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- Convenors:
-
Nicola Melis
(University of Cagliari, Sardinia)
Paul Nugent (University of Edinburgh)
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- Stream:
- History
- Location:
- David Hume, LG.08
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 12 June, -, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
In late 1800s territoriality became a key factor in Africa. But most borderlands represented older frontier zones, so colonial borders had to deal with those earlier political practices. The panel aims at analysing the history of political continuity and discontinuity of borderlands.
Long Abstract:
The idea that African boundaries are a European creation has been often proved, at least partially. As territoriality became a defining factor in the late nineteenth century, the lack of well defined borders in most African regions did not mean a vacuum of political control over them. Some regions were part of the Ottoman Empire, or the various African kingdoms and polities, meaning that borders created by colonial time treaties had to deal with those previous arrangements and political practices. Moreover, pre-colonial frontier regions, in the interstices between polities, often became the places where colonial borders were drawn.
Depending on the case, overlapping or conflicting ideas of borderlands created over the decades a number of controversial issues. Between 1880 and 1910, following the methods of European imperialism in Africa, several former empires and kingdoms tried to reinvent themselves as new imperial(ist) power in the attempt to resist or survive the new territorial and political setting of the continent. In this regard, the Ottoman Empire constitute an exemplary case study, with the creation of a colonial hinterland in Fezzan, and Buganda, with its conquests in the Eastern region.
Since then, those frontiers became zones of interaction where power was often contested. They constituted borderlands where local politics played a central role in shaping imperial interests and the policies of the "centres", positioning the so called peripheries at the centre of state and regional politics. The panel aims at analysing the history of those political continuities and discontinuities in borderlands areas.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 12 June, 2019, -Paper short abstract:
Colonies and their infrastructure were often built on the configurations of previous empires and kingdoms. This paper strips away the layers of history contributing to debates about the colonial state and those concerned with the historicity of infrastructure.
Paper long abstract:
Although colonies were ostensibly novel constructs, they were often built on the configurations of previous empires and kingdoms. Moreover, while it is often asserted that modern trade infrastructure is based on the colonial infrastructure that was created to bring goods from the interior to the coast of Africa, what is less often recognized is that was, in turn, layered upon precolonial infrastructure. This holds for the territory of modern-day Uganda. In fact, at the time of European arrival in Buganda in the mid-1800s, the region was part of different kingdoms (Buganda being the strongest at that moment) with a long-distance trading system made up of roads and trade centres (market towns), linking the Great Lakes Region to the East coast. When the British arrived and settled there, they 'recorded' what they found, and used both the competition among different kingdoms and that impressive road system for their own interests. British colonial power and the road system was therefore built upon a previous regional configuration. The use of Baganda troops and (partially) its administrative system to conquer and pacify the Eastern region, is part of that usage of existing structures of coercion and physical infrastructure, thereby demonstrating that the colonial power shaped the Protectorate by adapting local structures to its needs. This paper, which strips away the layers of history, contributes to larger debates about the foundations of the colonial state as well as those that are concerned with the historicity of infrastructure.
Paper short abstract:
Le Mali et la Guinée sont séparés par une frontière héritée d'une limite administrative entre deux colonies de l'AOF. L'objectif de cette communication est de mettre en évidence les spécificités d'une limite intra-impériale, de retracer l'histoire de sa construction afin de saisir son historicité.
Paper long abstract:
Les États du Mali et de Guinée ont une frontière commune héritée de la limite administrative entre deux colonies de l'AOF. Jamais démarquée ni véritablement matérialisée, elle est issue d'un découpage territorial qui avait comme objectif de constituer des entités spatiales gérables et non de futurs États. L'objectif de cette communication est d'évaluer les spécificités de la construction de cette limite intra-impériale. Au-delà du caractère lacunaire des délimitations officielles, l'étude la construction du tracé révèle de multiples processus de rupture, analogues à ceux d'une frontière inter-impériale. Elle se superpose ou plutôt se surimpose à un cadre géopolitique régional plus ancien, constitué à la fois de lignes de séparations, de discontinuités religieuses ou politiques et de zones de complémentarités. Elle s'inscrit dans un espace fortement maillé sur le plan politique où trois constructions politiques majeures confinent dans la région étudiée, au moment où s'amorce la pénétration française vers le fleuve Niger, le Fouta Djalon, les États construits par El Hadj Omar Tall et par Samori Touré. Différentes limites précoloniales ont été inventoriées et mobilisées par les missions de reconnaissance françaises menées dans les années 1880 et ont en partie servi de soubassement aux différents segments de la frontière guinéo-malienne qui repose ainsi sur des traces de limites anciennes mais relève aussi d'une grande part d'aléatoire, loin de la représentation d'une toute puissance coloniale imposant un découpage territorial arbitraire. La genèse de cette limite est influencée par des facteurs endogènes, par des stratégies politiques locales mais reste surtout empreinte de pragmatisme.
Paper short abstract:
We explore the spatial and temporal paths of sovereignty-making in the Maasai Mara borderlands in Kenya. Opposing land claims have changed the landscape into fragmented spaces, escalating conflict between those erecting fences to protect their crops and those needing common access to grass and water
Paper long abstract:
The invisible authority characterizing frontiers often inhibits its inhabitants' sense of state representation. As it is with Kenya's Maasai Mara borderlands, multiple opposing resource claims can even transform landscapes into contested spaces.
Here, sovereignty has been contested between the state and the Maasai since the latter was moved there in 1911 by means of the Maasai Treaty. Despite declaring the area exclusively for Maasai use, the colonial state continuously bypassed the Maasai throughout the colonial period, approving multiple plans for settlement by non-Maasai, and even designating an area as a National Reserve. Additionally, in discussions leading to independence, the British Government maintained that the Maasai Treaty merely made them morally obliged to honour the Maasai's claim to adequate resources. Hence, they could not be held legally responsible if they decided not to. The landscape has not become less contested in postcolonial years. Recently, farming and fencing have increased dramatically, inhibiting the mobility of Maasai and migrating wildlife.
In our study, we combine spatial analyses of aerial photographs from the late 1960s with historical data from the National Archive (London), including how rhetorical narratives have historically been used to legitimize authority from (1) the colonial government and (2) the governed Maasai. Our presentation explores the spatial and temporal trajectories leading from 'invisible' authority and claims to land, through the parcelling of the landscape with fence lines, to the escalation of social and economic conflicts, including how structures of deception, fear and mistrust are now reflected in the need for physical boundaries.
Paper short abstract:
The power dynamics and territorial control of indigenous empires and their French adversaries in the Senegambia region shifted based on the loyalty of non-state actors: local military professionals. A study of these soldiers provides a clearer picture of empire building in West Africa.
Paper long abstract:
The period from 1850 to 1900 was marked by a vast expansion of France's colonial army. French officers attempted to solidify their control deep into the interior of West Africa. Fighting against indigenous empire builders in the Senegambia region, including Lat Joor and Al-Hajj Umar Taal, French colonial and military officials were dependent on local forms of military recruitment and conscription. Whether from the ceɗɗo/jaami-bur system of the former Jolof Empire or the sòfa/tónjon armies of Fuuta Tooro and jihādist forces of Al-Hajj Umar Taal and his successors, this reservoir of men likely provided the troops French officers needed for their expanding campaigns in the late 19th century.
Due to the chaotic political situation in the 19th century, more and more professional soldiers were available for military service as the states and patrons they served could no longer sustain their livelihoods. Even after the "weapons revolution," France was dependent on auxiliaries. Many would continue to serve at home and abroad in the early decades of the 20th century, including a growing métis officer class with both European and African ancestry. The power dynamics of these three expansionist polities, the Jolof Empire; the Umarian State; and the French Empire, shifted based on the loyalty of non-state actors, the military professionals of the region. A better understanding of these soldiers provides a clearer picture of the scope and context of empire building in West Africa.
Paper short abstract:
The conceptual device of 'threshold' is deployed to critically explore the history of the Owambo region (Namibia/Angola) caught in the sights of different colonial powers, and the means and mediums through which we come to know history, specifically during the South African occupation in WW1.
Paper long abstract:
A framed or outlined space through which one enters another zone, the term threshold suggests a space of dense histories and passages that is constantly negotiated and renegotiated. In many ways a threshold is a zone of partial convergences. This paper looks at an African floodplain caught in the sights of different colonial powers by sounding out aspects of a much longer history of the region. In doing so it also tries to interrogate the means through which we come to know history, where there is ambiguity in relating each archival fragment to any larger picture. At all times we are fundamentally dealing with the thresholds of historical perception, and there are moments when these are very slippery.
As a conceptual device the notion of threshold situates the Owambo region within a larger subcontinental atlas, as a space of partial overlap and liminalities at different times. It is porous, impure, profoundly compromised, engendered by cultural values and historical resources that may or may not have a common measure and which changed and adapted. This is an intense space of cross-group interactions whose components cannot be boiled down to their essences, even though there were competing claims to distinctive origins, genealogies and civilisational values at different moments. How these became embroiled is of interest here, as are the limits to these processes. There were parities and disparities, around which power was very specifically mobilized, especially during the South African occupation during World War 1.
Paper short abstract:
The demarcation of colonial borders was often influenced by dynamics of inter-African relations that went back in time. The Anglo-French border between Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire was the result of a long history of competition between African polities for territorial control over a Borderland
Paper long abstract:
The frontier between Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire was created through the demarcation of a colonial boundary between Britain and France in late Nineteenth century. However the history of this frontier is much more complex than the pure result of European colonial enterprise.
When considered from a local - or micro-regional - perspective, the process which led to the 1889 Agreement demarcating the Anglo-French boundary was merely the final act in a long history that had begun at least 160 years before: more precisely around 1724-25, when the Anyi kingdom of Sanwi swept a number of communities and micro-polities in the valleys of Tano and Bia rivers, establishing its hold over the access to the Atlantic coast. In this process, Sanwi entered into fierce competition with the Nzema kingdom to the east.
After the collapse of Asante direct rule over the region in the 1820s, the Nzema kings attempted to expand territorial control over the Borderland by establishing military strongholds and supporting groups of settlers. In 1848 the British mediated a peace-agreement between Nzema and Sanwi, and a French-Dutch Border Convention in 1868 accepted the conventional boundary between the two polities.
These were the fundamental historical and legal precedents in the negotiations that set off in 1880 in order to demarcate a stable Anglo-French boundary. African agency actively interacted with vested European interests and strategies, contributing greatly to the consolidation of a new status quo. This made the border well recognizable by the people it was meant to separate
Paper short abstract:
The present-day political frontiers in North Africa and Near East often follow old provincial administrative boundaries, dating back to the late Ottoman period, and even before. In this concern, the cases of the Tunisian-Tripolitan and the Lebanese southern borderlands are quite interesting.
Paper long abstract:
In the state-making decisions that occurred after World War I, Ottoman administrative borders that had existed before were partly ignored. Despite this, the present-day political frontiers often follow traces of the old Ottoman provincial administrative boundaries. With respect to North Africa and Near East, the signs of that past are quite evident, as the cases of the Tunisian-Tripolitan and the Lebanese southern borderlands show. The borders created by colonial time treaties has still to deal with past practices rendered into modern.
1st Case Study (Tunisian-Tripolitan borderland 1880-1911)
Ottoman and French conflicting ideas of a borderland between Tunisia and Tripolitania gave birth to a controversial issue that was partially solved with a the treaty signed in Tripoli in 1910. In this present case I show how the Ottoman oldest borderland was transformed into a bordered land with consequences in the present.
2nd Case Study (Southern Lebanon)
The creation of the border which separated Lebanon from Palestine (Israel today) in the early 20s' of the past century marked the beginning of a slow but relentless transformation that affected both the borderland and its population. All the main actors involved in the regional geopolitics have repeatedly caused the borderline to fluctuate, reshaping every time the frontier region and its dynamics. Drawing on some relevant categories theorised in border studies, this second case seeks to illustrate the evolution which the Lebanese southern borderland underwent from the mandate period until the Israeli invasion in 1982, taking into account its post Ottoman implications.
Paper short abstract:
This paper will assess how, during the so-called 'Liberal period' of Italian colonization of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, Jabal Nafusa reaffirmed its crucial role in the Western region long-term power dynamics for the very fact of being a frontier area confronting more centralized logics of power.
Paper long abstract:
At the outset of 1910s European intra-imperial competition led to the reorganization of North Africa's internal boundaries, resulting in the French-Ottoman agreement of 1910 establishing the border between Tripolitania and Tunisia. Long before European colonial penetration in North Africa, Tripolitanians groups had often crossed the area ranging from Jabal Nafusa to the coastal town of Zwara during periods of famine or droughts. And, after the establishment of French protectorate over Tunisia, they continued reproducing these long time migratory patterns throughout the second half of the XIX century, when Tripolitanian witnessed a gradual economic decline resulting from the trans-Saharan trade routes crises. At the end of 1911, the Italian occupation of Ottoman Tripolitania and Cyrenaica marked the beginning of a new phase of political and economic crisis in which Jabal Nafusa became the pivotal center of Tripolitania resistance. Indeed, its geography allowed anti-Italian leaders to leverage on the inter-imperial competition opposing French and Italy to their own purposes, by acting through boundaries whose acceptance or refusal was strictly connected to the affirmation of colonial sovereignty. This paper will assess how, between 1911 and 1918, Jabal Nafusa reaffirmed its crucial role in Tripolitania long-term power dynamics for the very fact of being a frontier area confronting more centralized logics of power. Indeed, practically disposing of the frontier served both Tunisian and Tripolitania's local resistance groups for constantly challenging the legitimacy of their respective colonial powers, either questioning colonial boundaries or exploiting their recognition as a political exchange weapon.