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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the impact of decolonization on practices of mobility and understandings of space, belonging, and statehood in East Africa. Through resettlement campaigns and refugee movements, this page explores the ways new states used border policies to reimagine mobility and belonging.

Paper long abstract:

Debates over the role of mobility and borders in Africa seem almost unescapable in contemporary popular and political discourses. In many ways, these discourses mirror local, regional, and pan-Africanist debates at decolonization, when the imagining alternative postcolonial spaces of belonging seemed not only possible but pressing. This paper examines the impact of decolonization on practices of mobility and understandings of space, belonging, and statehood in East Africa. The independence of Tanzania (then Tanganyika), Uganda, and Kenya successively in the 1960s as coherent, separate nations was a more contested process than triumphant nationalist histories have often presented. While secessionist campaigns and debates over regional federation pulled the spatial imagination of decolonization in seemingly opposite directions, nationalists in each state worked to secure their territorial inheritances. Many earlier practices of mobility and translocality were either criminalized or humanitarianized. Even where border policies were promoted as quite open, as in independent Tanzania, cross-border movements became highly legislated and subject to a series of "exceptions". These "exceptions" often took advantage of the slippery usages and distinctions between different forms of mobility and designations of belonging. Looking specifically at the cases of resettlement campaigns of Kikuyu from Kenya to Mpanda in Tanzania, and Rwandan refugees in Uganda and Tanzania, this paper examines the ways in which the independent states of East Africa used border policies and regional control of movement to transform longer histories and patterns of mobility and transterritorial belonging into opportunities to fortify boundaries, define citizenship, and perform their newly-attained sovereignty.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores theoretical and empirical implications of connecting African diaspora and mobilities perspectives. It argues that a focus on mobility regimes is relevant for diaspora research while attention to temporal reasoning and belonging may offer inspiration to mobilities studies.

Paper long abstract:

Mobilities and African diaspora studies share a concern with migration and (im)mobility, yet there is surprisingly little connection between the two. In this paper I reflect on potential analytical overlaps and research agendas, arguing that there may be fruitful inspiration in applying key insights from one literature to the other.

First, I suggest that a regimes of mobility perspective (Schiller and Salazar 2013) offers important insights to diaspora analysis, directing the attention to how different mobilities are governed, facilitated, enforced, blocked or delayed, celebrated or stigmatized. The enforcing and regulating power over mobility and immobility - whether 'voluntary' or enforced - constitutes a pertinent aspect in African diaspora studies. This concerns the 'old' African diaspora emerging out of the transatlantic slave trade as well as the contemporary mobilities of 'new' African diaspora groups where European politics of externalization, restrictive visa legislation and border control filters and constrains African mobilities.

Second, I propose that the attention paid to temporality and belonging in diaspora studies may be inspirational for mobilities studies. Analyzing these dimensions sheds light on how mobile subjects make sense of the past, present and future through their narratives, claims and perceptions of routes and journeys, their relationships and possible homecoming to an erstwhile, ancient or imagined 'homeland' or elsewhere, and the role of mobility in memories and in hopes for the future. It hence emphasizes belonging to particular people, places and experience over time and space, and its implications.

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This paper asks what road deaths reveal about the political, social, and spiritual meanings of risk and mobility in Africa, and how have these meanings emerged from and shaped cultural transformation throughout the 20th century.

Paper long abstract:

The most recent WHO report on global road safety states that the number of road deaths is "unacceptably high, with an estimated 1.35 million people dying each year" (2018). The African continent has the worst rate of road traffic deaths in the world at 26.6 deaths per 100,000 people. While these are present-day statistics, road deaths in Africa have played a transformative role in shaping conceptions of mobility, technology, and dying across the continent. In their seminal article, Vaughan and Lee argued that addressing the changing nature of "violent death and its meanings [in Africa]…would have to include the as yet unwritten histories of…road accidents…alongside criminal and political violence" (2008). What do these deaths reveal about the political, social, and spiritual meanings of risk and mobility in Africa, and how have these meanings emerged from and shaped cultural transformation over the course of the twentieth century? This paper will connect historical/anthropological meditations on death and dying with mobility studies' frames of analysis. In particular, the paper will explore the changing cultural and political significance of death brought about by technology-enhanced movement in Africa where the likelihood of dying through automobility is nearly three times that of Europe. The paper will also challenge Urry and Sheller's largely secular approach to the embodiment and emotional geography of automobility by foregrounding African spiritual practices and landcapes of death and dying. Particular attention will be paid to how death through automobility has reconfigured or reinforced material and spiritual power relations.

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This paper illustrates how the lens of personhood, a longstanding empirical and theoretical concern in African Studies, offers important insight to mobility studies through an ethnographic discussion of Boda Bodas in Kampala, Uganda.

Paper long abstract:

This paper illustrates how the lens of personhood, a longstanding empirical and theoretical concern in African Studies, can offer important insight to mobility studies through an ethnographic discussion of Boda Bodas in Kampala, Uganda. Boda Bodas are motorcycle taxis that provide a vital means of urban mobility as they cut through congestion, extend the reach of the city's minibus system, and navigate the hilly city's uneven road surfaces. They are also involved in hundreds of accidents a year and have given rise to a moral panic in the city's media, the municipality, and the national government around moto-mobility and informal transportation. The paper argues that two divergent concepts of personhood are at the heart of the dominant moral framings of the boda boda industry. On the one hand, drivers view the industry as a moral community and engage in numerous modes of exchange, ranging from mutual aid to financial exploitation, that are predicated on an extended notion of the person as embedded in and emergent from social relations. On the other, regulators in the government, NGOs, and the tech-sector mobilise an individualized and individualizing notion of personhood in order to transform the industry through disciplinary technologies like apps, loans, registration, and safety equipment . Based on ethnographic research conducted from 2013-14, the paper compares how the practices and materiality of these two visions of personhood shape the distribution of risk, injury, and recognition for Kampala's Boda Boda drivers.

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Paper short abstract:

On the basis of a long-standing ethnographic involvement with transnational mobility between Burkina Faso and Côte d'Ivoire, this paper illustrates the ways in which idioms of kinship serve as a central currency for facilitating labour migration and other moves in this region.

Paper long abstract:

When generations of labour migrants create and uphold transnational connections, it is often understood to be a family affair. Pioneers send for their children, or pave the way for parents, siblings and more distant relatives, and transnational spaces are maintained through the similar aspirations and trajectories of new generations of migrants. What is less understood is how flexible notions of kinship may be in these contexts. On the basis of a long-standing ethnographic involvement with transnational mobility between Burkina Faso and Côte d'Ivoire, this paper illustrates the ways in which idioms of kinship serve as a central currency for facilitating labour migration and other moves in this region.

The analysis emphasises historical continuities in labour mobility between these two countries, vested in local ideals of hospitality and solidarity through the institution of the tutorat in Côte d'Ivoire, as well as the ruptures in these social contracts through the past two decades of political and armed conflict. Conceptually, the paper suggests that the evocation of transnational kinship ties represents a strategy to create a singular transnational space, rather than to maintain connections between separate localities. The paper thus adds to the emerging literature on migration brokers, by ascribing these kinship-like ties a pivotal role in facilitating the continued mobility within a transnational space. The argument thereby aligns with the panel's focus on the theoretical relevance of mobility studies for African studies, or vice versa, by analysing kinship idioms as a central social currency in structuring transnational mobility across space and time.

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Paper short abstract:

We use the mobilities theory to examine how Kenyan migrants face emotional and skills disruptions in the UK hotel industry. Using dimensions of 'power' and 'emotions' we explore unequal, differential and hierarchical relations experienced at work despite a world-class hotelier training from Kenya.

Paper long abstract:

This paper serves as a useful conduit in 'voicing' migrants' lived experiences in a foreign country and in particular, considers shedding some light on the impact of migration on migrants' hotel careers. With reference to Kenyan hotel migrant workers in this study, their career development (or lack of) in the UK is examined. The traditional theory of career mobility whereby education and professional training have a strong positive impact on careers is challenged in this study. Instead we found that despite their world class industry-specific training, Kenyan hoteliers faced multiple (im)mobilities in their workplace. Using the mobilities theory and it's dimensions of 'power' and 'emotions' we explore the lived and career experiences of these migrant workers. We examine how their skills are under-deployed and the emotional disruptions that follow. We draw attention to the changes in the politics of power of movement in foreign land. This knowledge is generated by the use of modified life history interviews with thirty-two Kenyan migrants including ten face to face and six Skype interviews conducted with participants that were still living and working in the UK. The remaining sixteen face-to-face interviews were conducted with participants who had returned to Kenya. The life history technique gives the overall picture of an individual, however, this research, focused only on the career stage of the participants and as such, parameters were drawn which started with their post secondary education through to their working lives as at the time of the interviews.