Paper short abstract:

The development of oil industry is bringing new fuel to old conflicts in the Ghana-Côte d’Ivoire borderland. Africans played crucial roles in the establishment of the colonial boundary. The process shaped new identities and produced a corpus of historical narratives of enduring influence

Paper long abstract:

The recent discovery of offshore oilfields in Western Ghana prompted Côte d'Ivoire to secure its own rights of access to such a resource by negotiating a detailed demarcation of the maritime boundary with Ghana. A request to be among the parties in the process came from established interests based in the borderland region, like the royal stool of Sanwi, which never gave up its claims for some autonomy from Abidjan (secessionist crises broke out repeatedly since 1959). Ongoing developments are bringing new fuel to old borderland issues and conflicts. Ghana-Côte d'Ivoire boundary is not just the simple result of European colonial enterprise. It was established in late 19th century as an Anglo-British frontier. However, when considered in a long term historical perspective, the creation of the colonial boundary is also a follow up of two centuries of competition for hegemony between two local power centers: Sanwi and Nzema. This type of African agency interacted with vested European interests and strategies, contributing to a large extent to consolidate a new balance, whose most visible seal was the border which was finally agreed upon. In the process fundamental territorial, political and ethnic identities were re-interpreted and re-defined, setting the background for the 20th century landscape of the region. The corpus of narratives created by the demarcation of the border came to constitute a fundamental text for a new status quo, and the palimpsest for all formulations about local history and the redrawing of internal boundaries, including the interpretation of ongoing developments linked to the birth of oil industry.

Paper short abstract:

This paper draws on the conceptualization of the African border as a resource, to consider ambiguous memories of colonial grazing boundaries in northern Kenya. It demonstrates that colonial borders are resourced long after independence, particularly to articulate current grievances against the state.

Paper long abstract:

In colonial records, the former Northern Frontier District (NFD) of Kenya is depicted as a classic example of a 'militarized margin'; a violent, unstable place, whose inhabitants routinely fought each other, and against colonial authority. Yet contemporary local memories of the borderland imagine a place of peace and tranquillity. Current residents state that clan based grazing boundaries were clearly demarcated, and that when instances of trespass did occur, compensation was negotiated and paid. This paper draws on the conceptualization of the African border as a resource, to consider the contested memory of colonial grazing boundaries in the former NFD. The paper argues that the utopian memory of colonial order is at once the consequence of the historicization of current constituency re-alignments as part of the Kenyan governments war against shifta (bandits or rebels), as well as the result of the politicization of resource disputes since independence. Overall the paper shows how colonial boundaries continue to be resourced long after independence, particularly to articulate current grievances against the post-colonial state.

Paper short abstract:

In September 2009 a dispute over internal boundaries caused widespread roting and social unrest in the Ugandan Kingdom of Buganda. This paper analyses contested narratives around the historicity of competing boundary claims and explores the role of the British colonial government in their evolution.

Paper long abstract:

In the final decade of the nineteenth century the Kingdom of Buganda undertook a period of significant expansion with British assistance. The British believed Buganda to be more "civilised" than neighbouring territories and Buganda utilised such beliefs, alongside European geo-political concerns, to pursue an extension of Kingdom boundaries within the newly created Uganda Protectorate. Consequently, a number of non-Ganda peoples were included within the Kingdom's administrative sphere.

This paper explores how contemporary boundary disputes in Buganda's north-eastern territories of Buruli and Bugerere can be traced historically throughout the twentieth century. The extension of the Kingdom's northern borders was achieved through the annexation of lands belonging to the neighbouring Kingdom of Bunyoro. This incorporation of Nyoro lands resulted in a long-running dispute which culminated in the return of two territories to Bunyoro in 1964. Buruli and Bugerere, however, remained under Ganda control. Since the 1980's a number of indigenous peoples of these two areas have increasingly agitated for a redrawing of internal boundaries to allow them to secede from Buganda's cultural and administrative sphere.

In 2009 continued tensions around border issues resulted in widespread riots and violence across Buganda and in the Ugandan capital, Kampala. Drawing upon these events this paper argues that while contested cultural and ethnic boundaries are partially the result of contemporary concerns over resource allocation, the tenacity and power of such disputes derives from the complex narratives of Buganda's colonial history.

Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates the historical origins of one of the current disputes between Sudan and South Sudan over borderland territory, and suggests that events in the colonial period underlie both current tensions and local demands for the protection of local rights by the state.

Paper long abstract:

One of the zones disputed by Sudan and South Sudan along their common border is a fourteen mile stretch of territory south of the river Bahr el-Arab or Kiir, territory historically used by two nomadic pastoralist groups as a zone of dry season grazing: the Rizeigat Baggara (now defined as citizens of Sudan) and the Malual Dinka (now defined as citizens of South Sudan). The vigour of protest among Malual populations against the possibility of 'giving away' this territory to Sudan briefly seemed to threaten the authority of South Sudan's government in late 2012. This protest seems to reflect a feeling that this territory was won with the blood of those who fought in the Sudanese civil wars, righting the historical wrongs of the British colonial state, which handed this territory to the Rizeigat in the early twentieth century, regardless of the Malual's deeper historical claims.

This paper argues that the process of drawing state actors into local borderland politics, including the demands that the state protect the rights of local populations, has been a ongoing political dynamic in this area since the colonial period. Moreover it suggests that the (internal) border of the colonial period in this area was never the clear 'legible' line of theoretical imagination: but rather remained an area of fuzzy, overlapping zones of local interaction, which state actors only ever had limited control over. In practice this area has long been a zone of shared sovereignty, whatever the line on the map suggests.

Paper short abstract:

Using memories about 19th century military campaigns in the Kivus this paper shows that discourses about the pre-colonial past are still relevant within the protracted conflict in the DRC, simultaneously shaped by the conflict, and shaping territorial claims about borders within the conflict.

Paper long abstract:

This paper looks at the expansion of the Rwandan kingdom and military campaigns under mwami Rwabugiri in what is nowadays the DRC at the end of the 19th century. These campaigns left behind material sites such as camps and residencies, which could be considered as markers of Rwabugiri's symbolic appropriation of the landscape and of what was claimed as Rwandan territory.

During interviews in both the DRC and Rwanda, memories about these residencies and other traces were apparent, but they were heavily influenced by the social present and often reframed within contemporary discourses about conflict, and especially within discourses on borders.

The distance in time and especially the contested nature of Rwandan claims over territory in the eastern Congo today (e.g. Pasteur Bizimungu of Rwanda using 'historical' arguments to legitimate Rwandan's military presence in the region, or Nkunda claiming that without colonialism, Kivu would have been within the borders of the current Rwandan state), make it difficult to analyse the meanings of these places and traces, as they become contested sites of former Rwandan presence in the eastern DRC.

As such, the paper firstly shows how the protracted conflict in Kivu ramifies historical narratives about territorial claims in the past and secondly it looks at the way historical arguments are used to legitimate territorial claims and claims about borders within the region today. It will show that discourses about the (pre-colonial) past are still relevant, simultaneously shaped by the conflict, and shaping claims to legitimize exclusion and violence within the conflict.

Paper short abstract:

From the 1960s onwards, the fringe of the Sahara desert controlled by Spanish colonists was object of overlapping claims of sovereignty: this paper explores the implication for citizenship of all of them, in Western Sahara as much as in the areas across its borders.

Paper long abstract:

Relations between territory, people and political power in the Western Sahara have been object of intense debates along history. Since last years of Spanish colonization, these debates developed around the question of sovereignty and its holder. In 1959 Spain declared that Ifni, Tarfaya and the Spanish Sahara were integral part of Spanish state as provinces. At the same time, the government of recently independent Morocco claimed the Spanish Sahara as part of its national territory. During the seventies, the national movement lead by the POLISARIO Front demanded for an independent state on its own, in the name of a Saharaui nation. Even Mauritania, independent since 1960, developed its own national aspirations towards Western Sahara.

In all cases, advocates would make extensive use of history: some alleging the legacy of Spanish colonialism, others reminding older political relations, such as those of the Moroccan sultan with the Saharan quabilas. This history has been well documented in other places.

What our research aims to illuminate are the effects that these alternative claims of exclusive sovereignty has had on the configuration of citizenship, not only in the territory occupied by Morocco since 1975, but also in adjacent places such as Tinduf in Algeria, Tarfaya in Morocco and even Mauritania. The paper will present preliminary insights, based on archive work and field research. We will analyse the processes through which populations are at the same time integrated, excluded and fragmented, and their rights redefined and differentiated.

Paper short abstract:

This paper will examine the historical and political discourse on the borders of Borno in modern-day Nigeria.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will analyse how British imperialism did not always destroy African polities but, as in the case of Borno, favoured the reconstruction of a nineteenth-century territory within the Nigerian colony. It will be argued that the British manipulated the concept of the territory of Borno as the colonial administration recycled the late nineteenth-century kingdom of Borno within the Nigerian framework. The quest for territorial legitimacy led the British to constantly adapt their colonial administration to the previous nineteenth-century space.

Moreover, Borno a geographic cornerstone of colonial Nigeria, never ceased to count in the geopolitical balance of postcolonial Nigeria. Indeed, the post-1960 fragmentation of the federation led to the creation of Borno State in 1976 but also led to its division in 1991 between Yobe and Borno. If at first glance it would seem that the territory and borders of Borno were disappearing within Nigeria, a strong sense of belonging still exists.

Paper short abstract:

Boundaries or border zones in Africa, and the inter-state and inter-community relations generated across them, have been major sites for the inter-play of various historical, social, economic and political dynamics.

Paper long abstract:

'The Bakassi Peninsula Zone of Nigeria and Cameroon': The politics of history in contemporary African border disputes

Angela Ebele Udeoji

Dept. of French & Int'l Studies

National Open University of Nigeria

Victoria Island, Lagos Nigeria

Email: ebeleudeoji@yahoo.com; Phone: 2348037002561

Abstract: Boundaries or border zones in Africa, and the inter-state and inter-community relations generated across them, have been major sites for the inter-play of various social, economic and political dynamics. This will reflect on the dialectics of the state-society relations within the socio-economic prism in the context of the Nigeria/Anglo-Cameroon border. Situating the analysis in the post-independence period, the paper will examine critically the historical, socio-economic challenges and paradoxes confronting the two independent states of Nigeria and Cameroon Republic in regard to the legitimacy of the Bakassi Peninsula border zone that divides an area and the people despite its extremely high level of cultural homogeneity.In recent times, Bakassians consider that the Federal government of Nigeria has not done much to protect their interests since the ICJ ruling on October 10 2002. They also believe that they were not consulted in the determination of their future. Therefore, the group has not only carried its complaint to the UN but has also opted for self determination. The implication of this is that these "the partitioned Africans" of the affected border communities are still crying out for "Salvation" and self Determination amidst the threat to international Peace and security.