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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.