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Paper short abstract:

“Afropean” is treated here as a contemporary analysis Euro-african relations. I will, however, show a deeper history to this concept- tracking the fundamental relationship between the colonial mobility governance and racial classification, through histories of Greek migration in southern Africa

Paper long abstract:

The study of Euro-African mobility has, of late, focussed on European anxieties about African mass immigration. This anxiety is a manifestation of a centuries old urge to dominate mobility, human and material, across oceans - to define and thus govern the "desirable" and "undesirable" migrant ever more carefully. A close reading of that history reveals a spectrum of immigrant origins, identities and experiences – such as those of Greek immigrants in Southern Africa who were neither coloniser nor colonised. This reality sat uneasily both within imperial ideologies, premised on binaries of coloniser and colonised, and emerging modernist ideas of “scientific”, racialised colonial governance in the late 19th century. In response, colonial and imperial officials produced a growing and ever-changing set of immigration governance systems that relied on ever-increasing formalisation of the classification of desirable (i.e.: “white”) and undesirable mobility, moving patterns of classification away from older, cruder “common sense” ideas of racial superiority. This paper is therefore concerned with the establishment and reinforcement of the boundaries of “Europeanness” through ideas of “whiteness” and “civilisation” and, eventually, in opposition to "Africanness" and “Nativeness”. It seeks to explore how these categories were negotiated and changed over time and how its inherent contradictions, in turn, created systems of migration governance that are central to the global history of migration governance to this day.