Exploring Borderlands and Romanticizing Clandestine Activities (original) (raw)
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Centring the Margins: Fifty Years of African Border Studies
2011
Notes for Contributors The Africa Review of Books presents a biannual review of works on Africa in the social sciences, humanities and creative arts. It is also intended to serve as a forum for critical analyses, reflections and debates about Africa. As such, the Review solicits book reviews, reviews of articles and essays that are in line with the above objectives. Contributions that traverse disciplinary boundaries and encourage interdisciplinary dialogue and debate are particularly welcome. Reviews and essays should be original contributions: they should not have been published elsewhere prior to their submission, nor should they be under consideration for any other publication at the same time. The recommended length of the reviews is 2,000 words, with occasional exceptions of up, to 3,000 words for review articles or commissioned essays. Notes (which should be submitted as endnotes rather than as footnotes) should be used sparingly. Contributions should begin with the following publication details: title of the book; author; publisher; number of pages; price; and ISBN. Contributions are best sent electronically as e-mail attachments. If sent by post as hard copy, they should be accompanied by soft versions on CD in the MS Word or RTF format. Authors should also send with their submissions their full address and institutional affiliation as well as a short bio-data (including a sample of recent publications) for inclusion in the "Notes on Contributors" section. Authors are entitled to two copies of the issue of the Review in which their contribution is published.
Palgrave Series in African Borderlands Studies
2016
Advisory Board Anthony I. Asiwaju (African Regional Institute) David Coplan (University of the Witwatersrand) Alice Bellagamba (University of Milan-Bicocca) Pierre Englebert (Pomona College) Jan-Bart Gewald (University of Leiden) Amanda Hammar (Copenhagen University) Thomas Hüsken (University of Bayreuth) Georg Klute (University of Bayreuth) Baz Lecocq (Ghent University) Camille Lefebvre (Panthéon-Sorbonne/CNRS) Kate Meagher (London School of Economics) Paul Nugent (University of Edinburgh) Wafula Okumu (African Union Border Programme) Timothy Raeymaekers (University of Zürich—) Cristina Udelsmann Rodrigues (University Institute of Lisbon) Holger Weiss (Åbo Akademi University) Jerzy Zdanowski (Polish Academy of Sciences) Werner Zips (University of Vienna)
Journal of Borderlands Studies, 2017
This paper examines the cross-border sociocultural and economic activities of the inhabitants of the contiguous border areas of Zambia, Malawi, and Mozambique (ZMM), in order to compare perceptions towards each of these practices by various actors including informal cross-border traders (ICBTs), ordinary inhabitants of the borderland communities of these countries, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and state and local authorities, among others. The specific sociocultural practices in question include the accessing of social services, fulfillment of sociocultural needs/obligations, and the economic activities, informal cross-border trade. Legislations, policy reports and scientific publications are thoroughly reviewed and interviews with key policymakers, ICBTs, and locals are conducted. Qualitative and quantitative analysis of data collected from the interviews is also performed. Various actors generally regard accessing social services (such as education and health) across borders by nationals of neighboring countries as normal and "acceptable" practices while some forms of informal cross-border trade are regarded "unacceptable." However, both sociocultural and economic actors engage in cross-border activities out of necessity, convenience, for survival, and as practices which they, being inhabitants of the borderlands, have traditionally followed. Representatives of state and local governments in the adjacent provinces of the contiguous borderlands should form transboundary coordinating committees through which to establish sustainable and effective burden-sharing and service provision systems, to meet the socioeconomic needs of borderland inhabitants.
Witnessing stories in the Grey Zone: complicity and anthropological research in Mozambique
Understanding Conflict research cluster, College of Arts and Humanities, University of Brighton, 2015
At the beginning of the year 2012 I was returning home in Maputo, the capital city of Mozambique in Southern Africa. As I was arriving home, a group of people started chasing a young boy. The group consisted of more or less 20 people, local neighbors. Among them were women and men, boys and girls. They all ran after the young boy, screaming and threatening him, shouting “agarra Moluene, agarra Moluene” (meaning: “grab the street children”). After a while, they grabbed him and started to beat him up. I stayed there as a witness for a short time. Then I left. Did the young boy die? Almost. Did I have the moral duty to intervene? I will argue that when conducting ethnographic fieldwork, the central issue is in the relationship between the anthropologist and the participants, in which complicity plays a central role (Marcus 1997, 1986; Geertz 1986; Clifford 1986). This relationship is complex and most of the times occurs in the grey zone, a concept developed by Primo Levi (1986) about his experience as a survivor of Auschwitz, the Nazi extermination camp. The grey zone is a metaphor for moral ambiguity when living under extreme and co-coercive situations in which there is no good or evil, right or wrong, friends or enemies. However an understanding of the grey zone is also interconnected with the role of the anthropologist as a witness during fieldwork, particularly when dealing with the imbalances of power in the uncovering of problems and the possibilities of being able to solve them, resulting in a moral tension between the anthropologist and the participants (Geertz 1968). (Paper presented at the Complicity Conference, 1st April; conference organized by the Understanding Conflict research cluster, College of Arts and Humanities, University of Brighton, 31st March-1st April 2015) (see http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/re/conflict and http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/re/conflict/events2/complicity-conference)
This publication based dissertation offers a comparative examination of the making and contestation of the Namibia-Zambia and Uganda-South Sudan borders in everyday relations between state and non-state actors. While events in the former borderland were strongly determined by the annual floods of the Zambezi, the movements of massive numbers of people fleeing from past and fearing future conflict characterized the latter. Past and present events in both borderlands, despite their peripheral location, are shown to be an integrate and crucial part of state formation in both countries. The key question guiding the analysis is: How are competing claims of territory, authority and citizenship negotiated between state representatives and residents in these borderlands, and what kinds of governance regimes emerge as a result of these negotiations? This is the synthesis of two lines of investigation pursued by the author. The first seeks to clarify how pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial governments’ power is broadcast from the centre to the territorial and social margins in African borderlands. The second seeks to clarify in what ways those who inhabit these borderlands exercise their own power. With the answers to these questions the author contributes to the ethnographic and historiographic study of borderlands worldwide and in Africa, as well as the literature that examines state formation as a continuous processes constituted in everyday-encounters between representatives of the state and its citizens. The author conceptualizes borderlands as dynamic sites where the actual meanings and practices of state-society relations are contested and forged on a daily and continuous basis in the relationships between borderland inhabitants with each other across the border, and with those who represent central state authority. The central argument of this dissertation is that this lived quality is what makes the border ‘real’: The border does not only exist as an abstract construct separate from or ‘above’ the people and territories it is supposed to separate. Borderland actors actively engage, challenge and thereby reshape the state, over time and repeatedly. They contribute to fine-tuning the state in ways that do not necessarily undermine or hollow it out. This working practice of the border is what brings it to life in the sense in which a relationship between people is only alive - and therefore real - if it is filled by meaningful and ongoing exchange and interaction.
Symposium on Border Regions in Southern Africa
2015
This paper examines the cross-border economic and sociocultural activities of the inhabitants of the contiguous border areas of Zambia, Malawi and Mozambique. Specifically, it compares the economic activities of informal cross-border traders (ICBTs) in these areas and the sociocultural practices of the inhabitants including accessing social services as well as the fulfillment of ethno-cultural obligations across borders. Further, it compares perceptions towards each of these practices by various actors including, among others, the ICBTs, ordinary locals, non-governmental organization (NGOs), and State and local authorities. Legislations, policy reports and scientific publications are thoroughly reviewed and interviews with key policymakers, ICBTs, and locals are conducted. Qualitative and quantitative analyses of data collected from the interviews are also performed. Various stakeholders generally regard accessing social services (such as education and health) across borders by nationals of neighboring countries as something that is acceptable and normal while some forms of informal crossborder trade are considered undesirable. However, both economic and ethno-or sociocultural actors engage in cross-border activity out of necessity, convenience, as means of survival, and something that they have traditionally engaged in as inhabitants of the borderlands. Representatives from State and local governments of the adjacent provinces in the contiguous border areas should establish trans-border coordinating committees to establish systems for addressing and coordinating, especially, the sharing of the burden of providing social services.
ANTHROPOLOGICAL PLACES IN MOZAMBIQUE IN THE CONTEXT OF POLITICAL CONFLICT
Soon after independence in Mozambique (1975), the country´s Toponymy changed significantly through a replacement of the names of public and historical places with national heroes aiming to decolonize the past. The article composes a chapter of an ongoing thesis entitled "The influence of ethnicities in political conflicts in African states: the case study of Mozambique (1976-2019)". The meaning of anthropological place is subjective - within the same country, the same place could be valued differently among people from different regions (South, Center, and North). The article aims to analyze the use of anthropological places in the context of political conflict. Three research questions were raised: How does the name of a place shape the behavior of people living or visiting that place? How can the name transform a space into an anthropological place with a sacral meaning? How does political power use anthropological places? Preliminary results show that, during the transformation of anthropological places, the new names have a meaning of local events and figures; there are some names with national impact, therefore, it cannot be seen as a potential for the emergence of conflict. However, the way politics uses public spaces is more propagandistic, therefore, it creates an environment of political parties' cleavages which ends up with political conflicts, in addition to other factors. Methodologically, the chapter is a result of a literature review. The study is important because it brings an approach to conflict beyond, neither armed, nor political, but anthropologically. Key-words: Anthropological places; Mozambique; political conflicts; sacrality; administrative decentralization.
Forging the frontiers: Travellers and documents on the South Africa-Mozambique border, 1890s-1940s
Kronos, 2014
It is well known that the Union of South Africa started to build an onerous border regime at the turn of the twentieth century in order to secure a White Man's Country in southern Africa. Newly formed, ambitious Immigration Departments consequently targeted ' Asiatics', poor whites and finally 'surplus' Africans from the 1920s onwards. An infrastructure of exclusion (detention and deportation compounds, police patrols, fingerprint offices and so on) soon emerged at the region's maritime gateways as the colonial states sought to undermine decentralised indigenous societies characterised by long-term mobility. This article shows that the Union remained vulnerable on its eastern frontier with Mozambique and Swaziland, where 'undesirables' continued to arrive in numbers. Long-distance movement had a long precedent in these borderlands, and it proved difficult for colonial states to forge effective border controls until deep into the twentieth century. Based on extensive and critical engagement with multiple border control archives, the article traces the gradual 'paperisation' of the border, and follows a thriving market in identity permits in southern Mozambique and Swaziland, which became important backdoor entry points to the Union. The main people to exploit corrupt local officials and entrepreneurial headmen on either side of the border were those associated with the merchant houses of coastal west India, syndicates from the Portuguese Atlantic island of Madeira, and long-distance, so-called 'tropical', African migrants. Together they forged sophisticated networks that moved permits, people and money across the region and gave southeast Africa's border builders hard and often thankless paperwork. We begin with a startling sight: a border guard on the banks of the Komati River in 1884, standing naked. For this description we must thank Edward Mathers, a 33-year-old Scottish-born investment booster-his peers later praised him for being 'intensely imperialistic'-who was at the beginning of a luminous career in journalism. 1 Commissioned by the Natal Mercury, he had sailed from Natal to Delagoa Bay with a 'motley crowd' of about 50 men scoured from various European homelands: 'diggers of long standing, soldiers and sailors, boatmen and quay hands, bricklayers and carpenters, engineers, loafers and loungers, all herding together. ' 2 The party's goal was the newly opened goldfields of the eastern Transvaal, and they had elected to take