Paper short abstract:

This paper aims to discuss the potential future collaborative pathways between history and anthropology in strong association with material culture and archaeology, and how it can enrich community histories and collaboration by taking the research into Kenya’s Ilchamus community as an example.

Paper long abstract:

Few regions offer as much potential as Africa for interdisciplinary study of the past through analysis of archaeological, historical, linguistic, ethnographic, and anthropological sources. Particularly for the recent history, the varied sources offer the possibility to weave together a detailed interpretation of the past from multiple strands of independent corroborating, but also contradictory, evidence. Despite such potential, the insights that can be drawn from careful scrutiny of Africa’s later history by including material culture and the materiality of things remain poorly developed.

This paper aims to discuss how material culture, archaeology in combination with anthropology and history can create fertile grounds to enrich and elaborate the recent past by tracing ethnogenesis and identity change, environmental degradation and conservation, and economic prosperity and decline. Its intent is to stimulate cross-disciplinary interaction between archaeology, history and anthropology, which currently mostly follow separate lines of research on the continent, and create research pathways that constructively engage with contemporary political issues and promote participation in local research contexts.

The paper will show how transdisciplinary research into the 200-year history of Kenya’s Ilchamus community, the different immigrations, and subsistence changes reveal interesting processes and social ideals that shaped and continue to shape their identity, and how ‘the material and tangible’ history is considered key as they find their place in Kenya’s socio-political landscape and prepare for a future where their identity is uncertain.

Paper short abstract:

Narratives on a past of land relations often have a certainty or constancy about them. This is challenged by looking at how temporality shape perceptions in accounts. Based on cases from Kenya, this paper explores the implications on people’s perceptions of identity and possibilities for the future.

Paper long abstract:

Narratives connected to a past of land relations often have an air of certainty and constancy about them, e.g. “we have been living here since…”. However, this certainty can be challenged by interrogating how temporal experiences shape and implicate perceptions of the past, present and future in individual people’s accounts on land relations. To this end, this paper draws on case stories from Kenya, analyzing the wide-ranging implications that multitemporal layers of land relations hold for people’s perceptions of their lives, identities and possibilities for the future. Specifically, we argue how narratives tying land relations to a subjective past inhibits certain future scenarios from taking form. Paying attention to temporality in narratives thereby emphasizes the continuity and open-endedness of what field-based researchers attempt to distill, while at the same time illustrating how future scenarios can become off-limits for narrators. The paper thus intends to affect analyses of the tricky terrains where narrated pasts become instrumentalized for unresolved land relations.

Paper short abstract:

Standard analyses of land conflict in northern Uganda focus overwhelmingly on recent events. This paper pushes back against this tendency, reframing the stakes – and future implications – of contemporary land conflicts in the Acholi region as part of a century-long struggle for ancestral lands.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines how memories of colonial-era forced displacement shape responses to contemporary government(-backed) land grabbing in Uganda’s Acholi region.

In 2006, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) withdrew from Uganda, allowing 1.7 million Acholis to return home after a decade of internment in camps. Land conflict has marred this resettlement process and has thus become a leading topic of research on the region. Unfortunately, the 19-year-long LRA war looms so large in our understanding of Acholiland that most analysis of present-day land conflict is blinkered by a focus on this war and its effects.

To many Acholis, however, the struggle for their lands does not begin with wartime internment. Rather, it dates to an earlier mass forced migration. In 1913, ostensibly for purposes of sleeping sickness control, British colonial administrators relocated the entire population of western Acholiland, later converting the vacated territory into conservation areas. While these events caused lasting damage to Acholi land-use practices, many communities struggled throughout the 20th century to return to their former homes. This struggle was interrupted in the mid-1990’s by the escalation of the LRA war; but has resumed, in new forms, in the years since.

This paper examines how the stakes of contemporary land conflicts change when considered within the context of a century-long fight for ancestral lands. Building on both archival and ethnographic research, it explores how the academically overlooked history of colonial-era forced displacement is remembered by Acholi communities and mobilized in struggles to secure customary land rights for future generations.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the practices and the context of the elaboration and confirmation of the “Luba-Kasai” and “Lulua” categories as political identities in the Kasai region. It examines the ways in which colonial ethnopolitical entrepreneurs invested these categories with groupness.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the practices and processes, the mechanisms and the contexts of the elaboration and confirmation of the “Luba-Kasai” and “Lulua” categories as political identities in the Kasai region. It examines the ways in which colonial ethnopolitical entrepreneurs invested these categories with groupness and how these categories became institutionalized and incorporated in administrative routines, myths, memories, and narratives. The paper also tries to understand how the local notables internalized and appropriated the new political identities and labels and struggled to reinterpret and reconstruct the “customs” and “traditions” to make sense of their situation under the pressure of growing capitalist relations of production, taxation, land alienation, urbanization, and westernization.

The study addresses the following questions: how did successive groups of western Luba migrants who settled in the Kasai region at different time periods became identified, essentialized, and naturalized as distinct ethnic groups? Why was the prospect of decolonization accompanied by the emergence of intense political, but ethnically framed, conflict between proximate groups who had been getting along well until then? How did the discursive framing of grievances operate? How was the conflict managed and resolved? How did the process of production of historical narratives take shape? This research is informed by the scholarship on the "invention of traditions," “the creation of tribalism,” and the “imagined communities.”

Paper short abstract:

The papers engages with three key events and activities of the Kalanga communities along the Zimbabwe-Botswana border and seeks to demonstrate how these communities through these events have grappled with issues of autochthony, citizenship and belonging in postcolonial Zimbabwe and Botswana.

Paper long abstract:

In 1885, the British declared present day Botswana (Bechuanaland) a protectorate in an endeavor to curb the Germany eastward expansion. This was followed by the erection of the boundary fence that divided Zimbabwe (Southern Rhodesia) and Botswana. This boundary fence cut across the Kalanga people who had a shared history, origin and identity, who constantly moved between the two territories unhindered prior to colonial rule. The paper seeks to demonstrate how in post-colonial Zimbabwe, communities living along the Zimbabwe-Botswana border have continued to undermine these colonial artificial boundaries in an endeavor to assert their identity and belonging in the post-colonial state. Through an analysis of three events and activities; the 2002 exhumation of chief Nswazwi’s remains, the 2006 repatriation of 600 members of the Nswazwi community; and everyday smuggling of people and goods along the border, the paper engages with the persistence of the precolonial porous boundaries. It further argues that through these events and activities Kalanga communities on both sides of the border have appealed to autochthony, history and origin in order to contest belonging, marginality and exclusion (political and economic) in postcolonial Zimbabwe and Botswana. Moreover, the paper probes the questions of citizenship and the limits of the power of the post-colonial states in dealing with communities on the margins of the states. It draws insights from interviews conducted with these communities, archival sources and secondary material in order to unpack the pertinent issues surrounding borders, migration and belonging in post-colonial Africa.

Paper short abstract:

This paper – based on ethnographic research – will explore how communities re-settling the ruins conceptualise the past of this place to organise their daily life in a new residence in spite of political, economic and environmental struggles.

Paper long abstract:

For the Sudanese, the term Soba has essentially two meanings today. The first, refers to the former capital of the medieval Nubian Kingdom of Alwa and one of the largest archaeological sites in Sudan (‘Past Soba’). The second, to the suburban zone of the Khartoum agglomeration (‘Modern Soba’). ‘Past Soba’ and ‘Modern Soba’ are two intertwined space-time continuums, whose relations are multi-layered especially since the 1990s when the ruins started to be radically reduced by modern settlement.

This paper – based on ethnographic research – will explore how communities re-settling the ruins conceptualise the past of this place to organise their daily life in a new residence in spite of political, economic and environmental struggles. The research is part of the archeological project entitled ‘Soba – the Heart of Alwa’ initiated in 2019.