant movement as ‘‘la question des exodes.’’ They strove to stop it and regulate it, without success. What appeared as an undifferentiated mass of migrants concealed, in fact, different groups with different reasons for migrating. Among the migrant population were slaves who left never to come back and whose movement was an attempt to leave their origins behind and start a new life. Others migrated to avoid forced labor and compulsory recruitment. They also left to avoid having to pay taxes or, alternatively, to find paid jobs abroad that would allow them to pay taxes on their return.55 Through migration, Ader’s inhabitants resisted taxation and demands on their labor. They also resisted, more generally, having to abide by norms and regulations that were not suitable to the living conditions at the desert’s edge. When the new rulers’ decisions proved intolerable, people moved to British territory or retreated into the desert. If their interests clashed not with the French colonial administration but with the village or canton chief, unhappy subjects sent delegations to the commandant exposing their complaints. Ader’s society chose which governmentality it would operate in, depending on the circumstances. Locals acted politically with political representatives of the centralized state when this could yield convenient results. They migrated when they judged that political action would not yield desirable outcomes.

Conclusion: Kinetocracy as Governmentality Kinetocracy is not a type of state; it is a type of governmentality. This chapter has followed Foucault’s suggestion that we should avoid putting the state at the center of the analytical focus.56 The state does not shape society any more than it is itself shaped by cultural rationales that inform social norms at any one time and place. If the state shapes people’s conduct in a variety of ways, so do the school, the market, and the family. The state’s governmental rationales are an outcome of broader historical, cultural, and social dynamics. Understanding state action requires us to inquire into the underlying rationales that inform government, in the broadest sense of the term. Foucault uses the notion of government in two ways. At one level, his notion of government is very general:

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The exercise of power is a ‘‘conduct of conducts’’ and a management of possibilities. Basically, power is less a confrontation between two adversaries or their mutual engagement than a question of ‘‘government.’’ This word must be allowed the very broad meaning it had in the sixteenth century. ‘‘Government’’ did not refer only to political structures or to the management of states; rather it designated the ways in which the conducts of individuals or of groups might be directed—the government of children, of souls, of communities, of families, of the sick. It covered not only the legitimately constituted form of political or economic subjection but also modes of action, more or less considered and calculated, that were destined to act upon the possibilities of action of other people. To govern, in this sense, is to structure the possible field of action of others.57 This first meaning allows us to distinguish between different governmental rationales that inform different types of rule. It implies that institutions (including the state) shape the conduct of socialized individuals according to the values of the time, and that certain categories of actors, by virtue of their social status and position, can act on the actions of others even without the use of force. Tuareg elites in kinetocratic systems could expect to control the movements of their dependents who, in turn, needed the protection of their nomadic patrons if they wished to travel safely. Less successfully, the French administration tried to control the movements of Ader’s population, issuing travel permits to traders, expecting migrants to return from their destinations in order to pay taxes, and recruiting workers on colonial worksites. But it proved difficult to turn people into disciplined colonial subjects. Foucault also talks of ‘‘government’’ as the specific shape that state rule started to assume in seventeenth-century Europe. In this sense, French colonial administration partook of a particular mentality of government, a governmentality, different both from how suzerain power manifested itself in earlier European history and—for the purpose of this chapter—from the rule of Tuareg warrior elites.58 Following Foucault, France occupied Ader at a time when its governmentality was peculiarly concerned with shaping the conduct of the population understood primarily as living beings. In Foucault’s analysis, the establishment of this specific form of governmentality marks the transformation of politics into biopolitics, and is to be seen

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as the most recent transformation in Europe’s rationales of rule: ‘‘For millennia man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics calls his existence as a living being into question.’’59 Foucault’s primary interest in power/knowledge, rather than in power as it manifests itself in class struggles and other types of confrontations, yields consensual views of power, that is, views that highlight the ways in which the governed and the governors, the victims and the perpetrators, partake of the same cultural rationales that shape how people think and act.60 However, as has been noted by several critics, Foucault did not try to apply his theoretical framework to multicultural contexts.61 This chapter attempted to do just this: examine a situation in which two governmental rationales with different social and historical origins interacted in the same place. Of course, we all know how the story ended. Colonial forces defeated Tuareg kinetocratic rule, and imposed a new ideology of government. But how far was the colonial state really capable of shaping the conduct of local inhabitants in marginal desert regions? Plainly stated, not much. The desert had remained, as in earlier times, an environment that eludes ‘‘normal’’ state governance due to its intrinsic characteristics. These environmental factors are not static and unchangeable, but, with Braudel, they change more slowly than political regimes.62 As suggested earlier in this chapter, desert-based societies and urban societies are not compartmentalized, but rather they are engaged in a dialectic relationship. The desert’s ‘‘refusal to cooperate’’63 with the political rationales that govern social life in urban centers is manifest in the difficulties that empires and states encountered when they attempted to transform desert regions into areas where settled life was possible. From the centralized state’s perspective, the establishment and maintenance of urban infrastructure in the desert has high costs. From the perspective of local inhabitants, investments in valuable property—from elaborate dwellings to productive resources—are too risky. These enduring conditions favor the entrenchment of kinetocratic governmentality and resistance against the normalization of state rule. As briefly discussed in the previous section, kinetocracy is antithetical to at least some of the main traits and characteristics of government in urban centers and settled societies. From the perspective of Quirk and Vigneswaran’s conceptual framework, this might be a case of mobility unmaking states. In kinetocracy, it is not state policy that channels mobility, but instead it is the necessity to move—ultimately for

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survival—that structures political hierarchies and social relations. Kinetocratic resistance to state rule takes the form of escape and migration, giving rise to struggles over the meaning and control of people’s mobility. The state tries to regulate movement, but state representatives in desert posts do not share those kinetocratic rationales that enable the exercise of power in these regions. Faced with their failure to enforce their rules and regulations, central states resort to violent clampdowns at the margins.64 In the desert, kinetocracy and state rule follow separate governmental logics. Resistance consists in guerrilla or the ‘‘exit option’’ independently conceived and self-managed by migrants. The ‘‘voice option’’ would imply political action within the state apparatus. By contrast, ‘‘exit’’ is an avoidance strategy—a rejection of the political rationales of centralized states. This can be a circumstantial—not an absolute—position: migrants may change their behavior once they reach the city. Again, the two systems are not mutually exclusive; they express a tension familiar to all the men and women who navigate between them. Through mobility, migrants and modern nomads travel between the desert, where kinetocracy prevails, and temporarily settled lifestyles in cities, governed by different rationales of social and political conduct.65 In the absence of consistent, state-financed safety nets that allow local populations to shift from an emphasis on ‘‘access’’ to an emphasis on ‘‘ownership,’’ the capability to control one’s own and other people’s movements has remained a fundamental condition for survival and a precondition for the exercise of power at the desert’s edge.

Chapter 8

Decolonization and (Dis)Possession in Lusophone Africa Pamila Gupta

The power of things inheres in the memories they gather up inside them, and also in the vicissitudes of our imagination, and our memory. —Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence

European decolonization was always a messy affair, both for those in power and those dispossessed of it.1 Very often, it resulted in the mass migration of a large portion of the colonial population, suddenly and abruptly. This chapter conceptualizes decolonization less as a historical event; rather, as a series of overlapping ethnographic moments, its postcolonial dissonances reverberate across oceans and national boundaries, amid acts of everyday and ordinary affect performed by citizens, wherein ideas of legal governance, citizenship, respectability, and entitlement get tested in and out of the water. The focus is Portuguese decolonization in Lusophone Africa (Mozambique and Angola), as seen through the eyes of three participantobservers, their emphasis on things highly significant. What this chapter highlights, to adopt several terminologies put forth at the beginning of this volume, is the portability of the Portuguese colonial enterprise, through an examination of an understudied topic, that of its demise or rather its processes of unmaking (as opposed to making, which tends to be a more central focus in studies of colonialism) that involved

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various forms of mobility (of persons, but also things). By showing how decolonization necessarily involves the physical relocation and redistribution of the instruments of rule and colonizing peoples, including their possessions, my contribution to this volume intends to show how concentrations of power in certain Lusophone colonial capital cities (Lourenc¸o Marques and Luanda, respectively) operated by way of promotion and channeling of movement, with people and objects both in circulation at the end of colonialism. In other words, mobility can both make and unmake states. My approach is ethnographic but one attuned to history. By interrogating a historical event (Portuguese decolonization in Lusophone Africa) as comprised of a series of interrelated and overlapping ethnographic moments (accessed through the visual, written, and oral), I hope to generate important insights into the nature of decolonization as a process of physically moving the tools, objects, and agents of the colonial state. Therein arise several potential values of such an approach: an ability to move beyond circumscribed tropes that only view decolonization as a chronological benchmark (as a brief stopover to a subsequent condition); a basis for exposing new dynamics of mobility where the state is understood as reconfiguring both colonial populations and connections between people and things; and finally, its exploratory worth in developing a generative grammar that we can employ to describe and name phenomena (such as decolonization).2 Our first eyewitness3 is the late Mozambican photojournalist Ricardo Rangel, who visually documented the last days of Portuguese colonial rule in the Mozambican capital city of Lourenc¸o Marques (present-day Maputo), including his images of those Portuguese leaving on the eve of its decolonization with their most prized possessions in hand. His photographs stand as testimony: the group of heavily armed, uniformed Portuguese soldiers stationed at the port city’s docks to ensure law and order among Portugal’s citizenry amid the chaos of decolonization; the Portuguese Dona with her hair hastily tied up in a scarf, trying to decide which things are respectable enough for living in the metropole and (by implication) which are not; the image of cranes loading cars and boxes onto massive freight ships being readied to cross the Indian Ocean to arrive safely in Portugal. Our second eyewitness is Carlos Garc¸a˜o.4 His vivid oral account, one recorded much earlier in the year 1988, shows his sense of Mozambique’s impending lawlessness, compelling him to leave during its last colonial days

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for Apartheid South Africa. His casual descriptions are of those disquieting moments when a neighbor decides to destroy the plumbing of a house on the way out or pour cement down a private well, ensuring that no one else can possess what was once his alone, a sense of entitlement marked in these small territorial acts. But it is also Carlos’s disavowal of these feats in a reflective moment that give hope for postcolonial reparation and resistance. Our last eyewitness is the late Polish journalist Ryszard Kapus´cin´ski,5 who was reporting from Angola’s capital city of Luanda on the eve of its decolonization in June 1975, a historical process and ethnographic moment both distinct from but also very much connected to what was happening in Mozambique. His written account is also suggestive of what had taken place there only six months earlier. Thus, his analogous description of the rotting garbage, packs of starving stray dogs, and heaping piles of discarded objects that confront him as he makes his way through a deserted and desolate city stay with the reader; his long-winded description of a floating ‘‘city of crates’’ that makes its way toward an unsuspecting Lisbon suggests a ripple effect across oceanic terrains. Together, these testimonies serve to complicate how we view decolonization from both a theoretical and methodological standpoint, as less a brief and simple space in the seemingly seamless transition from colony to postcolony, but rather as moments of ‘‘thick-description,’’6 wherein concepts of law and governance are translated across troubled land and water(s); wherein one’s possessions come to stand in for idealized notions of entitlement, class, and respectability, and resistance on departure, and finally wherein individuals face new and unexpected forms of citizenry and belonging in the act of crossing the Indian Ocean. Writing About Decolonization Decolonization refers to the process whereby colonial powers transferred institutional and legal control over their territories and dependencies to indigenously based, formally sovereign, nation-states.7 Prasenjit Duara’s description above is a good starting point for reminding us that European decolonization, more generally, was about an institutional and legal transfer of power from a colonial power to a newly independent nation-state. Yet it was far from a smooth transition; rather, there were difficulties built into this widespread ‘‘process’’ that took place largely in

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the aftermath of the Second World War, difficulties that I am interested in exploring here in relation to decolonization in Lusophone Africa (specifically Mozambique and Angola). Jane Jacobs has argued quite persuasively that decolonization is the ‘‘least meaningful signifier of what might be thought of as postcoloniality.’’8 It is a premise I have written about elsewhere, suggesting that the concept of ‘‘decolonization’’ has been poorly understood, let alone recorded, historicized, or theorized9; it has often been viewed as an unproblematic given, an insignificant signifier in the transition from colony to postcolony when, in fact, as Achille Mbembe recently suggested, it was a foundational moment that was not only based on an ideal of ‘‘universal human emancipation,’’10 but fundamentally reshaped peoples and states of the West and, I would argue, in relation to the non-West. Very briefly then, I want to outline some of my thoughts with regard to treating decolonization as a subject and object of analysis. More generally, the critical project of postcolonial studies has been one of ‘‘deconstructing Master narratives, unsettling binaries and admitting marginalized knowledges.’’11 These studies have looked to the strengths and vulnerabilities of colonialism and its attendant colonial subjectivities, the political and economic effects of colonialism as a postcolonial condition, the continued cultural links between metropole and colony in the aftermath of empire, and, finally, the difficulty of giving voice to those silenced by colonialism itself.12 Interestingly, or perhaps paradoxically, many of these studies have tended to overlook the crucial link, or rather historical step, the one that transformed colonies into postcolonies: that is, the physical act of decolonization itself. Instead, European ‘‘decolonization’’ has been rendered an undifferentiated act that occurred in almost the same way in various parts of the world, largely in the aftermath of the Second World War, its cultural distinctiveness in particular contexts negated in favor of studying the more sweeping experience of postcolonialism as an enduring political and historical condition. I argue that only in the more recent past, as we increasingly distance ourselves even more from the globalized process of decolonization, has it become a possible focus of research in its own right. As historian Raymond Betts points out in his 1998 book Decolonization, the term ‘‘decolonization’’ entered the lexicon in the 1930s but did not attain popularity until thirty years later, that is, only when the concept had been put into practice. Betts also points to the difficulty of conceptualizing ‘‘decolonization’’:

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It is an awkward and inelegant word, therefore, in a way, appropriate to the subject it attempts to describe. Unlike the phrase ‘‘end of empire’’ which has a certain poetic economy suggesting a grand and sweeping occurrence, ‘‘decolonization’’ is work-a-day, rather like other ‘‘de’’ prefixed words that denote cleansing changes.13 Furthermore, Betts rightly points out that Decolonization was not a process but a clutch of fitful activities and events, played out in conference rooms, acted out in protests mounted in city streets, fought over in jungles and mountains. Its results pleased no one. It was too hastily done for some, too slowly carried out for others, too incomplete in effect for most. The subject is historically loose-ended; there is no end to discussion of it.14 Writing about decolonization as a political and material reality suggests that it was messy and complicated, occurring in a wide variety of legal settings throughout the world at very different moments in time and with very real consequences, and that it dramatically altered the livelihoods of all those involved, not only those directly in the service of the colonial state. In other words, things changed dramatically, in both good and bad ways, and overnight. We need not only to interrogate the universality of the event of decolonization but also look to its particularities, as a moment of closure and possibility at the same time and in relation to specific historical contexts. My aim, as I have outlined briefly above, is to look at decolonization as a series of mutually constituting ethnographic acts, by locating its politics in the personal, in the everyday. Here I am invested in exploring the ties that bind metropole and colony together in uncomfortable, unsettling, and unexpected ways during colonialism’s dismantling. It is those shifts— material and ideological—that transformed colonies into something ‘‘post’’ that are relevant here. Thus, my emphasis is less on studying decolonization at the level of political transition at its more understudied underbelly,15 as simultaneously a deeply material and intimate act wherein certain individuals had to interpolate larger state processes at a more personalized level. Such a nuanced perspective, I argue, can potentially help us understand the multiple and sometimes contradictory experiences of decolonization and to do so from those persons who experienced it firsthand. As well, this same

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approach suggests that we look at decolonization as simultaneously a struggle over ownership and self-hood in a period of dramatic transition; that is, decolonization was a process by which people and things increasingly started to stand in for each other, as individuals experienced profound personal loss, the fear of starting over looming ahead. I also emphasize the daunting task and sheer physicality of decolonization in moving people and things across oceans and territories in a very heightened and rapid manner, and which I argue has not been addressed in most writings on decolonization. Finally, I want to suggest that we need to look at the manner of decolonization—its conditions of possibility—as fundamentally shaping the contours of the postcoloniality of a specific place. I have elaborated elsewhere on the itinerant quality of Portuguese colonialism more generally, suggesting that there was much movement over the longue dure´e by both colonizer and colonized and between multiple colonial outposts.16 Specifically, that the Portuguese colonial state was historically a highly mobile one also shaped the manner by which this pattern continued in its period of decolonization, with large numbers of its colonial population leaving not only for the metropole but for other locations as well (for example, South Africa), just as the case of Carlos Garc¸ a˜o will demonstrate. Moreover, it was the lateness of Portuguese decolonization, particularly in Africa, that fundamentally shaped its postcolonial contours as well as the perception of the ‘‘slowness/backwardness’’ of the Portuguese as not initiating the process sooner, as not following the lead of other European powers in realizing that colonialism was no longer acceptable in the new global world order of things or that decolonization was the next step in a moral shift in landscape.17 Thus, while the bulk of British and French Africa experienced their decolonization processes throught the period of the 1960s, Portuguese Africa (Portugal’s ‘‘third empire’’ as it was called)18 was only dismantled in 1975, and due more to extenuating circumstances, even as the ‘‘wars of liberation’’ were building up in Angola and Mozambique in the 1960s.19 Decolonization came about for these two colonies only after the death of Portugal’s dictator Antonio de Oliveira de Salazar in 1970, and the subsequent April 25 Carnation Revolution and liberal changes in government in Portugal, rather than as an agreed on transfer in power negotiated peacefully between colonizer and colonized.20 This historical context, in turn, both serves as a reminder that colonialism was at a fundamental level a form of possession21 and intimates the complicated politics of

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decolonization in the Lusophone Africa case, particularly the resoluteness of the state and its citizens caught up in the ‘‘sea change of empire’’22 to hold onto their things in the face of sudden dispossession. Moreover, the Portuguese colonial state that is characterized here in the face of decolonization is increasingly a highly mobile and largely absent one, as will become evident in the following eyewitness accounts that reveal the day to day politics of dismantling a well-worn state apparatus.23 On the one hand, colonial officials were clearly concerned with the physical and material processes of moving the instruments and agents of rule. On the other, they also had to maintain a moral obligation to get citizens out as safely, smoothly, and quickly as possible, that is, with consideration toward what Foucault describes as the ‘‘conduct of conduct,’’24 precisely because it was a colonial state poised to leave, its departure as sudden and abrupt as its process of decolonization. These circumstances, I suggest, help us understand how Mozambique and Angola’s ‘‘Portuguese’’25 citizens were given immediate ‘‘refugee’’ status and told to pack up their things. Interestingly, the presence of the Portuguese military, a large number of conscripted soldiers already stationed in Angola and Mozambique due to the ongoing wars of liberation, functioned as representatives of sorts of this colonial state on the move.26 They too come up in these narratives of ‘‘white flight,’’ as upholding law and order (but also abusing their power) in the face of colonialism’s sudden demise.27 I must note that my focus in this chapter is not on the flip side of the coin of Portuguese decolonization— African independence, the exciting and momentous rebirth of Mozambique and Angola as independent sovereign powers in their own right. There is another equally compelling story, for example, that celebrates the victorious arrival of President Samora Machel in Lourenc¸o Marques on June 23, 1975,28 captured on film by the same Ricardo Rangel under discussion in this chapter, yet is not told here.29 Thus, for the Lusophone cases (Lourenc¸o Marques and Luanda) under analysis here, it is remarkable that, in a matter of a few weeks in the lead up to Mozambique’s transition to independence, scheduled for June 1975 by the outgoing colonial government, approximately 450,000 Portuguese citizens left, with the majority of these retornados (‘‘returned ones’’) departing for the metropole, but some choosing to migrate to South Africa or Brazil,30 the specter of fear and lawlessness haunting them in the wake of impending decolonization and, thus, compelling them to change their lives dramatically, for better or worse. Only a few months later, with its transfer

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of power scheduled for November 1975, 95 percent of Angola’s Portuguese population started packing up their personal things,31 with ships, planes, and caravans all awaiting them.32 Both hope and despair drove them to depart hastily and abruptly, but not without their most prized possessions in hand to represent and remind them of what they had left behind in the face of an uncertain and unknown future. What is taken up in this chapter, then, is a serious engagement with the concept of ‘‘decolonization’’ in order to suggest a rethinking of its matrices and to view the historical process through an ethnographic approach. The chapter relies on several accounts (visual, oral, and written) of the last days of colonialism in Mozambique to look at the ways certain individuals made sense of the chaos of decolonization, at the level of material effect and emotive affect, carving out a future (of respectability and entitlement), while using personal possessions to stand in for so much more as they crossed land and water in search of new ways of governance, citizenship, and belonging. The narrative thickness of this chapter, then, comes from my focus on material objects as standing in for much about the play and presence of power. Last, if we consider this case study as an extreme (rather than unique) example of the general tendency of European empires to promote the movement of populations between metropole and colony and among various colonial possessions, we can perhaps gain some insights into wider processes of decolonization. The Lusophone experience allows us to learn by example, and to look more closely at specific Anglo- and Francophone contexts wherein mobility was also evident but perhaps less magnified in its contours. In other words, the framing of the Portuguese case has much to suggest for intertwining the relationship of state portability and decolonization.

Thinking About Things Ordinary affects are public feelings that begin and end in broad circulation, but they are also the stuff that seemingly intimate lives are made of. They give circuits and flows the forms of a life. They can be experienced as a pleasure and a shock, as an empty pause or a dragging undertow, as a sensibility that snaps into place or a profound disorientation. They can be funny, perturbing, or traumatic. Rooted not in fixed conditions of possibility but in the actual lines of potential

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that something coming together calls to mind and sets in motion, they can be seen as the pressure points of events or banalities suffered and the trajectories forces might take if they were to go unchecked. . . . The question they beg is . . . where they might go and what potential modes of knowing, relating, and attending to things already somehow present in them in a state of potentiality and resonance.33 In writing about decolonization, I am interested in thinking about discourses of colonial loss as articulated in the intense relationship between people and their things. At one level, my project is inspired by Arjun Appadurai’s attempt to look at the ‘‘social life of things,’’34 wherein objects become the focal point for tracing historical landscapes. I am also interested in looking at how memory, nostalgia, and longing cohere in objects, something that Susan Stewart has written about quite poetically.35 Finally, my focus on people’s possessions (particularly what items they choose to take with them versus what they leave behind) is a way to look at ethnographically rich moments of ‘‘ordinary affect’’ following Kathleen Stewart cited above.36 That people are attached to their things is nothing new, as they cross geographies, inhabit different spaces, and create new homes; rather, I am invested in suggesting the ways we can ‘‘read’’ things to understand decolonization at an individual level of (dis)possession. Even as the things I look at may be of value, or not (both monetary and personal), to the owners involved, some of them taking on the role of souvenirs or ‘‘memory objects’’ and others less so, it is the range of things I am interested in here that intimates so much about the reactions of individual persons and their inability to articulate colonial (and hence national) loss amid a shifting moral postcolonial landscape that was not necessarily of their choosing. I have selected three distinct personalized experiences—each bearing witness to the entangled relationships of people and things—because they serve as a window onto Portuguese decolonization in southern Africa.37 These narratives also shed light on a larger theme of this volume, that of processes of channeling—the different categories and forms of selection and discrimination adhered to by (colonial) states when contending with mobile and, in this case, elite populations on the eve of their departure for the metropole. Nor can these accounts be seen as impartial in any way38; rather I have chosen them precisely because of their varying degrees of attachment to what was taking place in front of them. For Ricardo Rangel, it is the story of the independence of his nation that is unfolding in front

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of his camera lens, a story that needs to be told to his Mozambican counterparts. It is, for Carlos Garc¸a˜o, a reflection on past difficult choices made during a time of duress, a young family in tow, not only about whether to stay or go in Portuguese Mozambique but also about where to relocate to, his account recorded in an Apartheid context (1988) for a white South African audience. Finally, for Ryszard Kapus´cin´ski, a visiting Polish journalist to Luanda in late summer 1975, it is a little-known dramatic story he feels compelled to expose to an international audience. I have also chosen these three parallel narratives for their ethnographic richness and depth. That they take the form of three different mediums— visual, oral, and written—suggests as well the multiple registers we can potentially use to access the experience of decolonization. However, we must realize that a photograph by Rangel is no less innocent a medium than any other: it is just as complicit in a particular political context as is a personal reflection by Garc¸a˜o or an observation recorded on paper by Kapus´cin´ski. In other words, each witness sees, states, or writes from an embedded (and often prejudiced) subject position, a point that will be taken up in more depth when I look at each individual’s experiences and articulations. Last, I have selected these three accounts because they have been produced from three different locations (Mozambique, South Africa, and Angola). My historiographic interest lies in exposing historical and ethnographic connectivities (of people and things and choices) in southern Africa—an area that still requires much more attention and critical analysis, as opposed to writing linear histories of colonial independence, thus suggesting potentially one way forward to writing postnational narratives.39 My emphasis on looking at people’s intimate relationship to their things as they face colonial loss and dispossession in Mozambique and Angola is also another way to look at national pride as deeply implicated in colonial pride, particular to the Lusophone case. In other words, we need to return to Jacob’s earlier point that decolonization is the least meaningful signifier of postcoloniality. A note of caution needs to be taken into account to better understand how deeply the propaganda of the Salazar state conflated colonialism with nationalism40: entitlement and belonging were one and the same for its citizens, particularly for those located overseas who maintained a life of colonial comfort at the expense of the Africans who cleaned their houses, raised their children, and drove their cars.41 The end of colonialism and the adoption of a liberal government acted in some senses to undermine everything the Portuguese nation-state stood for. So, when faced with little choice (and, remember, for many a migration not of their

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choosing) but to leave Lourenc¸o Marques or Luanda on the eve of their independences, much was at stake in these acts of migration to an unfamiliar landscape. Here a discourse of things stands in for a sense of personhood, respectability, and class standing very much present alongside feelings of insecurity, anger, and resentment; as well, a fear of falling on hard times like the Africans in their employment was palpable, perhaps not so far off. All they were asking for was a stable sense of being in the world just as everything else familiar to them was falling apart and driving them to leave their homes (for some, the only ones they had ever known) for elsewhere. Thus, if we allow decolonization to sit in the uncomfortable and confused space between colonialism and its aftermath, the something ‘‘post’’ here, instead of sidestepping it in our urgency to move to the condition (and hope) of postcoloniality, we can perhaps access those confused and vulnerable sentiments of people and their things as a way to understand better intimate subjectivities in a shifting political and moral landscape that is still so little understood.

Ricardo Rangel: ‘‘The Departure of the Colonialists’’ In this section, I turn to the first of our three eyewitnesses who experienced the last days of colonialism in Mozambique. My intention with these three accounts is to look at decolonization as an ethnographic event, its materiality and intimacy intertwined in the relationship between people and their things. The late Ricardo Rangel (1924–June 11, 2009) is Mozambique’s best-known photographer. While Rangel himself was of mixed Greek, African, and Chinese parentage, he was a prolific photojournalist whose work spanned over six decades (1950s–2009). He was the first ‘‘black’’ photographer to be employed by many of Mozambique’s major newspapers in Lourenc¸o Marques (Notı´cias de Tarde, Notı´cias, A Tribuna) and Beira (Voz Africana, Dia´rio de Mocambique, Notı´cias de Beira), before founding a political weekly magazine called Tempo in 1970, alongside four other journalists.42 Remarkably, Tempo was both Mozambique’s first magazine to include color images and the only publication that stood in opposition to the propaganda of the Portuguese colonial state.43 A jazz enthusiast as well, Rangel contributed some of Mozambique’s most iconic images (prostitutes on the streets of Beira, interracial dancing between South African men and black Mozambican women at nightclubs, the first pictures of Samora Machel on his momentous march into Lourenc¸o Marques to take up the presidency

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in 1975,44 Frelimo soldiers, colonial high society),45 even as many of his colonial era photos were banned or destroyed by the strict Portuguese censors. However, many of his images survive, including a remarkable set of photographs taken during the last days of colonialism, in the period of the mass exodus of the capital city’s Portuguese population. It is to those images that I now turn. I first met Ricardo himself in April 2008 at the Centro de Documentac¸a˜o e Formac¸a˜o Fotogra´fica, a small photography center he had established in downtown Maputo.46 I had stumbled across a small exhibit of his images in downtown Johannesburg six months earlier at the Afronova Gallery in Newtown, the arts precinct of Johannesburg. Of the few images of his that were on display, I sensed there was so much more to be seen. Numerous emails and phone calls later, I was sitting across from Ricardo Rangel, surrounded by stacks of Ilford manufactured photographic paper boxes, asking him about his life in photography. When I mentioned my interest in photographs of the last days of Portuguese colonialism in Lourenc¸o Marques, his interest was immediately sparked. He told me to come back the next day while he did some digging around in his photographic archives. One of the first black-and-white images Rangel shows me the following day is of a group of Portuguese soldiers helping load things onto what looks like a shipping container. The men look quite young, in their army uniforms and berets. They are in a line, hoisting what looks like a chair and some bags onto the container—one man looks like he is smiling. It is June 1975. A second image is titled ‘‘Soldados Portugueses de Regreso 1975’’ (Return of the Portuguese Soldiers, 1975). The title is written by Rangel himself and hastily scribbled onto the contact sheet that includes a reprint of the image. The photograph shows what looks like a long line of people, many of them evidently soldiers from their uniforms, each with an airport cart, waiting patiently to board a plane, most likely to Lisbon. Their trolleys are filled with things—I see the outline of a musical instrument, perhaps a guitar. I see a man waiting outside the central line, briefcase in hand. It looks like a normal flight almost, except for the piles of things in the carts. A third image, and this one is my favorite, is that of a Portuguese woman, clearly of some class standing, surrounded by her things (in particular I notice a set of fancy dining room chairs) alongside a huge roll of brown packing paper in what looks like a warehouse clearly in a state of disarray. She is surveying her possessions, a hastily tied scarf protecting her

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blond hair from the dust of the place. A middle-aged black man whose face the viewer cannot see very clearly is loading her precious things—what looks like a bed mattress covered in protective plastic—into a large crate. The next set of images (four and five) take us to the port docks of Lourenc¸o Marques, where we see cranes and cars about to be loaded onto a huge container ship in the background. Images six and seven show oversized crates ready to be shipped, large lettering displaying the crate volume of one such crate (1.12 m3), alongside the owner’s name and a written plea ‘‘na˜o leves mas ya chega˜o, que roubas, obrigado’’ (don’t take this, but let it arrive without being robbed, thank you), a whiff of the fear of corruption (at sea) apparent in the plea. I see a range of Portuguese names—Teixeira, Gloria, W. Soares, Leixo˜es, Mendes—on various other crates piled up around the port docks, their most precious things no doubt securely packed inside.47 The last image Rangel shows me from his archive is a telling one: it is an image of a nearly deserted street but with a lone person walking, the caption: ‘‘Fugo dos colonos’’ (the escape of the colonialists). This last photo suggests the specter of decolonization as a process of emptying out (of people, things, ideologies) but also its (dys)topic/utopic elements that shape the everyday and make some people choose to leave for particular destinations, certain things in hand (that will prove to be markers of a rich past in an unknown future tense), while others less fortunate (with regard to class and race) are not given that same choice and are quietly channeled elsewhere, far from the metropole. It is the hint of the chaos bubbling underneath the fac¸ade of the seemingly orderly fashion of these moments of colonial departure that Rangel captures in his images that stays with the audience.48 It is the subtle questioning of the smoothness of decolonization the state wants to project that he so beautifully undermines with his ethnographic attention to detail. Both Rangel’s politics in taking these photos that shows the complexities of colonial rule for those departing white elites who are experiencing it firsthand, and his choice of certain disquieting themes (soldiers, crates and things, individuals, names), handwritten captions, choice in lighting, and so forth capture what Elizabeth Edwards call the ‘‘expressive’’ in photography.49 The visual and the visceral together suggest a moment (here two weeks) much wider in depth (and filled with both despair and hope, but with a sense that life continues) and more ideologically complex than we could have possibly imagined not having witnessed it ourselves.

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Carlos Garc¸a˜o: ‘‘We must take care’’ Just as Ricardo Rangel bore witness to and documented the last days of colonial rule in Mozambique through his photographs, Carlos Garc¸a˜o was one of those individuals caught up in the chaos that was decolonization and whose life history was recorded orally to historian Suzanne Gordon. Entitled Under the Harrow: Lives of White South Africans Today (1988),50 Gordon interviewed Garc¸a˜o in the late 1980s as part of a larger research project focused on whites living in Apartheid South Africa. Even as his life history was recorded some twenty-six years ago and in an Apartheid context, nonetheless, it carries much ethnographic value because it provides yet another window onto the experience of Portuguese decolonization from a very different perspective and political landscape. In particular, his account helps illustrate that Portuguese colonial and military officials were able to exercise considerable control over mobility at particular spatial locations—here caravans, roadblocks, military camps, and border posts— that served as key sites for the concentration and configuration of state power. However, in ‘‘reading’’ his testimony from a contemporary moment, I am fully aware of the (retrospective and biased) context in which some of his comments were made.51 Carlos Garc¸a˜o was born in Lisbon in 1939 to a Portuguese colonial family (his grandfather having been a judge posted in Portugal, Angola, and Mozambique, yet another example of promotion to the colonies from the metropole), but as a young child immigrated with his parents to Mozambique, where his father supervised building the railway in northern Mozambique. Carlos enlisted in the army and served for three years before getting a position in the Reserve Bank of Mozambique in Tete (northern Mozambique). He married young and had four children in quick succession, settling into family life and working at the nearby bank. However, in Tete he began to see how active Frelimo (Frente de Libertac¸a˜o de Moc¸ambique) was in fact and the impending dangers they all could not avoid seeing. He describes his decision to take his family and leave, despite the bank bonus for living in what was declared a war area: ‘‘We started to have some problems with our children; they were beginning to dream about the war and the landmines. We were living under pressure. Then I told my wife, ‘It’s time to move.’ It was a really bad time.’’52 He and his family made their way from their house in Tete with a car full of things to

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the military camp on the outskirts of town; they were then escorted by Portuguese military men traveling onward. He describes the scene: Two or three military trucks led, then about five civilian cars, then an armored car and more civilian cars. We traveled cautiously. There was a lot of bush lining the road. . . . I can remember the soldiers—they were a special contingent of whites from Portugal— laughing and talking to the civilians whenever we stopped, creating a good spirit. They were without shirts and brown like Indians. We left about one o’clock with heavier support because the bush in this part was thicker. We were attacked and the soldiers started firing the mortars into the bush; again I saw nothing, just heard the shooting from the bush. The convoy stopped and the soldiers surrounded us to keep us safe. Later some of them collected watermelons and cucumbers that were growing near the road and gave them to us to keep us happy and we set off again.53 Despite securing work at a bank after arriving in Lourenc¸o Marques, Carlos decided to uproot the family once again a year later due to the continuous outbreaks of violence and rioting, precipitated by both right and left, that he started to witness on a day-to-day basis.54 He could no longer see a future for himself or his family in Mozambique and decided it was time to leave for good. Describing the sense of fear and lawlessness that engulfed all the white Portuguese community, and despite the presence of some 70,000 Portuguese troops stationed throughout the country, he says, ‘‘the courts are not courts anymore. There are no lawyers; people with four years, or sometimes only two years of primary school become judges . . . it was a law of the bush . . . the air was charged with fear.’’55 Carlos and his wife Elena reached South Africa in January 1975, bringing their two younger children, Pedro and Sergio. Following a typical pattern of migration that split up large families, the two older children had been taken to Lisbon by his parents. Carlos and Elena arrived with very little, telling the South African authorities on entry that Carlos was sick, ‘‘in need of a doctor.’’56 Instead, he immediately started looking for a job, he adds, ‘‘any job.’’57 The family took up residence in two rooms at the back of a house, what had probably been the black domestic worker’s quarters previously.58 After working in a steel factory and as a barman when there was little other

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employment available (and he had not yet received his full work permit)59 he eventually got a job—interestingly, through someone he had worked with at a bank in Mozambique—employment as a trade union worker helping to enable Mozambican labor in South Africa to send food to their families in Mozambique.60 Carlos describes how it was through living in Johannesburg that he got to know the Mozambicans living there, and ‘‘it was a surprise.’’61 He was also surprised by the conservatism of the Portuguese community in South Africa: ‘‘the Portuguese community think the blacks want to take over our houses, our schools, our salaries, our cars, our jobs.’’62 Next, Carlos goes on to describe his discovery, only later from Johannesburg and unbeknown to him at the time, that many of his white friends and colleagues, on the eve of their departure from Lourenc¸o Marques, had ‘‘sabotaged machinery at their work places,’’ while others had ‘‘poured cement down drainage pipes in buildings.’’63 He describes how in Johannesburg, ‘‘I met people who told me how they had broken the machines where they worked and removed crucial parts.’’64 Carlos was shocked by this kind of behavior, for it suggests that, as a last colonial act, the focus was on not letting the next generation of black Mozambicans inherit any of the things left behind by colonialists on the eve of their departure. Decolonization had been done too hastily for some and not without obvious bitterness or regret over losing what they considered rightfully theirs. At the end of his interview (in 1988 and recorded amid the ensuing civil war that ended only in 1992), Carlos reflects on the messy state of affairs in Mozambique, siding with neither Frelimo (Frente de Libertac¸a˜o de Moc¸ambique) nor Renamo (Resisteˆncia Nacional Moc¸ambicana), instead stating that ‘‘there are no free people in Mozambique, no free radio, no free papers. We cannot talk. . . . We must do something, but we must take care how we do it. We must take care.’’65 Carlos’s oral narrative of the last days of Portuguese colonial rule in Mozambique, like Rangel’s visual documentation, is one of disquietudes. His account highlights both the lawfulness and lawlessness of decolonization, its attempts at organization and security rubbing against the chaos of an outgoing government managing the movement of a dense population in a matter of weeks. His ethnographic description also tells us so much more about decolonization—about the high presence of the Portuguese military during the end of colonial rule; about the itinerant nature of Portuguese colonial families, wherein members moved between outposts and were

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divided under the duress of decolonization; about individuals choosing to destroy technological things (pipes, drains, machines) on the way out for their would-be inheritors—things standing in as remnants of the civilizing process that is colonialism—about trying to negotiate the South African Apartheid legal system, including its race rules, as a newly arrived immigrant; about the lowering of one’s class standing in navigating between colonial and Apartheid governmentalities; about using one’s colonial and diasporic connections in a new setting to get ahead, and at the expense of others less fortunate; about the difficulties adjusting to a new homeland amid trying times, on both a personal and political level; and finally, about freedom amid personal choice, Carlos’s politics very much reflected his idea of ‘‘taking care.’’

´ski: ‘‘We were Ryszard Kapus´cin imprisoned in a besieged city’’ In this last section, I turn to the eyewitness account of Ryszard Kapus´cin´ski, the renowned late Polish journalist (2007) who was in the capital city of Luanda (Angola) on the eve of its decolonization, a historical process that followed on the heels of Mozambique’s colonial independence. As a window onto what took place during the last days of colonial rule in Angola, his account is at the same time a reflection of what had happened on the other side of Africa, only five months earlier, echoing and reverberating across time and space. It also reveals the ways colonial capitals and port cities such as Luanda (or Lourenc¸o Marques, for that matter) served as dense spatial concentrations (and transfer points) of power and state portability at the end of colonialism. Titled Another Day of Life, his book is very much an ethnographic account of those last three months when the city of Luanda packed itself up (literally and metaphorically) and prepared to leave alongside the last of its ‘‘Portuguese’’ community.66 One must first, however, contextualize Kapus´cin´ski’s narrative and intended audience; as a Polish journalist who had lived through and survived World War II, the bleakness of war and exodus were no doubt familiar themes to him, ones that followed him wherever he traveled. His ‘‘reading’’ of Luanda on the eve of its decolonization is less than that of an innocent bystander; rather, the city is experienced through his own sense of displacement. As well, his intended audience is an international (Western) reading public; he feels

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compelled to describe what is unfolding in front of him—to bear witness— unbeknown to them located halfway across the world. Having just arrived in the city and looking down on the chaos of the street below from his hotel room in downtown Luanda, Kapus´cin´ski writes, ‘‘Everyone was fighting a private war, everybody was on his own.’’67 Kapus´cin´ski had managed to get to Luanda on one of the last military planes flying into the city during the very ‘‘hot’’ summer of 1975, three months ahead of Angola’s scheduled independence in November.68 He found himself holed up in the Tivoli Hotel alongside a cast of Portuguese characters, all waiting to leave Angola. He describes the two elderly people in the next room, Don Silva, a diamond merchant, and his wife, Dona Esmeralda, dying of cancer: Despite the overwhelming heat, Don Silva always dressed in warm clothes. He had strings of diamonds sewn into the pleats of his suit. Once, in a flush of good humor when it seemed that the FNLA [National Front for the Liberation of Angola]69 was already at the entrance to the hotel, he showed me a handful of transparent stones that looked like fragments of crushed glass. They were diamonds. Around the hotel it was said that Don Silva carried half a million dollars on his person. The old man’s heart was torn. He wanted to escape with his riches, but Dona Esmeralda’s illness tied him down. He was afraid that if he didn’t leave immediately someone would report him, and his treasure would be taken away. He never went out in the street. He even wanted to install extra locks, but all the locksmiths had left and there wasn’t a soul in Luanda who could do the job.70 Across the hallway in another room were a young couple, Arturo and Maria. They too were waiting to leave: He was a colonial official and she was a silent blonde, calm, with misty, carnal eyes. They were waiting to leave, but first they had to exchange their Angolan money for Portuguese, and that took weeks because the lines at the banks stretched endlessly.71 The journalist goes on to describe the sad state of affairs inside the hotel itself:

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The whole Tivoli Hotel was packed to the transoms and resembled our [Polish] train stations right after the war: jammed with people by turns excited and apathetic, with stacks of shabby bundles tied together with string. It smelled bad everywhere, sour, and a sticky, choking sultriness filled the building. People were sweating from heat and from fear. There was an apocalyptic mood, an expectation of destruction. Somebody brought word that there were going to bomb the city in the night. Somebody else had learned that in their quarters the blacks were sharpening knives and wanted to try them on Portuguese throats. The uprising was to explode at any moment.72 Kapus´cin´ski’s nuanced character portraits from inside the hotel are quite telling; they not only paint a picture of the smell of fear that pervaded the space of the hotel, with people using their last reserves of energy to hold onto their bundles of things, but also suggest that seemingly simple acts, like protecting one’s most valued commodities or changing currencies, became more complicated in a situation whence the rules of colonial law have been suspended. At the same time, this clinging to what one perceives to be his or hers alone (on the part of Don Silva, Arturo and Maria, or the nameless faces inside the hotel), considered one’s rightful property, also points to a way of managing loss and despair in the face of uncertainty, a point familiar to him from his own experiences in wartorn Poland and which he references here as a point of comparison and understanding. That Dona Esmeralda is dying during all this chaos serves as a reminder of the slow death of the city that was to be her last home. Once Kapus´cin´ski leaves the hotel to walk around the city, he finds Luanda in a state of disarray. The journalist describes as well the lawlessness pervading the atmosphere, wherein ‘‘gangs from PIDE [Portuguese secret police] were prowling the city . . . they acted with impunity . . . and they wanted to get even for everything, for the revolution in Portugal, for the loss of Angola, for their shattered careers.’’73 He interviews one man on the street who says, ‘‘If only I could get out this minute. And never lay eyes on it again. I put in forty years of work here. The sweat of my damn brow. Who will give it back to me now? Do you think anybody can start life all over again?’’74 A soldier tells him that ‘‘They’ve [the black Angolans] taken everything from us.’’75 Another man assesses his own situation: ‘‘I’ve lived

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here for twenty-eight years and I can tell you some-thing about this country. Do you know what I had to show for it in the end? An old taxi that I left sitting in the street.’’76 These bitter discourses of resentment, of having lost out at the end of colonialism, are highly suggestive of the ways many white Portuguese saw decolonization as a tragic incident in which they played no (colonial) part, as innocent bystanders not asking for much, rather as just trying to make a decent living for themselves and their families. Nor do they question at whose expense they are allowed a certain standard of living. Reflecting on the death of the city of Luanda, in much the same way Dona Esmeralda was dying a slow death in her hotel room at the Tivoli, Kapus´cin´ski writes: Luanda was not dying the way our Polish cities died in the last war.77 There were no air raids, there was no ‘‘pacification,’’ no destruction of district after district. There were no cemeteries in the streets and squares. I don’t remember a single fire. The city was dying the way an oasis dies when the well runs dry: it became empty, fell into inanition, passed into oblivion. But that agony would come later; for the moment there was feverish movement everywhere. Everybody was in a hurry, everybody was clearing out. Everyone was trying to catch the next plane to Europe, to America, to anywhere. Portuguese from all over Angola converged on Luanda. Caravans of automobiles loaded down with people and baggage arrived from the most distant corners of the country. The men were unshaven, the women tousled and rumpled, the children dirty and sleepy.78 Baggage (both physical and psychological) is everywhere. Once again, Poland becomes a pivotal point of reference that perhaps allows Kapus´cin´ski a more empathetic reading of the situation unfolding before his eyes. Meanwhile, the scene at the airport is surreal: People are sitting on bundles covered with plastic because it is drizzling. They are meditating, pondering everything. In this abandoned crew that has been vegetating here for weeks, the spark of revolt sometimes flashes. Women beat up the soldiers designated to maintain order, and men try to hijack a plane to let the world know what despair they’ve been driven to. Nobody knows when they will fly out or in what direction. A cosmic mess prevails. . . . So the strongest

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board the plane and the women with children throw themselves on the tarmac, under the wheels, so the pilot can’t taxi. The army arrives, throws the men off, orders the women aboard, and the women walk up the steps in triumph, like a victorious unit entering a newly conquered city. . . . No criterion won general approbation. The despondent crowd swarmed around each plane, and hours passed before they could work out who finally got a seat. They have to carry half a million refugees across an air bridge to the other side of the world.79 Once again, reminiscent of the photographs of Ricardo Rangel and the eyewitness testimony of Carlos Garc¸a˜o, the Portuguese army is brought in to uphold law and order in a seemingly hopeless situation. And as in any case of war, women and children are given priority, after which come the men. ‘‘All they wanted was to get out with their lives and to take their possessions,’’ Kapus´cin´ski laments,80 as if they were not asking for very much, when, in fact, what they desired was too far weighted down with the burden of colonial history. As the journalist walks among the city’s streets, he finds debris of all sorts everywhere, the remnants of a once bustling city jammed into every crevice and corner. As well, he discovers that the city no longer has any police, firemen, or garbage men; gone too the barbers, repairmen, mail carriers, and concierges, for ‘‘they have all left with the last of the planes.’’81 He crosses paths with piles of rotting garbage and packs of pet dogs, abandoned by their previous owners, eating the last of the canned food offered by the few remaining Portuguese soldiers. Finally, Kapus´cin´ski arrives at the port to find that Luanda has been transformed into a wooden ‘‘city of crates’’: Everybody was busy building crates. Mountains of boards and plywood were brought in. The price of hammers and nails soared. Crates were the main topic of conversation—how to build them, what was the best thing to reinforce them with. Self-proclaimed experts, crate specialists, homegrown architects of cratery, masters of crate styles, crate schools, and crate fashions appeared. Inside the Luanda of concrete and bricks a new wooden city began to rise. The streets I walked through resembled a great building site. I stumbled over discarded planks; nails sticking out of beams ripped my shirt.

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Some crates were as big as vacation cottages, because a hierarchy in crate status had suddenly come into being. The richer the people, the bigger the crates they erected. Crates belonging to millionaires were impressive: beamed and lined with sailcloth, they had solid, elegant walls made of the most expensive grades of tropical wood, with the rings and knots cut and polished like antiques. Into these crates went whole salons and bedrooms, sofas, tables, wardrobes, kitchens and refrigerators, commodes and armchairs, pictures, carpets, chandeliers, porcelain, bedclothes and linen, clothing, tapestries and vases, even artificial flowers (I saw them with my own eyes), all the monstrous and inexhaustible junk that clutters every middle-class home. Into them went figurines, seashells, glass balls, flower bowls, stuffed lizards, a metal miniature of the cathedral of Milan brought back from Italy. Letters! Letters and photographs, wedding pictures in gilt frames. . . . .and I mean everything, . . . birds, peanuts, the vacuum and the nutcracker have to be squeezed in, too, that’s all there is to it, they have to be, and they are, so that all we leave behind are the bare floors, the naked walls, en de´shabille. The house’s striptease goes all the way, right down to the curtain rods—and all that remains is to lock the door and stop along the boulevard en route to the airport and throw the key in the ocean.82 This richly layered account by Kapus´cin´ski is revealing—in showing how ordinary citizens took decisions into their own hands when faced with decolonization, by transforming the city of Luanda into one big shipping container; in suggesting that social hierarchies pervaded even the packing of one’s things; in demonstrating the agency of ordinary citizens to desist leaving their fortunes behind; in highlighting the classed sensibilities of what was chosen for the long and uncertain journey ahead; in showing how things (letters, photographs, wedding albums) in moments of duress and transition stand in for so much more; and finally in suggesting that colonialism was about a sense of deeply entrenched ownership such that, after its demise, nothing (except for some bare floors, naked walls, and maybe a few curtain rods) would be left behind for its would-be successors. Kapus´cin´ski is so transfixed by what he sees at the port that he spends hours upon hours watching, observing, taking notes about the transformation of the city into something else, something quite unbelievable, from what it once was:

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The building of the wooden city, the city of crates, goes on day after day, from dawn to twilight. Everyone works. . . . The enthusiasm of the adults infects the children. They too build crates, for their dolls and toys. Packing takes place under cover of night. It’s better that way, when no one’s keeping track of who puts in how much and what. . . . So by night, in the thickest darkness, we transfer the contents . . . to the inside of the wooden city. People stopped thinking in terms of houses and apartments and discussed only crates. Instead of saying, ‘‘I’ve got to see what’s at home,’’ they said, ‘‘I’ve got to go check my crate.’’ By now that was the only thing that interested them, the only thing they cared about. . . . Nowhere else in the world had I seen such a city, and I may never see anything like it again. It existed for months, and then it suddenly began disappearing. Or rather, quarter after quarter, it was taken on trucks to the port. Now it was spread out at the very edge of the sea, illuminated at night by harbor lanterns and the glare of lights on anchored ships. . . . But afterwards . . . the wooden city sailed away on the ocean. It was carried off by a great flotilla with which, after several hours, it disappeared below the horizon. This happened suddenly, as if a pirate fleet had sailed into the port, seized a priceless treasure, and escaped to sea with it.83 Perhaps this obsession with crates and crate building (as containers for their things) on the part of the Portuguese community served as a therapeutic way of dealing with the trauma of leaving their homes. There is one last(ing) image of the floating city of Luanda that is not easy to forget in the words of our Polish journalist: I don’t know if there had ever been an instance of a whole city sailing across the ocean, but that is exactly what happened. The city sailed out into the world, in search of its inhabitants. These were the former residents of Angola, the Portuguese, who had scattered throughout Europe and America. A part of them reached South Africa. All fled Angola in haste, escaping before the conflagration of war, convinced that in this country there would be no more life and only the cemeteries would remain. But before they left they had still managed to build the wooden city in Luanda, into which they packed everything that had been in the stone city. . . . Somewhere

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on the ocean the partition of the city occurred and one section, the largest sailed to Lisbon, the second to Rio de Janeiro, and the third to Cape Town.84 Kapus´cin´ski’s vivid and visceral descriptions of Luanda as a city of crates are not easily forgotten. The themes of chaos, disorder, and fear; a heightened military presence; waiting (in hotels, at banks, in airports, at ports); people and their things; race, class, and whiteness; feelings of fear, jealousy, and envy all intertwined; the dying of a city and the removal of municipal services—all suggest the complexities of leaving a place (and what happens to it) during decolonization. As well, our journalist is witness to the unfolding of a highly mobile colonial state during a period of transition. Thus, on the one hand, his testimony points to the (obvious) processes of ruination that colonialism projects onto its aftermaths.85 However, on the other hand, and this is a crucial point, his account is a window onto the creative potentialities already built (but perhaps lying dormant) into the demise of colonialism, such that these refugees chose not to leave quietly as the result of political transition but found ingenious ways to take what they considered rightfully theirs with them. In this remarkable case, (colonial) dispossession is countered with a form of imaginative possession as a way to endure and move on with life.

Conclusion: Portuguese Postcoloniality There is an ethnographic moment, the intimacies of a conversation that still stay with me, more than ten years later.86 During fall 1998— interestingly, the five-hundred-year anniversary of the Portuguese Descubrimentos (discoveries)—I was on a Magellan fellowship to conduct archival research in Lisbon.87 I had befriended a Portuguese researcher named Paola whom I occasionally met socially and who was going to the United States to study for a Ph.D. in botany. One evening, our conversation conducted no doubt over a bottle of good Portuguese wine, I had asked her about her family history, when she casually slipped in a comment of how her mother had never really recovered after ‘‘we’’ lost Mozambique.88 She went on to describe how her mother had been unable to reclaim a sense of her wealth and entitlement after having to move to Lisbon as a refugee (or retornado) from the colonies, having lost all her beautiful things in Mozambique. It

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had struck me at the time as an odd and archaic comment, perhaps no more than the mutterings of one old woman. Of course, it is only now that I see her statement (as well as the invocation of the royal ‘‘we’’ by a daughter born during very different times) in a different light, as a way to comprehend the magnitude of the sentiments not only of both mother and daughter but also of the psychic trauma of a nation still in the throes of bereavement, such that it was transferred uncritically from one generation to another.89 Nor was her statement unusual in any way. It was echoed by others like Paola’s mother caught up in the last days of colonialism in Lusophone Africa, precisely because of what it signified—the turmoil and upheaval of decolonization such that she had not recovered from it some twenty years later, but also how much the material process of dismantling an empire formed individuals at the level of personal affect, her mother’s possessions standing in for deep and profound colonial loss that, in many ways, she could articulate only through a discourse on things. What this chapter has tried to suggest is that, once decolonization is critically examined as less a historical event than as a massive demobilization process that can be accessed ethnographically, we are better positioned to understand colonial state(s) on the verge of their unmaking, a focus that remains understudied. The Lusophone example of state portability presented here not only maps out interesting and new circuits of mobility and exchange between Lisbon, Lourenc¸o Marques, and Luanda at a time of much colonial upheaval but also shows how these twined process of promotion and channeling very much shaped materialities and subjectivities. By honing in on the intimate relationship between people (retornados) and their things on the eve of their departure from their colonial homelands, as seen through the eyes of three witnesses (Ricardo Rangel, Carlos Garc¸a˜o, and Ryszard Kapus´cin´ski, respectively), I have attempted to enrich our understanding of decolonization as a form of (dis)possession from an ethnographic perspective (and that is accessed through three distinct mediums, visual, oral, and written), including the substantial changes in status and livelihood that accompanied these various acts of white flight from colony to metropole during the last days of Portuguese colonialism, and the general sense of hasty dis-assemblage of a state’s moving parts (its instruments, objects, and agents) on the verge of its demise. This, in turn, says much about the way we rethink the relationship of empire to postcolony, by dwelling in the interim.

Chapter 9

Moving from War to Peace in the Zambia-Angola Borderlands Oliver Bakewell

In 1996, Mwinilunga in the far northwest of Zambia seemed close to the edge of the world, at the gateway of the small pedicle jutting between two of Africa’s large and chaotic states,1 the Democratic Republic of Congo to the north and east and Angola to the west. In particular, Angola was caught in the painful extra time of its civil war and most of its Moxico Province, which bordered Zambia’s Mwinilunga District was controlled by rebels of the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) rather than the Luanda government. Mwinilunga itself was a reasonably peaceful and quiet district town far from Lusaka and the Zambian Copperbelt. Much of the excitement came with tales of smuggling arms and diamonds across the border and with the adventurers who settled in the area who fed these rumors. To cross the border to Angola was an adventure that promised unpredictable outcomes of encounters and negotiations with UNITA, landmines, and all the other dangers of war. Today, while Mwinilunga remains as far as ever from Lusaka, it is no longer on the road to nowhere, a dead end open only to those prepared to risk the chaos beyond. A new sense of place has been created for Mwinilunga by the conclusive end of the war in Angola in 2002 with the death of UNITA leader Jonas Savimbi. It now has the potential to connect Zambia to the riches and opportunities opening up in Angola. Indeed, as the Benguela Railway, which runs from the Atlantic right across to Moxico, is rebuilt, this corner of Zambia may be transformed.2 Moreover, instead of being a

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frontier zone bordering chaos, now the Angolan government is controlling the territory right up to the border line, administering immigration and customs posts, patrolling the territory, and exercising some semblance of border control. Crossing the border has become more routine for those with the right papers, rather than an adventure into the unknown. This shift from war to peace in Angola has changed the nature of the border between Angola and Zambia. In this chapter, I explore how this has affected the lives of those residing in villages in the borderlands, away from the formal crossing points and the centers of administration of either state. Drawing on data gathered on the Zambian side of the border over the last fourteen years, the chapter focuses on the changes in the way people identify themselves, their livelihoods, and their movements between Angola and Zambia. It distinguishes between the formal policies and practices embedded in law and government action, on the one hand, and the locally negotiated patterns of interaction that determine the rules of the game in the borderland. By exploring these different levels of borderland practices, the chapter argues that the end of the war has simultaneously opened and closed the border for different actors and, in many respects, reduced the scale of the zone of transition and negotiation that marks out the borderland. This detailed examination of mobility in the borderlands informs this volume’s concern with variations in the concentrations of power and authority: how the variable distribution of state agents and institutions generate different levels and types of rule across space. Within the main body of the state, away from the borders, the complex pattern of relationships and interdependencies that enables it to administer justice, raise taxes, and provide protection may be relatively neatly knitted together to create an artifact—the state—that can be usefully analyzed as a distinct entity. Together, this knitted patchwork of states covers the African continent. However, what happens on the borders where the pattern changes and there are loose threads and potential holes? The rules that shape the state are likely to operate rather differently in this liminal space, where people are open to a set of alternatives, opportunities, and constraints that arise because of their proximity to the border and are barely relevant to those living elsewhere in the country. This chapter shows the role of mobility in making (and unmaking) the state at the border, where the formal policies are mediated by borderland conventions and practices. Moreover, by looking at the borderlands in times of war and peace, it demonstrates that the relationship between

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mobility and the functioning of the state is dynamic. With the shift to peace, the border may be normalized in the world of international states as the informal movements appear to be diminishing. However, as I argue in the conclusion, making such a distinction between formal and informal falls apart in these borderlands. Here, the state functions through the seemingly informal.

Conceptual Framework This chapter builds on a growing literature on borderlands drawing from political geography, political science, and anthropology.3 Baud and Van Schendel note that earlier studies tended to take a state-centered view looking at borders as they were seen from the center. Instead, they call for a ‘‘view from the periphery.’’ As they observe, ‘‘generally speaking there has always been an enormous gap between the rhetoric of border maintenance and the daily life in the borderlands.’’4 In the last decade, this balance has started to be redressed, particularly within the African continent, with studies by historians, anthropologists, and political scientists exploring how the border shapes the lives of those within the borderlands—and they, in turn, help shape the meaning and extent of the borderlands.5 The borderlands can be described as a ‘‘zone of transition’’ in which ‘‘cultural, linguistic and social hybridity emerge,’’6 creating a zone in which movement across the line becomes much easier. Newman writes of this in terms of lessening ‘‘the shock of meeting the ‘other’.’’ This perhaps does not apply in settings where the border runs through sociocultural and linguistic groups, which is a common occurrence across the African continent. In such cases, the ‘‘other’’ is not to be found in the population on the other side. Here, the transition zone may be more concerned with easing the change in economic and legal regimes from one state to another. These are the borders that have often been described as artificial and irrelevant: a colonial construct with little meaning or legitimacy in the eyes of ordinary people living near the border. It is this sort of border with which I am concerned in this chapter. The formal authority of the state tends to be stretched very thin in borderlands that are peripheral areas far from the centers of state power. State officials are few and far between and they are in isolated situations with very limited resources. They can only exercise their authority through

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a process of negotiation and accommodation with the local population. Such borderlands may be described as ‘‘unruly.’’7 Nevertheless, as Raeymaekers argues in his case study of the ‘‘unruly’’ Congo-Uganda border, this process can result in the emergence of informal and enduring forms of regulatory authority across the borderland.8 The borderlands are concerned with finding local accommodations and exchanges that enable the ‘‘silent encroachment’’ of the frontier.9 While this may be presented as a challenge to the state, ‘‘the actions and tactics of the poor do not necessarily undermine state sovereignty as such, but instead mound and transform it in the process of generating local livelihoods and places.’’10 By tracing out the (transborder) livelihoods of the people living on both sides of the border, Raeymaekers elaborates the workings of these emergent institutional arrangements, or ‘‘subsystems’’ of power, in which people can acquire unofficial status to regulate movement, charge ‘‘taxes,’’ and control markets. While such arrangements may acquire some stability and local legitimacy, he suggests that they fall short of constituting a ‘‘social contract.’’ Instead, they give rise to a hybrid system of regulation that mixes ‘‘different and often contradictory legal orders and cultures.’’11 As a result of this complex system, the outcome of any particular interaction between actors is not the predictable result of these patterns of power relations but rather ‘‘specific instances of negotiation and confrontation’’: they are embedded in the moment. Nugent takes up a similar theme in his analysis of the power dynamics on the Senegambian and Ghana-Togo borderlands.12 Like Raeymaekers, he also observes the patterns and regularities in the multifarious interactions across the border, suggesting that over time these have developed into a complex set of rules of the game that shape future interactions. To help make sense of this changing landscape and explore the composition of the ‘‘rules’’ pertaining to any encounter, he distinguishes three elements that must be taken into account: the social contract, the convention, and the moment. The social contract is concerned with the bargain struck between the state and the people over whom it claims authority—in particular, those who stay within its boundaries. It is articulated both through the laws and state institutions that provide services and regulate life within the boundaries of the state. It defines what is seen as legitimate action by both the state and the people. As Nugent argues, even in the seemingly chaotic environments of many African states, there is often a ‘‘surprisingly deep-seated

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attachment to bureaucratic rules and behavior.’’13 The nature of the social contract will affect the way government officials interact with the population in the borderlands. While the social contract is somewhat abstract and negotiated at a distance from the borderland, a convention is the locally negotiated and more fluid set of practices that come to define the acceptable behavior in the borderlands. For instance, the law may require showing identity papers to cross the border, but there may be a convention that local residents can move freely and will face no penalties if found on the ‘‘wrong side.’’ In Zambia, the social contract offers no provision by which people who enter the country as refugees can become citizens. Nevertheless, as I will show below, there are well-established informal procedures whereby self-settled refugees can acquire national registration papers that secure the benefits of citizenship (including the right to vote). Such conventions develop over time through the accumulation of practice in encounters between different actors in the borderland. This notion seems to capture the ‘‘institutional creativity and ‘bricolage’ ’’ described by Raeymaekers14 and the local negotiation of a ‘‘standard model of interaction,’’ including a ‘‘free-trade pact’’ on the Benin-Nigeria border as described by Flynn.15 Although such conventions may become almost institutionalized at the local level (while potentially completely disavowed by the social contract), they are fluid and subject to continuous renegotiation. In particular at the time of any encounter, while the expectations and behavior of the actors involved may be shaped by both the social contract and convention, the actual outcome will be contingent on the circumstances of the moment. For example, Nugent notes that where the border moves through rural locations cutting across intensive social and linguistic groups, the social contract is likely to have reduced weight compared to the conventions worked out by government officials as they negotiate their presence and function in the local communities.16 Personal relationships also come to the fore in shaping encounters. For the conventions to operate, the protagonists need to know not only the ‘‘rules of the game’’ but also each other, or have some means of vouching for themselves, for example, through the mediation of local people.17 More generally, it seems reasonable to suggest that the extent to which the social contract or existing conventions may take precedence may vary greatly depending on the location, the particular actors involved, the broader sociocultural institutions at play, and the time of the encounter.

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The moments of encounters, revealed by observation, interviews, and narrative sources, offer a lens through which the workings of conventions and social contracts in the borderlands can be perceived. In what follows, I attempt to apply this framework to one part of the Zambia-Angola borderlands. I set out to explore how people’s relationship with the border and the shape of the borderland has changed with this transition from war to peace. It is important to note that I am using the term ‘‘borderlands’’ to refer to the spatial and social zone on either side of the line on the ground— moving from the one-dimensional line to the two-dimensional area. Hence, I take the border to be a political and geographical fact, marked out on maps and in places inscribed in the ground. My interest is in the social meaning of that ‘‘fact,’’ particularly in the day-to-day lives of those in the borderlands and how it changes over time. Hence, the borderland is a dynamic zone of interaction where the proximity of the border (the line) brings about distinctive social, political, economic, and cultural exchanges. I am concerned with both the objective meaning of the difference the presence of the border makes to people’s lives—what they do, how they can live—and also the subjective meanings concerned with how living close to the border affects their sense of being—their identity and possibilities. With this in mind, in what follows, I focus on three particular transnational aspects of life in the borderlands: livelihoods, identities, and movements.

The Study Area: The Zambia-Angola Borderlands The focus of this chapter is the northern half of the border with Zambia’s North-Western Province to the east and Angola’s Moxico Province to the west, often known more generally as the upper Zambezi. The river Zambezi rises in Mwinilunga District north of the town and flows west into Angola before turning south and reentering Zambia at Chavuma in Zambezi District, after which it starts its eastern flow to the Indian Ocean. The majority of the fieldwork was conducted in Mwinilunga District in a village approximately fifty kilometers west of the district town and eight kilometers from the border with Angola. This is a remote area of Zambia about three hundred kilometers from the provincial capital, Solwezi, and nearly one thousand from the capital, Lusaka. The people of the area are predominantly Lunda (Ndembu), an ethnic group that extends across the nearby borders

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into Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo.18 The main focus of the study was on a village in the territory of the Lunda senior chief Kanongesha. This is an area (also known as Kanongesha) where large numbers of refugees who fled the war in Angola settled, especially from the early 1980s. The process of integration and their interest in repatriation were the initial focus of the study.19 The history of the Lunda of Mwinilunga and related peoples is one of migration from Congo, through Angola, and across into Zambia. In broad terms, one can trace a general drift of population from the west and north into present Zambia in response to the slave trade (both to catch slaves and to avoid being caught) and in the hunt for ivory, beeswax, and rubber. Kanongesha was no exception to this pattern. Although Portugal considered Angola its colony from the fifteenth century, it controlled very little of the territory until the end of the nineteenth century, most it on the coastal strip.20 The end of the slave trade and the productivity of the interior encouraged explorers to move east and call for the extension of Portugal’s direct involvement in Angola to promote trade.21 However, the major spur for the expansion of Portugal’s control in Angola was the increasing pressure from Britain, Belgium, and France, looking to secure their access to the wealth of raw materials in the ‘‘scramble for Africa.’’ At the Conference of Berlin in 1884/85, Britain and Portugal agreed on the line of the border between their territories except for the upper Zambezi, including Zambia’s North-Western Province and Angola’s Moxico Province. This border was finalized only in 1905.22 The British arrived in northwest Zambia in 1906 when the British South African Company (BSAC) established administrative posts in Mwinilunga and Zambezi. At the same time as imposing this international border, the colonialists also mapped out ethnic boundaries between different groups. In particular, the British placed great emphasis on the role of traditional chiefs (as far as they understood it) and gave them an important role in the developing colonial state, particularly as intermediaries for extracting taxes from the population and exerting control. To ensure the chiefs’ cooperation, they were given a salary and status in the regime. The British desire to work through chiefs was initially complicated by chiefdoms crossing the newly demarcated colonial borders. Although they worked with Kanongesha in Angola for some time, in the 1920s the British requested that he create a new chieftainship to cover the Zambian side of the border. This was achieved by installing one of his sons, Mwilombi, as

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the first Zambian Kanongesha. The Angolan Kanongesha is still seen as the senior of the two. Hence, the separation of the Lunda of Zambia from their kin in Angola is a recent product of the imposition of the border and occurred in the living memory of some of the older people. A similar story could be told of the Luvale and Mbunda farther south.23 The continued contact between chiefs across the border and the exchange of visits ensure that this history is known and that new generations are aware where they have come from in the recent past.24 Despite the ‘‘artificial’’ nature of the international border between Zambia and Angola, clearly the creation of colonialists, from the earliest days the local people have imbued the line on the ground with meaning and sought to use it to their advantage. The most obvious example of this was in avoidance of taxation. One of the key roles of the British colonial administrator in Zambia was to collect taxes from the villagers, and frequently people ran across the border to avoid registration. When taxation was first introduced, there was a mass exodus from Zambia into neighboring Angola and Congo. Likewise, when the Portuguese introduced taxes, people moved in the other direction.25 Repression and political violence also played important roles in movement between the colonies. Although slavery was abolished in Angola in 1878, it was replaced by a repressive ‘‘contract labor’’ system. People in Kanongesha recalled the harshness of the system whereby they were forced to go and work on roads, bridges, railways, and other projects for no wages and even no food. Every adult had to do forced labor; people would be taken in turn from the village. A group might work once a week or even for a whole month. No pay was given but possibly a cup of salt. Workers had to bring their own food. If people hid in the homes, they would be beaten and then forced to work, and this caused many people to come to Zambia.26 The policy caused a massive migration of Angolans into neighboring countries, with over half a million living in exile in 1954.27 The resultant labor shortage increased the demand for contract labor, and the system survived until the start of the Angolan revolution in 1961.28 The development of large towns in the Zambian Copperbelt provided another incentive for the migration of Angolans. Some came for jobs in the mines, but many others were drawn into the large markets generated by the urban areas. In northwest Zambia the British administration, cut off from white farmers in the south, ‘‘was lucky in finding a rural population, continually swelled by kindred immigrants from neighboring Portuguese

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territory (Angola), which was capable of and most interested in producing substantial amounts of food for sale.’’29 Traders moved back and forth from Angola across Kanongesha to bring meat, fish, and other produce to ‘‘town’’ (as the Copperbelt is known) in exchange for soap, salt, cloth, and other manufactured goods. Similar trade continues today. The establishment of the border thus introduced a new set of constraints and opportunities for the people of Kanongesha. It became an important part of people’s lives as they crossed to avoid taxation and violence, gain protection, or find jobs, markets, education, and health care. While the border rapidly became something to be exploited, it took longer to gain any significance as a line between people of different nationalities. During the colonial era, there was very little control of the border according to the accounts of the villagers, who look wistfully back to the time when the British and Portuguese were in charge and they did not need papers to cross. This changed with the independence of Zambia in 1964 and the war of independence in Angola that started in 1961. These two factors changed the significance of nationality and the border, both for the states and the local people living in the borderlands. In 1966, an eastern front was opened in Angola’s war of liberation. This stimulated the first movement of refugees into the west of independent Zambia. Angolan independence in 1975 presaged the start of the civil war between the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), which took control of the government from the Portuguese, and UNITA. This war ultimately lasted nearly thirty years. The vast majority of Angolans who fled to Kanongesha arrived between 1982 and 1986, as UNITA took control of the neighboring Alto Zambeze district of Angola’s Moxico Province. Cazombo, the district capital, and the other local towns of Calunda, Lovua, and Cavungu were captured between 1982 and 1986, and many villages were totally destroyed. Cazombo’s vital link to the rest of Angola, the bridge over the Zambezi, was also destroyed. During the most violent phases of the war in Moxico Province in the 1980s, the numbers of people flowing into Mwinilunga district were at times overwhelming and put immense strain on local resources, particularly food. However, throughout the border area, villagers, officials, and other observers frequently commented that the Angolans rapidly settled in the area, worked hard, and caused no problems. Nearly all the villagers who expressed an opinion said they were very glad to see their relatives come to

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stay. Even if the initial difficulties of food were severe, they have long since been forgotten. The MPLA and UNITA reached a peace agreement in 1991 and presidential elections were held in 1992.30 However, far from putting the seal on the peace, the elections marked the start of a further decade of war. The results were rejected by UNITA leader Jonas Savimbi, who took his forces back to the bush and launched attacks on many government-held towns. The extreme violence of this ‘‘war of the cities’’ ebbed from 1994 with the signing of the Lusaka Protocol, which resulted in an uneasy stalemate. This left the country effectively divided between the patchwork of governmentcontrolled areas focused on the west and the provincial capitals across the country, and the extensive area controlled by UNITA, whose strongholds were in the south and east, including that part of Moxico Province, Alto Zambeze District, that borders Zambia. This research project started in 1996, during this period of stalemate. From 1996 to 1998, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) was making plans for the imminent repatriation of refugees from Zambia. These preparations had to be abandoned as the situation in Angola deteriorated further and the country returned to full-scale war in late 1999. The government launched a major offensive in UNITA’s heartland in the south and east of Angola and managed to capture its administrative center, Jamba. This displaced tens of thousands more refugees into Zambia in December 1999 and throughout 2000, including many UNITA functionaries who had been based in Jamba. With the fall of Jamba, the focus of the conflict shifted to Moxico Province, and it was there that UNITA leader Jonas Savimbi was killed in February 2002. It was only with his death that the war in Angola came conclusively to an end—a peace agreement was reached six weeks later.31 Controversial elections in 2008 and 2012 have consolidated MPLA political dominance.

The Changing Relations with the Border After this brief sketch of the local context for the study, this section explores in more detail the changing meaning of the border for residents of the borderlands as Angola has moved from war to peace. It highlights the changing interaction between the social contracts, conventions, and

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moments, drawing on detailed fieldwork largely focused on one chieftainship on the Zambian side of the border. It looks at how people position themselves in relation to Angola and Zambia, through the use of papers and expressions of national identity. It highlights the contrast between these changing local conventions and the much more static and rigid state policy on the rights of migrants and refugees to citizenship. It then shows how local livelihoods that relied on border crossing have had to adapt to the extension of the Angolan state to the border and the end of the war economy that stimulated cross-border trading. Finally, it shows how local patterns of mobility in the borderlands are changing as the border is ‘‘normalized,’’ reducing the scope both for everyday crossing and migration to settle across the border. While this may be taken as evidence that the efforts of the Zambian and Angolan states to prevent and channel mobility are yielding the desired results, the reduced level of movement today can also be attributed to the earlier resettlement of those with an interest in living in Angola and the changing economic conditions. Before launching into these findings, I should provide some more details on the research process. The initial research was conducted over twelve months in 1996–97. The study was originally framed around a research question about the repatriation of self-settled Angolan refugees. However, from the outset, my approach was to call into question people’s motivations for moving into Angola, so my inquiry focused precisely on questions of identity, livelihoods, and mobility. Moreover, since the study rejected the assumption that movement to peaceful Angola would only be a concern for refugees, I consistently asked the same questions of both Angolans and Zambians in the border villages. The study used a range of methods to investigate the nature of the cross-border linkages and movements, people’s contacts with Angola, the integration of refugees, and views toward repatriation. The dataset included structured interviews with 195 people, both Zambian and Angolan, key informant interviews, narratives of visits to Angola, and observations in the field. Over the next decade, I maintained sporadic contact through correspondence, but my first opportunity to return to Kanongesha only came in 2008, when I made a very short visit, sufficient only for a very limited number of interviews. A third trip in 2010 over six weeks gave me the chance systematically to find out the whereabouts of the original respondents (gathering data on 96 percent of the group), re-interview those still in Kanongesha (25 percent of the group), and observe more of the changes in the area over the last decade.

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Borderland Identifications For Angolans moving into Zambia in the precolonial and colonial periods, the journeys were often one way, and newcomers settled to become indistinguishable from those they found on arrival. For those who came as refugees after Zambian independence, this avenue of settlement was formally closed in the government’s eyes. Nonetheless, following historical precedents, many have been able to follow it with the full collaboration of other villagers and chiefs. A large proportion of the people born in Angola who are now residing in Mwinilunga entered Zambia as refugees. Under Zambian law, refugees must register with government authorities, who issue them a refugee identity card and require them to live in designated settlements, unless they have special leave to reside elsewhere. Moreover, Zambian law provides no legal avenue for a person granted refugee status to become a resident and in due course a citizen: once a refugee in Zambia, always a refugee. Refugee status is passed down the generations, so the child of a refugee will also be seen as a refugee. This is the formal position of the Zambian state, restated in government offices from Lusaka to the local district council. Hence, the official policy has always been that refugees should register and move away from the borderlands to the Meheba refugee settlement, which is near Solwezi. However, any pressure the government exerts on people to move has to be mediated through the chiefs. In a number of cases, in particular in Kanongesha, the chiefs did not cooperate at all. For example, in 1990, government officials from Solwezi came to Kanongesha and announced to the people that all refugees had to go to Meheba or they would be sent back to Angola. This threat was immediately contradicted by the senior chief at the time, who stressed that those who wanted to stay in his area would be welcome as his people. Moreover, as the years have passed, many of those with the formal status of refugees have been able to acquire a national registration card as citizens, effectively making it impossible for outside bureaucrats to distinguish Angolans from Zambians in the borderlands.32 In particular, as refugee children have grown up, village headmen, chiefs, and local officials have colluded to vouch for them as ‘‘children of the village’’ who are entitled to Zambian identity papers. Even those who have not obtained Zambian papers have reported this causing no problems as long as they remain within the chieftainship. It is only when they move beyond the borderland

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—for example, traveling on the main road to the Copperbelt—that they may be challenged to produce papers. With the end of the war in Angola, the focus of the Zambian state and the international community shifted toward the repatriation of Angolan refugees, including those living in the border villages. UNHCR and the Zambian government attempted to register self-settled refugees for return to Angola between 2003 and 2006. Teams of officials visited the villages and asked for those who were interested in repatriating to Angola to come forward. None of the respondents reported any pressure being exerted on people to register, whether from their neighbors, the headmen, the senior chief, or even the officials conducting the exercise. One Angolan couple said that they personally knew the officials involved, invited them to their house during the registration process, and took their advice not to repatriate. The senior chief reminded people about the lack of health services and education in Angola and discouraged people from registering. Therefore, it seems reasonable to believe that those few who came forward did so voluntarily. In these borderlands a rather robust convention of self-settlement of refugees has emerged. Indeed, UNHCR statistics suggest a much larger drop in the number of refugees than can be explained by their figures for repatriation; this suggests that the self-settled refuges may have been ‘‘written off’’ the books.33 In a sense, the convention has outweighed the social contract. Despite government policy that does not accept any integration of refugees, there is evidence of very successful integration in Mwinilunga District. Since this has come about through the exercise of borderland conventions, it remains unacknowledged. However, this convention of informally accepting Angolans (refugees) is being challenged since the war ended. This effective ‘‘legal’’—in the sense of securing documents but technically illegal—integration during the war did not result in people necessarily seeing themselves as becoming Zambian. Some would make no distinction between being Zambian or Angolan. Others referred to their nationality in pragmatic terms, for instance, saying, ‘‘while I am in Zambia, I am a Zambian, but if I go to Angola, I will be Angolan’’34; ‘‘this time I am Zambian as my wealth is from Zambia [that is, house, and fields], but I will become Angolan again’’35; or ‘‘I am a Zambian because I stayed so long and have identity papers from here.’’36 For such people, their declared national identity was shaped by their mobility, flexibly adapted to where they found themselves. For others, their nationality was a reflection of their history, a given fact of life: immutable even in the face of mobility. They described themselves

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as Zambian or Angolan according to where they had been born or brought up or where their parents had come from. It was neither something to be adapted to the circumstances nor revealing a sense of strong identification with their country. Then there were those for whom a declaration of nationality expressed an emotional bond to the country. They referred to feeling their nationality in the heart, or being ‘‘100 percent,’’ ‘‘full time,’’ or ‘‘pure’’ Zambian or Angolan. In this sense, to say one is Zambian or Angolan is not concerned so much with a legal status but a declaration of a person’s identity in the ‘‘strong’’ sense of a consistent presentation of oneself across time in different contexts.37 Such people remained attached to Angola despite living in Zambia for many years. The point here is that, in 1997 during the war, all these views of nationality were expressed freely and were perfectly acceptable. There was no expectation that Angolans should renounce their Angolan-ness, even if they acquired Zambian identity papers. Has this convention of flexible citizenship that was prevalent in the borderlands been sustained since the end of the war? The evidence from postwar fieldwork suggests that it has not. As one man put in 2008, ‘‘Now I say I am Zambian. If I stay in Zambia, I am Zambian. I have an NRC [national registration card]. Before, I used to call myself Angolan as I used to go there to hunt and fish. Now the people who went back are Angolan, and those who stay here are Zambian.’’38 Similarly, one woman in 1997 had spoken enthusiastically of her plans to return to Angola to stay when peace was established and schools reopened. At that time, she described her national identity as follows: ‘‘where I am staying that is my place, so at the moment I am Zambian.’’ By 2008, she had abandoned any idea of going to Angola and saying of her and her husband, ‘‘it is no longer in our minds to be Angolan’’; in 2010, she said, ‘‘I have forgotten about Angola.’’39 Her husband showed an even stronger shift in terms of his selfidentification. In 1997, he said that he was ‘‘full-time’’ Angolan and planned to return as Angola ‘‘is my country.’’ In 2010, these responses were forgotten: ‘‘I have been in Zambia 15–20 years, so I see myself as Zambian rather than Angolan. When I came to Zambia in 1984, I said I would never go back to Angola but stay here in Zambia, so I said I was Zambian.’’40 All those who had described themselves as Angolan in 1997 and were reinterviewed in 2010 described themselves as Zambian; a couple of them denied ever having changed nationality. As participants in one village

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discussion said, ‘‘those who came from Angola have become Zambian and have their NRCs,’’41 and this was confirmed by individual respondents. It seems, then, that the term ‘‘Angolan’’ has shifted from being associated with refugees and the stigma of war to referring to a ‘‘normal’’ nationstate. During the war, it was possible for people in Zambia to declare themselves Angolan without further explanation for their presence. Today, that has changed and those who remain in Zambia only refer to themselves as Zambian. There now appears to be a greater correlation between people’s declared nationality and their nationality officially recognized through identity papers.

Borderland Livelihoods Even after nearly forty years of war, the destruction of its infrastructure, and the memories of horrific violence that many people suffered there, Angola is often seen as a place of wealth and opportunity by the people of the upper Zambezi. Their livelihoods are largely based on subsistence cultivation, hunting, fishing and gathering, while the underpopulated bush in Angola has supplies of bush meat, fish, honey, mushrooms, and caterpillars, beyond anything available in Mwinilunga. During the war, there were trading opportunities, especially since Alto Zambeze district was cut off from the rest of Angola. In 1997, many villagers in Kangongesha complained that the only way for them to obtain cash was to cross into Angola. This hunting and gathering were undertaken either in the deep bush close to the border where people hoped to avoid any contact with UNITA or through negotiation with the rebels. For example, hunting for bush meat was nearly impossible in Zambia as the only animals remaining are in game management areas, a long way away and policed by Zambian game guards who deal roughly with poachers. In Angola, there was no effective state and so no formal control of hunting. Instead, hunters would come to a deal with UNITA soldiers to provide them with a portion of the kill. Some hunters also reported that they rented guns from UNITA, while others used locally made muzzle loaders (with homemade ammunition) or wire (made from bicycle brake cable) and nylon string (made from old maize sacks) to make traps. It was not uncommon for these hunting parties to go deep into the bush for days and still return with very little, but a successful trip could be very profitable. Likewise, many people crossed from Zambia into Angola

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to reach the larger rivers and the better supply of big fish. On both hunting and fishing trips, encountering UNITA could easily result in people losing their whole catch (and all their other belongings) to the rebels. The thicker bush in Angola also has an abundance of other natural resources that are coming under more pressure in Zambia. Many beekeepers set hives over the border, and honey hunters were more likely to find natural hives in Angola. The women who collected caterpillars and mushrooms also went across the border where there were more to be found. All these activities were generally limited to the bush close to the border, and tales of such trips did not usually involve any contact with UNITA or large settlements; nonetheless, the fear of encountering rebels was always in their minds. In 1997, there was also continuous cross-border trade. The ‘‘bush’’ products of meat, fish, honey, caterpillars, and mushrooms could all be profitably sold in the Zambian Copperbelt. While many people from Kanongesha would cross into Angola to gather these bush products, it was a risky and time-consuming business, and there are many who preferred to leave the gathering to people in Angola and go across only to buy the goods from them. During the war, this trade was very important for people living on the Angolan side of the border as they were almost completely cut off from the rest of Angola, especially since the bridge across the Zambezi had been destroyed in the 1980s. It was difficult for local people to move out of UNITA-controlled Alto Zambeze into areas controlled by the Luanda government. As a result, most of the supplies for people in the area came from Zambia. Within this borderland, much of the trade was conducted through a barter system, and people usually returned with meat and fish. The traders from Kanongesha used back routes where they had no contact with the Zambian authorities and paid no duties. If they went to markets in the towns of Angola, they were likely to have to pay ‘‘taxes’’ to UNITA. With the end of the war, it might have been expected for these exchanges with Angola to expand as it became safer to cross. However, the evidence from those living in Kanongesha suggests that the opposite is true. The use of the ‘‘private roads’’ has declined, and people now need to obtain papers and are more likely to cross via the ‘‘immigration routes.’’ In 2008, people reported that it was now much tougher to negotiate with the border patrols and immigration officials that they now find in Angola. As one respondent put it, it is much harder to go hunting and fish now ‘‘the government is at work.’’ By 2010, the Angolan government had installed a unit

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of its border guards (Policia Frontera, PF) right next to the boundary on one of the main back routes into Angola. These borders guards often came across into Zambia to obtain basic supplies, drink, and socialize. In Zambia, they were received in a friendly fashion, but they were widely seen in a different light when they were in Angola on patrol; there, they were a threat, and many people complained about their seizing goods and harassing people who crossed without papers or were caught hunting. It was acknowledged that, although encounters with the PF might be expensive, they were not lethal. This is in stark contrast to the days of UNITA, who were known to kill people on occasions. Nonetheless, it is clear that the people of Kanongesha had developed a working relationship with UNITA over the years (despite the fact that many of them had fled Angola to escape when UNITA captured Alto Zambeze in the early 1980s). Many felt they could negotiate with them and do business, whether it was hiring guns for hunting or paying them ‘‘taxes’’: UNITA was good. FAPLA is difficult and does not understand the people.42 During the war there was lots of trade, but it seems more difficult now. UNITA made friendship with people, but people have not made friends with the soldiers there now.43 Now it is hard to cross as the laws are binding. During UNITA time it was easy as UNITAs were also looking for foods so they could not refuse people.44 They are still struggling to build up a similar flexible and accommodating relationship with the Angolan government officials, who are much more recent arrivals to the area. However, the cozy contacts may never be replicated with the government. UNITA needed people to bring supplies from Zambia for their survival in the area; the PF can come into Zambia to do their business at will, and they also receive government supplies by helicopter. Looking from the Zambian side, the end of the war may have brought little change to the cross-border exchanges. It may be seen as an everyday tale of border folk using informal channels for smuggling, which has changed little over the last fifteen years. However, from the Angolan side,

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there has been a much more fundamental shift. During the war, the social contract, enshrined in formal law and the constitution, was effectively suspended in this remote corner of UNITA’s territory. Instead, a reasonably stable set of conventions emerged that shaped people’s expectations of encounters with the UNITA military and civilian authorities, making it possible for them cross and do business. Far from working against the quasistate established by UNITA, these conventions helped sustain it. The shift from peace to war has effectively undermined these conventions and reinstated the social contract on the Angolan side. The extent to which the villagers of Kanongesha and other border areas can establish new conventions that enable them to continue their cross-border livelihoods may be very limited. As a result, the extensive borderland in which they could secure their livelihoods that reached as far as Cazombo during the war may have irrevocably shrunk to the narrow margins alongside the streams marking the border itself.

Borderland Movements The strong historical, cultural, social, and economic links between Angola and Zambia were reflected in the steady flow of people of Kanongesha back and forth across the border. During the war, these movements ebbed and flowed according to the situation in Angola. In periods of relative calm, more people were visiting Angola; about 58 percent of men and 22 percent of women interviewed in 1997 had visited Angola in the past year for one reason or another. Many of these were short trips, often confined to the bush, avoiding any contact with the Zambian authorities or UNITA. Some people were adamant that they were only interested in visiting Angola and that they would never settle there, whatever the situation in the future. However, many people (about 30 percent of those interviewed) expressed great interest in settling in Angola if it achieves a stable peace. Across the borderlands (and elsewhere in Zambia), the draw of Angola was widely recognized. Villagers and officials were anticipating a significant drop in population in Kanongesha and the other border areas of Zambia when the situation improved in Angola. Before the end of the war, some had already started the long, slow, flexible process of moving to settle in Angola. This started with going back and forth continuously in ever longer visits, in due course establishing new

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fields and even a new household across the border. Hence, some villagers were described as having ‘‘one foot in Zambia and the other in Angola,’’ and their weight shifted from foot to foot all the time. This was not the one-off event of ‘‘return’’ migration envisaged in the discourse of refugee repatriation. Rather, it was a process with no clear beginning or end. Since the end of the war, there has certainly been a shift of population to Angola, and that shift seems likely to continue as conditions there improve. However, the movement is not on the scale of the depopulation of the border areas that was anticipated by many in 1997. Half of those who had planned to move to Angola—these included both people from Angola and Zambia—were still living in Zambian Kanongesha in 2010 and those interviewed seemed much more reticent about going there: The people who were bringing fish and meat from Angola have gone back there. Those have stayed have put their mind to farming rather than catching fish and meat45; Since the war ended people from Angola in Zambia feel comfortable and have started developing. The future is in Zambia not in Angola.46 The increased difficulty in crossing the border, especially the perceived harassment from Angolan border patrols and the lack of basic services, in particular schools, were among the reasons people cited for their change of plans. Some of those who had attempted the move then found that it did not work out as expected, so they returned to Zambia. Even interest in visiting Angola appears to have declined. Eighteen of those re-interviewed had expressed an interest in visiting Angola in 1997, but only half of these still had any ideas of visiting when asked in 2010. As a result, the level of cross-border movement appeared to have declined since the war in Angola. Again, the conventions that governed movement across the borderland—continuously reproduced in moments of interaction between villagers, Zambian officials, or UNITA—appear to have broken down with the extension of the Angolan state to the border with Zambia. The informal opportunities for migration appear to be giving way to programs of repatriation orchestrated by the UNHCR and the Angolan and Zambian governments and ‘‘regular’’ processes of immigration requiring official permits and payments.

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Conclusion Here it has only been possible to sketch some of the possible transformations in people’s relationship with the border as Angola consolidates its peace. Certainly, my (perhaps naı¨ve) expectations that the end of the war would enable more cross-border trade and movement have been confounded. Instead, the fundamental changes in the political and security situation in Angola have rippled out to the borderlands, where they have unsettled the longstanding practices of informal but patterned negotiation and accommodation that operated during the many years of war. The border infrastructure of immigration and customs posts, paperwork, and other controls are increasing. These facilitate the movement of those who move within the framework of the social contracts that are recognized by the governments on both sides. In this sense, the border can be seen as more open. Moreover, it may be taken as a positive sign of development that allows people to put aside their precarious cross-border livelihoods in favor of new opportunities.47 However, in another sense, the shift from war to peace in Angola is closing down the borderlands for villagers living in Kanongesha, who are far from the formal crossing points and are largely excluded from the formal border regimes. It also appears to be increasing the significance of national identity on each side of the border, bringing to an end the ease (or at least informality) of movement that was possible in precolonial times and was able to continue as long as Alto Zambeze remained largely a no-man’s land beyond the reach of formal state structures. Of course, with a peaceful border, we might expect the extension of formal state infrastructure and power to control and channel cross-border mobility would result in less informal movement. However, it is important to recall that in these Zambia-Angola borderlands the formal border infrastructure is taking the place of an active and extremely violent military force, UNITA, which caused thousands of refugees to flee into Zambia. Here it seems reasonable to expect that the removal of this lethal threat would enable people to cross more easily, even in the face of new, but still extremely sparse, formalities. Instead, the opposite appears to be true. Analyzing the changing conventions at work helps make sense of this. During the war, crossing the border used to bring the risk of death, but it was a risk that could successfully be mitigated by conforming to the borderland conventions governing interactions with UNITA. Now, the local people

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have lost their ability to negotiate their way across. It is important to stress that this does not necessarily mean that informal crossing, smuggling, and irregular migration across the border are not continuing or are even reduced overall. The evidence simply shows the change in the spatial distribution of these practices. This process of simultaneous open and closing of the borderlands along with the sharpening of the lines defining identity and movement may be a reflection of the peculiar circumstances of this Zambia-Angola border. Nonetheless, it does resonate with the analysis of other cases found in the literature. To some extent, the separation between the formal law and policy and actual practice that it reveals is well-trodden ground. However, I argue that the analysis presented here brings to light a more profound link between these conventions and the core functioning of the state than is often recognized. Before pursuing this discussion, it is important to stress that the border has not been a product of war. The Angolan civil war has been a struggle within the given borders of the country—the only claim for secession has been in Cabinda, the small oil rich enclave far away on the Atlantic coast. The Angola-Zambia border may have been breached at various times during the forty years of conflict, with occasional incursions, first by Portuguese and then UNITA and FAPLA (People’s Armed Forces for the Liberation of Angola), but always primarily in pursuit of opponents. It has never been a dispute over territory with Zambia. Moreover, on the Zambian side of the border, the state is neither the aggressor nor using violence to displace or determine insiders and outsiders. Even on the Angolan side, during most of the period of the study, the people crossing the border have been of rather marginal interest to the authorities, whether the UNITA ‘‘quasi-state’’ or, since the end of the war, the Luanda government. In contrast to other contributors in this volume (for example, Simon Turner), this is not a study of violence as a means of state making. Of course, violence lay at the center of the struggles for the Angolan state, but the borderlands were, for the most part, on the periphery of the conflict; hence, they could be used as a place of refuge. It might be tempting to see the conventions described here as simply a reformulation of the concept of customary or traditional law, which may run in parallel with the statutory law. Customary law is a body of rules governing personal status, communal resources, and local organization in many parts of Africa. It has been defined by various ethnic groups for their

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internal organization and administration. Customary law is recognized by the courts and exists as a second body of law (in addition to statutory law) governing citizens in the countries of Sub-Saharan Africa.48 In Zambia, this is embedded in the constitution. The chiefs have jurisdiction to settle many minor cases, such as theft, divorce, and so forth in the local courts. In Angola, there is no such formal recognition of the chiefs’ positions, but they still wield authority to settle some local disputes. In neither country can the conventions around citizenship, cross-border trade, and migration that are discussed here be seen as part of customary law; they lie far beyond its jurisdiction. To a large extent, the conventions described in the chapter here have become institutionalized; do they reflect more than the often described discrepancy between law and institutionalized practice? For example, Hughes appears to describe a similar process of local integration of Mozambican refugees in Zimbabwe in the 1990s, which ran counter to Zimbabwean law.49 He shows how the local chiefs encouraged Mozambicans to settle in areas of their traditional land that had been incorporated within the national park and were the subject of ongoing disputes with the state. Not only did this mean that the Mozambicans were in a marginal position, but they also served an important local political purpose. The settlement of ‘‘refugees’’ was, then, seen as a way of pursing a contest for power and resources with the Zimbabwean state. There is little evidence of such a process in this part of the ZambiaAngola border. Further south, in the district of Chavuma, there has been more suggestion that settlement of refugees have played into a longstanding land dispute.50 However, there the dispute is between Lunda and Luvale groups, a local contest between senior chiefs, each appealing to the state to support their case. The settlement of refugees is not being used to make a claim against the state. That said, the presence of Angolans, insofar as it represents an increase in population, is used by the chiefs to increase their prestige and make claims for government resources, in particular, services such as schools, clinics, and roads. The process of incorporation by the Zimbabwean chiefs might be seen as an example of a ‘‘twilight institution’’ as discussed by Lund.51 However, the Zambia-Angola borderland conventions that I describe do not correspond so neatly. They are not the same as local institutions such as chieftainships, vigilante groups, local elite groups, that claim authority—often backed by historical narratives and territorial markers—to act in particular

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localities in opposition to the state, nor do they claim separation from the state.52 Indeed, if we take Lund’s conception of the state being ‘‘formed as a combination of people’s everyday encounters with representatives of the state and its representations,’’53 it is reasonable to suggest that the conventions described here reflect the operation of state in the local area. They effectively support and reproduce the state at a most fundamental level. They are not simply concerned with local politics, but these are local conventions that tie in directly to central issues of the state—in particular, who can come and go and who is accepted as citizen. This is the stuff of ‘‘government institutions that claim to be the embodiment of the state.’’54 Here we are concerned with public authority embedded within the state (or quasi-state in the case of UNITA), not reflecting how things work in the ‘‘face of obvious state failure and impending collapse,’’55 but how local interactions interpret and enable the state to function. There is little evidence of people challenging the legitimacy of the state to exert its power. The question is how it can work with such limited resources and weak manifestations. The actors who play out these conventions are agents of the state, often acting in their official roles, but making the best of what opportunities they have, both to fulfill their tasks given the resources at their disposal and also for their enrichment and self-aggrandizement. In contrast to the case of the Ader described by Benedetta Rossi (in this volume), their acceptance of cross-border movement and settlement is not a form of resistance to the state but the form of governmentality in the borderlands. Unlike twilight institutions, these conventions are not competing with the social contract;56 they are interpreting it. As I have shown in this chapter, the end of the war in Angola has unsettled the conventions shaping people’s identity, livelihoods, and mobility in the Zambia-Angola borderlands. Observing the changes in the people’s expectations and practices casts a light on the profound role these local conventions play in the art of state making in a remote corner of Africa. The particular conditions of this case have served to bring these interactions into sharp relief. It shows the subtle knitting together of local institutions and practices that creates the boundaries of the state. The change from war to peace in Angola, the new configurations of state power and authority in the borderlands, the shift of population from Zambia to Angola, and the reconnection of Moxico to the rest of Angola have all served to unstitch the conventions observed in the late 1990s. It seems certain that the people of the borderlands will not be able to move and

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settle across the border in the same way they were able to during the war. Nonetheless, the functioning of the state at the border will continue to be shaped to a large extent by the new local conventions on cross-border mobility and national identifications that emerge. At these remote borderlands, the distinctions between the formal and informal or between the law and practice are unhelpful. The only mechanism by which the formal systems or legal rights can be exercised from day to day is through local institutions of the chieftainship, headmen, and such like, which are widely associated with informality. As this case shows, this can even extend to the basic state functions of managing entry through its borders and determining citizenship. These local conventions on mobility in the borderlands may play only a marginal role in ‘‘making the state.’’ Nonetheless, they are important as they provide useful insights into the boundary making and connections of a state with its neighbors, with whom it routinely exchanges people and goods. For many parts of Africa, such exchanges move across remote borders such as that between Zambia and Angola. By examining the microlevel interactions and the changing practices over time, it enriches our understanding of how the patchwork of states across the continent is stitched together and where they leave holes and loose threads.

Chapter 10

Recognition, Solidarity, and the Power of Mobility in Africa’s Urban Estuaries Loren B. Landau

African cities’ rapidly transforming morphology and social composition starkly illustrate the remarkable power of human mobility. Whatever the reason—failing rural economies, conflicts, spatialized material inequalities, gentrification, and urban development programs—people are moving into, out of, and through African cities as almost never before. As elsewhere in the world, countries’ elite and well connected are evacuating inner-city neighborhoods and established residential suburbs in favor of purposebuilt suburban estates and gated communities.1 Those remaining behind are joined by migrants from smaller towns, rural areas, across borders, or further deprived parts of their own cities. Elsewhere, once sparsely occupied periurban areas have become transit stations and destinations for people moving out of the city and those first coming to it. A decade into its life, the newly constructed, carefully planned township on Diepsloot on the fringes of Johannesburg has become a patchwork of informal housing plots that have all but obscured the township’s original form.2 On the margins of Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, and a dozen other cities, such morphing takes place with only the faintest signature of state planning. As Africa moves past the ‘‘tipping point’’ and becomes primarily urbanized, much of the continent’s population will live in spaces such as these.3 The nature of urbanization across Africa will help shape, if not dictate, patterns of politics for decades to come. Neither these patterns nor the preexisting forms of politics conform to the narratives of modernization in

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Europe. Although we must be wary of speaking of Africa in universally dystopian or exceptional terms, urban growth across the continent already appears to be creating forms of sociality and subjectivities that are working against the consolidation of state-centered political orders. This chapter concentrates on the varied politics emerging within Africa’s urban ‘‘estuaries.’’ Like their natural counterparts forged where rivers and oceans converge, these estuarial zones are shaped by the almost tidal movements of people between rural and urban spaces and the flows of people into and through them. This almost structured fluidity has a dual and seemingly contradictory effect on politics. Most evidently, the diversity and mobility of people works against the consolidation of unified and state-centered patterns of authority and power that are likely to be internalized and linked to an overarching teleology or political metanarrative. But while these point to a kind of fragmentation and anarchy, these places are not bereft of order. Instead, in the absence of strong and shared formal or social institutions that regulate interactions of people, property, or production, other kinds of highly socialized, contextualized, and decentered politics are emerging. These are at once geographically specific and deeply networked across space through residents’ social and economic ties. Although they remain malleable—a necessity in spaces of flux—they nonetheless offer the requisite physical order and conceptual infrastructure required for people to conduct the business of their lives. In doing so, they typically incorporate elements of formal state institutions: laws, police, even politicians. At the least, they are shaped by them if only to preserve individual or collective autonomy. The argument made here builds on an understanding that ‘‘states are made’’ in a specific way. Centralized political power is founded and maintained by achieving shared or overlapping forms of political subjectivity among cities’ residents. This is typically achieved—or has been historically —through the consistent and regular interaction among the population in ways that encourage the formation of social categories and help establish ‘‘appropriate’’ relationships among them.4 In doing so, people come to know where they fit, however unwillingly, in various sociopolitical hierarchies or configurations and can recognize their opponents and allies. The order is maintained as people come to accept it as necessary for achieving individual and collective projects. Leadership and political institutions subsequently maintain their political authority and legitimacy by preserving the order necessary for these endeavors.5

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Given varied migrant trajectories, the irregular interactions of individuals and groups, and states’ often arbitrary application of coercion across contemporary African cities, the conditions rarely exist for strong, shared, and cognitive orderings and categories to emerge, be built, or be institutionalized. In their place, we see fragmented and occasionally intersecting forms of belonging and solidarity. With these are splintered and often socially located modes of sovereignty and regulation. At times, the products of these arrangements reflect highly localized regimes. At others, patterns of social and material exchange and recognition that reach into the countryside or across political borders where they intersect with alternative normative and coercive regimes. Without the ability of a single body or consortia to centralize these regulatory systems, African cities are unlikely to serve as progenitors for the kind of nationalism and centralized domination seen elsewhere in the world. Instead, interactions of a range of actors are creating multiple visions or ‘‘faces’’ where the state and the regulations associated with it exist in varied forms among the resident populations. To put this central point in the language of this volume, mobility ‘‘makes’’ and transforms states, but not in the unitary or linear forms ‘‘statemaking’’ often conjures. The remainder of this chapter proceeds through four primary sections. The first quickly reviews the data sources used in supporting my central argument. The second makes the theoretical case for a focus on recognition and solidarity as the basis of political power in African cities. The third provides an empirical account of how migration is working against the consolidation of spatialized sovereign forms. Through a brief analysis of three elements of contemporary African urban life, it attempts to illustrate the degree to which practices associated with geographic mobility—and aspirations for it—work against the recognition necessary for the emergence of territorial sovereignty. It begins by outlining the trajectories of people into, within, and through the cities, highlighting the degree to which these urban spaces are deeply diverse and, perhaps more important, the degree to which people’s orientation—normative and material—remains extra-local. It then considers the degree to which the state or other bodies are able to induce a collective project through the application of law. My emphasis breaks from the Weberian focus on the coercive elements of law enforcement or states’ explicit efforts to ‘‘embrace’’ its population, to use Torpey’s term. Rather, the concern with law and courts stems from their potential power to name social phenomena and build a sense of collective rules and political logics. I argue that the decentralized and highly

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diverse systems of criminal redress—systems that involve the police, vigilantism, and acceptance—work against the creation of broadly shared rules or state mythologies, although it may help generate highly spatialized imaginaries. Finally, the chapter considers various forms of social membership and the presence of various forms of social capital. It finds that few urban residents participate in the kind of organization and bodies that generate trust across and even within ethnic or national groups. There are, nonetheless, bonds and emergent sociopolitical orders forming in direct opposition, as forms of passive or tactical resistance to the state or other forces, or in the spaces where states are but faint specters. While participation in a religious organization suggests a potential area for social consolidation, these too serve more to fragment and reinforce translocal orientations than to bind. The essay ends by reflecting on how migration—and urban diversity more generally—hinders the consolidation of a centralized system of authority and rule while generating alternative, decentered, and socialized orders.

Data and Methods This chapter draws on an ecumenical set of data in illustrating patterns of movement and social interaction. Most of the information reflected here stems from migration-related research in southern and eastern Africa— beginning with Johannesburg and expanding to Nairobi and Maputo— undertaken between 2002 and 2010. The focus on these cities stems from a recognition that they are growing rapidly due to urbanization and reflect important sites for understanding the dynamics of migration in urban Africa. Despite the many evident similarities among the cities, there are also clear and significant differences in the human development levels of the three cities, an indication not only of wealth but a relatively effective proxy for state capacity and economic resources. The 2007 UN Human Development Index (HDI) ranked South Africa 129, Kenya 147, and Mozambique near the bottom at 172. However, the extent of wealth inequality also differs across countries. South Africa is far more unequal than either Mozambique or Kenya. At one level, this speaks to its relative wealth and the opportunities within the country. Given that this wealth is deeply spatialized as a result of Apartheid-era urban planning, parts of the country and sections of every city—including Johannesburg—remain far poorer than the overall HDI score suggests.6 It was in those areas that the data were collected.

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While each of the sites included here is a destination and transit point for domestic and international migration, together they express the diversity of social, economic, and political characteristics that gives me the confidence to make modest generalizations about the migration experience. Moreover, they are each destination and transit points for a ‘‘mixed flow’’ of refugees, immigrants, circular migrants, and people transiting to communities and cities elsewhere. Although these cities are not representative of all of the continent’s urban centers—and the focus on estuarial zones further limits the data’s generalizability—they, nevertheless, collectively reflect a diversity of experiences to afford the basis for the kind of conceptual inquiry I am attempting. The appearance of such similar processes in all the cases—including the often anomalous South Africa—further speaks to the importance of these trends and the suitability of the comparison. The account presented here draws on survey data and qualitative research. The survey data were generated from interviews with 2,211 people in the three cities conducted during 2006, targeting particular groups of foreigners categorized by nationality. With the exception of Mozambicans included in the Johannesburg survey, these include national groups Somalis, Rwandans, Sudanese, and Congolese that straddle the line between purely economic migrants and those who might be considered (in substance, if not in law) forced migrants or displaced persons. Despite significant limitations, the data discussed here reflect some of the most comprehensive data available on displacement and migration in African cities. The qualitative accounts, which form the bulk of the remaining narrative, have been drawn from a range of research projects designed to investigate the politics of migration in African cities. Conducted over a period of years in collaboration with colleagues and students, they provide as of yet incomplete insights into the complex processes unfolding across urban Africa. Although I include quotations and other qualitative evidence to provide text and illustrations, the following pages must be read as an extended conceptual exploration, rather than a definitive statement.

Coercion, Recognition, and Consolidating Sovereignty As indicated above, this chapter builds on continued debates over the relationships existing among mobility and the nature of state power and political authority. My starting point is Torpey’s recognition that

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modern states, and the international state system of which they are a part, have expropriated from individuals and private entities the legitimate ‘‘means of movement.’’ The result of this process has been to deprive people of the freedom to move across certain spaces and to render them dependent on states and the state system for the authorization to do so.7 Torpey’s focus on the material and institutional aspects of control marks the relatively uncontrolled and unlabeled movements of people across much of Africa as a sign of incomplete political consolidation. Indeed, where there are formal laws and institutions, their power rarely extends systematically beyond the central business districts, government bureaucracies, and wealthy residential suburbs and can do little to categorize or organize their populations in any direct way. Even in the cities, effective power is often shared in ad hoc ways, with private security firms and condominium committees designed to intentionally fragment and delimit rights to urban space.8 Elsewhere, urban governance regimes are characterized by a mishmash of patronage politics, irregular policing, and neglect, benign and otherwise. For those in political office and for many analysts, these conditions often suggest a kind of diminished sovereignty or state failure.9 Such weakness is not usually due to centralized opposition to its rule—organized crime, revolutionary social movements, or powerful religious organs—but is instead due to the form of postcolonial political consolidation that has occurred across the continent.10 Given the limited coercive power associated with many of Africa’s ‘‘juridical states’’—formal and institutional structures mandated by law but not by the societies they ostensibly govern—we are left with a somewhat dismal picture. As observers, this need not be dismal in a normative sense, but rather in an analytical one. If sovereignty is conditioned so heavily on the physical control of movement, how then do we make sense of the widespread inability of states to ‘‘embrace’’ their populations? The ‘‘weakness’’ of African central states calls for a shift in perspective if we are to reveal the complex and ever evolving nature of the politics that shape people’s daily lives. Such a perspective includes three central if interrelated tenets. The first is the recognition that, in the absence of a single dominant coercive force, there is space for a myriad of governing regimes, nonstate centers, and socially generated mechanisms of control.11

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Given that nonstate actors only rarely have the capacity to step in and establish an alternative coercive hegemony, although they may well do so over parts of a country or a neighborhood (for example, the Mungiki in Nairobi, the ‘‘Com-Tsotsis’’ in parts of South Africa), this means a focus on a range of intersecting and overlapping (but rarely interlocking and stable) sovereignties and systems of territorialized orders that potentially compete, but rarely consolidate. The second tenet relates to the question of consolidation. If political authority is as dispersed as I suggest, then we must ask how these fragmented systems might ultimately consolidate into a more unified and relatively stable system of regulation over people and space. My particular concern here is how the nature of mobility and migration in African cities—at least those few considered here—facilitates or frustrates the possibility of generating forms of state and nonstate centered sovereignties. The question of consolidation draws our attention to a third analytical element. If states and other actors possess inadequate coercive or economic resources to facilitate or demand the consolidation of political authority, then we are left exploring what Lukes would call the third face of power: political subjectivity, values, and norms.12 Even in Torpey’s work, the state’s enduring power comes less from its coercive capacities than from the ability to categorize and label, hence distinguishing populations and rooting their subjectivities to space and institutions. Building on Foucauldian notions of biopower and governmentality, we can then shift our discussion to the kind of implicit and often invisible rules that govern conduct and human interactions. The direct and unintended products of micro- and macrostrategies of control and regulation—such ways of being are critical foundations for political authority and governance in the absence of unified, coercive, or material hegemony.13 Even in the absence of a centralized authority—state, church, or factor—common forms of sociality and subjectivity may emerge that can ultimately cohere into political community. In the remainder of the chapter, I focus my attention on the realm of recognition: a sense among resident populations that those around them are engaged in a common future and shared sociopolitical trajectory. Only when such recognition is achieved—through intention or accident—can the fragmented subjectivities and sovereignties fuse into a systemized, if still syncretic, regime of governance infused with a sense of common project or collective future. As Nettl noted years ago, stateness is ‘‘essentially a sociocultural phenomenon,’’ which can occur when, through some process of unification, a population is defined and becomes inclined, however

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unconsciously it may be, to incorporate the idea of the state and a public in individual thinking and collective action.14 The remainder of this chapter illustrates how patterns of migration and urbanization exacerbate existing sociopolitical differences in urban areas. Beyond simply heightening such ethnolinguistic diversity, consolidation is hindered by the nature of people’s objectives, geographic aspirations, and translocal ethics. Before turning to the empirics, a few words are in order about the nature of recognition, its theoretical genealogy, and its practical manifestations. The way I use the term here draws from at least two strains of literature. The first is from the liberal or voluntaristic tradition, the other from Hegel’s explicit discussion of recognition and its resonances in the work of Foucault and other poststructuralist scholars. In both Hobbes and Locke, for example, we find modern political community and statecraft founded on a kind of contractual arrangement and agreement—if only semivoluntary in Hobbes’s case—between individuals and the public as reflected by the state or other forms of regulatory institutions.15 Translated into the language of contemporary political formations, Maier (echoing Arendt) argues that, ‘‘Democratic social cohesion is a product of the recognition that citizens give to one another as equal partners in social and political practices, as bearers of equal rights and responsibilities, or as participants in a game played according to the same rules.’’16 Similar strains of thinking appear in the work of Habermas and others who argue, if only implicitly, that social coherence and a more or less unified system of rule— sovereignty—is possible when a common language and set of values structure interactions and provide the frameworks through which differences and conflicts are negotiated. While their concerns are with the foundations of a democratic regime of governance, a sense of political community is nevertheless a prerequisite for any relatively stable sovereignty maintained through something other than the central state’s coercive power. While understanding social consolidation as a form of potentially productive oppression rather than a normative ideal, the Hegelian/Foucauldian tradition also focuses on the value of recognition in the creation and perpetuation of sovereign forms. Unlike the liberal tradition in which accommodation is founded on principles of fundamental equality, Hegelian perspectives—encapsulated most obviously by the master-slave dialectic— understands that recognition in a common system of rule is both (a) an essential component of a stable sociopolitical system and (b) that incorporation into that system can be deeply unequal and can help perpetuate

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fundamental differences of rights and status. Kant’s ethics of hospitality shares a similar approach to incorporating difference.17 For our purposes, what is important is how that system is consolidated: through recognition of another, their differences, and an acceptance of their place (and one’s own) in a sociopolitical structure. An unwillingness to accept, acknowledge, or recognize diversity consequently denies the possibility of a consolidated system of sociopolitical regulation. Via Hegel, we come to Foucault’s work on state formation, which draws attention to the importance of states (or other regulatory institutions) justifying their authority and position through a shared sense in a collective project. Borrowing the language of salvation from the religious institutions that they eventually supplant, contemporary political formations rely on a sense of salvation in the material world or, at the very least, a sense of improvement for oneself or one’s next of kin by participation in a collective project.18 In many ways, this reflects the logic in Leviathan and, somewhat more sinisterly, in the protection rackets Tilly describes: by working together under benevolent state rule, we will be collectively safer and stronger. In all cases, such collective action demands a sense of a shared future and a willingness to accept others’ roles in shaping it. This can be achieved when a sense that the collective project is ‘‘represented and reproduced in visible, everyday forms, such as the language of legal practice, the architecture of public buildings, the wearing of military uniforms, or the marking out and policing of frontiers. The cultural forms of the state are an empirical phenomenon, as solid and discernible as a legal structure or party systems.’’19 To summarize, it is only through repeated actions and interactions, each infused with sets of values that enforce a partial commonality, that diverse objectives and identities can be fused in ways that generate systems of sovereign rule. Such unity can be based on liberal or cosmopolitan principles, syncretic belief, or even deep conflict and repressive hierarchies. The absence of such interactions effectively denies the possibility of unified rule through anything other than coercion.

Trajectories, Law, Capture, and Cohesion At this point, I can return to forms of hypermobility and diversity in a number of Africa’s urban centers. Due to a combination of international

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and, more important, domestic migration, ethnic/national heterogeneity and cultural pastiche are the empirical norms, not exceptions, in many of these environments.20 These fragmented, overlapping but rarely intersecting systems of exchange, meaning, privilege, and belonging are rooted in longstanding patterns of political and economic marginalization—Apartheid, indirect colonial domination, monopolistic party rule—and rapid urbanization driven by the dual pressures of failing rural economies and the aspirations of migrants, their families, and existing urban populations.21 Among other effects, these forces are generating greater disparities of wealth, language, and nationality, along with diverse gender roles, life trajectories, and intergenerational tensions in both migrant-sending and -receiving communities. Through geographic movement—into, out of, and within cities— urban spaces that for many years had only tenuous connections with the people and economies of the rural hinterlands of their own countries are increasingly the loci of economic and normative ties with home villages and diasporic communities spread (and spreading) across the continent and beyond.22 For present purposes, the question is whether these regulatory and identitive formations rarely find the points of intersection necessary to realize a sense of political community that can translate into territorially bound and relatively stable sets of ordering principles and sovereign forms.

Trajectories and Translocality Much of the writing on migration and urbanization explores how host communities recognize or resist new arrivals. Such perspectives are premised on the existence of identifiable, dominant values and institutions that may be challenged by migration, but ultimately adapt in ways that recognize, name, and incorporate (even if unjustly) newcomers. The data from African cities suggest we should be wary of ascribing undue social coherence to the cities’ current populations, populations characterized as much by ethnic heterogeneity, economic disparity, and cultural pastiche as by solidarity. Cities are being transformed by migration, spreading their geographic footprints and reshaping the social formations within them. International migrants—whether Somalis in Nairobi, Zimbabweans in Johannesburg, or Nigerians pretty much anywhere–often attract the majority of popular attention and political opprobrium, often as threats to an

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emergent nation and the political projects conducted in its name. Despite their visibility, domestic migrants from rural areas comprise the largest proportion of total migrants in African cities.23 According to UN Habitat, Africa had only 39.1 percent of its total population living in cities, making it the least urbanized region in the world.24 However, the African urban population is projected to more than double its 2007 level of 373.4 million by 2030. Viewed on a national level, this has extraordinary effects. Countries like Angola that were only 30 percent urbanized in 1985 are likely to be over 60 percent urbanized by 2015. In the same period, Mozambique will go from 17 to 42 percent.25 Although Kenya and South Africa have seen less dramatic urbanization as a percentage of the total population, here too the absolute numbers of people moving into and through cities can be staggering.26 Johannesburg, grew from 3.2 million in 2001 to 4.4. million a decade later. Of this, approximately three-quarters (74 percent) was due to natural growth. The remaining 25 percent was due to migration. However, even as a hub for migrants from across the continent, international migrants comprise only between 5 and 6 percent of the province’s population.27 As elsewhere on the continent, the vast majority of migrants in Africa’s cities are citizens arriving from rural areas or secondary towns.28 Of almost equal importance is continued mobility: moving to a place in a city is by no means a permanent and final step as people often oscillate to ‘‘sending’’ areas or move frequently within conurbations in search of accommodation and livelihoods. If nothing else, the rapidity of African urbanization suggests that longterm residents, domestic migrants, and noncitizens are simultaneously finding their ways in a new (and ever-changing) social landscape. Even domestic migrants may have as little in common with the people they find in the city as those coming from across international boundaries. The rapid expansion of urban populations—and its specific geography, which tends to concentrate migration and urban growth in particular urban gateway neighborhoods—calls into question the use of the term ‘‘local’’ or ‘‘host’’ to talk about the destination areas. Furthermore, it has implications for the way we think about recognition and the possibility of becoming integrated into a systemized regime of governance. Moreover, while millions are moving to cities, we must not assume that the first move will be the last. Repeated movements within the city, oscillating movements between rural and urban areas, and passages through cities all question the intention or ability to achieve a life and livelihoods sustained by a single urban center.

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Table 2: Translocal Financial Connections by City

Translocal/transnational financial linkages Native born local Foreign born local Native born migrant Foreign born migrant N

Johannesburg

Maputo

Nairobi

41.6 58.9 53.7 43.3 847

55.6 26.1 54.2 23.3 609

62.3 33.0 57.5 8.6 755

Connections and regular shifts between rural (or periurban) and urban areas are a critical factor in slowing the emergence of urban regimes that, rather than destinations, are often stations on an on-going journey. For many moving for work, the primary motivation is profit and the need to extract urban resources to subsidize the ‘‘real’’ life they live elsewhere. Indeed, in many instances, spouses and children remain elsewhere while men and women earn money in the cities to sustain them (See Table 2). Although urban residents may establish second urban families, in many instances social, ethnic and political ties to rural areas prevent full social integration into urban communities. The intention to retire in the countryside or move elsewhere further limits people’s financial and emotional investments in urban areas. In some instances, significant numbers of the foreign-born population—or nonlocal citizens—arrive in the city seeking protection from conflict and persecution with the intentions to return home or move on when conditions allow. This helps generate a kind of permanent temporariness in which they actively resist incorporation.29 For many, the city has, in Castells’s words, become a place of flows where rooting and local representation are not the goals.30 Moreover, the burdens and binding that connections and political participation offer are often something to be avoided.31 Given the insecurity of land tenure, the possibility of violence, and on-going economic deprivation, people often maintain feet in multiple sites without firmly rooting themselves in any.32 Although it is difficult to draw firm conclusions about the consequences, an orientation toward permanent settlement almost undoubtedly facilitates the formation of common (or at least partially shared) values, norms, and ethics. Given populations’ transience and translocal orientation, membership, and shared values—and the obligations they bring—are often anathema to individual projects and trajectories.

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Table 3: Expectation of Residence in Two Years (Percentage)

Will be here in 2 years Native born local Foreign born local Native born migrant Foreign born migrant N

Johannesburg

Maputo

Nairobi

50.0 68.9 45.0 43.2 847

76.8 65.2 65.6 55.5 609

75.4 44.4 69.3 52.5 755

Criminality and Coherence Law, legal decision making, regulation, and enforcement are treated as potentially important mechanisms for bounding and naming events in ways that can forge relations among citizens and with state institutions.33 When courts and other coercive mechanisms are popularly accepted, these institutions and legal channels help enmesh state or other governing institutions with a legally designated population in a common set of disciplines and practices. This amalgam of actors and laws not only serves to standardize behavior within a population but also creates sociological and practical divisions between this population and an ‘‘other’’ who possibly, but not necessarily, occupy a distinct and external geographic territory.34 A unified and widely legitimated set of social norms of appropriateness applying to both political elites and popular actors may serve as a functional equivalent of a codified, formal legal system although one that is decidedly less state centric.35 The story in African cities is one in which the police—the most common and evident manifestation of formal law making—operate less as a force to develop a consistent rule and sense of a shared or collective project among the population. Authors like Chabal and Daloz and Bayart suggest that networks of extortion and corruption can, in some ways, embed the state within a diverse urban population. Such a position lends an undue coherence to how force is applied. Instead, forms of extralegality and corruption may create local relationships and connections but operate in such a way as to deny both the state and the population the opportunity to ‘‘know’’ each other in a way that is consistent and shared.

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Drawing on evidence from the 2006 survey described above, the levels of crime within the cities already suggest an environment in which the law, as a principle if nothing else, is only unevenly applied. While most people have been a victim of crime, far fewer have engaged with the police in an attempt to find justice or address it. That said, almost all interact fairly regularly with the police, often in situations in which money is exchanged. The point here is not to decry lawlessness, although all three cities offer dangerous environments for newcomers and long-term residents alike. Instead, the levels of insecurity offer two points that contribute to my argument. First, the varying degrees to which foreign and national groups are targeted—a distinction that would be all the more remarkable were I able to include a breakdown by nationality among the ‘‘foreign’’-born population—suggests a kind of implicit coding and regulation of space that is negotiated at the level of the resident or beat cop. This reveals an approach to difference that may help cohere into some kind of mutually recognizable schema, but one that largely excludes the state or includes state actors working in private capacities. In some instances, these interactions can be systemized as in the one described by Yunus, a Tanzanian living in Nairobi’s Shauri Moyo neighborhood: ‘‘There’s a mentality that if you’re from outside you are going to pay. For the police everything is about this paying and they can plant anything on you if they want to take a case forward’’ (November 22, 2009).36 Elsewhere, migrants and citizens express a level of dismissiveness of the police and reveal a sense that, while present, their behaviors are often too unpredictable and their interests too obscure for them to be trusted. Indeed, there are frequent, if irregular, engagements with the police across the various national groups living within the three cities being discussed here. Were this the only type of interaction taking place, it could easily generate some form of mutual recognition: where residents come to understand the state as a particular type of body possessed with a certain power and magic. In Das’s work, the irregularity and unknowability of state agents’ actions and motivations only further contribute to the state’s mystery and power.37 Based on the available data, I cannot deny that the unknowability of the police has helped generate a common (if fearful) political subjectivity. However, we must be wary of seeing the police as a standardizing influence that contributes to a unified territorial regime. The sheer variation of the type of interaction across groups and space means that that

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state becomes a remarkably different object to the various subgroups within an urban area. Similarly, the inconsistency with which the police behave and their irregular presence in the lives of the people they ostensibly regulate denies the possibility of coming to see the society as bound to state agents within a consistent normative framework. As Mama Hamza, an elder in one of Nairobi’s fluid neighborhood suggests, ‘‘We have a security detail but even they can’t respond immediately. They are not really there and only seem to come together for some small reasons’’ (November 23, 2009). The regular desire of citizens to evade contact with the police—interactions that are more likely to result in extortion than any gain in security—provides further incentive for dissimulation and evasion. Again, the absence of trust between citizens and the police can be read as a further indicator of this irregular and inconsistent engagement (in the 2006 survey, nowhere did more than half those questioned trust the police. Among foreigners in Nairobi, the figure was under 20 percent). As Mama Hamza’s quotation above suggests, the police are not the only actors in African cities that provide security services or protection rackets. In Nairobi, the Mungiki and other ethnically based organizations have effectively colonized neighborhoods, supplanting both the police and city council. Levying the credible threats of violence, they collect fees for people moving through their territory and demand payment from residents to ensure their security. In Johannesburg, groups of citizens have formed vigilante groups and security committees in an attempt to control crime within their communities. At their most extreme, they have taken on an explicit mandate for migration control. In the words of one gang member in Itireleng (outside Pretoria), ‘‘If government is failing to stop them at the borders, we shall stop them here.’’38 While these initiatives often co-opt police or state officials and regularly act in the name of the nation—this is particularly the case during South Africa’s 2008 xenophobic attacks—the systems of rule are decidedly local and often aimed at creating systems of regulation and rule outside the law.39

Collective Mobilization and Social Capital Whether religious, cultural, or economic, collective participation is a potentially important mechanism for inculcating a sense of common purpose and forging the social connections necessary to suffuse a population with

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common perspectives, values, and ethics. However, given the population’s volatility, social networks are often spread thinly across many people and places. It is of little surprise, then, that people sampled in the surveys show remarkably low levels of trust between ethnic and national groups and, surprisingly, within them. Even among citizens in both Johannesburg and Maputo, levels of social capital—trust of each other and public their institutions—are strikingly low.40 Nairobi offers a slightly more trusting environment, although here too the data reflect deep tensions. Networks of clan, neighborhood, or coreligionists undoubtedly exist,41 but these are often fragmented and functional, organized without an explicit recognition or sense of mutual obligation to those beyond the boundaries of familiarity.42 Instead, they are often limited to assisting others only to overcome immediate risks or if a corpse needs returning to a country or community of origin.43 Among neither migrants nor the ostensible host population can we speak of a community or set of overlapping institutions that are engaged in a collective project, state driven or otherwise. Instead, recognition of ‘‘the other’’ is almost always done in terms that are short term and instrumental. These may eventually cohere into some form of widespread norms or implicit sense of a collective enterprise, but, given the populations’ dynamics and the limited engagement with common institutions, such an outcome seems particularly unlikely. Religion is the one notable exception to relative absence of social organization among the populations under discussion. Throughout Europe and Asia, religious institutions have played central roles in binding population to each other and, quite regularly, helping establish the state as a central—if occasionally elusive and symbolic—figure in individuals’ sociopolitical cosmology.44 However, a combination of factors, including the increasing heterogeneity of the urban population, effectively denies the possibilities that religious institutions can serve a similar role in contemporary African cities. Among the Nairobi citizenry we surveyed, for example, 65.6 percent were Protestant, 30.6 percent Catholic, 2.7 percent Muslim, with only 0.3 percent claiming no religion. In Johannesburg, the sample was 59.7 percent Protestant, 18.8 percent no religion, 14.1 percent Catholic, and 6.8 percent Muslim. (The foreign-born population in Johannesburg was more evenly divided with 39 percent Protestant, 28.5 percent Catholic, 26 percent Muslim, and 6.3 percent claiming no religion.) While urban Africans are strongly religious, the denominational divisions within those affiliations— and the often fractured and conflictual relationships among them—can

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serve more to divide than create a unified network with which to disseminate messages of unity and sanctions to achieve it. Along with the sheer diversity of competing claims for religion and belonging, the liturgical content of many churches serves to undermine further the possible emergence of a territorially bound or state-centered subjectivity. This is perhaps most visible in the ever-expanding pool of Pentecostal churches operating within Africa’s urban centers. At one level, these inclusive (often massive) institutions offer the possibility of bridging barriers between various groups. As one Zimbabwean migrant in Johannesburg stated, ‘‘In the church, they help us in many ways, no matter where you come from, they just help you.’’45 While they offer a sense of salvation in the form of ‘‘health and wealth,’’ they are distinctly post-territorial in their outlook. Although there is not space here to reflect the diversity of testimonies and preaching included in even one five-hour mass, many pastors build on their strong connections to institutions in Nigeria, Ghana, Congo, and the United States. For many of the churches’ founders—who are themselves migrants—their current pulpit is merely a place where they can enter a global social universe. In the words of the Nigerian pastor at the Mountain of Fire and Miracles church in Johannesburg, ‘‘Africa is shaped like a pistol and South Africa is the mouth from where you can shoot out the Word of God.’’46 For others, they have been sent on a mission to Kenya, Mozambique, or elsewhere to help counter postcolonial malaise—including corruption and state oppression—with a message of truth. Moreover, while they may preach tolerance, many of these churches generate a set of translocal and, often, antipolitical tenets of belonging. Their fragmentary and often conflictual sources of religious authority further serve to deny the state—or, indeed, even a single church—the possibility of naming what is good and the direction the collective should follow.

Conclusions: Nomads, Magic, and Fragmentary Social Sovereignty The mobility and diversity of values and trajectories visible in African cities and the absence of institutions capable of ‘‘binding’’ them to each other and the territory itself illustrates the challenges that migration levies to the creation of African nation-states that approximate anything like the Weberian ideal. Here, instead, we see overlapping and not necessarily mutually

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enforcing systems of regulation and norms that prevent state officials— should they wish to—from enforcing regulation through noncoercive or nonmaterial means. In other words, the state and officials lack moral authority and regulatory legitimacy. The arbitrariness and limited coercive reach of nonstate vigilantism and gangsterism combine with a general lack of social membership to prevent the emergence of unified, alternative sovereignties. Such fragmentation is heightened by—and, in turn, encourages —the transience of many urban Africans and their ongoing extralocal orientations. In many ways, Africa’s mobile urban residents are implicitly exercising what Deleuze and Guattari speak of as a kind of ‘‘nomadic resistance’’ that denies states the possibility of becoming fixed, if not geographically then in a sociopolitical schema of rights and recognition.47 Stepping beyond Deleuze and Guattari’s idealism—which echoes in Scott’s fascination with Me´tis and the power of passive resistance—we begin to see that this mobility is not much of a threat to current state practice. Indeed, as I outlined in this chapter’s opening paragraphs, African states rarely have the capacity and often not even the desire to regulate and fix their populations in the way described by Torpey and others. As such, ongoing mobility may be less of a threat to an existing state-centered order than a powerful shaper of other emerging sociopolitical configurations and sovereignties. What African cities are generating is something akin to the spaces of flows or ‘‘nowherevilles’ described by theorists writing about globalization’s effects on European and American cities. However, given the different starting point, the political subjectivities emerging in urban Africa are unlikely to be infused with romantic remembrances or ethical idealism associated with urban public or a national collectivity. To be sure, future ethics will only rarely be shaped by a legacy of liberalism or ‘‘high’’ cosmopolitanism or the kind of collective responsibility infused through Habermasian social communication and political socialization. This need not mean cities will be the anomic, violent, and miserable places Kaplan described many years ago, which suggests cities devoid of regulation and controls.48 It is only that those controls are likely to remain fragmented and work across multiple territories and registers. Recognizing this, I wish to turn to my final point, a reflection on the meaning of sovereignty. Writers such as Das and Latham suggest that sovereignty is fundamentally rooted in the ability to name and make sense of daily practices and events. This is the point illustrated in Chalfin’s work in

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which she described how particular forms of border control and customs unions help generate political subjectivities, labeling what is right and wrong and providing the norms to support such designations.49 However, in the hodgepodge of African cities where people are almost constantly on the move, the state and almost nobody else are able to exercise such a regular form of naming and rationalization. Instead, this task is left to a range of actors working against or outside the realm of state regulation: religious institutions, private schools, vigilante groups, or even transnational trading networks and families. These alternative avenues of generating meaning are creating new forms of decentralized sovereignty that can be either highly territorialized (for example, a local protection racket) or almost thoroughly unbounded by space (for example, Somali remittance networks). The more cities become nodes of transit, the stability of these naming systems and the possibility for mutual recognition and values will continue to decrease. What this paper suggests is the need to rethink the nature of political power in Africa. State formation—or rather the formation of integrated/ overlapping/self-reinforcing regulatory regimes—is far more decentralized than we often presume. Moreover, these practices are rarely exclusively state authored, although many may be shaped by the presence of the state. In many instances, we must see the application of the law (or some version thereof) as not necessarily state driven. Even the police, the essential element of state power, can operate on their own logics and in line with forms of social rather than constitutional legitimacy.50 While state officials undoubtedly relish the trappings of authority and power, ‘‘real and existing’’ forms of authority and power are spread unequally, even within the urban areas over which they have the greatest chance to govern. Under these conditions, we have little choice but to accept, as Rose and Miller argue we should, that the state is not a single, essential thing but rather an entree into understanding the practices of government.51 In many cases, the most significant practices of regulation and governance are not necessarily state-centered or state-authored or informed by clearly articulated and unified strategies of control. As this chapter attempts to demonstrate, many forms of ‘‘informal’’ politics borrow language and imperatives from past and contemporary politics but retain a level of autonomy that, when exercised, constitutes a form of polity that we have yet to name, let alone understand.

Notes

Chapter 1. Mobility Makes States 1. ‘‘State of the World’s Cities 2010/2011: Bridging the Urban Divide’’ (London: UN HABITAT, 2008), 15. 2. Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents and Citizens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), Phillip Cole, Philosophies of Exclusion: Liberal Political Theory and Immigration (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000). 3. Adrian Favell, Mirian Feldblum, and Michael Smith, ‘‘The Human Face of Global Mobility: A Research Agenda,’’ Society 44, 2 (2007): 15–25; Loren B. Landau and Darshan Vigneswaran, ‘‘Shifting the Focus of Migration Back Home,’’ Development 50, 4 (2008): 82–87. 4. For example, Robert Guest, The Shackled Continent: Power, Corruption, and African Lives (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 2004); Martin Meredith, The State of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence (London: Free Press, 2005); William Easterly, The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 5. V. Y. Mudimbe, Liberty in African and Western Thought (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Independent Education, 1988); Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). 6. For further commentaries, see John Urry, Mobilities (Cambridge: Polity, 2007); cf. Tim Cresswell, ‘‘Towards a Politics of Mobility,’’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28, 1 (2010): 17–31. 7. Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat, Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants, and States in the Postcolonial World (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005); Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, Theory from the South, or, How Euro-America Is Evolving Toward Africa (Boulder, Colo.: Paradigm, 2011); Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 8. Jeffrey Herbst, States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000). 9. Two main variations can be identified here. On the one hand, we have the language of ‘‘failed’’ or ‘‘quasi’’ states, which involves the addition of a pejorative adjective to emphasize that the states in question are not ‘‘true’’ states. On the other hand, we have language of ‘‘polities,’’ which is predicated on the idea that some political communities are so deficient they cannot be legitimately labeled states at all. 10. Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa, 3rd ed., African Studies Series (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Mathew Forstater,

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‘‘Taxation and Primitive Accumulation: The Case of Colonial Africa,’’ Research in Political Economy 22 (2005): 51–64; Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, ‘‘Research on an African Mode of Production,’’ Critique of Anthropology, 2, 4–5 (1975) 38–71; Henry Bernstein, ‘‘African Peasantries: A Theoretical Framework,’’ Journal of Peasant Studies 6, 4 (1979): 421–43. 11. Robert H. Bates, Essays on the Political Economy of Rural Africa, African Studies Series (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Robin Horton, ‘‘Stateless Societies in the History of West Africa,’’ in History of West Africa, ed. J. F. Ade Ajayi and Michael Crowder (New York,: Columbia University Press, 1972). 12. One potential way of resolving this issue would be to focus less on the state and more on questions of governance (or governmentality) more generally. While this broader framing is not without merit, we are reluctant to move the conversation too far away from the state as a foundational concept, so our preferred approach involves other concepts being employed as complementary frameworks, rather than competing and exclusive vocabularies. 13. The study of the state in Africa has long been dominated by a model of adjective plus state essentialism (e.g., failed states, patrimonial states). Achille Mbembe, ‘‘Biopolitics and Sovereignty,’’ Wiser in Brief 2, 1 (2003); Jean-Franc¸ois Bayart, Stephen Ellis, and Beatrice Hibou, eds., The Criminalization of the State in Africa (Oxford: Currey, 1999); J.-F. Bayart, The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly (London: Longman, 1993); S. N. Eisenstadt, Traditional Patrimonialism and Modern Neopatrimonialism, Studies in Comparative Modernization Series (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1973); Robert H. Jackson, Quasi-States: Sovereignty, International Relations, and the Third World, Cambridge Studies in International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 14. Comaroff and Comaroff, Theory from the South, 13. 15. Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, Cambridge Middle East Library (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); J. Robinson, ‘‘A Perfect System of Control: State Power and Native Locations in South-Africa,’’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 8, 2 (1990): 135–62. 16. John Thornton, A Cultural History of the Atlantic World, 1250–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 17. Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005). 18. Ralph A. Austen, Trans-Saharan Africa in World History, New Oxford World History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Bailyn, Atlantic History; Pier Martin Larson, Ocean of Letters: Language and Creolization in an Indian Ocean Diaspora, Critical Perspectives on Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 19. Charles Tilly, ‘‘Reflections on the History of European State-Making,’’ in The Formation of National States in Western Europe, ed. Charles Tilly and Gabriel Ardant (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975), 42. 20. Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1990, Studies in Social Discontinuity (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990): 1–5 21. Ibid.; Charles Tilly, ‘‘War Making and State Making as Organized Crime,’’ in Bringing the State Back In, ed. Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 22. Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: A Archaeology of Medical Perception, 1st American ed., World of Man (New York: Pantheon, 1973); Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 1st American ed. (New York: Pantheon, 1977).

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23. Nicholas De Genova, ‘‘The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement,’’ in The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement, ed. Nicholas De Genova and Nathalie Mae Peutz (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010); Wayne A. Cornelius, Philip Martin, and James Hollifield, eds., Controlling Immigration: A Global Perspective (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994); Saskia Sassen, ‘‘Beyond Sovereignty: Immigration Policy Making Today,’’ Social Justice 23, 3 (1996): 9–20; Russell King, ‘‘European International Migration 1945–90: A Statistical and Geographical Overview,’’ in Mass Migrations in Europe: The Legacy and the Future, ed. Russell King (London: Belhaven, 1993); M. B. Salter, ‘‘The Global Visa Regime and the Political Technologies of the International Self: Borders, Bodies, Biopolitics,’’ Alternatives 31, 2 (2006): 167–89; James Frank Hollifield, Immigrants, Markets, and States: The Political Economy of Postwar Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992); J. F. Hollifield, ‘‘The Politics of International Migration,’’ in Migration Theory, Talking Across Disciplines, ed. C. B. Brettell and J. F. Hollifield (London: Routledge, 2001); J. F. Hollifield, ‘‘The Emerging Migration State,’’ International Migration Review 38, 3 (2004): 885–912; Rogers Brubaker, Immigration and the Politics of Citizenship in Europe and North America (Washington, D.C.: German Marshall Fund of the United States, 1989); Peter Andreas and Timothy Snyder, The Wall Around the West: State Borders and Immigration Controls in North America and Europe (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000); William Walters, ‘‘Deportation, Expulsion, and the International Police of Aliens,’’ in The Deportation Regime, ed. De Genova and Peutz. 24. See, for example, Cornelius, Martin, and Hollifield, eds., Controlling Immigration; Grete Brochmann and Tomas Hammar, Mechanisms of Immigration Control: A Comparative Analysis of European Regulation Policies (Oxford : Berg, 1999). 25. Cf. Saskia Sassen, Losing Control?: Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization, University Seminars/Leonard Hastings Schoff Memorial Lectures (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). 26. Tim Martineau, Karola Decker, and Peter Bundred, ‘‘ ‘Brain Drain’ of Health Professionals: From Rhetoric to Responsible Action,’’ Health Policy 70, 1 (2004): 1–10; B. Lowell, ‘‘Policy Responses to the International Mobility of Skilled Labour,’’ International Migration Papers 45 (Geneva: International Labour Office, 2002). 27. Loren B. Landau, The Humanitarian Hangover: Displacement, Aid, and Transformation in Western Tanzania (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2008); Simon Turner, ‘‘Reclaiming Politics in the Bureaucratic Space of a Burundian Refugee Camp in Tanzania,’’ in The Governance of Daily Life in Africa: Ethnographic Explorations of Public and Collective Services, ed. Giorgio Blundo and Pierre-Yves Le Meur (Leiden: Brill, 2009); Liisa Malkki, ‘‘Refugees and Exile: From ‘Refugee Studies’ to the Natural Order of Things,’’ Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995): 495–523. 28. Rebecca Sutton and Darshan Vigneswaran, ‘‘A Kafkaesque State: Deportation and Detention in South Africa,’’ Citizenship Studies 15, 5 (2011): 627–42. 29. Catherine Boone, Political Topographies of the African State: Territorial Authority and Institutional Choice, Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Tony Hodges, Angola: Anatomy of an Oil State, 2nd ed., African Issues (Oxford: Fridtjof Nansen Institute in Assocation with James Currey, 2004). 30. Deborah Posel, The Making of Apartheid, 1948–1961: Conflict and Compromise (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

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31. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1944); Douglass Cecil North, Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance: The Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 32. Herman Jeremias Nieboer, Slavery as in Industrial System: Ethnological Researches (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1900). 33. Joel Quirk and David Richardson, ‘‘Europeans, Africans and the Atlantic World, c. 1450–1850,’’ in Before the Rise of the West: International Orders in the Early Modern World, ed. Joel Quirk, Shogo Suzuki, and Yongjin Zhang (London: Routledge, 2014). 34. Joel Quirk, The Anti-Slavery Project: From the Slave Trade to Human Trafficking, Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). 35. For example, Catherine Campbell, ‘‘Selling Sex in the Time of Aids: The PsychoSocial Context of Condom Use by Sex Workers on a Southern African Mine,’’ Social Science and Medicine 50, 4 (2000): 479–94; Claire C. Robertson and Martin A. Klein, Women and Slavery in Africa (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1997). 36. Joseph C. Miller, ‘‘Introduction: Women as Slaves and Owners of Slaves,’’ in Women and Slavery: Africa, the Indian Ocean World, and the Medieval North Atlantic, ed. Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007), 12. 37. Joel Quirk and Darshan Vigneswaran, Slavery, Migration and Contemporary Bondage in Africa (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 2013). 38. John Torpey, ‘‘Coming and Going: On the State Monopolization of the Legitimate ‘Means of Movement,’ ’’ Sociological Theory 16, 3 (2002): 239–59; The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 39. David B. Coplan, ‘‘A River Runs Through It: The Meaning of the Lesotho-Free State Border,’’ African Affairs 100, 398 (2001): 81–116; Darshan Vigneswaran et al., ‘‘Criminality or Monopoly? Informal Immigration Enforcement in South Africa,’’ Journal of Southern African Studies 36, 2 (2010): 465–81. 40. Nicholas De Genova and Nathalie Mae Peutz, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in The Deportation Regime, ed. De Genova and Peutz. 41. De Genova, ‘‘The Deportation Regime,’’ 39. 42. These categories are adapted from Cresswell, ‘‘Towards a Politics of Mobility.’’ 43. This use of ‘‘channel’’ should be distinguished from its other application in the migration literature. See, for example, Allan M. Findlay and F. L. N. Li, ‘‘A Migration Channels Approach to the Study of Professionals Moving to and from Hong Kong,’’ International Migration Review 32, 3 (1998): 682–703. 44. Alison Mountz, Seeking Asylum: Human Smuggling and Bureaucracy at the Border (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); J. M. Heyman, ‘‘Ports of Entry as Nodes in the World System,’’ Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 11, 3 (2004): 303–27; Josiah Heyman, ‘‘United State Surveillance over Mexican Lives at the Border: Snapshots of an Emerging Regime,’’ Human Organization 58, 4 (1999): 430–38. 45. James C. Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998). 46. For the purposes of this discussion, power is here broadly defined in terms of the capacity of the state and its agents to influence a given course of events using a combination of military, institutional, legal, economic, and ideological resources. This working definition

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is relatively open ended and thereby sidesteps larger theoretical debates regarding how power should ideally be defined, but we believe it is sufficient as a starting point for thinking about where and how power over mobility is most commonly manifest. 47. Bayart, The State in Africa. 48. Herbst, States and Power in Africa; Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff, Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977); John K. Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 73–97. 49. Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism, Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996); Crawford Young, The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994). 50. Benno Teschke, The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics and the Making of Modern International Relations (London: Verso, 2003); Hendrik Spruyt, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors: An Analysis of Systems Change (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994). 51. Darshan Vigneswaran, Territory, Migration and the Evolution of the International System (New York: Palgrave, 2013). 52. Peter Adey, ‘‘Surveillance at the Airport: Surveilling Mobility/Mobilising Surveillance,’’ Environment and Planning A 36, 8 (2004): 1365–80; Peter Adey, ‘‘ ‘May I Have Your Attention’: Airport Geographies of Spectatorship, Position, and (Im)Mobility,’’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 25, 3 (2007): 515–36; Peter Adey, ‘‘Airports, Mobility and the Calculative Architecture of Affective Control,’’ Geoforum 39, 1 (2008): 438–51; Virginie Guiraudon and Gallya Lahav, ‘‘Comparative Perspectives on Border Control: Away from the Border and Outside the State,’’ in The Wall Around the West, ed. Andreas and Snyder; Reece Jones, Border Walls: Security and the War on Terror in the United States, India and Israel (London: Zed, 2012). 53. Boone, Political Topographies of the African State, 30. 54. John William Bernhardt, Itinerant Kingship and Royal Monasteries in Early Medieval Germany: c. 936–1075, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought 4th ser. 21 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Rita Costa Gomes, The Making of a Court Society: Kings and Nobles in Late Medieval Portugal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Levi Roach, ‘‘Hosting the King: Hospitality and the Royal Iter in Tenth-Century England,’’ Journal of Medieval History 37, 1 (2011): 34–46; Fernando Arias Guille´n, ‘‘A Kingdom Without a Capital? Itineration and Spaces of Royal Power in Castile, c. 1252–1350,’’ Journal of Medieval History 39, 4 (2013). 55. Hansen and Stepputat, Sovereign Bodies; Malkki, ‘‘Refugees and Exile.’’ 56. Mbembe, On the Postcolony. 57. Robert H. Bates, When Things Fell Apart: State Failure in Late-Century Africa, Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Bayart, The State in Africa; Bayart et al., The Criminalization of the State in Africa; Young, The African Colonial State; Pierre Englebert, Africa: Unity, Sovereignty, and Sorrow (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 2009); Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz, Africa Works: Disorder as Political Instrument (Oxford: International African Institute with James Currey, 1999). 58. Vigneswaran, Territory, Migration and the Evolution of the International System.

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Chapter 2. Portuguese Empire Building and Human Mobility in Sa˜o Tome´ and Angola, 1400s–1700s 1. Amsterdam Staasarchief (hereafter SAA), Notarialen Archieven (hereafter Not. Arch.), 1611/52-53: 1639-07-23. For more examples of similar incidents with travel documents, see SAA, Not. Arch. 1690/599: 1648-04-16; Not. Arch. 420/536: 1639-12-10; Not. Arch. 1555B/ 1453: 1641-10-08. 2. John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 11–12. 3. Ibid., 13. 4. Thomas Metcalf, Imperial Connections: India and the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 1–8. 5. For further information on the powers of each of these institutions, see Manuel Subtil, ‘‘A Administrac¸a˜o Central da Coroa,’’ in Histo´ria de Portugal, ed. Jose´ Mattoso (Lisboa: Cı´rculo de Leitores, 1998), 83–90. 6. The most important legal codes were the Ordinances of the Kingdom (Ordenac¸o˜es do Reino). There were three editions of the general ordinances with Afonso IV, Manuel I, and Filipe I (Philip II of Spain). Besides these general codes, there were also compilations of extravagant regulations. Ibid., 80–83. 7. For a general overview, see Edgar Prestage, The Royal Power and the Cortes in Portugal (Watford: Voss and Michael, 1927). For the period under study, see, for instance, Fernando Jesus Bouza Alvarez, ‘‘Portugal en la Monarquı´a Hispa´nica (1580–1640): Felipe II, las Cortes de Tomar y la Ge´nesis del Portugal cato´lico,’’ Ph.D. dissertation, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 1983; Pedro Almeida Cardim, As Cortes de Portugal: Se´culo XVII (Lisboa: s.n., 1993); Francisco Ribeiro da Silva, A Participac¸a˜o do Porto nas Cortes de Lisboa de 1619 (Porto: Caˆmara Municipal, 1987). 8. Anto´nio Manuel Hespanha, As Ve´speras do Leviathan: Instituic¸o˜es e poder polı´tico em Portugal: Se´culo XVII, vol. 1 (Lisboa: Hespanha, 1986), 179–85. 9. Marı´lia dos Santos Lopes, ‘‘A Explorac¸a˜o econo´mica da Guine´ e de Cabo Verde nos se´culos XV e XVI,’’ in Portugal do mundo, ed. Luı´s de Albuquerque, vol. 1 (Lisboa: Publicac¸o˜es Alfa, 1989), 254; Artur Teodoro de Matos, ‘‘Aspectos da administrac¸a˜o das colo´nias portuguesas nos se´culos XVI e XVII,’’ in Portugal no mundo, ed. Albuquerque, vol. 4 (Lisboa: Publicac¸o˜es Alfa, 1989), 313. 10. A similar administrative system had already been used in Portugal during the Middle Ages. In order to populate, defend, and promote economic exploitation on the areas bordering the Spanish and Muslim kingdoms, the king attributed vast territories with political, judicial, and fiscal jurisdiction to noblemen and religious and military orders. The success of this solution led the Crown to use it overseas. First, it was tried with success in Madeira and the Azores, and from there was transferred to Cape Verde, Sa˜o Tome´, Angola, and Brazil. Given this evidence, the early Portuguese administration of its Atlantic possessions had a medieval character. Cristina Maria Seuanes Serafim, As Ilhas de Sa˜o Tome´ no se´culo XVII (Lisboa: Centro de Histo´ria de Ale´m-Mar da Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 2000), 9–14, 48–49; Eunice R. J. P. L. J. da Silva, ‘‘A Administrac¸a˜o de Angola: Se´culo XVII,’’ vol. 1, MA thesis, Universidade de Lisboa, 1996, 300–314; Luı´s de Albuquerque, ‘‘A Colonizac¸a˜o de Sa˜o Tome´ e Prı´ncipe: Os capita˜es do se´culo XV,’’ in Portugal no mundo, ed. Albuquerque, vol. 2 (Lisboa: Publicac¸o˜es Alfa, 1989), 189–90; Matos, ‘‘Aspectos da administrac¸a˜o das colo´nias

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portuguesas nos se´culos XVI e XVII,’’ 311–14; Humberto Carlos Baquero Moreno, ‘‘A´lvaro de Caminha, Capita˜o-Mor da Ilha de Sa˜o Tome´,’’ in Congresso Internacional Bartolomeu Dias e a sua ´epoca, vol. 1 (Porto: Universidade do Porto, Comissa˜o Nacional para as Comemorac¸o˜es dos Descobrimentos Portugueses, 1989), 199–213. For a general overview, see Francisco Bethencourt, ‘‘Political Configurations and Local Powers,’’ in Portuguese Oceanic Expansion, 1400–1800, ed. Francisco Bethencourt and Diogo Ramada Curto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 197–254; Anto´nio de Vasconcelos de Saldanha, As Capitanias e e regime senhorial na expansa˜o portuguesa (Funchal: Secretaria Regional do Turismo, Centro de Estudos de Histo´ria do Atlaˆntico, 1992). 11. For a printed edition of the royal donation charter, see A. Bra´sio, ed., Monumenta Missionaria Africana, vol. 3 (Lisboa: Ageˆncia geral do Ultramar/Academia Portuguesa de Histo´ria, 1953), 36–51. 12. See note 11. 13. On the early Portuguese settlement in Sa˜o Tome´, see Albuquerque, ‘‘A Colonizac¸a˜o de Sa˜o Tome´,’’ 189–90; Luı´s de Albuquerque, A Ilha de Sa˜o Tome´ nos se´culos XV e XVI (Lisboa: Publicac¸o˜es Alfa, 1989). See also Pedro Jose´ da Paiva da Cunha, ‘‘A Organizac¸a˜o econo´mica de Sa˜o Tome´ (Do Inı´cio do povoamento a meados do se´culo XVII),’’ MA thesis, Universidade de Coimbra, 2001; Celso B. de Sousa, ‘‘Sa˜o Tome´ e Prı´ncipe: Do descobrimento aos meados do se´culo XVI: Desenvolvimento interno e irradiac¸a˜o no Golfo da Guine´,’’ MA thesis, Universidade de Lisboa, 1990; Mo´nica Ester Pargana Conduto Gonc¸alves Sousa, ‘‘Igreja e sociedade em Sa˜o Tome´ entre os se´culos XV e XVIII,’’ MA thesis, Universidade de Coimbra, 2001). 14. Sending orphans and convicts to serve in the army in Sa˜o Tome´ and Angola was one of the few solutions found by the state to cover for the absence of a professional army and navy until the mid-seventeenth century and the reluctance of mercenaries and soldiers to serve in the deathly environments of these regions. On several occasions, the governors of different garrisons in sub-Saharan Africa requested from the state the shipment of convicts to serve as soldiers. For instance, in 1671, the governor of Angola asked for exiles to serve in the forts under his jurisdiction. His appeal was heard in Lisbon, and by the mid-1670s 300 exiles were sent to Angola. On the same occasion, a second group of convicts was shipped to Sa˜o Tome´. Arquivo Histo´rico Ultramarino (hereafter AHU), Angola, box 10, doc. 43: 1671-07-27 and box 11, doc. 70: 1676-07-17; Madeira, box 1, doc. 27: 1676-05-06; Sa˜o Tome´, box 3, doc. 22: 1674-09-24. 15. Timothy Coates, Convicts and Orphans: Forced and State-Sponsored Colonizers in the Portuguese Empire, 1550–1755 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001), 53, 61–63; Luı´s da Cunha Pinheiro, ‘‘O Arquipe´lago do Golfo da Guine´: Fernando Po´, Sa˜o Tome´, Prı´ncipe e Ano Bom: O povoamento,’’ in Nova histo´ria da expansa˜o portuguesa: A colonizac¸a˜o atlaˆntica, ed. Artur Teodoro de Matos, vol. 2 (Lisboa: Editorial Estampa, 2005), 251–53. 16. Orphans and exiles were also used by the state during periods of economic crises to balance free migration of European population to colonial areas offering better economic opportunities. For instance, in seventeenth-century Sa˜o Tome´, the transport of exiles to the island increased to compensate the population fleeing to other areas due to the decline in the sugar production and the shifts in the Atlantic commercial circuits and networks. Fernando Castelo-Branco, O Come´rcio externo de S. Tome´ no se´culo XVII (Lisboa: Centro de Estudos Histo´ricos Ultramarinos, 1968); Serafim, As Ilhas de Sa˜o Tome´ no se´culo XVIII, 154–210; Isabel Castro Henriques, ‘‘O Ciclo do ac¸u´car em Sa˜o Tome´ nos se´culos XV e XVI,’’ in Portugal no mundo, ed. Albuquerque, 1: 264–80.

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Notes to Pages 45–49

17. For further details on the consolidation of the Portuguese early modern state, see Hespanha, As Ve´speras do Leviathan; Anto´nio Manuel Hespanha, ‘‘Cities and the State in Portugal,’’ Theory and Society 18, 5 (1989): 707–20; Anto´nio Manuel Hespanha, Histo´ria de Portugal moderno: Polı´tico e institucional (Lisboa: Universidade Aberta, 1995). See also Ana Cristina Nogueira da Silva, O Modelo espacial do estado moderno: Reorganizac¸a˜o territorial em Portugal nos finais do antigo regime (Lisboa: Editorial Estampa, 1998). 18. For more information on Novais’s rule in Angola, see Ilı´dio do Amaral, O Consulado de Paulo Dias de Novais: Angola no u´ltimo quartel do se´culo XVI e primeiro do se´culo XVII (Lisboa: Ministe´rio da Cieˆncia e da Tecnologia, Instituto de Investigac¸a˜o Cientı´fica Tropical, 2000). 19. Silva, ‘‘A Administrac¸a˜o de Angola,’’ 1: 259–63; Anto´nio Luı´s Alves Ferronha, ‘‘Angola: 10 Anos de histo´ria (1666–1676),’’ vol. 1, MA thesis, Universidade de Lisboa, 1988, 126–38; Beatrix Heintze, ‘‘Angola nas garras do tra´fico de escravos: A guerra do Ndongo (1611–1630),’’ Revista Internacional de Estudos Africanos 1 (1984): 11–60. 20. Anto´nio Dores Costa, ‘‘Recrutamento,’’ in Nova histo´ria militar de Portugal, ed. Manuel Themudo Barata and Nuno Severiano Teixeira, vol. 2 (Lisboa: Cı´rculo de Leitores, 2004), 73–92; Anto´nio Manuel Hespanha, ‘‘A Administrac¸a˜o militar,’’ in ibid., 2, 169–75. 21. Beatrix Heintze, ‘‘Ngonda a Mwiza: Um sobado angolano sob domı´nio portugueˆs no se´culo XVII,’’ Revista Internacional de Estudos Africanos 8–9 (1988): 221–33; Heintze, ‘‘L’arrive´e des Portugais a-t-elle sonne le glas du Royaume du Ndongo: La marge de manoeuvre du Ngola 1575–1671,’’ Studia 56–57 (2000): 117–46; Heintze, ‘‘Angola nas garras do tra´fico de escravos.’’ 22. Manuel Jose´ Subtil, ‘‘Governo e administrac¸a˜o,’’ in Histo´ria de Portugal, ed. Jose´ Mattoso, vol. 5 (Lisboa: Editorial Estampa, 1993), 157–203; Hespanha, As Ve´speras do Leviathan; A. H. de Oliveira Marques, Histo´ria de Portugali, vol. 2 (Lisboa: Edic¸o˜es Agora, 1972), 326–27. 23. M. A. Costa, ed., Ordenac¸o˜es filipinas, 3 vols. (Lisboa: Fundac¸a˜o Calouste Gulbenkian, 1985); M. A. Costa, ed., Ordenac¸o˜es manuelinas, 5 vols. (Lisboa: Fundac¸a˜o Calouste Gulbenkian, 1984). 24. In the Guinea-Bissau region, there was an identical situation. Anto´nio Carreira, Os portugueses nos rios de Guine´, 1500–1900. (Lisboa: A. Carreira, 1984), 54–97. 25. Silva, ‘‘A Administrac¸a˜o de Angola,’’ 1: 104–6, 194–200. 26. Valentim Alexandre and Jill Dias, eds., O Impe´rio africano (se´culos XIX e XX) (Lisboa: Editorial Estampa, 2000), 242–365. 27. On the monopoly of Henry the Navigator over the western coast of Africa, see, for instance, Joa˜o Silva de Sousa, A Casa senhorial do Infante Dom Henrique (Lisboa: Livros Horizonte, 1991). 28. Carlos Alberto Caldeira Geraldes, ‘‘Casa da I´ndia: Um estudo de estrutura e funcionalidade (1509–1630),’’ MA thesis, Universidade de Lisboa, 1997; ‘‘I´ndia, Casa da,’’ in Diciona´rio de histo´ria de Portugal, vol. 3 (Porto: Liv. Figueirinhas, 1981), 281–89; Franciso Mendes da Luz, ed., Regimento da casa da ´India: Manuscrito do se´culo XVII existente no Arquivo Geral de Simancas (Lisboa: Ministe´rio da Educac¸a˜o e Cultural, Instituto de Cultura e Lı´ngua Portuguesa, 1992); Damia˜o Peres, ed., Regimento das casas das ´Indias e Mina (Coimbra: Instituto de Estudos Histo´ricos Dr. Anto´nio de Vasconcelos, 1947). 29. Serafim, As Ilhas de Sa˜o Tome´ no se´culo XVII, 84–89; Isabel de Sa´-Nogueira and Bernardo de Sa´-Nogueira, ‘‘A Ilha do Prı´ncipe no primeiro quartel do se´culo XVI:

Notes to Pages 49–51

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Administrac¸a˜o e come´rcio,’’ Congresso Internacional Bartolomeu Dias e a sua ´epoca, vol. 3 (Porto: Universidade do Porto, Comissa˜o Nacional para as Comemorac¸o˜es dos Descobrimentos Portugueses, 1989), 85–86; Silva, ‘‘A Administrac¸a˜o de Angola: se´culo XVII,’’ 205–18. 30. See note 29. 31. Jill Dias, ‘‘As Primeiras penetrac¸o˜es em A´frica,’’ in Portugal no mundo, ed. Albuquerque, 1: 285; Marı´lia dos Santos Lopes, ‘‘A Explorac¸a˜o econo´mica da Guine´ e de Cabo Verde nos se´culos XV e XVI,’’ in Portugal no mundo, 1: 252. 32. J. Bato’Ora Ballong-Wen-Mewuda, ‘‘A instalac¸a˜o de fortalezas na costa africana: Os casos de Arguim e da Mina, come´rcio e contactos culturais,’’ in Portugal no mundo, 2: 137–49. Fre´deric Mauro, Portugal, o Brasil e o atlaˆntico (1570–1670), vol. 1 (Lisboa: Editorial Estampa, 1997), 217–18. 33. Filipa Ribeiro da Silva, ‘‘Transferring European Fiscal System Overseas: A Comparison Between the Portuguese Home and Colonial Fiscal System,’’ in Fiscal Systems in the European Economy from the 13th to the 18th Centuries, ed. Simonetta Cavaciocchi, vol. 1 (Firenze: Firenze University Press, 2008), 550–67. 34. For further information on the transfer of the Portuguese fiscal system to the colonies, see ibid., 545–67. 35. Serafim, As Ilhas de Sa˜o Tome´ no se´culo XVII, 84–89; Sa´-Nogueira and Sa´-Nogueira, ‘‘A Ilha do Prı´ncipe no primeiro quartel do se´culo XVI,’’ 85–86. 36. Silva, ‘‘A Administrac¸a˜o de Angola: se´culo XVII,’’ 1: 205, 218, 221–53. 37. In January 1620, Captain Garcia Mendes Castello Branco informed the Court that around two hundred Angolan rulers (sobas) had recognized Portuguese sovereignty and, therefore, they were to pay tribute to Portugal. Heintze, ‘‘Angola nas garras do tra´fico de escravos’’; Heintze, ‘‘L’Arrive´e des portugais a-t-elle sonne le glas du Royaume du Ndongo,’’ 117–46; Heintze, ‘‘Ngonda a Mwiza.’’ 38. Bra´sio, ed., Monumenta Missionaria Africana, vol. 6 (Lisboa: Ageˆncia Geral do Ultramar, 1952), 446–52; ‘‘Relato´rio de receitas e despesas de Sa˜o Tome´ de 13 de Outubro de 1605,’’ in Artur Teodoro de Matos, ‘‘Os Donos do poder e a economia de Sa˜o Tome´ e Prı´ncipe no Inı´cio de seiscentos,’’ Mare Liberum 6 (1993): 184–86; Silva, ‘‘A Administrac¸a˜o de Angola,’’ 2: 267–70. 39. On the early Portuguese presence in Angola, see Ilı´dio do Amaral, O Reino do Congo, os Mbundu (ou Ambundos), o Reino dos ‘Ngola’ (ou de Angola) e a presenc¸a portuguesa de finais do se´culo XV a meados do se´culo XVI (Lisboa: Ministe´rio da Cieˆncia e da Tecnologia, Instituto de Investigac¸a˜o Cientı´fica Tropical, 1996); Amaral, O Consulado de Paulo Dias de Novais; Amaral, O Rio Cuanza (Angola), da Barra a Cambambe: Reconstruc¸a˜o de aspectos geogra´ficos e acontecimentos histo´ricos dos se´culos XVI e XVII (Lisboa: Ministe´rio da Cieˆncia e da Tecnologia, Instituto de Investigac¸a˜o Cientı´fica Tropical, 2000); Amaral, Aspectos do povoamento branco de Angola (Lisboa: Junta de Investigac¸o˜es do Ultramar, 1960); Amaral, Entre o Cunene e o Cubango, ou, a propo´sito de uma fronteira africana (Lisboa: Centro de Estudos Geogra´ficos, 1982). 40. By the 1660s, European and mixed descent permanent residents were forbidden by Angolan and Portuguese authorities to access the hinterland, in particular the fairs. The same dispositions applied to European temporary migrants and wealthy Angolan merchants operating in the inland commerce. AHU, Angola: 1664-11-19: ‘‘Consulta do Conselho Ultramarino,’’ in Bra´sio, Monumenta Missionaria Africana, 12: 508–13. Biblioteca do Arquivo

246

Notes to Pages 51–52

Histo´rico Ultramarino (hereafter BAHU), ‘‘Regimento do governador do reino de Angola, Trista˜o da Cunha, 10 April 1666,’’ in Legislac¸a˜o Antiga, vol. 18 (Lisboa, 1950), 297–367; Silva, ‘‘A Administrac¸a˜o de Angola,’’ 1: 259–63, 309. 41. In practical terms, the contratadores were allowed by the Portuguese Crown to transfer to a third party a part or a branch of the contract through a sort of trading licenses (avenc¸as). The avenc¸as were contracts authorizing the holder (avenc¸ador) to export a certain quantity of a given product in a specific geographical area. According to these contracts, the contratadores would cover the risks involved in the transport, such as sinking, fire, and capture by pirates and corsairs. The other party had permission to load the quantity of goods mentioned in the contract in a specific port. For instance, in Angola, the ships of the avenc¸adores were to be loaded only at Luanda. The loading was to be inspected by the agent of the contratador and the royal factor. The contratadores or their agents could sell these trading licenses in Portugal and the various Atlantic territories. To register all the avenc¸as sold in Portugal, the contratador received a book issued by the Royal Treasury Council (Conselho da Fazenda). The trading licenses sold overseas were to be listed by the highest royal official of the Royal Treasury in the colony (Provedor da Fazenda) and dispatched to Lisbon annually, 221–53; Aure´lio de Oliveira, ‘‘As Concesso˜es Mercantis e a Construc¸a˜o Atlaˆntica Portuguesa,’’ in Actas do Congresso Internacional Atlaˆntico de Antigo Regime: poderes e sociedades (Lisboa: Instituto Camo˜es, 2008). 42. Serafim, As Ilhas de Sa˜o Tome´ no se´culo XVII, 11–13; Albuquerque, ‘‘A Colonizac¸a˜o de Sa˜o Tome´,’’ 174. 43. For security reasons, private ships heading to Sa˜o Tome´, Cape Verde, the Upper Guinea Rivers, and Brazil were obliged to sail a convoy with at least four vessels. To facilitate the process, they were authorized by the Crown to join the royal fleets departing from Lisbon to the same destinations every year. For identical reasons, ships were also required to transport a specific number and type of guns on board for their own defense. The number and type of guns were defined according to the ships’ tonnage. ‘‘Livro do despacho das naos e naujos que foram desa cydade que ham de hir armadas,’’ in J. A. Pinto Ferreira, ed., Certas provideˆncias re´gias respeitantes a` guarda da costa do Reino e ao come´rcio ultramarino, no se´culo de Quinhentos (Porto, 1967), 39–46. 44. However, this situation would change over time. In the late seventeenth century, the Portuguese state took several measures to restrain the movement of temporary migrants, both Portuguese and foreigners, especially in the Angolan borderlands and frontiers. The state’s main goal was to limit these men’s access to the Angolan fairs located close to the Portuguese forts in the vicinity of the Angolan chieftaincies under Portuguese influence. According to a law dating from 1666, Europeans living temporarily in Luanda, Benguela, or the fortresses along the Kwanza River for commercial purposes were forbidden to leave the towns and forts, to travel to the interior to conduct trade at the fairs, and to engage in slave raiding. This legislation aimed at stopping these traders from inflicting all sorts of abuses on African traders and local populations either by ambushing slave caravans on their way to the fairs, by offering unfair deals to local traders, or by simply conducting slave raids in neighboring villages. AHU, Angola, 1664-11-19: ‘‘Consulta do Conselho Ultramarino,’’ in Bra´sio, ed., Monumenta Missionaria Africana, 12: 508–13; BAHU, ‘‘Regimento do Governador do Reino de Angola, Trista˜o da Cunha (10-04-1666),’’ Legislac¸a˜o Antiga 18: 297–367; Silva, ‘‘A Administrac¸a˜o de Angola,’’ 1: 259–63, 309; Ferronha, ‘‘Angola: 10 anos de histo´ria,’’ 1: 126–38; Heintze, ‘‘Angola nas garras do tra´fico de escravos.’’

Notes to Pages 53–60

247

45. Rui Ramos, ‘‘Rebelia˜o e sociedade colonial: ‘Alvoroc¸os’ e ‘levantamentos’ em Sa˜o Tome´ (1545–1555),’’ Revista Internacional de Estudos Africanos 4/5 (Jan.–Dec., 1986): 17–74; Carlos Agostinhos das Neves, Jorge M. Flores, and Artur Teodoro de Matos, ‘‘A repressa˜o contra os escravos de Sa˜o Tome´ (1595) e a guerra em Ceila˜o (1587–1617),’’ in Portugal no mundo, ed. Albuquerque, 5: 100–112. 46. These agreements, known as contratos de vassalagem, aimed at obtaining from the neighboring chiefs recognition of Portugal’s sovereignty over their territories and populations and the recognition of their ‘‘submission’’ to the authority of the Portuguese king, establishing a sort of seigniorial relationship on a very medieval style; Heintze, ‘‘Ngonda a Mwiza’’; Heintze, ‘‘L’arrive´e des Portugais a-t-elle sonne le glas du Royaume du Ndongo’’; Heintze, ‘‘Angola nas garras do tra´fico de escravos.’’ 47. Heintze, ‘‘Angola nas garras do tra´fico de escravos,’’ 11–60. Beatrix Heintze, ed., Fontes para a histo´ria de Angola do se´culo XVII (Stuttgart: Steiner Verlag Wiesbaden, 1985). See also Maria Isabel Figueira Freire, ‘‘Memo´ria da Rainha Jinga: Portugal e Angola no se´culo XVII,’’ MA thesis, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 1995. 48. Even in the 1960s, Angolan borderlines remained out of reach for Crown officials, partly given the lack of road infrastructure and disinterest of colonial authorities toward certain areas. 49. ‘‘Carta da Caˆmara de Luanda a El-Rei D. Afonso VI’’: 1659-04-29, in Bra´sio, ed., Monumenta Missiona´ria Africana, 12: 231–33; AHU, co´dice 16, folio 135v: ‘‘Consulta do Conselho Ultramarino sobe queixas dos moradores de Luanda’’: 1664-11-19; Silva, ‘‘A Administrac¸a˜o de Angola,’’ 1: 233–37.

Chapter 3. ‘‘Captive to Civilization’’: Law, Labor Mobility, and Violence in Colonial Mozambique 1. See Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 2. Mahmood Mamdani, focusing especially on the role played by African authorities, has characterized this as ‘‘decentralized despotism.’’ Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism, Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/ History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996). 3. The phrase comes from British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s1960 speech, delivered in Ghana and South Africa in January and February, respectively. 4. A few of the broader conceptualizations of this problem are discussed in Jean-Franc¸ois Bayart, L’e´tat en Afrique: La politique du ventre (Paris: Fayard, 1989); Mamdani, Citizen and Subject; Achille Mbembe, De la postcolonie: Essai sur l’imagination politique dans l’Afrique contemporaine (Paris: Kharthala, 2000). 5. Martin Channock, Law, Custom, and Social Order: The Colonial Experience in Malawi and Zambia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Sara Berry, ‘‘Hegemony on a Shoestring: Indirect Rule and Access to Agricultural Land,’’ Africa 62, 3 (1992): 327–55; Diana Jeater, Marriage, Perversion, and Power: The Construction of Moral Discourse in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) 1894–1930 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993); Elizabeth Schmidt, Peasants, Traders, and Wives: Shona Women in the History of Zimbabwe: 1870–1939 (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1992). For a magisterial overview of much of this literature, see Thomas Spear, ‘‘Neo-Traditionalism and the Limits of Invention in British Colonial Africa,’’ Journal of African History 44, 1 (2003): 3–27.

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Notes to Pages 60–63

6. Gregory Mann, ‘‘What Was the Indige´nat? The ‘Empire of Law’ in French West Africa,’’ Journal of African History 50, 3 (2009): 332. 7. David Killingray, ‘‘The ‘Rod of Empire’: The Debate over Corporal Punishment in the British African Colonial Forces, 1888–1946,’’ Journal of African History 35, 2 (1994): 201–16; David Anderson, ‘‘Master and Servant in Colonial Kenya, 1895–1939,’’ Journal of African History 41, 3 (2000): 459–85; Steven Pierce, ‘‘Punishment and the Political Body: Flogging and Colonialism in Northern Nigeria,’’ Interventions 3, 2 (2001): 206–21. 8. Michel Foucault, ‘‘Governmentality,’’ in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 87–104; see also Benedetta Rossi, this volume. For this point on the indige´nat, see Mann, ‘‘What Was the Indige´nat?’’ 352. 9. Bridget O’Laughlin, ‘‘Class and the Customary: The Ambiguous Legacy of the Indigenato in Mozambique,’’ African Affairs 99, 394 (2000): 9. Here, O’Laughlin is engaging directly with Mamdani’s argument in Citizen and Subject. 10. Article 1 of the Labor Code, from Joaquim Moreira da Silva Cunha, O trabalho indı´gena: Estudo de direito colonial, vol. 2, 2nd ed. (Lisbon: Ageˆncia Geral do Ultramar, 1955), 147. 11. Anto´nio Enes, Moc¸ambique: Relato´rio apresentado ao governo (1893; Lisbon: Imprensa National, 1971),75. 12. If not precisely totalitarian, the situation resembles Arendt’s model of totalitarianism; see Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973). 13. The labor law specified requirements of edible food and healthy housing, just as it prohibited employers from using corporal punishment. 14. Perry Anderson, ‘‘Portugal and the End of Ultra-Colonialism, Parts 1–3,’’ New Left Review 15 (May–June 1962): 83–102; 16 (July–Aug. 1962): 88–123; 17 (Winter 1962): 85–114. 15. Isabelle Merle, ‘‘De la ‘le´galisation’ de la violence en contexte colonial: Le re´gime de l’indige´nat en question,’’ Politix 17, 66 (2004): 143. 16. Ibid.; Mann, ‘‘What Was the Indige´nat?’’ Merle is concerned in particular with how the indige´nat was a more or less open contradiction of France’s republican legal system. 17. In practice, assimilated status was limited to those who could attend several years of school and achieve a measure of material wealth. Uncommon even among the urban African population that had better access to educational and economic opportunities, such upward mobility was all but unknown to rural residents. Moreover, as Jeanne Penvenne has so poignantly shown, acquiring and maintaining one’s status as an assimilado depended on a denial of self and on the whim of a settler class that jealously and at times capriciously policed and fortified the boundaries that separated the races. Jeanne Penvenne, African Workers and Colonial Racism: Mozambican Strategies and Struggles in Lourenc¸o Marques, 1877–1962 (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1995). 18. Emmanuelle Saada, ‘‘La Re´publique des indige`nes,’’ in Dictionnaire critique de la re´publique, ed. V. Duclert and C. Prochasson (Paris: Flammarion, 2002); cited in Mann, ‘‘What Was the Indige´nat?’’ 336. 19. Though focused largely on a later period than the one considered here, Zachary Kagan-Guthrie offers an insightful discussion of forced exile as a tool of ‘‘spatialised control’’; Zachary Kagan-Guthrie, ‘‘Repression and Migration: Forced Labour Exile of Mozambicans to Sa˜o Tome´, 1948–1955,’’ Journal of Southern African Studies 37, 3 (2011): 451.

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20. Merle, ‘‘De la ‘le´galisation’ de la violence,’’ 140. 21. Ibid., 159. 22. Justin Willis, ‘‘ ‘Men on the Spot,’ Labor, and the Colonial State in British East Africa: The Mombasa Water Supply, 1911–1917,’’ International Journal of African Historical Studies (1995): 26; see also discussion on 37–46. Willis focuses on the formation of ‘‘local policy,’’ and as such highlights the role of African authorities, as the policy-making partners of district administrators. His more general point about the distance from law to practice reveals the similarity with the central Mozambican case. 23. Frederick Cooper, ‘‘From Free Labor to Family Allowances: Labor and African Society in Colonial Discourse,’’ American Ethnologist 16, 4 (1989): 750. 24. See Agamben, State of Exception. 25. Merle, ‘‘De la ‘le´galisation’ de la violence,’’ 160; Mann, ‘‘What Was the Indige´nat?’’ 339–40. 26. Agamben, State of Exception, 51; Mann, ‘‘What Was the Indige´nat?’’ 333. 27. Agamben, State of Exception, 31–40. 28. See, for example, Anto´nio Enes, ‘‘Regulamentac¸a˜o do trabalho dos indı´genas,’’ in Moc¸ambique: Relato´rio apresentado ao governo, (1893; rep. Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional, 1971), 495–513. 29. Article 1 of the Labor Code. The code applied to all indigenous peoples, not only Africans. 30. James Duffy, A Question of Slavery (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967); Leroy Vail and Landeg White, Capitalism and Colonialism in Mozambique: A Study of Quelimane District (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980); Penvenne, African Workers and Colonial Racism; Allen Isaacman, Cotton Is the Mother of Poverty: Peasants, Work, and Rural Struggle in Colonial Mozambique 1938–1961 (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1996); Luı´s Anto´nio Covane, O Trabalho migrato´rio e a agricultura no sul de Moc¸ambique (1920–1992) (Maputo: Prome´dia, 2001). 31. These exemptions are laid out in Article 3 of the 1899 law, reproduced in Anto´nio Enes, Moc¸ambique: Relato´rio apresentado ao governo (1893; Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional, 1971), 496. {Same question here about the style for indicating the publication dates}. Women’s exemption was honored in the breach, though their service as forced laborers for the state or private employers was largely local and short term, while men were regularly sent long distances for months at a time. Forced cultivation, as distinct from forced labor, left women vulnerable to nearly unceasing work. 32. I discuss the effect of the League of Nations on Portugal’s policies in Eric Allina, Slavery by Any Other Name: African Life Under Company Rule in Colonial Mozambique (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012), 77–82. 33. Da Silva Cunha, O Trabalho indı´gena, 203. 34. A triggering event was Ghana’s complaint to the International Labour Organization. 35. Enes, Moc¸ambique, 75. 36. Ibid., 70–71. 37. Ibid., 69. 38. Patrick Harries, ‘‘Slavery, Social Incorporation and Surplus Extraction: The Nature of Free and Unfree Labour in South-East Africa,’’ Journal of African History 22, 3 (1981): 309–30; Patrick Harries, Work, Culture, and Identity: Migrant Laborers in Mozambique and South Africa, 1860–1910 (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1994).

250

Notes to Pages 67–68

39. The historical literature on this migration is extensive; the best work in English, especially for the early decades, is Harries, Work, Culture, and Identity. Over a longer dure´e, see T. Dunbar Moodie and Vivian Ndatshe, Going for Gold: Men, Mines, and Migration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Stephen Lubkemann, Culture in Chaos: An Anthropology of the Social Condition in War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 40. Allen Isaacman, Mozambique: The Africanization of a European Institution: The Zambesi Prazos, 1750–1902 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1972); Malyn Dudley Dunn Newitt Portuguese Settlement on the Zambesi: Exploration, Land Tenure, and Colonial Rule in East Africa (New York: Africana, 1973). For the sugar plantations of the Zambesi Valley, see the masterful work by Vail and White, Capitalism and Colonialism in Mozambique. 41. The Gaza state did not fall until late 1895 and some prazeros submitted to Portuguese authority only several years later. The Makombe, rulers of the Barue´ region in the upper Zambezi Valley, retained a good deal of autonomy until 1917, when a widespread but ultimately failed rebellion against the Portuguese ended with a firm stamp of colonial power. See Allen F. Isaacman and Barbara S. Isaacman, The Tradition of Resistance in Mozambique: AntiColonial Activity in the Zambesi Valley, 1850–1921 (London: Heinemann, 1976); Rene´ Pe´lissier, Naissance du Mozambique: Re´sistance et re´voltes anticoloniales (1854–1918) (Orgeval: Pelissier, 1984). 42. Philip R. Warhurst, Anglo-Portuguese Relations in South-Central Africa 1890–1900 (London: Longmans, 1962); Eric Axelson, Portugal and the Scramble for Africa, 1875–1891 (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1967); Malyn Dudley Dunn Newitt, A History of Mozambique (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). 43. Well-founded insecurity about the solidity of Portugal’s territorial claims in Africa against imperial rivals fueled a nativist imperial lobby in Lisbon. 44. The British South Africa Company comes close, but it ruled the territory later known as Southern Rhodesia only until 1923. There were many others, though none had as much autonomy or lasted much past the conquest years: the Imperial British East Africa Company, the Royal Niger Company, the German East Africa Company, as well as France’s decision to rent out more than 270,000 square miles of central Africa to concessionary companies and the pursuit of King Leopold II of a vast private fiefdom in the present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo. 45. For the history of company rule in central Mozambique, see Neil Tomlinson, ‘‘The Mozambique Chartered Company,’’ Ph.D. dissertation, University of London, 1987; Leroy Vail, ‘‘Mozambique’s Chartered Companies: The Rule of the Feeble,’’ Journal of African History 17, 3 (1976); Allina, Slavery by Any Other Name. Vail and White look at a slightly different type of company in Capitalism and Colonialism in Mozambique. 46. Tomlinson, ‘‘The Mozambique Chartered Company’’ 43–45, 101–7, 114–16. 47. Boletı´m da Companhia de Moc¸ambique 10 (May 16, 1907). Forced labor in other parts of colonial Mozambique is examined in Vail and White, Capitalism and Colonialism in Mozambique; Isaacman, Cotton Is the Mother of Poverty; Penvenne, African Workers and Colonial Racism; Joel Maurı´cio Das Neves Tembe, ‘‘Economy, Society and Labour Migration in Central Mozambique, 1930–c. 1965: A Case Study of Manica Province,’’ Ph.D. dissertation, University of London, 1998; Covane, O Trabalho migrato´rio e a agricultura; Arlindo Gonc¸alo Chilundo, Os Camponeses e os caminhos de ferro e estradas em Nampula (1900–1961) (Maputo: Prome´dia, 2001).

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48. The settler maize farming community did not emerge until midway through the first decade of the twentieth century; most early settlers hoped to strike it rich in gold mining. For more on this early history of white settlement in central Mozambique, see Tomlinson, ‘‘The Mozambique Chartered Company,’’ chap. 3. 49. This chain of events occurred shortly after the overthrow of the monarchy in Portugal; in this context, the company administration took somewhat seriously claims that ‘‘The farmers and miners and commercial men had made the country . . . it was time that the men who made the country ruled it.’’ Beira Post, November 16, 1910, supplement. For a more detailed account of this episode, see Allina, Slavery by Any Other Name, 37–39. 50. The company labor regime was based on fictional ‘‘contracts’’ that workers neither saw nor signed; many of the labor department regulations were similarly fictional, most especially regarding wage rates and payments. I discuss this, and its implications, more fully in Allina, Slavery by Any Other Name, 40–45. 51. Such payments, initially informally made, were later officially authorized and incorporated into regular district-level administrative practice. AHM, FCM/SGR/Caixa 1: Governor Annual Report 1901, SGR/002/01, 19; Caixa 256: Moribane District Report June 1898; Caixa 2: Governor Annual Report 1905, SGR/006/01, 46; Caixa 5: Governor Annual Report 1911, SGR/011/01, 20; AHM, FCM, SGP/Caixa 74: Circular 29/2010 of September 1,1916. 52. A widespread practice throughout colonial Africa often designated at the time as indirect rule. Sara Berry calls it ‘‘hegemony on a shoestring’’; Mamdani dubs it ‘‘decentralized despotism.’’ Berry, ‘‘Hegemony on a Shoestring’’; Mamdani, Citizen and Subject. 53. AHM, FCM, SGR/Caixa 113: Native Labor Department Annual Report 1926, SGR/ 2268/01, 18, 20–161. 54. Some more substantial, though temporary changes came following hearings of the Temporary Slavery Commission of the League of Nations and the 1926 Convention on Slavery. Despite Portugal signing the convention, officials used a series of subterfuges to meet it in letter, though not in spirit. I discuss this at greater length in Allina, Slavery by Any Other Name, 77–82, 153–57. 55. Anthony Hamilton Millard Kirk-Greene, ‘‘The Thin White Line: The Size of the British Colonial Service in Africa,’’ African Affairs 79, 314 (1980): 25–44. Kirk-Greene used the phrase in his essay describing the relative paucity of administrators in the British colonial service, relative to both the population and the territory they controlled. Notwithstanding their small numbers, he notes they wielded great influence and attributes this to, among other factors, coercive practices and roles of African authorities. The view here contrasts with the far more limited state power described by Crawford Young and Jeffrey Herbst, and the contrast is worth comment. First, their characterization of the colonial state as weak begs the question ‘‘weak relative to what?’’ Weakness (or strength) is a relative capacity, not an absolute characteristic. In the case of the African colonial state, regardless how it may have compared to models of the modern European state, it nonetheless developed, by joining its coercive practices to a set of channeling processes and a portable, dispersed infrastructure, a great capacity to secure Africans’ compliance. While social science orthodoxy dictates that weak states rely on violence while strong states cultivate a hegemonic discourse to secure compliance, it is hard to imagine that Africans perceived or experienced the violence of the colonial state as an expression of its weakness. 56. Boletı´m 14 (July 17, 1911), Order 3216, Article 15, paragraph 2; AHM, FCM/SGC / Caixa 178: Circular 2 of February 2, 1920. The company had first attempted to impose a yearlong contract in 1917 but suspended its implementation when the Makombe uprising broke

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out early that year. AHM, FCM/SGP/Caixa 70: Circular 46/2739 of December 9, 1916; AHM, FCM/SGC/Caixa 177: Circular 7 of January 30, 1918. 57. Boletı´m 2 (January 16, 1909), Order 2966. 58. Boletı´m 14 (July 17, 1911), Order 3216 of July 12, 1911. 59. That the law forced people to purchase their pass added an insult to its imposition. 60. James Duffy, Portuguese Africa (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959) 147; Jose´ Capela and Eduardo Medeiros, O tra´fico de escravos de Moc¸ambique para as Ilhas do Indico, 1720–1902 (Maputo: Universidade Eduardo Mondlane, 1987); Gwyn Campbell, ‘‘Madagascar and Mozambique in the Slave Trade of the Western Indian Ocean 1800–1861,’’ in The Economics of the Indian Ocean Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century, ed. William Gervase Clarence-Smith (London: Frank Cass, 1989), 166–93; Jehanne-Emmanuelle Monnier, Esclaves de la canne a` sucre: Engage´s et planteurs a` Nossi-Be´, Madagascar 1850–1880 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006). 61. Douglas Wheeler notes that the idiom is in part the product of Portugal’s long history of alliance with a much more powerful English partner; during 1650–1945, Portugal was dependent, to varying degrees, on England, and when faced with requests (or demands) that Lisbon could not or preferred not to meet, a superficial response sometimes followed. Douglas Wheeler, Historical Dictionary of Portugal (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1993), 38. Jeanne Marie Penvenne has commented on the idiom’s enduring use in the contemporary world; see Jeanne Penvenne, ‘‘Review of Confronting Leviathan: Mozambique Since Independence, by Margaret Hall and Tom Young,’’ International Journal of African Historical Studies 33, 1 (2000): 198–200. 62. AHM, FCM/SGP/Caixa 73: D. A. Chiloane to D. A. Sofala, no. 23 of July 9, 1913. 63. Oral testimony (OT), Machipanda (Bairro Chiqueia), May 14, 1997; OT, Chiteve, May 15, 1997; OT, Messika (25 de Setembro) May 31, 1997; OT, Chazuca, July 29, 1997. On chibaro more generally, see, for example, Charles Van Onselen, Chibaro: African Mine Labour in Southern Rhodesia, 1900–1933 (London: Pluto, 1980). While conducting interviews with older residents in central Mozambique, I once asked if those who were taken for contract work had any choice in the matter; the response was dismissively descriptive: ‘‘He who wants, he who doesn’t want—let’s go.’’ That answer, repeated by many, usually accompanied by a facial expression suggesting my question was naı¨ve, at best, made clear to me what appeared only rarely in the written record: the question of consent was entirely beside the point. 64. Most administrators considered conscription of 10 percent of the male population judged ‘‘fit’’ to be the norm. 65. I have written on these violations more extensively in Allina, Slavery by Any Other Name, 46–71. 66. AHM, FCM/SGP/Caixa 69: Inspecc¸a˜o de Financ¸as e Explorac¸a˜o to Governor, 374 of August 28, 1924, 5. 67. Ibid.; Caixa 71: Indı´genas para Manica, Governor to Managing Director, letter 1441 of 1910, November 3, 1910. 68. AHM, FCM/SGP/Caixa 70: D. A. Manica to Governor, 302/2304 of December 31, 1919, SGP/0130/39; Commission report to D. A. Manica, December 31, 1919, SGP/0130/39 [attached to letter 302/2304, D. A. Manica to Governor]. 69. OT, Davide Franque, August 18, 1998; S. J. Hanna, Standard Shona Dictionary, rev. ed. (Harare: College Press, 1987), 189.

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70. AHM, FCM/SGP/Caixa 74: Fuga de Indı´genas para o Territo´rio inglez; Inspector General of Exploration to Governor, no. 411 of 1901, confidential, November 22, 1901. 71. AHM, FCM/SGP/Caixa 105: P. Binde´ to D. A. Moribane, July 17, 1900. 72. AHM, FCM/ATICE/Caixa 13: Agent Neves Ferreira to George Diakuo, Monte Chiluvios, January 13, 1929. 73. AHM, FCM/SGC/Caixa 15: Governor to Managing Director, no. 357, March 30, 1910; AHM, FCM/SGP/Caixa 74: Agricultores Vila Pery to Governor, April 22, 1918, SGP/ 0130/39. 74. AHM, FCM/SGR/Caixas 111–13: NLD Reports, 1911–26. 75. AHM, FCM/SGR/Caixa 234: Manica District 4th Trimester Report 1911, SGR/5024/ 01, ‘‘Servic¸o de Vigilaˆncia.’’ 76. Data on worker flight: for 1911 can be found in AHM, FCM/SGR/Caixa 234: Manica District, Annual Report for 1911 from the Delegation of the Native Labor Department, SGR/ 5025, 8; for 1912–26, see the reports from the Native Labor Department, AHM, FCM/SGR/ Caixas 111–13. The ‘‘fiery sun’’ comment can be found in Caixa 236: Manica District 4th Trimester Report 1914, SG/5044/01, ‘‘Ma˜o d’Obra Indı´gena.’’ 77. AHM, FCM/SGR/Caixa 111: NLD Report, 3rd Trimester 1912, SGR/2211/01, Manica Delegation Report, 3. 78. The mortality for Native Labor Department recruits in Manica averaged 2.9 percent in the last quarter of 1912 and first quarter of 1913. During 1911 and the first three quarters of 1912, it averaged just 0.5 percent. AHM, FCM/SGR/Caixa 234: Manica District Annual Report 1911, Manica Delegation Report 1911, SGR/5025/01, 9; Caixa 111: NLD Report, 2nd Trimester 1912, SGR/2209/01, 27; NLD Report, 3rd Trimester 1912, SGR/2211/01, 3 of annexed Manica Delegation Report; NLD Annual Report 1912, SGR/2212/01, 73; NLD Report 1st Trimester 1913, SGR/2213/01, 33. Data on the total number of recruits in Manica during these years comes from Caixa 236: Manica District Annual Report 1914, SGR/5045/01, 132. 79. Data on the evadidos comes from AHM, FCM/SGR/Caixa 111: NLD 3rd Trimester Report, SGR/2213/01, 27; NLD Annual Report 1912, SGR/2212/01, 71; Caixa 235: Manica District Report 3rd Trimester 1912, SGR/5030/01, unpaginated; Manica District Report 1st Trimester 1913, SGR/5035/01, unpaginated. 80. These two paragraphs draw on documents found in AHM, FCM/SGP/Caixa 733: ‘‘Mau tratos a` indigenas’’ [Ill-treatment of natives]. 81. AHM, FCM/SGP/Caixa 733: Native Labor Department agent to district administrator Chimoio, letter 6/105, February 10, 1920. 82. The general counsel referred to a possible criminal investigation of the death, though I was unable to locate any documents referring to one. 83. AHM, FCM/SGP/Caixa 72: D. A. Mocoque to D. A. Govuro, November 27, 1909. 84. AHM, FCM/SGP/Caixa 70: D. A. Sena to Governor, January 24, 1911. 85. AHM, FCM/SGPC/Caixa 28: D. A. Chiloane to Governor, March 7, 1931. While detained, women faced a high risk of sexual assault at the hands of police. This vulnerability, for African women in Mozambique, is documented in Leroy Vail and Landeg White, Power and the Praise Poem: Southern African Voices in History (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1991); Isaacman, Cotton Is the Mother of Poverty. Mann also describes hostage taking as an element of the practice of the indige´nat: Mann, ‘‘What Was the Indige´nat?’’ 342. 86. I have written at greater length on how market-oriented production could protect against forced labor in Allina, Slavery by Any Other Name, 162–66.

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87. Frederick Cooper uses the phrase to characterize the incipient rights recognized in early colonial Africa; Cooper, ‘‘Afterword: Social Rights and Human Rights in the Time of Decolonization,’’ Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 3, 3 (2012): 481. 88. Henry R. Nevinson, A Modern Slavery (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1906); John Harris, Portuguese Slavery: Britain’s Dilemma (London: Methuen, 1913); Edward Alsworth Ross, Report on the Employment of Native Labor in Portuguese Africa (New York: Abbott Press, 1925); Duffy, A Question of Slavery; Suzanne Miers, Slavery in the Twentieth Century: The Evolution of a Global Pattern (Walnut Creek, Calif.: Alta Mira Press, 2003); Kevin Grant, A Civilised Savagery: Britain and the New Slaveries in Africa, 1884–1926 (New York: Routledge, 2005); Joel Forbes Quirk, ‘‘The Anti-Slavery Project: Linking the Historical and Contemporary,’’ Human Rights Quarterly 28, 3 (2006): 565–98. 89. The idea has its roots in Hammond’s argument about metropolitan Portugal’s weakness, though it had a revival in more recent scholarship as an argument about the weak Portuguese colonial state. 90. I have written at greater length on such official dissent and criticism in Allina, Slavery by Any Other Name, 82–87 and in ‘‘ ‘Free Labor’ for Colonial Subjects: The View of the ‘Men in the Middle,’ ’’ Humanity 3, 3 (2012): 337–59. 91. Mann, ‘‘What Was the Indige´nat?’’ 336. 92. Gerhard Anders and Monique Nuijten, Corruption and the Secret of Law: A Legal Anthropological Perspective (Abingdon: Ashgate, 2008) 12. 93. Mann, ‘‘What Was the Indige´nat?’’ 353.

Chapter 4. Victims, Saviors, and Suspects: Channeling Mobility in Post-Genocide Rwanda 1. A number of publications have more or less critically evaluated the various means that have been taken to create justice and reconciliation. Among the more interesting are Barbara Oomen, ‘‘Donor-Driven Justice and Its Discontents: The Case of Rwanda,’’ Development and Change 36, 5 (2005): 887–910; Bert Ingelaere, ‘‘ ‘Does the Truth Pass Across the Fire Without Burning?’ Locating the Short Circuit in Rwanda’s Gacaca Courts,’’ Journal of Modern African Studies 47, 4 (2009): 507–28. 2. Roxanne Lynn Doty, ‘‘The Double-Writing of Statecraft: Exploring State Responses to Illegal Immigration,’’ Alternatives 21, 2 (1996): 171–89. 3. Cf. Thomas Hansen and Finn Stepputat, eds., Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants and States in the Postcolonial World (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005). Foucault has similarly shown how the liberal state formally moved government outside the state: Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, 1st American ed., vol. 1 (New York: Pantheon, 1978). 4. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Meridian (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998); Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End: Notes on Politics, Theory out of Bounds 20 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). 5. Liisa Malkki, ‘‘National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity Among Scholars and Refugees,’’ Cultural Anthropology 7, 1 (1992): 24–44; Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, eds., Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Nevzat Soguk, States and Strangers: Refugees and Displacements of Statecraft (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

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Press, 1999); Doty, ‘‘The Double-Writing of Statecraft’’; Saskia Sassen, ‘‘Spatialities and Temporalities of the Global: Elements for a Theorization,’’ Public Culture 12, 1 (2000): 215–32. 6. Gupta and Ferguson, eds., Anthropological Locations. 7. Soguk, States and Strangers. 8. Zygmunt Bauman, ‘‘Soil, Blood and Identity,’’ Sociological Review 40, 4 (1992): 675–701. 9. Agamben, Homo Sacer; Hansen and Stepputat, Sovereign Bodies; Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006); Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). 10. Johan Pottier, ‘‘Land Reform for Peace? Rwanda’s 2005 Land Law in Context,’’ Journal of Agrarian Change 6, 4 (2006): 509–37; Helen Hintjens, ‘‘Post-Genocide Identity Politics in Rwanda,’’ Ethnicities 8, 1 (2008): 5–41; Danielle Beswick, ‘‘Managing Dissent in a PostGenocide Environment: The Challenge of Political Space in Rwanda,’’ Development and Change 41, 2 (2010): 225–51. 11. Nigel Eltringham and Saskia Van Hoyweghen, ‘‘Power and Identity in Post-Genocide Rwanda,’’ in Politics of Identity and Economics of Conflict in the Great Lakes Region, ed. Ruddy Doom and Jan Gorus (Brussels: VUB University Press, 2000); Pottier, ‘‘Land Reform for Peace?’’; Hintjens, ‘‘Post-Genocide Identity Politics in Rwanda.’’ 12. Chi Mgbako, ‘‘Ingando Solidarity Camps: Reconciliation and Political Indoctrination in Post-Genocide Rwanda,’’ Harvard Human Rights Journal 18 (2005): 201–24; Andrea Purdekova´, ‘‘Repatriation and Reconciliation in Divided Societies: The Case of Rwanda’s ‘Ingando’,’’ RCS Working Paper (Oxford: Refugee Studies Programme, 2008); Susan Thomsen, ‘‘Re-Education and Reconciliation: Participant Observations on Ingando,’’ in Remaking Rwanda: State Building and Human Rights After Mass Violence, ed. Scott Straus and Lars Waldorf (Madison: University of Wisonsin Press, 2011). 13. Oomen, ‘‘Donor-Driven Justice and Its Discontents’’; Mathijs van Leeuwen, ‘‘Imagining the Great Lakes Region: Discourses and Practices of Civil Society Regional Approaches for Peacebuilding in Rwanda, Burundi and Dr Congo,’’ Journal of Modern African Studies 46, 3 (2008)’’ 393–426; An Ansoms, ‘‘Re-Engineering Rural Society: The Visions and Ambitions of the Rwandan Elite,’’ African Affairs 108, 431 (2009): 289–309. 14. Margeret Urban Walker mentions the breakdown of trust as one of the greatest consequences of mass atrocities: Moral Repair: Reconstructing Moral Relations After Wrongdoing (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 15. See rwandagateway.org for the official picture of the new Rwanda. See also Purdekova´, ‘‘Repatriation and Reconciliation,’’ 12. 16. Testifying to the fact that this is not simply yet a bureaucratic planning paper but rather a high profile document that is part of national identity, the national football team is called Vision 2020. 17. Republic of Rwanda (Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning), ‘‘Rwanda Vision 2020’’ (Kigali, 2000). 18. Purdekova´, ‘‘Repatriation and Reconciliation.’’ 19. For discussions of this trend, see Christian Lund, ed., Twilight Institutions: Public Authority and Local Politics in Africa (London: Blackwell, 2007); Lars Buur and Helene Kyed, eds., State Recognition and Democratization in Sub-Saharan Africa: A New Dawn for Traditional Authorities? (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007); John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, Civil

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Society and the Political Imagination in Africa: Critical Perspectives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). As opposed to the classic modernism of the 1960s and 1970s, this revival of traditional institutions goes hand in hand with a neoliberal economy. 20. Republic of Rwanda (National Unity and Reconciliation Commission), ‘‘The Causes of Violence After the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda’’ (Kigali, 2008). 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid., 113–14. 23. While the Rwandan state paints a self-portrait as the avant garde of a new generation of African leadership, calling itself the ‘‘New Rwanda’’ and comparing itself to Singapore, there are striking similarities with the ideologies of newly independent African states in the 1960s and 1970s. The imidugudu program is very similar to villagization program in Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Tanzania, despite the government’s claims to the opposite. Mathijs van Leeuwen, ‘‘Rwanda’s Imidugudu Programme and Earlier Experiences with Villagisation and Resettlement in East Africa,’’ Journal of Modern African Studies 39, 4 (2001): 623–44. For analysis of the national unity discourse in Ghana and Tanzania, see Sara Rich Dorman, Daniel Patrick Hammett, and Paul Nugent, Making Nations, Creating Strangers: States and Citizenship in Africa, African Social Studies Series 16 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 7–8. 24. Director of DDG, interview January 2009. 25. Ambassador to Sweden, interview January 2011. 26. Simon Turner, ‘‘Staging the Rwandan Diaspora: The Politics of Performance,’’ African Studies 72, 2 (2013): 265–84. 27. van Leeuwen, ‘‘Rwanda’s Imidugudu Programme.’’ 28. Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001); Nigel Eltringham, Accounting for Horror: Post-Genocide Debates in Rwanda (London: Pluto, 2004); Alana Erin Tiemessen, ‘‘After Arusha: Gacaca Justice in Post-Genocide Rwanda,’’ African Studies Quarterly 8, 1 (2004): 57–76; P. A. Cantrell, ‘‘The Anglican Church of Rwanda: Domestic Agendas and International Linkages,’’ Journal of Modern African Studies 45, 3 (2007): 333–54. 29. Suzanne Buckley-Zistel, ‘‘Remembering to Forget: Chosen Amnesia as a Strategy for Local Coexistence in Post-Genocide Rwanda,’’ Africa 76, 2 (2006): 131–50. 30. Eltringham and Van Hoyweghen, ‘‘Power and Identity in Post-Genocide Rwanda.’’ 31. Caseload is a technical UNHCR term for groups of refugees, defined by time of flight. Old caseload refers here to the Tutsi who fled after 1959, new caseload to the Hutu who fled in 1994. 32. Eltringham and Van Hoyweghen, ‘‘Power and Identity in Post-Genocide Rwanda.’’ 33. Hintjens, ‘‘Post-Genocide Identity Politics in Rwanda.’’ 34. Rachel Ibreck, ‘‘The Politics of Mourning: Survivor Contributions to Memorials in Post-Genocide Rwanda,’’ Memory Studies 3, 4 (2010): 330–43. 35. Tiemessen, ‘‘After Arusha,’’ 63. 36. Authors such as Margaret Urban Walker have argued that one of the greatest effects of experiencing crimes such as genocide is the fact that victims lose trust—not only in the perpetrators but also in society as a whole and, ultimately, in their own moral judgments. Walker, Moral Repair. Therefore recognition of their suffering and clear signals that what they experienced was morally wrong are important ingredients in moral repair. 37. Hintjens, ‘‘Post-Genocide Identity Politics in Rwanda’’; Oomen, ‘‘Donor-Driven Justice and Its Discontents’’; Pottier, ‘‘Land Reform for Peace?’’; Filip Reyntjens, ‘‘Rwanda, Ten

Notes to Pages 88–91

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Years On: From Genocide to Dictatorship,’’ African Affairs 103, 411 (2004): 177–210; Filip Reyntjens, ‘‘Post-1994 Politics in Rwanda: Problematising ‘Liberation’ and ‘Democratisation’,’’ Third World Quarterly 27, 6 (2006): 1103–17; An Ansoms, ‘‘Striving for Growth, Bypassing the Poor? A Critical Review of Rwanda’s Rural Sector Policies,’’ Journal of Modern African Studies 46, 1 (2008): 1–32. 38. Barbara Cruikshank, The Will to Empower: Democratic Citizens and Other Subjects (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999); Thomas Hansen and Finn Stepputat, States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001). 39. Mitchell Dean, Governmentality : Power and Rule in Modern Society (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1999); Barry Hindess, ‘‘The Liberal Government of Unfreedom,’’ Alternatives 26, 2 (2001): 93–111; Nikolas S. Rose, Powers of Freedom : Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Foucault, ‘‘Governmentality.’’ 40. See Simon Turner, Politics of Innocence: Hutu Identity, Conflict, and Camp Life, Studies in Forced Migration 30 (New York: Berghahn, 2010), for a discussion of victimhood and benevolent biopower. 41. There are striking similarities with many postrevolutionary and postliberation movements, where counterrevolutionary forces must be kept at bay through an ongoing revolution and where it is the responsibility of the avant garde to keep the transformation on track. 42. Reyntjens, ‘‘Rwanda, Ten Years On.’’ 43. Hazel Smith and Paul Stares, eds., Diasporas in Conflict: Peace-Makers or PeaceWreckers? (Tokyo: UN University Press, 2007). 44. Peter Hansen, ‘‘Circumcising Migration: Gendering Return Migration Among Somalilanders,’’ Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 34, 7 (2008): 1109–25. 45. Ibid. 46. I have written elsewhere about the gendered nature of victimhood and humanitarian aid. See Turner, Politics of Innocence. 47. Of course there are numerous cases of strong diasporic influence after radical political change. Apart from Israel, we may mention South Africa, the Palestinian Territories, Afghanistan, and Georgia. However, apart from Israel, it has usually been a small political elite that has returned, while in Rwanda the numbers are substantial. 48. Hintjens, ‘‘Post-Genocide Identity Politics in Rwanda.’’ 49. Eltringham and Van Hoyweghen, ‘‘Power and Identity in Post-Genocide Rwanda.’’ 50. Ibid., 227. 51. Cyrus Reed, ‘‘Exile, Reform, and the Rise of the Rwandan Patriotic Front,’’ Journal of Modern African Studies 34, 3 (1996): 479–501; Mahmood Mamdani, ‘‘The Political Diaspora in Uganda and Background to the RPF Invasion,’’ in Conflict and Ethnicity in Central Africa, ed. Didier Goyvaerts (Tokyo: Institute for the Stuy of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, Tokyoi University of Foreign Studies, 2000); Mahmood Mamdani, ‘‘African States, Citizenship and War: A Case-Study,’’ International Affairs 78, 3 (2002): 493–506. 52. Obviously, the individuals in this group have agency and are able to maneuver in relation to these ascribed identities. However, as a group they are bereft of agency in the public sphere. 53. Rwanda is traditionally Francophone, while the refugees in Uganda had been through an Anglophone school system. Even their native Kinyarwanda was often weak.

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54. Purdekova´, ‘‘Repatriation and Reconciliation,’’ 4. 55. The issue of remaining pure in exile is widespread in diaspora movements. See also Liisa Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology Among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 56. Purdekova´, ‘‘Repatriation and Reconciliation,’’ 4. 57. It is common for diasporas to have this perception of themselves as being able to see things in the homeland that those who remained are unable to see (Simon Turner, ‘‘The Waxing and Waning of the Political Field in Burundi and Its Diaspora,’’ Ethnic and Racial Studies 31, 4 [2008]: 742–65) and that their experiences abroad enable them to contribute in ways that locals cannot (Hansen, ‘‘Circumcising Migration’’). 58. van Leeuwen, ‘‘Rwanda’s Imidugudu Programme.’’ 59. Rwandan Tutsi, living in Burundi, may well prefer to remain in Burundi, where their francophone education is of use, although Burundi has a policy of employing Hutu in order to rectify past biases. The Rwandan Tutsi in Zaire/Congo are worse off in the sense that Congo is a dangerous place to stay for a Tutsi. They are forced to return to Rwanda only to see the best positions go to the ‘‘Ugandans.’’ 60. Beswick, ‘‘Managing Dissent in a Post-Genocide Environment.’’ 61. Hintjens, ‘‘Post-Genocide Identity Politics in Rwanda.’’ 62. General Secretary of CNLG, interview with Mr. Mucyo (January 2009). 63. Interview, Kigali, January 2009. 64. National Unity and Reconciliation Commission, available from www.nurc.gov.rw. (NURC homepage) 65. Here there are similarities with Vigneswaran’s chapter on policing in Johannesburg, because police work is always about identifying and locating potential criminals. 66. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 1st American ed. (New York: Pantheon, 1978). 67. Agamben, Homo Sacer. 68. Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers. 69. Rene´ Lemarchand, Rwanda and Burundi (London: Pall Mall Press, 1970); Ge´rard Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis, 1959–1994: History of a Genocide (London: Hurst, 1995). 70. Quoted in S. Buckley-Zistel, ‘‘Dividing and Uniting: The Use of Citizenship Discourses in Conflict and Reconciliation in Rwanda,’’ Global Society 20, 1 (2006): 105, her translation. 71. During the first spate of violence, it was in particular the elite, associated with the royal court and hence with an occupational force who had unrightfully oppressed the Hutu over centuries, that were the target of the violence. Later, the violence was a reaction to the sporadic attacks Tutsi refugees made across the border. 72. Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers. 73. Mahmood Mamdani, ‘‘From Conquest to Consent as the Basis of State Formation: Reflections on Rwanda,’’ New Left Review 216 (1996): 3. 74. Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, 190. 75. Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis, 1959–1994, 75. Following the same line of argument, identity cards, stating the ethnic belonging of the holder, were kept during Habyarimana’s regime to make sure the majority also had the majority of scholarships, public offices, and so forth.

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76. Mamdani, ‘‘African States, Citizenship and War’’; Buckley-Zistel, ‘‘Dividing and Uniting.’’ 77. Buckley-Zistel, ‘‘Dividing and Uniting’’; Peter Uvin, Aiding Violence: The Development Entreprise in Rwanda (West Hartford, Conn.: Kumarian Press, 1998); Catharine Newbury, ‘‘Rwanda: Recent Debates over Governance and Rural Development,’’ in Governance and Politics in Africa, ed. Go¨ran Hyden and Michael Bratton (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1992). 78. Ogenga Otunnu, ‘‘Rwandese Refugees and Immigrants in Uganda,’’ in The Path of a Genocide: The Rwanda Crisis from Uganda to Zaire, ed. Howard Adelman and Astri Suhrke (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1999). 79. Amnesty International, ‘‘Rwanda: Persecution of Tutsi Minority and Repression of Government Critics, 1990–1992’’ (Amnesty International USA, 1992). 80. Mamdani, ‘‘From Conquest to Consent’’; Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers; Ogenga Otunnu, ‘‘An Historical Analysis of the Invasion by the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA),’’ in The Path of a Genocide, ed. Adelman and Suhrke; Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis. 81. The link between enemy and alien is important, as it is the alien nature of the Tutsi that has always made them a threat to the nation—whether inside the territory or not. 82. Otunnu, ‘‘An Historical Analysis of the Invasion’’; Mamdani, ‘‘African States, Citizenship and War’’; Reed, ‘‘Exile, Reform, and the Rise of the Rwandan Patriotic Front.’’ 83. Doty, ‘‘The Double-Writing of Statecraft.’’ 84. Agamben, Means Without End; Soguk, States and Strangers; Hansen and Stepputat, eds., Sovereign Bodies.

Chapter 5. Channeling Mobility Across a Segregated Johannesburg 1. Bakewell, in this volume. 2. A. J. Christopher, ‘‘Urban Segregation Levels in the British Overseas Empire and Its Successors, in the 20th Century,’’ Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 17, 1 (1992): 95–107; Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa, African Studies Series 89 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); A. J. Njoh, ‘‘The Segregated City in British and French Colonial Africa,’’ Race & Class 49, 4 (2008): 87–95. 3. Jonathan Klaaren and Jaya Ramji, ‘‘Inside Illegality: Migration Policing in South Africa After Apartheid,’’ Africa Today 48, 3 (2001): 35–47; K. M. Otiso, ‘‘Forced Evictions in Kenyan Cities,’’ Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 23, 3 (2002): 252–67; Deborah Potts, ‘‘ ‘Restoring Order’? Operation Murambatsvina and the Urban Crisis in Zimbabwe,’’ Journal of Southern African Studies 32, 2 (2006): 273–91; Marshall Van Valen, ‘‘Continuity and Change in Migratory Flows in Gabon,’’ in In Search of Solutions: Methods, Movements and Undocumented Migrants in Africa, ed. Darshan Vigneswaran and Joel Quirk (Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand, 2006). 4. Steven Kelly Herbert, ‘‘Territoriality and the Police,’’ Professional Geographer 49, 1 (1997): 86–94; Steven Kelly Herbert, Policing Space: Territoriality and the Los Angeles Police Department (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). 5. Albert J. Meehan and Michael C. Ponder, ‘‘Race and Place: The Ecology of Racial Profiling African American Motorists,’’ Justice Quarterly 19, 3 (2002): 402. 6. John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship, and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

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7. Ivan Turok, ‘‘Persistent Polarisation Post-Apartheid? Progress Towards Urban Integration in Cape Town,’’ Urban Studies 38, 13 (2001): 2349–77. 8. A. J. Christopher, ‘‘The Slow Pace of Desegregation in South African Cities, 1996– 2001,’’ Urban Studies 42, 12 (2005): 2305–20; see below for updated figures. 9. UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Homicide Statistics, Criminal Justice Sources (2003–2008). The countries with higher rates were Honduras (60.9), Jamaica (59.5), Guatemala (45.2), Trinidad and Tobago (39.7), Colombia (38.8), and Lesotho (36.7). Using public health sources, South Africa reports the highest murder rate of all reporting countries (68.0). Crime and policing now rank among the top four issues for South African voters, along with unemployment, job creation, and poverty. Norbert Kersting, ‘‘Voting Behaviour in the 2009 South African Election,’’ Africa Spectrum 44, 2 (2009): 125–33. There remains a racial division in these numbers, with voters favoring the Democratic Alliance (a party formed out of the remnants of the National Party) rating crime and policing much higher on their agenda than ANC voters. 10. T. R. Samara, ‘‘Order and Security in the City: Producing Race and Policing Neoliberal Spaces in South Africa,’’ Ethnic and Racial Studies 33, 4 (2010): 637–55; Darshan Vigneswaran, ‘‘The Contours of Disorder: Crime Maps and Territorial Policing in South Africa,’’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32, 1 (2014): 91–107; Martin J. Murray, City of Extremes: The Spatial Politics of Johannesburg, Politics, History, and Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011). 11. Julia Hornberger, Policing and Human Rights: The Meaning of Violence and Justice in the Everyday Policing of Johannesburg (London: Routledge, 2011). 12. Darshan Vigneswaran, ‘‘Taking Out the Trash: A Garbage Can Model of Immigration Policing,’’ in Exorcising the Demon Within: Xenophobia, Violence and Statecraft in Contemporary South Africa, ed. Loren Landau (Johannesburg: WITS University Press, 2011). 13. Despite the ANC ‘‘get tough on crime’ rhetoric, government investment in crime prevention has actually declined in recent years. In 2004–2009 the police force/population ratio declined gradually (from .34 to .28), while the portion of the overall budget devoted to policing fell marginally (from 6.7 to 6.4 percent). The UNODC reports a 6.2 percent drop in police personnel per population level between 1995 and 2002: Stefan Harrendorf, Markku Heiskanen, and Steven Malby, International Statistics on Crime and Justice (European Institute for Crime Prevention and Control, affiliated with the United Nations; HEUNI, 2010). 14. Raenette Taljaard, ‘‘Private and Public Security in South Africa,’’ in The Private Security Sector in Africa, ed. Sabelo Gumedze, 69–98, ISS Monographs 146 (Pretoria: ISS, 2008). 15. Charlotte Lemanski, ‘‘Global Cities in the South: Deepening Social and Spatial Polarisation in Cape Town,’’ Cities 24, 6 (2007): 448–61; Samara, ‘‘Order and Security in the City.’’ 16. Ulrich Jurgens and Martin Gnad, ‘‘Gated Communities in South Africa : Experiences from Johannesburg,’’ Environment and Planning B-Planning & Design 29, 3 (2002): 337–54; Karina Landman, ‘‘Gated Neighbourhoods in South Africa: An Appropriate Urban Design Approach?’’ Urban Design International 13 (2008): 227–40; Jo Beall, Owen Crankshaw, and Sue Parnell, Uniting a Divided City: Governance and Social Exclusion in Johannesburg (London: Earthscan, 2002). 17. Loren B. Landau, ed., Exorcising the Demons Within: Xenophobia, Violence, and Statecraft in Contemporary South Africa (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2011).

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18. The white population also commutes but almost never in and through black former township areas. 19. A widely accepted index of segregation, where 100 represents total separation of white and black residents and 0 represents even distribution across all census tracts 20. While the broad contours of residential patterns have remained the same, some areas have seen dramatic transformation in racial and class composition, Brij Maharaj and Jannil Mpungose, ‘‘The Erosion of Residential Segregation in South Africa: The Graying of Albert Park in Durban,’’ Geoforum 25, 1 (1994): 19–32; Daniel Schensul, ‘‘From Resources to Power: The State and Spatial Change in Post-Apartheid Durban, South Africa,’’ Studies in Comparative International Development 43, 3–4 (2008): 290–313. 21. All the southern suburbs now contain significantly higher proportions of black Africans than the Johannesburg average of 74 percent. 22. Alan Morris, Bleakness and Light: Inner-City Transition in Hillbrow, Johannesburg (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1999) 6. 23. Ibid., 53. 24. To some extent, this reputation is warranted. The precinct has consistently featured in the provincial and national lists for reporting high levels of priority crimes. However, these figures need to be read against the fact that Hillbrow is one of, if not the most densely populated police precincts in South Africa. It contains large numbers of the nation’s tallest residential buildings, many of which are over-occupied. Yet, the rankings are based on absolute numbers of reported crime, rather than the number of crimes per capita of population and so may overstate the problem. Furthermore, while there is no reliable national measure of service levels, compared with some of the township precincts we studied in our comparative ethnography, service at Hillbrow’s Client Service Centre is remarkably professional, which may result in higher reporting rates and raise the precinct’s levels of reported crime. 25. Vigneswaran, ‘‘The Contours of Disorder.’’ 26. Vigneswaran, ‘‘Taking Out the Trash.’’ 27. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, Einaudi Contemporanea 38 (Torino: Einaudi, 1995). 28. Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, Cambridge Middle East Library (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 29. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

Chapter 6. Policy Spectacles: Promoting Migration-Development Scenarios in Ghana Parts of this chapter have previously been published in Nauja Kleist, ‘‘Flexible Politics of Belonging: Diaspora Mobilisation in Ghana,’’ African Studies 72, 2 (2013): 285–306, reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd. The chapter is related to the research program Mobilizing African Diasporas as Agents of Change, funded by the Danish Council for Social Research. I am grateful for the support. Likewise, I thank the Ghanaian government officials, migrants, and returnees for sharing their thoughts with me, as well as Darshan Vigneswaran, Joel Quirk, Ninna Nyberg Sørensen, and Finn Stepputat for comments and questions to earlier versions of this chapter. 1. R. Augunias Dovelynn and Kathleen Newland, Developing a Road Map for Engaging Diasporas: A Handbook for Policymakers and Practitioners in Home and Host Countries (Geneva: International Organization for Migration & Migration Policy Institute, 2012);

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Global Commission on International Migration, Migration in an Interconnected World: New Directions for Action (Geneva: Global Commission on International Migration, 2005); Mau¨ zden, International Migration, Remittances and the Brain Drain (Washrice Schiff and Caglar O ington, D.C.: World Bank, 2005). 2. Alan Gamlen, ‘‘Diaspora Engagement Policies: What Are They and What Kinds of States Use Them,’’ Compas Working Paper 32 (Oxford: University of Oxford, 2006). 3. Peter Andreas, ‘‘Redrawing the Line: Borders and Security in the Twenty-First Century,’’ International Security 28, 2 (2003): 78–111. 4. Thomas Hansen and Finn Stepputat, eds., States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001); Janine R. Wedel, Cris Shore, Gregory Feldman, and Stacey Lathrop, ‘‘Towards an Anthropology of Public Policy,’’ Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 600, 1 (2005): 30–51. 5. Thomas Hansen and Finn Stepputat, ‘‘Introduction: States of Imagination,’’ in States of Imagination, 1–37; Achille Mbembe, ‘‘Provisional Notes on the Postcolony,’’ Africa 62 (1992): 3–37; Charles Piot, Nostalgia for the Future West Africa After the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 6. Graham Harrison, ‘‘Economic Faith, Social Project and a Misreading of African Society: The Travails of Neoliberalism in Africa,’’ Third World Quarterly 26 (2005): 1303–20. 7. Cf. Peter Andreas, Border Games: Policing the U.S.-Mexico Divide, 2nd ed., Cornell Studies in Political Economy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2009). 8. Hein De Haas, ‘‘Migration and Development: A Theoretical Perspective,’’ International Migration Review 44 (2010): 227–64; Thomas Faist, ‘‘Transnationalization and Development Towards an Alternative Agenda,’’ Social Analysis 53 (2009): 38–59. 9. Beverly Lindsay, ‘‘Migration and National Development: An Introduction,‘‘ in African Migration and National Development, ed. Beverly Lindsay (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1985). 10. Elliot P. Skinner, ‘‘Labor Migration and National Development in Africa,‘‘ in African Migration and National Development, ed. Lindsay. 11. Hein de Haas, ’’International Migration and National Development: Viewpoints and Policy Initiatives in Countries of Origin: The Case of Nigeria,‘‘ Working Papers Development and Migration Series (International Migration Institute, 2006); Boris Nieswand, ’’Development and Diaspora: Ghana and Its Migrants,‘‘ Sociologus 59, 1 (2009): 17–31. 12. Andreas, ‘‘Redrawing the Line’’; Hein de Haas, Irregular Migration from West Africa to the Maghreb and the European Union: An Overview of Recent Trends (Geneva: International Organization for Migration, 2008); Riina Isotalo, ‘‘Politicizing the Transnational on Implications for Migrants, Refugees, and Scholarship,‘‘ Social Analysis 53 (2009): 60–84. 13. Ninna Nyberg-Sørensen, Nicholas Van Hear, and Poul Engberg-Pedersen, ’’The Migration-Development Nexus: Evidence and Policy Options State-of-the-Art Overview,‘‘ International Migration 40, 5 (2002): 3–47. 14. World Bank, ‘‘Migration and Development Brief 20’’ (Migration and Remittances Unit, Washington D.C.: World Bank, 2013). 15. Nina Glick Schiller, ‘‘A Global Perspective on Migration and Development,’’ Social Analysis 53, 3 (2009): 14–37; Simon Turner and Nauja Kleist, ‘‘Agents of Change? Staging and Governing Diasporas and the African State,’’ African Studies 72 (2013): 192–206. 16. Emmanuel Akyeampong, ‘‘Africans in the Diaspora: The Diaspora and Africa,’’ African Affairs 99 (2000): 183–215.

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17. Aribidesi Usman and Toyin Falola, ‘‘Migration in African History: An Introduction,’’ in Movements, Borders, and Identities in Africa, ed. Toyin Falola and Aribidesi Usman, 1–37 (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2009). 18. Kevin Kelly Gaines, American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Jemina Pierre, The Predicament of Blackness: Postcolonial Ghana and the Politics of Race (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 19. The situation was further aggravated by the expulsion of more than one million Ghanaians from Nigeria in 1983. 20. Giles Mohan, ‘‘Making Neoliberal States of Development: The Ghanaian Diaspora and the Politics of Homelands,’’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 26, 3 (2008): 464–79. 21. Jennifer Hasty, ‘‘Rites of Passage, Routes of Redemption: Emancipation Tourism and the Wealth of Culture,’’ Africa Today 49, 3 (2002); Pierre, The Predicament of Blackness; Nauja Kleist, ‘‘Flexible Politics of Belonging: Diaspora Mobilisation in Ghana,’’ African Studies 72, 2 (2013): 285–306. 22. Ernest K. Y. Addison, ‘‘The Macroeconomic Impact of Remittances,’’ Presentation at the conference Migration and Development in Ghana, La Palm Royal Beach Hotel, Accra (2004). 23. In 1995, 60 percent of Ghanaian doctors left Ghana, increasing to 90 percent in 2002; see Simona Vezzoli, Building Bonds for Migration and Development Diaspora Engagment Policies of Ghana, India and Serbia (Esborn: Deutsche Gesellschaft fu¨r Technische Zusammenarbeit, 2010), 3. 24. Ibid. 25. Right of Abode, http://www.ghanaimmigration.org/right_abode.htm. 26. Kufuor especially continued Rawlings’s tourism initiatives targeting the ‘‘African diaspora.’’ See Kleist, ‘‘Flexible Politics of Belonging’’ and Pierre, The Predicament of Blackness, for further analysis. 27. John A. Kufuor, ‘‘Inaugural Speech, 2001,’’ http://allafrica.com/stories/20010 1070055.html. 28. Former GIPC-employee, Accra, June 2008. 29. GIPC, Homecoming Summit for Ghanaians Living Abroad, Accra, July 23–25, 2001 Summary Report on the Way Forward (Accra: GIPC, 2001). 30. GIPC, Action Plan Homecoming Summit Recommendations (Accra: GIPC, 2001). 31. GIPC, Homecoming Summit Half-Year Status Report as at December 2001 (Accra: GIPC, 2001), 2. 32. The real name of Mr. Appiah has been changed. Interview, Accra, May 2008. 33. Private letter from Mr. Appiah, February 2003. 34. Interview, Accra, May 2008. 35. Mohan, ‘‘Making Neoliberal States of Development.’’ 36. Peggy Levitt and Rafael de la Dehesa, ‘‘Transnational Migration and the Redefinition of the State: Variations and Explanations,’’ Ethnic and Racial Studies 26, 4 (2003): 587–611. 37. Cf. Vezzoli, ‘‘Building Bonds for Migration and Development.’’ 38. Interview, IOM, Accra, March 2008 and January 2010. 39. GIPC, Homecoming Summit for Ghanaians Living Abroad, Accra, July 23–25, 2001 Summary Report.

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40. Abeasi Kwasi, ‘‘Launch of the Non-Resident Ghanaian (NRG) Secretariat at the M-Plaza Hotel Accra on Wednesday, 30th April 2003’’ (Accra: GIPC, 2003). 41. Interview, Bank of Ghana, Accra, May 2008 and January 2010. 42. Interview, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Accra, February 2008; interview, Ghanaian ambassador in Denmark, Copenhagen, October 2007; interview, Ghanaian deputy high commissioner in the UK, London, October 2008. 43. Todd Moss and Stephanie Majerowicz, ‘‘No Longer Poor: Ghana’s New Income Status and Implications of Graduation from IDA,’’ Center for Global Development Working Paper 300 (Washington, D.C.: Center for Global Development, 2012). There is no agreement about the size of remittances, and, according to the director of research, Bank of Ghana, Dr. Addison, the level of remittances was somewhat higher, culminating in US$1.8 billion in 2007, interview, January 2010. 44. Cf. Peter Quartey, Migration in Ghana: A Country Profile 2009 (Geneva: IOM, 2009). 45. Interview, GIPC, Accra, June 2008 and January 2010. 46. Quartey, Migration in Ghana, 82. 47. Interview, Ministry of Interior, Accra, January 2010. 48. Interview, Bank of Ghana, Accra, January 2010. 49. See Kleist ‘‘Flexible Politics of Belonging,’’ for analysis on these initiatives. 50. Levitt and De la Dehesa, ‘‘Transnational Migration and the Redefinition of the State,’’ 588. 51. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population Lectures at the Colle`ge de France 1977– 78 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2004). 52. Gamlen, ‘‘Diaspora Engagement Policies.’’ 53. Mirjam Kabki, Valentina Mazzucato, and Ernest Appiah, ‘‘ ‘Wo Benan a Ey Bebree’: The Economic Impact of Remittances of Netherlands-Based Ghanaian Migrants on Rural Ashanti,’’ Population, Space and Place 10, 2 (2004); Nauja Kleist, ‘‘Modern Chiefs: Tradition, Development and Return Among Traditional Authorities in Ghana,’’ African Affairs 110, 441 (2011): 629–47; Nieswand, ‘‘Development and Diaspora’’; Mohan, ‘‘Making Neoliberal States of Development.’’ 54. Interview, Ministry of Manpower, Accra, July 2008. 55. Interview, Ministry of Health, Accra, June 2008 and January 2010. 56. Interview, Ministry of Education, Accra, June 2008. 57. A. A. Mohamoud, ‘‘Reversing the Brain Drain in Africa Harnessing the Intellectual Capital of the Diaspora for Knowledge Development in Africa’’ (Amsterdam: SAHAN Wetenschappelijk Adviesbureau, 2005). 58. Many Ghanaian labor migrants work end up in menial work, rather than exploiting their training; see, e.g., Eli Vasta and Leander Kandilige, ‘‘ ‘London the Leveler’: Ghanaian Work Strategies and Community Solidarity,’’ Compas Working Papers 52 (Oxford: University of Oxford, 2007). 59. Cf. De Haas, ‘‘Migration and Development.’’ 60. Kwaku A Twum-Baah, ‘‘Volume and Characteristics of International Ghanaian Migration,’’ in At Home in the World: International Migration and Development in Contemporary Ghana and West Africa, ed. Takyiwaa Manuh, 55–77 (Accra: Sub-Saharan Publishers, 2005). 61. James C. Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998), 81–82.

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62. Interview, Ghana Immigration Service, Accra, April 2008. 63. Mitchell Dean, ‘‘Demonic Societies: Liberalism, Bioplitics, and Sovereignty,’’ in States of Imagination, ed. Hansen and Stepputat, 47. 64. Vanessa Mensah-Adu, Database for Ghanaians in US, www.ghanaweb.com/Ghana HomePage/diaspora/artikel.php?ID⳱199 649; Ghana Embassy, www.ghanaembassy.org, accessed January 14, 2011. 65. Scott, Seeing like a State. 66. Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants, and States in the Postcolonial World, ed. Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), 3. 67. Scott, Seeing like a State; Wedel et al., ‘‘Towards an Anthropology of Public Policy.’’ 68. Interview, Ghana Immigration Service, Accra, April 2008. 69. ‘‘European Union Gives to Immigration Service and Police CID,’’ March 25, 2013, http://www.ghananewsagency.org/social/european-union-gives-to-immigration-service-andpolice-cid-58079. 70. Interview, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Accra, May 2008. 71. Interview, Ministry of Education, Accra, June 2008. 72. Harrison, ‘‘Economic Faith, Social Project and a Misreading of African Society.’’ 73. Levitt and de la Dehesa, ‘‘Transnational Migration and the Redefinition of the State’’; Gamlen, ‘‘Diaspora Engagement Policies.’’ 74. Cf. Nina Glick Schiller and Noel B. Salazar, ‘‘Regimes of Mobility Across the Globe,’’ Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 39, 2 (2013): 183–200.

Chapter 7. Kinetocracy: The Government of Mobility at the Desert’s Edge I wish to thank Joel Le Corre, Amanda Hammar, Loren Landau, Joel Quirk, and Darshan Vigneswaran for helpful comments on different versions of this chapter. 1. The term kinetocracy combines elements from the ancient Greek words kine¯sis (κνησις, motion, movement) and kra´tos (κρ τος, ‘‘force’’ or ‘‘power’’). I use it to indicate a form of government whereby power corresponds to control over (one’s own and other people’s) mobility. Together with words such as theocracy (a form of government in which priests rule in the name of God), democracy (government by the people), technocracy (government by an elite of technical experts), and kleptocracy (government characterized by corruption, government by thieves), kinetocracy allows us to compare a particular logic of government, in which power corresponds to the capacity to move freely and control other people’s movement, to other historically specific governmentalities. In terms of word formation, kinetocracy fits loosely in this category: literally, it means ‘‘government by movement.’’ Through a further interpretative step, we can understand this term to mean ‘‘government by (those who can control) movement.’’ This is possibly similar to the interpretation of the term plutocracy, meaning ‘‘government by wealth’’ (πλοτος, ploutos, wealth), and, by extension, government by those who possess or control wealth. 2. Most studies of governance in Africa focus on the perceived ‘‘failure’’ or ‘‘weakness’’ of the African state and do not develop conceptual tools for studying political authority in nomadic societies. Notable exceptions are Victor Azarya, Nomads and the State in Africa: The Political Roots of Marginality (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1996); Victor Azarya, ‘‘The Nomadic Factor in Africa: Dominance or Marginality,’’ in Nomads in the Sedentary World, ed. Anatoly Khazanov and Andre Wink, 250–81 (Richmond: Curzon, 2001).

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3. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (1980; London: Athlone, 1996), 377. 4. The case of Tuareg society considered in this chapter, and in particular of the incongruence between Tuareg social organization and state power, has received some attention, but this literature has not influenced general reflections on African governance. See Edmond Bernus, ‘‘Le nomadisme pastorale en question,’’ E´tudes Rurales 120 (1990): 41–52; Edmond ` la croise´e des parcours, ed. Chantal BlancBernus, ‘‘Le Berger touareg et le paysan,’’ in A Pamard and Jean Boutrais (Paris: Orstom, 1994); Pierre Boilley, ‘‘Les droits d’un peuple Touaregs: De la re´bellion a´ l’assimilation,’’ Monde des De´bats 10 (1993): 27–28; Pierre Bonte, Segmentarite´ et pouvoir chez les ´eleveurs nomades sahariens: E´le´ments d’une proble´matique, ´equipe ´ecologie et anthropologie des socie´te´s sastorales (Paris: Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1979); Andre´ Bourgeot, ‘‘L’herbe et le glaive: De l’itine´rance a` l’errance (la notion de territoire chez les Touaregs),’’ in Nomadisme: mobilite´ et flexibilite´? Bulletin de Liaison De´partement H: ORSTOM 8 (1986): 145–62, Andre´ Bourgeot, ‘‘ ‘Le lion et la gazelle’: E´tats et Touaregs,’’ in E´tats et socie´te´s nomades, Politique Africaine 34 (1989): 19–29; Andre´ Bourgeot, Les socie´te´s touare`gues: Nomadisme, identite´, re´sistances (Paris: Karthala, 1995); He´le`ne Claudot-Hawad, ‘‘Les Touaregs ou la re´sistance d’une culture nomade,’’ Revue du Monde Musulman et de la Me´diterrane´e 51, 1 (1989): 63–73; He´le`ne Claudot-Hawad, ‘‘Nomades et e´tat: L’impense´ juridique,’’ Droit et Socie´te´ 15 (1990): 229–42; He´le`ne Claudot-Hawad, ‘‘Le Tashumara: Antidote de l’e´tat,’’ Revue du Monde Musulman et de la Me´diterrane´e 57 (1990): 123–40; H. T. Norris, ‘‘Tuareg Nomadism in the Modern World,’’ African Affairs 51, 203 (1952): 52–55. 5. Benedetta Rossi, ‘‘Slavery and Migrations: Social and Physical Mobility in Ader (Niger),’’ in Reconfiguring Slavery: West African Trajectories, ed. Benedetta Rossi (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009), 182. 6. Edward W. Bovill, The Golden Trade of the Moors (1958; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 11–12. 7. For a discussion of slavery at the desert’s edge, see Stephen Bajer and Paul Lovejoy, ‘‘The Desert Side Economy of the Central Sudan,’’ International Journal of African Historical Studies 8, 4 (1975): 551–81. I develop this argument fully in my forthcoming monograph, Benedetta Rossi, From Slavery to Aid Ecology, Politics and Labour in the Nigerien Sahd, 1800– 2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 8. Fernand Braudel, Les Ambitions de l’histoire (Paris: Fallois, 1997), 60, my translation. 9. John L. Comaroff and Simon Roberts, Rules and Processes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 84. 10. Benedetta Rossi, ‘‘Tubali’s Trip: Rethinking Informality in the Study of West African Labour Migrations,’’ Canadian Journal of African Studies 48, 1 (2014), 1–24. 11. Max Weber emphasized the territorial nature of political organizations in Economy and Society, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 54. The territorialization of the modern Western state is discussed in Gianfranco Poggi, The Development of the Modern State: A Sociological Introduction (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1978); Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). 12. John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 9. See Quirk and Vigneswaran’s Introduction for a cogent discussion of this point in relation to African states.

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13. For a comparative discussion of this point, see Khazanov and Wink, eds., Nomads in the Sedentary World. 14. Jeffrey Herbst, States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 12. 15. John Iliffe, Africans: The History of a Continent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 70. 16. Robert H. Bates, Essays on the Political Economy of Rural Africa, African Studies Series (Cambridge: Cambridge Univesity Press, 1983), 35. 17. Cf. Robert Capot-Rey, Le Sahara franc¸ais (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1953), 63. 18. The tension between nomadic and settled societies has been attributed to different causes. Some authors saw the state’s military maintenance of territorial boundaries as an act of violence directed against the outside world; see, for example, Henri Lefebvre, La production de l’espace, socie´te´ et urbanisme (Paris: Anthropos, 1974), 322–23; Stuart Elden, Terror and Territory: The Spatial Extent of Sovereignty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). Others stressed the threat posed to settled life by nomadic ‘‘hordes,’’ constantly raiding peasants to satisfy their need for resources lacking in their fragile territories; see Bovill, The Golden Trade of the Moors, 12. In their ‘‘Treatise on Nomadology,’’ Deleuze and Guattari, in A Thousand Plateaus, see the nomadic hordes of deserts and steppes as the prototypical counterpoint of settled civilization, threatening urban strongholds from the margins and constituting an incommensurable ‘‘form of exteriority.’’ 19. Nehemiah Levtzion, Ancient Ghana and Mali (1973; New York: Africana, 1980) 9. 20. Ahmad b. Abi Ya’qub b. Ja’far b. Wahb b. Wadih, known as Al Yaqubi, ‘‘Kitab albuldan,’’ in Nehemia Levtzion and John F. P. Hopkins, Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for African History (Princeton, N.J. : Markus Wiener, 2006), 22. 21. Abu ‘l-Qasim Ibn Hawqal al-Nusaybi, known as Ibn Hawqal, ‘‘Kitab Surat al-Ard’’, in ibid., 49. 22. Abou-Obeid el-Bekri, Description de l’Afrique septentrionale, trans. William MacGuckin Slane (Paris: Maisonneuve, 1965), 311–23. 23. ‘‘In this vast region, we find nomads who do not stop in any place. Amongst them are the Beni Messoufa, fraction of the large tribe of the Sanhadja: they do not have a single town where they can seek refuge,’’ ibid., 284. 24. John O. Hunwick, ‘‘A Region of the Mind: Medieval Arab Views of African Geography and Ethnography and Their Legacy,’’ Sudanic Africa 16 (2005): 103–36. 25. Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah, ed. Franz Rosenthal (London: Routledge, 1958), 84–85. 26. Ibid., 308. 27. ‘‘The Bedouins need the cities for the necessities of life by the very nature of their mode of existence. As long as they live in the desert and have not obtained royal authority and control of the cities, they need the inhabitants (of the latter).’’ Ibid., 308–9, my emphasis. 28. Constitutive aspects of this tension are spelled out in detail in ibid., 257–58. 29. Abderrahman al-Sa‘di, ‘‘Tarikh Al-Sudan,’’ in Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire, ed. John O. Hunwick (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 29–31. 30. Ahmad B. Furtu, ‘‘Kitab Ghazawat Barnu,’’ in A Sudanic Chronicle: The Borno Expeditions of Idris Alauma (1564–1576), ed. Dierk Lange (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1987).

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31. Cf. Marc Carlier, Me´haristes du Niger (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001). 32. Capot-Rey, Le Sahara franc¸ais, 291; Emmanuel Gre´goire, ‘‘Major Sahelian Trade Networks: Past and Present,’’ in Societies and Nature in the Sahel, ed. Claude Raynaud (London: Routledge, 1997); Andre Bourgeot, ‘‘Une rupture du couple e´cologie-e´conomie: La crise du pastoralisme touareg,’’ in Dynamique ses syste`mes a` la croise´e des parcours pasteurs, ´eleveurs, cultivateurs, ed. Chantal Blanc-Pamard and Jean Boutrais (Paris: OSTROM, 1994), 63–78. 33. For a critical review of the literature on the state’s territoriality, see Stuart Elden, ‘‘Land, Terrain, Territory,’’ Progress in Human Geography 34, 6 (2010): 799–817. The philosophical underpinnings of the distinction between space and place are explored in Edward Casey, The Fate of Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). In his study of the historical development of the modern state, Gianfranco Poggi has been one of the supporters of the growing importance of territoriality as an increasingly important characteristic of European states. For example, he sees as the first aspect of the nineteenth-century state the ‘‘unity of the state’s territory, which comes to be bounded as much as possible by a continuous geographical frontier that is militarily defensible.’’ Poggi, The Development of the Modern State, 93. 34. Cf. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 380. 35. Cf. Djibo Hamani, L’Adar pre´colonial (1975; Paris: L’Harmattan, 2008), 155. 36. Capitaine Brescon, ‘‘Monographie du cercle de Tahoua (1901),’’ Archives Nationales du Niger [ANN] 17.1.3, 1901); Capt. Joly, ‘‘Monographie du cercle ce Tahoua,’’ ANN 17.1.1, 1901; A. Peignol, ‘‘Monographie du cercle fe Tahoua,’’ ANN 17.1.4, 1907; Capt. Pietri, ‘‘Note sur les Touareg oulliminden du cercle de Tahoua,’’ ANN 17.1.7, 1945; Francis Nicolas, ‘‘Notes sur la socie´te´ et l’e´tat chez les Twareg du Denneg (Iullemmeden de L’est),’’ Bulletin IFAN 15 (1939). 37. Cf. Rossi, ‘‘Slavery and Migrations,’’ 187–89. See also P. Kolchin, Unfree Labour: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987). For exceptions that emphasize the ability of some categories of slaves to move long distances on account of their owners, see Camille Lefebvre, ‘‘Un esclave a vu le monde: Se de´placer en tant qu’esclave au Soudan Central (xixe sie`cle),’’ Locus-Revista de Histo´ria 35, 2 (2012): 105–43; Bruce S. Hall, ‘‘How Slaves Used Islam: The Letters of Enslaved Muslim Commercial Agents in the Nineteenth-Century Niger Bend and Central Sahara,’’ Journal of African History 52, 3 (2011): 279–97. 38. Benedetta Rossi, ‘‘Tuareg Trajectories of Slavery: Preliminary Reflections on a Changing Field,’’ in Tuareg Society Within a Globalized World: Saharan Society in Transition, ed. Anja Fisher and Ines Kohl (London: Tauris, 2010). 39. Bajer and Lovejoy, ‘‘The Desert Side Economy’’; Stephen Bajer and Paul Lovejoy, ‘‘The Tuareg of the Central Sudan: Gradations in Servility at the Desert’s Edge (Niger and Nigeria),’’ in Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives, ed. Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977). 40. The intelligence underpinning French military operations against Tuareg groups shows that French officers presumed Tuareg warriors’ superior knowledge of the territory. 41. Edmond Bernus and Suzanne Bernus, ‘‘L’e´volution de la condition servile chez les Touaregs sahe´liens’’ and Pierre Bonte, ‘‘Esclavage et relations de de´pendance chez les Touareg Kel Gress,’’ in L’Esclavage en Afrique precoloniale, ed. Claude Meillassoux (Paris: Maspero, 1972).

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42. Transhumance refers to the seasonal movements of livestock, cattle, and camel herds. For example, the camel herds of the Kel Gress followed complex migratory patterns. In the summer, roughly between July and September, the majority left for the salt cure in Tegidda n’Tesemt, near In Gall. This was a collective movement. Camels were brought to the In Gall area. From In Gall, herds and herders dispersed to Tegidda n’Tesemt, Tegidda n’Adrar, and Tegidda n’Taguei, where a high concentration of sodium chlorine and sodium sulfate in the surface layers of the soil and in wells and springs had a laxative effect on the camels and stimulated elimination of intestinal parasites. The salt cure was also an occasion for obtaining salt in exchange for southern products brought by the Kel Gress (cloth, cotton, cattle, livestock, millet, butter. and wild honey). 43. Bernus and Bernus, ‘‘L’E´volution de la condition servile chez les Touaregs saheliens.’’ 44. For a discussion of Asna society in Ader, see Benedetta Rossi, ‘‘Being and Becoming Hausa in Ader,’’ in Being and Becoming Hausa: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Anne Haour and Benedetta Rossi (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 113–40. 45. Stephen Baier, An Economic History of Central Niger (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980). 46. Edmond Bernus and Suzanne Bernus, Du sel et des dattes: Introduction a` l’e´tude de la communaute´ d’In Gall et de Tegidda-n-Tesemt, E´tudes Nigeriennes 31 (Niamey: IFAN, 1972); Suzanne Bernus and Pierre Gouletquer, ‘‘Du cuivre au sel: Recherches ethno-arche´ologiques sur la re´gion d’Azelik (campagnes 1973–1975),’’ Journal des Africanistes 46, 1 (1976): 7–68. For a study of the relation between social organization and patterns of geographic mobility among the Illabakan, see Edmond Bernus, ‘‘Espace ge´ographique et champs sociaux chez les Touareg Illabakan (Re´publique du Niger),’’ E´tudes Rurales 37–38–39 (1970): 46–64. 47. A. Dan Asabe, ‘‘Comparative Biographies of Selected Leaders of the Kano Commercial Establishment,’’ MA thesis, Bayero University, 1987. 48. Benedetta Rossi, ‘‘Physical and Social Mobility in Ader, ca, 1920–2000,’’ Final Report, Mobilite´s Ouest-Africaines (MOBOUA), Institut de Recherche pour le De´veloppement, Paris, 2010. 49. Rossi, ‘‘Slavery and Migrations.’’ 50. Cf. Ge´ne´ral Gouraud, Zinder-Chad: Souvenirs d’un africain (Paris: Plon, 1914), 29ff. 51. Jean Auguste Marie Tilho, Documents scientifiques de la mission Tilho, 1910–14, 3 vols. (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1926), 1: xviii–xix. 52. ‘‘Rapport politique, ’’ANN 1E2.14, April 1905. 53. ‘‘Rapport du chef de bataillon Gouraud sur le combat et la reconnaissance de Zanguebe,’’ ANN 27.6, 1901; ‘‘Rapport du chef de bataillon Gouraud, commandant la re´gion ouest iiie`me territoire militaire, a` Monsieur le Lieutenant-Colonel, commandant militaire du territoire sur les ope´rations contre les Kel Gueress, 17–28 Juin 1901, 30 Juin 1901,’’ ANN 27.5., 1901. 54. ‘‘Notice sur la Colonie du Niger, premie`re partie,’’ SHD-BAT GR5 H211, 9ff; ‘‘Te´le´gramme du capt Sadoux concernant les ope´rations dans la re´gion est du secteur,’’ April 13, 1917; G. Alojali, Histoire des Kel Denneg (Copenhagen: Academisk Forlag, 1975). 55. Elliott Skinner, ‘‘Labour Migration and Its Relationship to Socio-Cultural Change in Mossi Society,’’ Africa 388, 3 (1960): 374–400; Igor Wallerstein, ‘‘Migration in West Africa: The Political Perspective,’’ in Urbanization and Migration in West Africa, ed. Hilda Kuper (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965). 56. Michel Foucault, ‘‘Lesson of 10 January 1979,’’ in The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Colle`ge de France, 1978–79, ed. Michel Senellart (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008), 6; cf. Colin

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Gordon, ‘‘Governmental Rationality: An Introduction,’’ in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 4. Charles Gre´mont, working on the Tuareg Iwellemmeden Kel Ataram, also emphasized the relevance of Foucault’s theory of power in relation to Tuareg political organization; see Charles Gre´mont, Les Touaregs Iwellemmedan, 1647–1896: Un ensemble politique de la boucle du Niger (Paris: Karthala, 2010). 57. Michel Foucault, ‘‘The Subject and Power,’’ in The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984, vol. 3, Power, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: New Press, 1984), 341. 58. Michel Foucault, ‘‘Lec¸on du 1er fe´vrier 1978,’’ in Se´curite´, territoire, population, cours au Colle`ge de France (1977–1978), ed. F. Ewald, A. Fontana, and M. Senellart (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 91–118. 59. Michel Foucault, La Volonte´ de savoir (Paris: Seuil, 1976), 127. 60. Foucault discusses how different types of power can be studied and justifies his choice of focus in ‘‘Afterword: The Subject and Power,’’ in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 208–26. For a comparison of Foucault’s work and Marxist approaches, and an assessment of their respective contribution to modern historiography, see especially Mark Poster, Foucault, Marxism and History (London: Polity, 1984), 70–94. 61. See Donald L. Donham, ‘‘Freeing South Africa: The ‘Modernization’ of Male-Male Sexuality in Soweto,’’ Cultural Anthropology 13, 1 (1998): 6; Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995); Benedetta Rossi, ‘‘Revisiting Foucauldian Approaches: Power Dynamics in Development Projects,’’ Journal of Development Studies 40, 6 (2004): 1–29. 62. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1949; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 63. Michel Callon and Bruno Latour, ‘‘Don’t Throw the Baby Out with the Bath School! A Reply to Collins and Yearley,’’ in Science as Practice and Culture, ed. Andrew Pickering, 343–68 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 64. Hagmann and Korf argued convincingly that ‘‘margins’’ or ‘‘peripheries’’ should not simplistically be equated with actual environmental or social discontinuities. They correspond to political discourses that allow the central state to impose exceptional measures of rule on particular regions and societies that are ‘‘peripheral’’ only from the perspective of the central government. While I am fully in agreement with this analysis, here I suggest that the material characteristics of desert environments matter not just as a social construction, even though such environments are accessible for analysis only through their discursive dimension. See Tobias Hagmann and Benedikt Korf, ‘‘Agamben in the Ogaden: Violence and Sovereignty in the Ethio-Somali Frontier,’’ Political Geography 31, 4 (2012): 205–14. 65. I take the expression projet migratoire from Florence Boyer, ‘‘Le projet migratoire des migrants touaregs de la zone de Bankilare´: La pauvrete´ de´savoue´e,’’ Stichproben Wiener Zeitschrift fu¨r Kritische Afrikastudien 8 (2005): 47–67.

Chapter 8. Decolonization and (Dis)Possession in Lusophone Africa Epigraph: Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence, trans. Maureen Freely (London: Faber and Faber, 2009), 45. 1. See Raymond Betts, Decolonization (London: Routledge, 1998); Duara Prasenjit, Decolonization: Perspectives from Now and Then (New York: Routledge, 2004); Frederick

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Cooper, ‘‘Provincializing France,’’ in Imperial Formations, ed. Ann L. Stoler, Carole McGranahan, and Peter Perdue (Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press, 2007), 341–77. 2. I thank Darshan Vigneswaran and Joel Quirk for their ability to see the worthiness of my approach and to spell it out for me in clear and precise terms. I very much am indebted to their comments and insights on this particular point. 3. In using the word ‘‘eyewitness’’ to describe each participant-observer, I do not mean to imply that their accounts are impartial in any way, but rather that they were each caught up, in varying degrees, with what was happening in front of them. I will expand on this point in later discussions of each case. 4. Suzanne Gordon, Under the Harrow: Lives of White South Africans Today (London: Heinemann, 1988), 27–44. 5. Ryszard Kapus´cin´ski, Another Day of Life, trans. William R. Brand and Katarzyna Mroczkowska-Brand (London: Penguin, 1987). 6. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic, 1973), 3–32. 7. Prasenjit, Decolonization, 2. 8. Jane Jacobs, Edges of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City (London: Routledge, 1996), 22. 9. Pamila Gupta, ‘‘Mapping Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean: A Research Agenda,’’ South African Historical Journal 57, 1 (2007): 94–96. 10. Achille Mbembe, ‘‘First Night with Fanon: Property, Wealth and Racial Nationalism After Decolonisation,’’ public lecture as part of the Sawyer Seminar Series, Faculty of Humanities at the University of the Witwatersrand, March 29, 2010. 11. Jacobs, Edges of Empire, 29. 12. For writings that developed out of this productive field of research, see Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Nicholas B. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001); Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993); Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000); and of course the prolific Subaltern Studies Collective from India. 13. Betts, Decolonization, 1. 14. Ibid. 15. Here I am indexing the idea of the ‘‘politics of the belly,’’ a phrase coined by JeanFranc¸ois Bayart; see The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly (London: Longman, 1993). 16. Gupta, ‘‘Mapping Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean,’’ 99–100. 17. Ibid., 97–99. 18. Norrie MacQueen, The Decolonization of Portuguese Africa: Metropolitan Revolution and the Dissolution of Empire (London: Longman, 1997), 1–4. Portugal’s ‘‘first’’ empire was based in Asia in the sixteenth century, its ‘‘second’’ based in Brazil in the seventeenth and eighteenth, and its ‘‘third’’ in Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth. 19. Ibid., 17–52. 20. Ibid., 64–88. Due to the limited scope of this chapter and its larger focus, I am providing only a brief historical context for the decolonization processes (as political processes of governmental transition) that took place in Mozambique and Angola (alongside Guine´Bissau, Cabo Verde, and Sa˜o Tome´) in 1974–75. For an excellent overview, see MacQueen,

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The Decolonization of Portuguese Africa, chaps. 5 and 6 on Mozambique and Angola respectively. 21. Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492– 1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 1–15, 149–78. 22. Betts, Decolonization, 19. I borrow this phrase from Betts, who uses it as the title for his Chapter 2. 23. Here I am very interested in writing about a mobile state (rather than a failed state) and documenting what historical change looks like, very much following the Call for Papers for the ‘‘Theorizing the State and Mobility in Africa Conference,’’ Maputo, Mozambique, August 2010. I would like to thank Joel Quirk and Darshan Vigneswaran both for inviting me to participate in this workshop and for their critical and insightful comments on this essay. 24. Michel Foucault, ‘‘Governmentality,’’ in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 87–104. 25. The category of ‘‘Portuguese’’ in relation to whiteness needs to be interrogated and requires much further critical analysis. I must qualify that, in this chapter, I am dealing with largely the white Portuguese community that left Mozambique and Angola, even as there were Goan Indians as well as Black Mozambicans who were granted refugee status and guaranteed placement on flights out of Lourenc¸o Marques and Luanda on the eves of their respective decolonizations. It was a complicated process by which certain individuals (with certain race and class backgrounds) were given refugee status while others were not. Decolonization also triggered a range of responses. I interviewed several Portuguese Angolans in 2008, some of whom chose to stay behind (for reasons of politics or personal concerns), others who chose to migrate to South Africa because they wanted to stay in Africa even as they were given a choice to go to Lisbon first, while others who had little choice but to migrate to nearby South Africa precisely because they were not expressly invited to return to Portugal. See my publication, Pamila Gupta, ‘‘ ‘Going for a Sunday Drive’: Angolan Decolonization, Learning Whiteness and the Portuguese Diaspora of South Africa,’’ in Narrating the Portuguese Diaspora: Piecing Things Together ed. Francisco Fagundes et al. (New York: Peter Lang, 2011). 26. MacQueen, The Decolonization of Portuguese Africa, 211–12. Here I am interested in conceptualizing the Portuguese colonial state less as a failed African state than as a highly mobile one. 27. There is a huge and growing literature on the retornados (the ‘‘returned ones’’) as those persons who emigrated from the ex-colonies to Portugal are called, including the experiences of the soldiers who were stationed overseas, many of whom created photo albums documenting their experiences. See, for example, R. Pena Pires, Os Retornados: Um estudo sociografico (Lisboa: Instituto Estudos para o Desenvolvimento, 1987). Also, see the following website, which hosts a variety of materials and memorabilia tied to the retornados, Memorias d’Africa e d’Oriente, cited August 13, 2010, http://memoria-africa.ua.pt/. I would like to thank Filipa Ribeiro da Silva who also participated in the ‘‘Theorising the State and Mobility in Africa Conference’’ (July 30–August 4, 2010; Maputo, Mozambique, organized by Joel Quirk and Darshan Vigneswaran) for her generosity in discussing this topic with me and for providing additional references for a field of inquiry that I am just beginning to research. Many of these retornados also experienced difficulties on their return migration, including discrimination as refugees ‘‘tainted’’ by their African histories. I interviewed one such person whose family, after leaving Mozambique for Lisbon in 1975, experienced such discrimination that they immigrated to South Africa ten years later. Interview, Luis, April 2008, Johannesburg.

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28. MacQueen, The Decolonization of Portuguese Africa, 152. 29. Again, my focus is not on stories of Mozambican and Angolan postcoloniality and their attendant subjectivities but rather an exploration of the transitional in-between space of decolonization as part of the unfolding story of Portuguese postcoloniality. 30. It is quite complicated to understand who chose to go where and for what reasons, as well as who was given a higher status for migration to the metropole. After Lisbon, popular second choices for migration were South Africa (for Portuguese Mozambicans and Portuguese Angolans) and Brazil (for Portuguese Angolans). Other popular choices were the U.S., Canada, and New Zealand according to the various individuals I have interviewed on this topic in Johannesburg, 2008. One such informant told me that as a young boy he remembers his family was not given passage on the outbound flights for Lisbon, so they migrated to South Africa instead. Others told stories of being treated poorly, being discriminated against in Lisbon, and labeled ‘‘refugees’’ from Africa. 31. Kapus´cin´ski, Another Day of Life, 35. 32. It must be reinforced here that Mozambique and Angola were very different yet interrelated cases of Portuguese decolonization (Angola following Mozambique only five months later) that took place under very dramatically different contexts, the conditions for the exodus of Angola’s majority Portuguese population much more dire, tensions between Europeans and Africans much more tense and racially fraught as the impending civil war was readily apparent. See MacQueen, The Decolonization of Portuguese Africa, 158–204. 33. Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007), 2–3. 34. Arjan Appadurai, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 3–63. 35. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1984), 3–36. 36. Stewart, Ordinary Affects, 1–7. 37. Here I am interested in looking at how Mozambique, Angola, and South Africa have deeply intertwined histories, rather than at each history in (nationalist, colonial, apartheid) isolation. Decolonization is an interesting analytic for bringing them into one field of analysis, since it involved the circulation of people and things across territorial borders and oceanic waters. 38. I consider all of them ‘‘eyewitnesses’’ because they experienced decolonization, even as I do not imply that they were impartial in their viewpoints. In all three cases, they were not disinterested observers but rather very attached to what they were caught up in, albeit to varying degrees. As well, their narratives were intended for very different audiences. 39. In suggesting ways to write beyond the nation, I am referring to a conference theme that I was involved in that was hosted by Dilip Menon in 2010, at the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa (CISA) at the University of the Witwatersrand: ‘‘Writing Post-National Narratives: Other Geographies, Other Times,’’ Johannesburg, South Africa. 40. This point was only reinforced by Salazar’s argument, one that was used to get Portugal out of the unpopular position of still maintaining colonies in a global era of decolonization, wherein he conveniently renamed them ‘‘overseas provinces,’’ its colonized subjects now purportedly holding equal rights as full citizens of Portugal. His ‘‘one nation theory’’ could only hold ideological favor for so long. For a discussion of how this political maneuver delayed

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decolonization, see Pratima Kamat, Farar Far: Local Resistance to Colonial Hegemony in Goa, 1510–1912 (Panaji, Goa: Institute Menezes Braganza, 1999), 283–84. 41. There is a huge literature on the propaganda of the Portuguese state, both in terms of press censorship and through education in the empire, that produced many colonial subjects (both Portuguese and not) wholly uncritical of the state; for some, nationalist fervor was synonymous with support of the colonial regime. See, for example, Jose´ Marques Guimara˜es, ´ frica: Da i repu´blica ao estado novo: 1910– A Polı´tica ‘‘educativa’ do colonialismo portugueˆs em A 1974 (Porto: Profedic¸o˜es, 2006). 42. For a summary of Rangel’s life history and photography projects, see, for example, Ricardo Rangel, Pa˜o nosso de cada noite (Maputo: Marimbique, 2004). University of the Western Cape history professor Patricia Hayes gave a lecture on Ricardo Rangel’s biography, presented at the Market Photo Workshop, Johannesburg, June 19, 2009, http://marketphoto workshop.org.za/PROJECTS/PastProjects/2009/PublicdiscussionRicardoRangel/tabid/2481/ language/en-US/Default.aspx, cited November 15, 2010. 43. As well, my life history of Rangel comes from interviews I conducted with the photographer in Maputo on November 27, 2008, and with his widow Beatrice (shortly following his death), on June 30, 2009. 44. Rangel produced some of the most iconic photographs of Mozambique’s colonial period as well as during its independence, particularly those taken of Samora Machel when he arrived in Lourenc¸o Marques to a crowd of over 100,000 people, including many Portuguese who stayed on, committed to the ‘‘new’’ Mozambique. See online article ‘‘Mozambique: Dismantling the Portuguese Empire,’’ Time, July 7, 1975. Also, my personal interview with Ricardo Rangel in Maputo on November 27, 2008. 45. The power of his images lies in his ability to capture intimacies, between sexual partners, between men and women, between black and white; he captures the fine line between despair and hope. 46. I dedicate this chapter to Rangel. Despite his death in 2009, his much acclaimed center, the Centro de Documentac¸a˜o e Formac¸a˜o Fotogra´fica, based in Maputo, which houses his entire photographic archive, is currently digitizing all his images. 47. As much as my focus in this chapter is on colonial possessions as standing in for a larger process of decolonization, those things that were left behind (or could not fit) must also be considered as standing in for so much more about the other layered effects of decolonization. 48. Once again, it is moments of intimacy captured here on film by Rangel that say so much; it is quiet glimpses of people behind the scenes (like the faceless man hoisting the mattress into the Portuguese madam’s crate) or the desperation of a handwritten plea on the side of a crate or Rangel’s own scribbled notes on a contact sheet. 49. Elizabeth Edwards, ‘‘Beyond the Boundary: A Consideration of the Expressive in Photography and Anthropology,’’ in Rethinking Visual Anthropology, ed. Marcus Banks and Howard Morphy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999), 58–60. Photographs are both ‘‘visual metaphor’’ and ‘‘lyrical expression,’’ capable of unraveling the deeper meanings and metaphors of cultural being. 50. Gordon, Under the Harrow, 27–44. In this section, I am summarizing from Gordon’s oral interview with Carlos Garc¸a˜o. It must be noted that his interview was recorded thirteen years after his arrival in South Africa and during an Apartheid governmentality; this makes

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rereading of his testimony some twenty two-years later a more complicated and careful reading. 51. Ibid. The account of Carlos Garc¸a˜o is deeply imbedded in the times in which he lived. While it is unclear from his testimony why he chose South Africa over Portugal for migration for himself and his family, one foreseeable reason could be the already wellestablished Portuguese diasporic community in South Africa, a large first wave of migration (from the mainland and Madeira) first taking place in the middle of the eighteenth century. See Debora Tozzo, ‘‘People in Transition Between Africa and Europe: Cultural, Social, and Economical Aspects of Portuguese Immigration into South Africa from 1926 to 1975,’’ MA thesis, University of KwaZulu Natal, June 2005. Also see Luus Leal, Breve histo´ria dos portu´ frica do Sul (Potchestrom, South Africa: Potchefstrromse Universiteit, 1977). gueses na A Noticeably absent in his testimony are examples of racism (against black South Africans) he must have witnessed on a day-to-day basis living in Apartheid Johannesburg, as well as the fact that, as a white person, he benefited from this discriminatory system. Even as Carlos sometimes romanticizes Portuguese colonialism (and is overly critical of decolonization) in retelling his life history and as a way to justify his migration to South Africa, his account can still be ‘‘read’’ for its firsthand account of Mozambican decolonization. 52. Gordon, Under the Harrow, 34. 53. Ibid., 35. Even while it does not come up in Carlos’s testimony, there were reported cases of abuse by soldiers against civilians. Nor did the many soldiers conscripted to serve in the colonies necessarily wholly support the colonial regime; there was much dissension among them, depending on their personal experiences. In other words, as I have yet to research this topic, I want to avoid stereotyping the many soldiers involved in the decolonization process in Mozambique and Angola. Once again, I thank Filipa Ribeiro da Silva for pointing out these historical nuances to me, August 1–4, 2010. 54. Gordon, Under the Harrow, 35. 55. Ibid, 36. 56. Ibid, 37. 57. Ibid. Of course, it was much easier to find a job considering that Carlos was white, young, healthy, and unemployed. Everything he gained in some sense was at the expense of (South African) blacks less fortunate than he. 58. The irony here is that Carlos left Mozambique during its decolonization for fear of what independence would bring in relation to racial tensions, and now he and his family were living in the back of a white man’s house, in quarters reserved for blacks under an Apartheid regime. No doubt this raised concerns for Carlos at the time over his social standing, and his fear of falling in class status, as he moved from an elite colonial situation to the status of a refugee (albeit a white one) taking on menial jobs (such as working in a bar) under an Apartheid regime. It is interesting how Carlos’s whiteness is used to navigate two different governmentalities with very different unexpected outcomes. 59. Carlos recounts how after numerous applications to remain in South Africa and even the expense of hiring a lawyer, he and his family were called in for an inspection (to determine they were not Coloured, he notes). It was only through the intervention of the Portuguese vice consul in Pretoria that Carlos was given a permit to stay in the country—interestingly, it is his ‘‘Portuguese-ness’’ and colonial connections that allow him and his family residency under an Apartheid regime.

276

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60. The irony is that the kind of job in South Africa he attained (once again, using his colonial connections) after leaving Mozambique was to send things back to Mozambique via Mozambican immigrant miners living in South Africa, which, in turn, suggests the continued (historical) connectivities between Mozambique and South Africa, as well as the power of political processes to cohere in things. In post-Apartheid Johannesburg today, I have noticed an interesting neocolonial relationship that has developed wherein members of the Portuguese community employ many Mozambicans in the service industry for an exclusively Portuguese-speaking clientele at restaurants, sporting clubs, and such public venues. 61. Gordon, Under the Harrow, 38. 62. Ibid., 42. 63. Ibid., 36. There are numerous rumors (ones I have heard myself) circulating that the Portuguese destroyed the plumbing of Mozambique on their colonial departure. Thus, Carlos’s statements are familiar on one level. Rather than investigating the truthfulness of this action, I find it interesting that this rumor abounds (and commonly in South Africa), particularly for what it says about the Portuguese as ‘‘bad’’ colonialists in comparison, for example, to the British, which, of course, ties into South Africa’s own colonial past. It is also interesting to ‘‘read’’ Carlos’s statements more seriously to think about what happens to the idea behind the thing when the thing itself (the toilet, drain, and so forth) is spoiled, so, through the act of destroying objects, perhaps those departing are attempting to destroy the idea of colonial loss as an inevitable process. Instead, the act of destruction is an assertion of agency (or act of resistance) to a political process (decolonization) that they had little choice in determining and that has profoundly affected their future lives. This was just one small way of getting even, of balancing state power. I thank Eric Allina for suggesting this textured reading of the destruction of things; Eric Allina, August 1–4, 2010. For an interesting discussion of the (myth of) the destruction of toilets in Mozambique during decolonization, see Sean Christie, ‘‘The Great Unblocking of Beira,’’ Mail & Guardian (Johannesburg), March 19, 2010. 64. Gordon, Under the Harrow, 36. However, Carlos also remembers that many unopened boxes of brand new equipment were left behind as well, which in turn suggests perhaps a delay in receiving and learning how to use new technology sent from the metropole on the part of the Portuguese living in the colonies, as well as their hasty departure during decolonization. 65. Ibid., 43; emphasis mine. 66. Of course, the ensuing civil war in Angola compelled most people to leave due to the dangerous circumstances. What was happening in Angola was both distinct from what was going on in Mozambique with regard to historical context, but the processes of decolonization were parallel in many regards, including the mass exodus of the majority of Portuguese citizens living there, but on a much larger scale in Angola. As well, many Portuguese Angolans chose to immigrate to Brazil, a popular choice that suggests the nation-state’s Atlantic oceanic connectivities, as compared to Mozambique. That a popular second choice for immigration was South Africa suggests Angola’s simultaneous connectivities within a larger southern African region. See Gupta, ‘‘ ‘Going for a Sunday Drive’,’’ 2–5. 67. Kapus´cin´ski, Another Day of Life, 8. 68. Ibid., 135. 69. The many political parties involved in the Angolan fight for independence included the FNLA—National Front for the Liberation of Angola—led by Holden Roberto and backed

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by Western powers and Zaire; MPLA—Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola—led by Agostinho Neto and backed by the Soviet Union and Cuba; UNITA—National Union for the Total Independence of Angola—led by Jonas Savimbi and backed by Western powers and South Africa. 70. Kapus´cin´ski, Another Day of Life, 4–5. 71. Ibid., 5. 72. Ibid., 6. Again, the racial tensions between black and white were much more charged (and with violence) in the Angolan case due to the historical context as well as the ongoing civil war. 73. Ibid., 7. Here the journalist is alluding to the abuses of power on the part of the Portuguese police that he witnessed, that is, their sense of frustration for what had happened at the level of state politics and their desire for getting even with a colonized population for something that they had no part in deciding and that determined their livelihoods. 74. Ibid., 11. 75. Ibid., 17. The trauma the soldiers themselves experienced while stationed overseas during the colonial wars is a topic rarely talked about and just starting to be researched. A Portuguese friend recently told me that two of her brothers served in Angola in the 1970s— they are still scarred from the experience (akin to Vietnam vet syndrome) and rarely talk about it with other members of the family. Apparently, many soldiers were given photograph albums to document their overseas tours. Again, I thank Filipa Ribeiro da Silva for this additional information. 76. Ibid. 77. Here our journalist uses his own life experiences—Poland during World War II—as a point of reference for describing what he sees in front of him. 78. Kapus´cin´ski, Another Day of Life, 10. His description of the caravan of cars is reminiscent of descriptions I heard during interviews conducted with several Portuguese Angolans who immigrated to South Africa during decolonization. The testimony of Rui in particular stands out, as well his comments about how his family had not been invited to go to Lisbon, but rather had little choice but to migrate to South Africa, given their social standing in Angolan society. He also recounted for me how traumatic the journey had been (via Namibia to South Africa) for his family. His comments complicate a neat narrative of colonial governmentality wherein the state sought to take care of its Portuguese citizens during its transfer of power. See Gupta, ‘‘ ‘Going for a Sunday Drive’,’’ 11–14. 79. Kapus´cin´ski, Another Day of Life, 12. 80. Ibid., 13. 81. Ibid., 23. 82. Ibid., 13–14. 83. Ibid., 16–17. 84. Ibid., 18–19. 85. See Ann Laura Stoler, ‘‘Imperial Debris: Reflections on Ruins and Ruination,’’ Cultural Anthropology 23, 2 (2008): 191–219; Nicholas Dirks, In Near Ruins: Cultural Theory at the End of the Century (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). 86. In many ways, this chapter has taken a ruminative stance toward thinking and writing about Portuguese postcoloniality (and in relation to its processes of decolonization in Lusophone Africa and as revealing an intense relationship between people, things, and colonial loss) as opposed to an in-depth discussion of Mozambican or Angolan postcoloniality.

278

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87. I find the parallels between the timing of my fellowship to travel to Lisbon to research the history of the Portuguese overseas colonial empire and all the celebrations taking place in Lisbon in 1998 to commemorate the Portuguese discoveries—for example, the staged World Exposition maintained ‘‘colonial’’ pavilion—which in some sense was a tribute to Portugal’s colonial beginnings. The fellowship, on the one hand, was an attempt to fund scholars like myself to look more critically at its colonial past. On the other hand, the celebrations were a commemoration of colonial glory, not its demise, which in some ways suggests a nation’s denial of its colonial loss. 88. Interesting and relevant here, as well that she used the royal ‘‘we’’ to include herself alongside her mother and her nation when she was only a few years old at the time they left for Portugal. 89. Paola’s comment, even as it stands in for the Portuguese nation, also reflects a paternalistic attitude toward Africans, as opposed to fearing them as perhaps her mother did while living in Mozambique. She is the next generation, but in some sense things have not changed all that much. Paola is standing in for her mother, her mother for Portugal the colonial empire and nation-state. Her comments can also perhaps show how the retornados (including her mother and herself) were received and treated poorly in Portugal, never escaping the trauma of being refugees.

Chapter 9. Moving from War to Peace in the Zambia-Angola Borderlands 1. Christopher Clapham, Jeffrey Herbst, and Greg Mills, eds., Big African States: Angola, Sudan, DRC, Ethiopia, Nigeria, South Africa (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2006). 2. The railway is being rehabilitated but details on its final route into Zambia remain unclear. The original route passed through DR Congo about 50 km north of the border and entered Zambia only after passing through Lubumbashi. There are widespread expectations that there will be a new branch line taking the line into Mwinilunga and on through Zambia to the Copperbelt; ‘‘Zambia: Benguela Rail Works to Reach Mwinilunga 2012,’’ allafrica.com, December 6, 2011; ‘‘Angola Ready to ‘‘Oil’’ Zambia,’’ Lusakatimes.com, May 11, 2012.. 3. For example, see James Anderson and Liam O’Dowd, ‘‘Borders, Border Regions and Territoriality: Contradictory Meanings, Changing Significance,’’ Regional Studies 33, 7 (1999): 593–604; Hastings Donnan and Thomas M. Wilson, Borders: Frontiers of Identity, Nation and State (Oxford: Berg, 1999); Veena Das and Deborah Poole, eds., Anthropology in the Margins of the State, School of American Research Advanced Seminar Series (Santa Fe: SAR, 2004); Emmanuel Brunet-Jailly, ‘‘Theorizing Borders: An Interdisciplinary Perspective,’’ Geopolitics 10, 4 (2005): 633–49; Vladimir Kolossov, ‘‘Border Studies: Changing Perspectives and Theoretical Approaches,’’ Geopolitics 10, 4 (2005): 606–32; I. William Zartman, ed., Understanding Life in the Borderlands: Boundaries in Depth and in Motion (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010); M. Michiel Baud and W. Willem Van Schendel, ‘‘Toward a Comparative History of Borderlands,’’ Journal of World History 8, 2 (1997): 212. 4. Baud and Van Schendel, ‘‘Toward a Comparative History of Borderlands,’’ 220. 5. Paul Nugent, Smugglers, Secessionists and Loyal Citizens on the Ghana-Togo Frontier: The Life of the Borderlands Since 1914, Western African Studies (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2002); Donna K. Flynn, ‘‘ ‘We Are the Border’: Identity, Exchange, and the State Along the Be´nin-Nigeria Border,’’ American Ethnologist 24, 2 (1997): 311–30; Wolfgang Zeller, ‘‘Danger and Opportunity in Katima Mulilo: A Namibian Border Boomtown at Transnational

Notes to Pages 196–201

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Crossroads,’’ Journal of Southern African Studies 35, 1 (2009): 135–54; Timothy Raeymaekers, ‘‘The Silent Encroachment of the Frontier: A Politics of Transborder Trade in the Semliki Valley (Congo-Uganda),’’ Political Geography 28, 1 (2009): 55–65; Nick Megoran, ‘‘For Ethnography in Political Geography: Experiencing and Re-Imagining Ferghana Valley Boundary Closures,’’ Political Geography 25, 6 (2006): 622–40; W. F. S. Miles, ‘‘Development, Not Division: Local Versus External Perceptions of the Niger-Nigeria Boundary,’’ Journal of Modern African Studies 43, 2 (2005): 297–320. 6. David Newman, ‘‘The Lines That Continue to Separate Us: Borders in Our ’Borderless’ World’,’’ Progress in Human Geography 30, 2 (2006): 151. 7. Baud and Van Schendel, ‘‘Toward a Comparative History of Borderlands,’’ 227. 8. Raeymaekers, ‘‘The Silent Encroachment of the Frontier,’’ 58. 9. Ibid., 57. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., 63. 12. Paul Nugent, ‘‘Sizing Up Asymmetry: State Logics and Power Dynamics in the Senegambian and Ghana-Togo Borderlands,’’ paper presented at Borderlands Theory in Africa: African Borderlands Research Network Annual Conference, University of Witwatersrand, South Africa:, 2010. 13. Paul Nugent, ‘‘States and Social Contracts in Africa,’’ New Left Review 63 (2010): 37. 14. Raeymaekers, ‘‘The Silent Encroachment of the Frontier,’’ 57. 15. Flynn, ‘‘ ‘We Are the Border’,’’ 323. 16. Nugent, ‘‘Sizing Up Asymmetry,’’ 8. 17. Flynn, ‘‘ ‘We Are the Border’,’’ 322. 18. For detailed discussion on the Lunda Ndembu see James Anthony Pritchett, The Lunda-Ndembu: Style, Change, and Social Transformation in South Central Africa (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001); Victor Turner, Schism and Continuity in an African Society: A Study of Ndembu Village Life (Manchester: Manchester University Press. 1957). 19. Oliver Bakewell, ‘‘Repatriation and Self-Settled Refugees in Zambia: Bringing Solutions to the Wrong Problems,’’ Journal of Refugee Studies 13, 4 (2000): 356–73. 20. Lawrence W. Henderson, Angola: Five Centuries of Conflict (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978), 106. 21. William G. Clarence-Smith, Slaves, Peasants and Capitalists in Southern Angola 1840– 1926 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 22. Andrew Roberts, A History of Zambia (New York: Africana, 1976). 23. Moses Sangambo, The History of the Luvale People and Their Chieftainship (Zambezi, Zambia: Mize Palace, 1984); Cheke Cultural Writers, The History and Cultural Life of the Mbunda Speaking Peoples (Lusaka: University of Zambia, 1994). 24. This ongoing contact was illustrated very clearly in August 2010, when Senior Chief Kanongesha from Zambia and a number of his councilors went to help with the installation of the new Kanongesha in Angola. 25. Achim von Oppen, Terms of Trade and Terms of Trust: The History and Contexts of Pre-Colonial Market Production Around the Upper Zambezi and Kasai (Hamburg: Lit, 1995) 432; Pritchett, ‘‘The Lunda-Ndembu’’. 26. Author’s interview with male respondent, 5 February 1997 27. Gerald J. Bender, Angola Under the Portuguese: The Myth and the Reality (London: Heinemann, 1978).

280

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28. Henderson, Angola. See also the chapters by Filipa Ribeiro da Silva and Eric Allina in this volume for further discussion of Portuguese colonial migration and labor policy. 29. von Oppen, Terms of Trade and Terms of Trust, 432. 30. Christopher Pycroft, ‘‘Angola: ’The Forgotten Tragedy’,’’ Journal of Southern African Studies 20, 2 (1994): 241–62. 31. International Crisis Group, ‘‘Angola: Exorcising Savimbi’s Ghost,’’ Current History 102, 664 (2003): 206–14. 32. See Oliver Bakewell, ‘‘The Meaning and Use of Identity Papers: Handheld and Heartfelt Nationality in the Borderlands of North-West Zambia,’’ Working Paper 5, International Migration Institute, University of Oxford, 2007. 33. UNHCR assisted the return of 74,000 Angolans from Zambia between 2003 and 2007. According to UNHCR statistics the number of Angolan refugees fell from the peak of 220,000 at the end of 2001, of which only 90,000 were receiving assistance, to 43,000 by the end of 2006, of which 18,500 were receiving assistance. This suggests that the number of selfsettled refugees has fallen by over 100,000. 34. Male (born 1974) interviewed by author, 25 January 1997. 35. Male (born 1933) interviewed by author, 25 January 1997. 36. Male (born 1968) interviewed by author, 24 July 1997. 37. Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, ‘‘Beyond ‘Identity’,’’ Theory and Society 29, 1 (2000): 10. 38. Male (born 1974) interviewed by author, 9 March 2008. 39. Female (born 1956) interviewed by author, 19 June 1997, 9 March 2008 and 2 September 2010. 40. Male (born 1952) interviewed by author 26 February 1997 and 3 September 2010. 41. Village group discussion conducted by author, 18th August 2010. 42. Female (born before 1940) interviewed by author, 18August 2010. 43. Male (born 1968), interviewed by author, 18th August 2010. 44. Female (born 1970) interviewed by author, 3 September 2010. 45. Male (born 1952) interviewed by author, 3 September 2010. 46. Male (born before 1950) interviewed by author, 15 August 2010. 47. Cf. Miles, ‘‘Development, Not Division.’’ 48. S. F. Joireman, ‘‘The Mystery of Capital Formation in Sub-Saharan Africa: Women, Property Rights and Customary Law,’’ World Development 36, 7 (2008): 1235. 49. D. M. Hughes, ‘‘Refugees and Squatters: Immigration and the Politics of Territory on the Zimbabwe-Mozambique Border,’’ Journal of Southern African Studies 25, 4 (1999): 533–52. 50. See Art Hansen, ‘‘Once the Running Stops: Assimilation of Angolan Refugees into Zambian Border Villages,’’ Disasters 3, 4 (1979): 369–74. 51. Christian Lund, ‘‘Twilight Institutions: An Introduction,’’ Development and Change 37, 4 (2006): 673–84; Christian Lund, ‘‘Twilight Institutions: Public Authority and Local Politics in Africa,’’ Development and Change 37, 4 (2006): 686–705. 52. Lund, ‘‘Twilight Institutions: Public Authority and Local Politics.’’ 53. Ibid., 689. 54. Ibid., 699. 55. Lund, ‘‘Twilight Institutions: An Introduction,’’ 674. 56. Lund, ‘‘Twilight Institutions: Public Authority and Local Politics,’’ 699.

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Chapter 10. Recognition, Solidarity, and the Power of Mobility in Africa’s Urban Estuaries 1. See UN Habitat, State of the World’s Cities 2010/2011: Bridging the Urban Divide (Nairobi: UN Habitat, 2008); John Briggs and Davis Mwamfupe, ‘‘Peri-Urban Development in an Era of Structural Adjustment in Africa: The City of Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania,’’ Urban Studies 37, 4 (2000): 797–809; Teresa P. R. Caldeira, ‘‘Fortified Enclaves: The New Urban Segregation,’’ Public Culture 8, 2 (1996): 303–28; Martin Murray and Garth Myers, Cities in Contemporary Africa (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 2. Anton Harber, Diepsloot (Johannesburg: Jonathan Bell, 2011). 3. Jo Beall, Basudeb Guha-Khasnobis, and Ravi Kanbur, ‘‘Introduction: African Development in an Urban World: Beyond the Tipping Point,’’ Urban Forum 21 (2010): 187–204. 4. See, for example, George Simmel, ‘‘The Metropolis and the Mental Life,’’ in The Blackwell City Reader, ed. Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson, 11–19 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002). 5. See Mitchell Dean, ‘‘Foucault, Government, and the Enfolding of Authority,’’ in Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism, and Rationalities of Government, ed. Andrew Barry, Thomas Osbome, and Nikolas Rose, 209–30 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 6. See Graeme Go¨tz and AbdouMaliq Simone, ‘‘On Belonging and Becoming in African Cities,’’ in Emerging Johannesburg: Perspectives on the Postapartheid City, ed. Richard Tomlinson et al., 123–47 (New York: Routledge, 2003); Jo Beall, Owen Crankshaw, and Sue Parnell, Uniting a Divided City: Governance and Social Exclusion in Johannesburg (Sterling, Va.: Earthscan, 2002). 7. John Torpey. The Invention of the Passport (Cambridge: Cambrdige University Press, 2000), 272. 8. Teresa Dirsuweit, ‘‘Johannesburg: Fearful City?’’ Urban Forum 13 (2002): 3–19; Richard Ballard, ‘‘Middle Class Neighbourhoods or ‘African Kraals’? The Impact of Informal Settlements and Vagrants on Post-Apartheid White Identity,’’ Urban Forum 15 (2004): 48–73; see also Caldeira, ‘‘Fortified Enclaves.’’ 9. See, for example, Scarlett Cornellison, ‘‘Migration as Reterritorialisation: Migrant Movement, Sovereignty and Authority in Contemporary Southern Africa’’ (May 2007), available from http://www.open.ac.uk/socialsciences/bisa-africa/workshop/cornelissen.pdf; Charles S. Maier, ‘‘ ‘Being There’: Place, Territory and Identity,’’ in Identities, Affiliations and Allegiances, ed. Seyla Benhabib, Ian Shapiro, and Danilo Petranovic´ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 10. See Jean-Franc¸ois Bayart, Stephen Ellis, and Be´atrice Hibou, ‘‘From Kleptocracy to the Felonious State,’’ in The Criminalization of the State in Africa, African Issues, ed. JeanFranc¸ois Bayart, Stephen Ellis, and Be´atrice Hibou, 1–31 (Oxford: James Currey, 1999); Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz, Africa Works: Disorder as Political Instrument (London: International African Institute in association with James Currey, 1999). 11. T. Hansen and Finn Stepputat, States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001); Ilda Lindell, ‘‘The Multiple Sites of Urban Governance: Insights from an African City,’’ Urban Studies 45, 9 (2008): 1879–1901. 12. Stephen Lukes, Power: A Radical View (London: Macmillan, 1997). 13. See Dean, ‘‘Foucault, Government, and the Enfolding of Authority.’’

282

Notes to Pages 225–229

14. John P. Nettl, ‘‘The State as a Conceptual Variable,’’ World Politics: A Quarterly Journal of International Relations 20, 4 (1968): 565–66. 15. See, for example, Faruk Birtek, ‘‘From Affiliation to Affinity: Citizenship in Transition from Empire to the Nation-State,’’ in Identities, Affiliations and Allegiances, ed. Benhabib, Shapiro, and Petranovic´, 17–44. 16. Maier, ‘‘ ‘Being There’: Place, Territory and Identity,’’ 141. 17. See James Bohman and Matthias Lutz-Bachmann, Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kant’s Cosmopolitan Ideal (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997). 18. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 213–15. 19. T. Mitchell, ‘‘The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics,’’ American Political Science Quarterly 85 (1991): 81. 20. See Brian Larkin, ‘‘Bandiri Music, Globalization, and Urban Experience in Nigeria,’’ Social Text 22, 4 (2004): 91–112; Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Abdou Maliq Simone, ‘‘People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg,’’ Public Culture 16, 3 (2004): 407–29. 21. Hania Zlotnick, ‘‘The Dimensions of Migration in Africa,’’ in Africa on the Move: African Migration and Urbanisation in Comparative Perspective, ed. Marta Tienda et al. (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2006), 15–37. 22. Peter Geschiere, ‘‘Funerals and Belonging: Different Patterns in South Cameroon,’’ African Studies Review 48, 2 (2005): 45–64; Denise Malauene, ‘‘The Impact of the Congolese Forced Migrants’ ‘Permanent Transit’ Condition on Their Relations with Mozambique and Its People,’’ MA thesis, University of the Witwatersand, 2004; Mamadou Diouf and Steven Rendall, ‘‘The Senegalese Murid Trade Diaspora and the Making of a Vernacular Cosmopolitanism,’’ Public Culture 12, 3 (2000): 679–702. 23. Derek Byerlee, ‘‘Rural-Urban Migration in Africa: Theory, Policy and Research Implications,’’ International Migration Review 8, 4 (1974): 543–66. 24. UN Habitat, State of the World’s Cities 2010/2011, 4. 25. UNDESA, World Urbanization Prospects, the 2011 Revision (2013), http://esa.un.org/ unup/pdf/WUP2011_Highlights.pdf. 26. Although there are significant debates over the rates and nature of urbanization and migration’s contribution to it, no one debates the significance of urban growth and the critical role mobility plays in it. See, for example, Deborah Potts, Circular Migration in Zimbabwe and Contemporary Sub-Saharan Africa (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2011); Philippe Bocquier, ‘‘World Urbanization Prospects: An Alternative to the UN Model of Projection Compatible with the Mobility Transition Theory,’’ Demographic Research 12 (2005): 197–236. 27. Loren B. Landau and Veronique Gindrey, Gauteng 2055: Trend Paper on Population and Migration (Johannesburg: Gauteng Department of Economic Development, 2008). 28. Barney Cohen, ‘‘Urban Growth in Developing Countries: A Review of Current Trends and a Caution Regarding Existing Forecasts,’’ World Development 32, 1 (2004): 23–51. 29. Caroline W. Kihato, ‘‘Migration, Gender and Urbanisation in Johannesburg,’’ Ph.D. dissertation, University of South Africa, 2000; Loren B. Landau, ‘‘Transplants and Transients: Idioms of Belonging and Dislocation in Inner-City Johannesburg,’’ African Studies Review 49, 2 (2006): 125–45; Malauene, ‘‘The Impact of the Congolese Forced Migrants’ ‘Permanent Transit’ Condition.’’

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30. Manuel Castells, ‘‘An Introduction to the Information Age,’’ in The Information Society Reader, ed. Frank Webster et al. (New York: Routledge, 2004). 31. Peter Kankonde, ‘‘Transnational Family Ties, Remittance Motives, and Social Death Among Congolese Migrants: A Socio-Anthropological Analysis,’’ Journal of Comparative Family Studies 41, 2 (2010): 225–43; Morten L. Madsen, ‘‘Living for Home: Policing Immorality Among Undocumented Migrants in Johannesburg,’’ African Studies 63, 2 (2004): 173–92. 32. See Iriann Freemantle, ‘‘ ‘You Can Only Claim Your Yard and Not a Country’: Exploring Contexts, Discourse and Practices of Quotidian Cosmopolitanism Amongst African Migrants in Johannesburg,’’ Ph.D. dissertation, University of the Witwatersrand, 2010. 33. For a discussion of these themes, see Sally Falk Moore, Social Facts and Fabrications: ‘‘Customary’’ Law on Kilimanjaro, 1880–1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 55–73; Bruce Lincoln, Authority: Construction and Corrosion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 34. See Philip Selznick, ‘‘Legal Cultures and the Rule of Law,’’ in The Rule of Law After Communism: Problems and Prospects in East-Central Europe, ed. Martı´n Krygier and Adam Czarnota (Brookfield: Ashgate, 1999); Thomas M. Franck, The Power of Legitimacy Among Nations, vol. 3 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). 35. Cf. Bayart et al., ‘‘From Kleptocracy to the Felonious State.’’ 36. See also Julia Hornberger, ‘‘ ‘My Police—Your Police’: The Informal Privatisation of the Police in the Inner City of Johannesburg,’’ African Studies 63, 2 (2004): 213–30. 37. Veena Das, ‘‘The Signature of the State: The Paradox of Illegibility,’’ in Anthropology in the Margins of the State, ed. Veena Das and Deborah Poole (Oxford: James Currey, 2004). 38. Jean Pierre Misago, Loren B. Landau, and Tamlyn J. Monson, eds., Towards Tolerance, Law, and Dignity: Addressing Violence Against Foreign Nationals in South Africa (Pretoria: International Organisation of Migration, 2008), 19. 39. Tamlyn J. Monson, ‘‘Making the Law; Breaking the Law; Taking the Law into Our Own Hands: Sovereignty and Territorial Control in Three South African Settlements,’’ in Exorcising the Demons Within: Xenophobia, Violence and Statecraft in Contemporary South Africa, ed. Loren B. Landau (Johannesburg: WITS University Press, 2012). 40. Cf. Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000). 41. See Vedaste Nzayabino, ‘‘Spiritual Ecology: The Role of the Church in Territorialising Belonging and Its Impact on Integration of Migrants in South Africa,’’ MA thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, 2009. 42. See Mark Sommers, Fear in Bongoland: Burundi Refugees in Urban Tanzania (New York: Berghahn, 2001). 43. Madsen, ‘‘Living for Home’’; Eva A. Maina Ayiera, ‘‘Burying Our Dead in Your City: Interpreting Individual Constructs of Belonging in the Context of Burial of Loved Ones in Exile,’’ MA thesis, University of Witwatersrand, 2008; Jens A. Andersson, ‘‘Informal Moves, Informal Markets: International Migrants and Traders from Mzimba District, Malawi,’’ African Affairs 105, 420 (2006): 375–97. 44. See, for example, Clifford Geertz, Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980). 45. Interview with author, March 18, 2009. 46. Interview with author, March 14, 2010.

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47. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 48. Robert D. Kaplan, ‘‘The Coming Anarchy: How Scarcity, Crime, Overpopulation, Tribalism and Disease Are Rapidly Destroying the Social Fabric of Our Planet,’’ Atlantic Monthly, February 1, 1994. 49. Brenda Chalfin, ‘‘Enlarging the Anthropology of the State: Global Customs Regimes and the Traffic in Sovereignty,’’ Current Anthropology 47, 2 (2006): 243–76. 50. Cf. Robert Latham, ‘‘Social Sovereignty,’’ Theory, Culture & Society 17, 4 (2000): 1–18. 51. Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller, ‘‘Political Power Beyond the State: Problematics of Government,’’ British Journal of Sociology 43, 2 (1992): 173–205.

Contributors

Eric Allina is Associate Professor in the Department of History, University of Ottawa. His research examines histories of labor and the state in southern Africa, especially colonial and independence-era Mozambique. A current project explores a transnational social history of African workers in East Germany during the Cold War’s last decade. He is author of Slavery by Any Other Name: African Life Under Company Rule in Colonial Mozambique and has published articles in History in Africa, Humanity, and Journal of Southern African Studies. Oliver Bakewell is Co-Director of the International Migration Institute and Associate Professor at the Department of International Development, University of Oxford. His empirical research focuses on the relationship between mobility and social change within Africa as a lens for critical reflection on broader theories and concepts in migration and development studies. His publications include articles on migration and development, forced and voluntary migration, African diasporas, and migration and social theory. Pamila Gupta is a Senior Researcher at WISER (Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research) at the University of Witwatersrand. She holds a Ph.D. in Socio-Cultural Anthropology from Columbia University. Her research explores Lusophone (post)colonial links and legacies in India and Africa. She has published in South African Historical Journal, African Studies, Journal of Asian and African Studies, Ler Histo´ria, Ecologie & Politique, and Public Culture, and is co-editor of Eyes Across the Water: Navigating the Indian Ocean with Isabel Hofmeyr and Michael Pearson and author of The Relic State: St. Francis Xavier and the Politics of Ritual in Portuguese India. Nauja Kleist is a Sociologist and Senior Researcher in the Global Transformations Unit at the Danish Institute for International Studies. Her research

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Contributors

focuses on modes of return migration, diaspora mobilization, migration and development, social (im)mobility, hope, and gender relations. She has especially studied Ghanaian migration and Somali diaspora groups. She has published in journals such as African Affairs, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, African Studies, African Diaspora and in a number of books. She is coordinator of the research program New Geographies of Hope and Despair, which examines the social effects of migration management for West African migrants. Loren B. Landau is Henry J. Lier Chair in Global Migration at Tufts University and South African Research Chair on Mobility and the Politics of Diversity at University of the Witwatersrand. His work explores mobility, belonging, and political authority with an emphasis on cities in the global south. He is author of The Humanitarian Hangover, editor of Exorcising the Demons Within, and co-editor of Contemporary Migration to South Africa: A Regional Development Issue and has published widely in the popular press along with articles in Millennium, Politics and Society, and African Affairs. He serves on the editorial boards of International Migration Review, Migration Studies, and Journal of Refugee Studies. Joel Quirk is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Studies, University of the Witwatersrand. His research focuses on slavery and abolition, human mobility and human rights, repairing historical wrongs, and history and politics of sub-Saharan Africa. Recent works include The AntiSlavery Project: From the Slave Trade to Human Trafficking and International Orders in the Early Modern World: Before the Rise of the West (coedited), along with articles in journals such as Review of International Studies, Human Rights Quarterly, and Social and Legal Studies. He is a current member of the International Scientific Committee of the UNESCO Slave Route Project, where he serves as Rapporteur. Filipa Ribeiro da Silva teaches in the Department of History, University of Macau. Her research interests are early modern economic and social history, maritime history, Portuguese and Dutch overseas history, and Iberian Inquisitions. She has published material on the Dutch and Portuguese in Western Africa and the Atlantic System, on labor migration to West Africa, and on labor relations in Mozambique.

Contributors

287

Benedetta Rossi is Lecturer in the History and Anthropology of West Africa at the University of Birmingham. She is author of a forthcoming book on the history of free and unfree labor in the region of Ader in today’s Republic of Niger, editor of Reconfiguring Slavery: West African Trajectories, and coeditor with Anne Haour of Being and Becoming Hausa: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Simon Turner is Associate Professor at the Centre for Advanced Migration Studies, University of Copenhagen. He is author of Politics of Innocence: Hutu Identity, Conflict and Camp Lif. He is presently doing research on state-diaspora relations in Rwanda. Darshan Vigneswaran is Co-Director of the Institute for Migration and Ethnic Studies at the University of Amsterdam and Senior Researcher at the African Centre for Migration and Society, University of the Witwatersrand. His research explores how state claims to territory are reconfigured in response to changing patterns of human mobility. He is author of Territory, Migration and the Evolution of the International System (2013) and has published articles in Political Geography, Review of International Studies, and Environment and Planning D: Society and Space.

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Index

Addei, Elisabeth, 142 Ader region (Niger), 150–68, 216 African National Congress (ANC), 106 Agadez, Sultanate of, 158 Agamben, Giorgio, 20, 64, 95; on ‘‘bare’’ problems, 116; Schmitt and, 82; on state of exception, 123 Al Yaqubi, 153–54 Algeria, 62 Alkmaar (ship), 37 Allina, Eric, 15, 19, 20, 59–78 Almoravids, 153, 155 Alooma, Idris, 156 al-Sadi, Abderrahman, 155–56 Anderson, Perry, 62 Angola, 205–6; borderlands of, 194–95, 199–217; centralized administration of, 45–48, 55–57; colonization of, 38, 42–58, 200; decolonization of, 169–18, 185–93; independence of, 178–79, 201, 202; slavery in, 49, 51–54, 57, 201; urbanization in, 228 Apartheid, 104–24, 178, 221, 227. See also South Africa Appadurai, Arjun, 177 Arendt, Hannah, 225 Aristotle, 167 Azores, 42 Bailyn, Bernard, 6 Bakewell, Oliver, 29, 194–217 Baud, M. Michiel, 196 Bedouins, 155 Benguela (Angola), 46, 48, 52, 194 Benin, 198 Berlin Conference (1885), 67, 200 Betts, Raymond, 172–73

biopolitics, 224; in Ghana, 138, 141–44; governmentality and, 166–67; ‘‘technologies of self’’ and, 151. See also Foucault, Michel Boone, Catherine, 26, 28 border control, 146, 194–95, 236; statecraft as, 100; urban segregation and, 104–24 borderlands, 196–99; definition of, 199; livelihoods in, 208–11; personal identification with, 205–8; social contracts in, 197–98, 203–6, 211, 213, 216 brain drain, 10; in Ghana, 127, 129–31, 140–42 Braudel, Fernand, 150, 153, 167 Brazil, 57, 175, 192 British South African Company (BSAC), 200 Buckley-Zistel, Suzanne, 86 bureaucracy, 142; corruption in, 56; expectations of, 198; Ghanian, 134–44; South African, 121–23; Zambian, 205–6 Burundi, 80, 92, 93, 97 Cape Verde, 42, 50 capita˜es-donata´rios (land parcels), 43–48 Casa da Suplicac¸a˜o (judicial court), 41 Castells, Manuel, 229 Cazombo (Angola), 202, 211 Chalfin, Brenda, 235–36 channeling mobility, 19–24, 40; after Apartheid, 106–8, 111, 123–24; during decolonization, 176–92; of diaspora groups, 126–28, 145–46; by Portuguese Crown, 42–45, 51–54, 57–58; in Rwanda, 79–103; for urban migration, 218, 222–224, 227–236. See also mobility citizenship: of diaspora groups, 125, 131–33, 137–38, 144–46; dual, 131, 135–38, 145;

290

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citizenship (continued ) flexible, 207; Rwandan, 88–89, 97–103; South African, 108; Zambian, 198, 205–8 ‘‘civilizing mission,’’ 66, 96, 185 Cohen, Robin, 90 colonization: beginnings of, 39–42; decolonization and, 104, 128, 156, 169–93, 223; economic development of, 21, 43–44, 52; labor mobility and, 60; settler incentives of, 44–45. See also imperialism Comaroff, Jean, 5 Commission for the Fight Against Genocide, 81 community work (umugando), in Rwanda, 84 Congo, Democratic Republic of, 234; borderlands of, 197, 200, 201; colonial history of, 42, 44, 46, 49; Rwandan refugees in, 80, 85–88, 90, 92–94, 97; urban migrants from, 222 contratadores (private businessmen), 50 contratados (contracted workers), 72 Cooper, Frederick, 63 Croeger, Pietersz, 37 da Silva, Filipa Ribeiro, 14, 15, 21, 30 Das, Veena, 231, 235 De Genova, Nicholas, 18 de la Dehesa, Rafael, 138, 146 decolonization, 104, 128, 156, 223; definitions of, 171–73; in Lusophone Africa, 169–93. See also colonization Deleuze, Gilles, 235 Derrida, Jacques, 82 Desmbargo do Pac¸o (judicial court), 41 diaspora groups, 125; Ghanian, 127, 129–37, 140–46; Rwandan, 85, 87–93; Somali, 90 donata´rios (land grants), 42–46 drug trafficking, in South Africa, 110, 118–20 Duara, Prasenjit, 171 economic development, 9, 125, 129; colonization and, 21, 43–44, 52; in Ghana, 129, 132–37; in Rwanda, 83–84; urbanization and, 218 Edwards, Elizabeth, 181 El Bekri, 154–56 Eltringham, Nigel, 86, 90–91 Enes, Anto´nio, 66

environmental issues, 98, 149–50, 157–59, 163, 167 FAPLA. See People’s Armed Forces for the Liberation of Angola feudal traditions, 40–41, 50 Flynn, Donna K., 198 FNLA. See National Front for the Liberation of Angola forced labor, 72, 201; corporal punishment with, 70, 74; in Mozambique, 59–78 forced migration, 44–45, 49, 222 Foucault, Michel, 9, 26–27; on governmentality, 88, 95–96, 138, 151, 165–67, 224; Hegelianism and, 225–226; ‘‘technologies of self’’ and, 151. See also biopolitics Frente de Libertac¸a˜o de Moc¸ambique (Frelimo), 182, 184 gacaca courts (Rwanda), 84 Gamlen, Alan, 146 Garc¸a˜o, Carlos, 170–71, 174, 177–78, 182–85, 189 genocide, 5–6, 127; Rwanda after, 79–103 Ghana, 125–46, 153, 234; borderlands of, 197; economic development in, 129, 132–37; mining industry of, 130. See also Gold Coast Global Forums on Migration and Development, 125 globalization. See neoliberalism Gold Coast, 42, 44, 51. See also Ghana Gordon, Suzanne, 182 governmentality, 88, 95–96, 138, 216; definition of, 151; implicit rules and, 224; kinetocracy as, 165–68. See also Foucault, Michel Great Depression, 70 Guattari, Fe´lix, 235 Guinea, 50 Guinea-Bissau, 42 Gupta, Pamila, 30, 169–93 Habermas, Ju¨rgen, 225, 235 Habyarimana, Juve´nal, 97–98 Hansen, Peter, 90 Hansen, Thomas Blom, 143 Hausa people, 156, 160–62 Hegel, G. W. F., 225–26 Henry the Navigator, prince of Portugal, 48

Index Herbst, Jeffrey, 4, 153 Hintjens, Helen, 86, 90 Hobbes, Thomas, 17, 225, 226 Hughes, D. M., 215 Human Development Index (HDI), 221 human rights, 25, 77; in Ghana, 140; in Rwanda, 82, 87; in South Africa, 107 Ibn Fartuwa, 156 Ibn Hawqal, Abu ‘I-Qasin, 154 Ibn Khaldoun, 155, 157 ibn Yacin, Abd Allah, 154 Ibuka (Rwandan organization), 88 identity papers, 71; South African, 108; Zambian, 205–8. See also passports Iliffe, John, 153 imperialism, 39–40, 42, 227. See also colonization indige´nat labor laws, 62–64, 77, 164 indigenato labor laws, 61–64, 72; abolition of, 66; circumvention of, 76–77; protests against, 77–78; revisions to, 65 ingando solidarity camps (Rwanda), 81, 83–85, 94–95, 101 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 130 International Organization of Migration (Ghana), 125, 136, 137, 144 itorero education system (Rwanda), 84, 95 Jacobs, Jane, 172 Joa˜o I, king of Portugal, 48 Johannesburg, 228; motorcycle accident in, 112–18, 123; residual segregation in, 104–24; robbery in, 117–23. See also South Africa judicial system, 41, 60–64; in Angola, 47–48, 56; in Rwanda, 84; in Sa˜o Tome´, 55–56 Juı´zo dos Mocanos, 48 Kabila, Laurent, 11 Kafka, Franz, 123 Kanongesha area (Angola), 200–205, 209–11, 213 Kant, Immanuel, 226 Kaplan, Robert D., 235 Kapuscinski, Ryszard, 171, 178, 185–92 Kayibanda, Gre´goire, 96–97 Kenya, 63; control of crime in, 230–32; Human Development Index, 221; urban migrants in, 218, 227–30

291

‘‘kinetocracy,’’ 31, 149–68 Kleist, Nauja, 22, 31, 125–46 Kongo, kingdom of, 42, 44, 46, 49 Kufuor, John Agyekum, 128, 131–32, 135, 136, 138 Landau, Loren B., 31–32, 218–36 land-to-labor ratio, 15–16 Latham, Robert, 235 League of Nations, 65 Levitt, Peggy, 138, 146 Lindela detention center (South Africa), 10–11 Locke, John, 225 Lund, Christian, 215, 216 Lunda people, 199–202 Lusaka Protocol (1994), 203 Machel, Samora, 175, 179–80 Madeira, 42 Maier, Charles S., 225 Mamdani, Mahmood, 96, 98 Mann, Gregory, 60, 62–64, 78 Manuel I, king of Portugal, 48 Mbembe, Achille, 172 Meehan, Albert, 106 Merle, Isabelle, 62–64 Mill, John Stuart, 13–14 Miller, Peter, 236 Mills, John Atta, 128, 135 mining industry: in Ghana, 130; in Mozambique, 74; in South Africa, 66–67 mobility, human, 3; commodification of, 17–18; labor laws and, 59–78; nomads and, 149–68; power of, 218–36; prevention of, 8–11; promotion of, 12–19, 125–46; urbanization and, 24, 32, 218–36; wealth realized from, 48–50. See also channeling mobility monopolies, 21, 50, 52; of governance, 56 Mozambique, 59–78; civil war in, 184; control of crime in, 230–32; decolonization of, 169–93; Human Development Index, 221; mining industry, 74; urban migrants in, 218, 227–36; Zimbabwe refugees from, 215 MPLA. See Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola National Commission for the Fight Against Genocide (CNLG), 94–95

292

Index

National Democratic Congress (Ghana), 131 National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA), 186 National Patriotic Party (Ghana), 131 National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), 194, 202–3, 208–16 National Unity and Reconciliation Commission (Rwanda), 84–85, 94 Native Labor Department, 68–70, 74–76 neoliberalism, 82, 130, 145; in Ghana, 127, 129, 134–44; market dynamics of, 13–14 Nettle, John P., 224–25 Newman, David, 196 Nieboer, Herman, 15–16 Niger, 150–68 Nigeria, 198, 227, 234 Nkrumah, Kwame, 130, 131 nomadic societies, 149–68, 235 Novais, Paulo Dias de, 43, 46 Nugent, Paul, 197–98 Nyasaland, 67 official development assistance (Ghana), 129 O’Laughlin, Bridget, 61 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), 9 orphans, 90; forced migration of, 44–45 ouvidores-gerais (auditor-generals), 47 Pamuk, Orhan, 169 Pan-Africanist movement, 130, 131 pass books, 71, 108 passports, 146; Torpey on, 39, 58, 106, 222–23. See also identity papers People’s Armed Forces for the Liberation of Angola (FAPLA), 210, 214 police, 220–21, 224, 236; control of crime by, 106–7, 117–23, 230–32; corruption among, 121, 231–32; private security workers and, 107, 110–11, 120–22; racial profiling by, 106; segregation enforcement by, 105–24 Ponder, Michael, 106 Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), 202–3 Portugal: Carnation Revolution in, 174; colonization by, 37–58, 200; feudal legacies of, 40–41, 50; modern economy of, 41–42 postcolonization. See decolonization

prisoners, 9; forced labor by, 72–73; forced migration of, 44–45; of Rwandan genocide, 81 Privatization and Industrialization Fund (Ghana), 133, 134 Purdekova´, Andrea, 91 Quirk, Joel, 1–34, 167–68 Raeymaekers, Timothy, 197, 198 Rangel, Ricardo, 170, 175, 177–81, 189 Rawlings, Jerry J., 130–31 religion, 5, 40–41, 129, 152, 221, 232–36 Resisteˆncia Nacional Moc¸ambicana (Renamo), 184 return migration, 90, 128, 133, 139, 212, 222 Rhodesia, 67 Rose, Nikolas, 236 Rossi, Benedetta, 5, 31, 149–68, 216 Rwanda, 79–103, 222 Salazar, Antonio de Oliveira de, 174, 178 Sanhaja people, 153–54 Sa˜o Tome´, 37–38, 42; centralized administration of, 45–48, 55; channeling mobility in, 51–54; colonization of, 44–58; judicial system of, 55–56; slave insurgencies on, 47, 55; trade policies of, 49–50 Savimbi, Jonas, 194, 203 Schmitt, Carl, 82 Scott, James C., 142, 235 segregation, 5–6, 227; controlling crime and, 106–7, 110–11; in Johannesburg, 104–24 Senegambian borderlands, 42, 197 Sepputat, Finn, 143 Sierra Leone, 42 slave trade, 16–17, 50; in Angola, 49, 51–54, 57, 201; in Ghana, 131; Portuguese control of, 41–42, 49, 57; settlers’ right to, 45; in Zambia, 200 slavery, 47, 55, 65; abolition of, 72, 201; master-slave dialectic and, 225–26; present-day heritage tours about, 131; among Tuareg, 150 Smith, Adam, 13–14 social capital, 221, 232–34 social contract, in borderlands, 197–99, 203–6, 211, 213, 216 Sokoto Caliphate, 158, 159 Somalia, 90, 222, 227, 236

Index South Africa, 104–24, 228; during Apartheid, 104–24, 178, 185, 221; control of crime in, 107, 110–11, 120–22, 230–32; drug trafficking in, 110, 118–20; economy of, 107–8; homicide rate in, 106–7; Human Development Index, 221; Lusophone emigration to, 171, 175, 178, 183–85, 192; mining migrants in, 66–67; police of, 106–7, 110–24; urban migrants in, 218, 227–36 Spruyt, Hendrik, 25 Stewart, Kathleen, 177 Stewart, Susan, 177 Sudan, 222 Survivors Fund, Rwanda, 81, 87 Tamesz, Pieter, 37 Tanzania, 97, 218; Rwandan refugees in, 89, 92, 93 tax collection, 164; in borderlands, 197, 200–202, 209; fraudulent practices, 56; monopolies and, 50 Teschke, Benno, 25 Thornton, John, 6 Tilly, Charles, 6–7, 14, 59, 226 Timbuktu (Mali), 155–56 Togo, 197 Torpey, John, 17–18, 220, 235; on monopolies, 21; on passports, 39, 58, 106, 222–23; on state coercion, 224 Tuareg people, 151; in Ader region, 158–62; French colonization of, 163–64; slavery among, 150, 159–62; Timbuktu and, 155–56 Turner, Simon, 22–23, 79–103 Uganda, 130; borderlands of, 197; Rwandans in, 89–93, 97, 99, 101

293

umugando (community work), in Rwanda, 84 UNITA. See National Union for the Total Independence of Angola United Nations: Development Fund for Women, 84; Human Development Index, 221; Human Settlements Programme (UN Habitat), 1, 228 urbanization, 24, 32, 218–36; rates of, 1, 228–30; segregation and, 104–24 van Hoyweghen, Saskia, 86, 90–91 van Leeuwen, Mathijs, 85 van Schendel, Baud, 196 vigilantism, 107, 215, 221, 232, 235, 236 Vigneswaran, Darshan, 20, 22, 25–26, 29–30, 104–24, 167–68 villagization (imidugudu) programs, 84 Vision 2020 development plan (Rwanda), 83–84 Weber, Max, 13, 220, 234 Willis, Justin, 63 World Bank, 125 World War II, 70 Zaire: Rwandan refugees in, 80, 85–88, 90, 92–94, 97. See also Congo, Democratic Republic of Zambia: Angola refugees in, 205; borderlands of, 194–95, 199–217; citizenship process in, 198, 205–8; slave trade in, 200 Zimbabwe: forced labor in, 73; Mozambican refugees in, 215; urban migrants from, 227, 234

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Acknowledgments

One of the main goals of this volume is to navigate between two extremes in the study of politics in contemporary Africa. These extremes can be traced to competing approaches to the relationship between the general and particular. On the one hand, we now have an extensive literature—most notably coming out of the fields of political science and international law— grounded in ostensibly ‘‘general’’ models regarding the ‘‘modern’’ state. This literature has tended to reduce experiences in Africa to the status of a series of marginalized ‘‘exceptions’’ to conventions and expectations that have been primarily derived from European and North American experiences. On the other hand, we have a similarly extensive literature—most notably coming out of the fields of anthropology and cultural studies— grounded in everyday and case-specific experiences in numerous locations across Africa. In this literature, there has been widespread resistance to any and all attempts to systematically connect these localized experiences to more general concerns and patterns. We believe that these opposing tendencies have compromised efforts to better understand the relationship between political authority and human mobility. As a result, this volume embraces an alternative approach that attempts to develop generalizable ideas and analytical frameworks that build on the synthetic and comparative analysis of contingent, localized, and case study-based examples of government efforts to harness human mobility. The logic behind our preferred approach can be traced to a longstanding conversation between the editors regarding the historical origins and subsequent evolution of the state and its interlocutors. This conversation started in Canberra in 2001, at the International Relations department of the Australian National University. During this period, we were best known erratic theoretical shouting matches between offices. While we may be recalled as the noisiest, all the corridors of our department were then buzzing with a spirit of intellectual curiosity and collegiality that we continue to

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Acknowledgments

cherish as a scholarly ideal. As newcomers, we especially valued the insights and examples set by our senior compatriots, who offered an invaluable source of information, instruction, and inspiration. While the contents of these theoretical arguments have evolved over the years, we would nonetheless hope that the examples we encountered during this initial period have continued to shape our respective efforts to date. Our interests resulted in divergent research projects. Joel was interested in slavery and abolition, while Darshan studied international migration. However, our work set us on the path toward a common empirical study of the politics of mobility in Africa. Joel relocated to the United Kingdom, where he found a new home at the Wilberforce Institute for the study of Slavery and Emancipation at the University of Hull. The main task of this institute was to explore underlying linkages between past and present, which in turn meant focusing on the contribution of Africa and Africans to the making of the modern world. Darshan went to WITS University’s African Centre for Migration and Society in South Africa to explore how contemporary African states controlled migration. Through collaborations with a network of political sociologists and anthropologists, he began to use a range of new techniques to explore the governance of human mobility in Africa. These two strands were brought together via the British Academy’s UKAfrica Partnership program, which provided an opportunity to combine historical and contemporary agendas. We are extremely grateful to the Academy—which no doubt could have decided to endorse colleagues with much more experience—for generously supporting our application for a conference and training series entitled ‘‘Migration and Forced Labour in Southern Africa: History and Methods.’’ We pitched the Academy a threeyear project that would bring together new and empirically grounded work to explore how contemporary migration policy could be related to earlier patterns of forced movement and labor; both local and international. Support from the Academy not only enabled an extremely productive series of thematic conferences, it also facilitated an allied program of graduate training that will hopefully contribute to future scholarship in the field. The book builds on a series of papers developed at the final event in the project, a writer’s workshop entitled ‘‘The State and Mobility in Africa,’’ held in Maputo, Mozambique in 2010. The Southern African-Nordic Centre also contributed funds to help us expand on our vision for this final event. We chose our collaborators for this workshop based on two criteria:

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our contributors should do empirically grounded work, and they should be keen to engage in a larger theoretical debate regarding general patterns. The workshop greatly exceeded our initial expectations. Over the course of five days, our small group of contributors engaged in the most generous way with each other and with the broader themes we had laid out. The workshop was the essence of interdisciplinary work, with historians, anthropologists, political scientists, and sociologists helping to recast our own ideas on politics and movement. The empirically and theoretically grounded studies that emerged in turn shaped a new vocabulary for talking about how and why ‘‘mobility makes states.’’ A number of individuals have helped nurture and promote this project in various ways. We are grateful to Lenore Longwe at ACMS for organizing the workshop, Steve Vertovec at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity for his generous support, and Rachel Paniagua at the British Academy for her thoughtful stewardship of our grant. Furthermore, the editors would like to thank Julia Hornberger and Amanda Hammar for their constructive interventions in Maputo, Nicholas de Genova and Andre´ Broome for their comments on the introductory chapter, and two anonymous reviewers for their extremely thorough and insightful suggestions on how to improve and refine the overall manuscript. The manuscript project has been masterfully shepherded throughout by Peter Agree at the University of Pennsylvania Press, with excellent support from Amanda Ruffner and Alison Anderson. In addition, Helena Uzelac expertly handled the preparation of the referencing system. Last, Darshan would like to acknowledge Kate and Anokhi Vigneswaran, with the hope that one day we will explore the breadth of this continent together. Similarly, Joel would like to acknowledge and thank Stacey Sommerdyk, who has been indispensable in building a new home in Johannesburg, South Africa.