We Live in a State of Fear: Eritrean refugees keep bearing the brunt of the Ethiopian crisis

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Cover photo by Markus Rudolf

by Markus Rudolf

For Eritrean refugees in Ethiopia, the situation has changed drastically with the armed conflict between the central government and Tigray state that broke out on 4 November 2020. Human Rights Watch reported that different military units and militias repeatedly attacked camp residents between November 2020 and January 2021. Eritrean soldiers executed listed individuals and deported large numbers of refugees. Hitsats and Shimelba, the camps closest to Eritrea, were completely destroyed. The two remaining camps, Mai Aini and Adi Harush, were cut off from any support after national and international aid organisations left. At the same time, Tigray and oppositional Eritrean militias took revenge on those suspected of looting camp residents. According to encounters in summer 2022 with those who fled, only the disabled, the pregnant and the elderly remained in the camps.

Refugees staying outside the camps were attacked too. Dawit, a man in his forties, insists that he and his family literally got the last bus to escape from the Adi Harush camp, in a contested area close to the border between Tigray and Amhara state. “There was no food, no water in the camp. We were escaping with 5 children. It was very difficult. We had a clinic but no doctors, no treatment, no medicine. On the one side were the federals on the other the TPLF [Tigray People’s Liberation Front] – the Eritreans were in the middle. We did not have a choice. We had nothing. No money. We had left all in Shire. There was fighting and the other day they came back. It went on like this for two weeks. We escaped on foot. It was very, very difficult. It took us three days [to get out].”

In between contradictory narratives

Since the start of the armed conflict, a propaganda battle has been raging over the narrative of who plays which role in the conflict and who is responsible for which atrocities and massacres. Humanitarian aid has become a political issue and the civilian population a pawn in the battle for global public opinion. The TPLF has been claiming that humanitarian aid is blocked by the central government and speaks of a strategy to use famine as a weapon of war. Ethiopia’s central government, in turn, accuses Tigrinya militias of human rights violations such as past and present massacres of civilians (as the attacks in Mai Kadra in 2020). It claims that the TPLF wants to re-establish the old regime and discredit the new government internationally with fake news. These claims resonate with Ethiopians who reject the old (TPLF) leaders.

In between contradictory narratives, shifting political alliances, and an opaque state of negotiations, Eritrean refugees find themselves at the centre of the conflict. Prior to the current conflict, all refugee camps for Eritreans were located along Ethiopia’s northern border and thus in the areas most affected by the fighting. According to UNHCR, there were 96,000 Eritrean refugees in the four camps in Tigray before the conflict broke out. INGOs now estimate the number of Eritrean refugees who have escaped to Addis to be around 80,000. In Addis, Eritrean refugees have become everybody’s scapegoats: they are harassed as Eritreans by Tigrayans and as Tigrinya speakers by Ethiopian nationalists. Increased hostilities and attacks against them in the capital have left many searching for a means of escape once more.

The camp as a last resort

In July, videos circulated on social media showing passengers waiting and wailing close to buses at the outskirts of Addis Ababa. They were supposedly Eritreans rounded up by the Ethiopian police to be transported to a refugee camp in Northern Ethiopia. According to Bereket, a single man in his late thirties who had made his way from the north to Addis Ababa twice, there is little doubt about the insecurity in the area: “It is too close [to the front line]. They [armed groups] can come any time,” he explains. The new Alemwach refugee camp near Dabat was established in Amharic territory in June 2021. Shortly thereafter, UNHCR reported looting and attacks by different armed groups. Subsequent reports from refugee activist groups confirmed that refugees had nowhere to run. As of 2022, INGOs consider the conditions in the camp as desperate and report that intercommunal violence remains prevalent. International staff – off the record – describe conditions as “catastrophic” and speak of a general lack of services in Dabat.

Adi Harush refugee camp. Photo Markus Rudolf.

Those affected most by these events were refugees who had ended up in camps as their last resort due to a lack of alternatives, like the case of Hassan shows. After decades of a life as an irregular day labourer on the move in Sudan, Kenya, Somalia, Yemen, Oman, the United Arab Emirates and Ethiopia, Hassan was deported back to Eritrea in 2019. Being in his late fifties, he was still not old enough to evade the obligatory and infamous draft to the army. He had to escape once again and made it to a camp in Sudan. There he founded a family and moved to Adi Harush, a camp for Eritrean refugees in Tigray, Northern Ethiopia, where he decided to stay put and file for resettlement: “I had enough. Now I am waiting for my process here. I have a brother in the US,” he explained during an encounter in the camp in 2019.

Longing for resettlement

Before the conflict erupted, his neighbour in a shelter turned into a makeshift house was Bereket, who had moved over the nearby border without any similar detours. When he crossed in 2012, it was a heavily militarised zone. He crossed during the stalemate between Ethiopia and Eritrea that followed a bloody war in 1998-2000. During that time, he had no trouble being registered as a refugee. Ethiopia, just as the Western and the Eastern blocs in Europe during the Cold War, welcomed refugees as evidence of its own superiority. Ever since, however, Bereket has remained stranded in Ethiopia as a refugee awaiting resettlement, preferably to New Zealand or Scandinavia where his relatives live. Waiting for his process, he continues to worry about still living within reach of the Eritrean security forces. Even before politics changed and alliances shifted, he lamented a lack of protection: “They [Eritrean government] have their people here [inside the camp]. They abduct people from the camps. You never hear from them again.”

The bridge marking the disputed borderline between Tigray and Amhara. Photo by Markus Rudolf.

Dawit, on the other hand, had come with his wife and children after a peace deal between Eritrea and Ethiopia in 2018. The border had been reopened for the first time in decades. People from both sides took the opportunity to visit relatives, friends, and colleagues they had been separated from since the two countries partitioned in 1991. The Eritrean side of the border was officially closed soon again but many still made it across. They often passed through the camps to move on to urban centres in Tigray to join kin who served as guarantors. Tigrinya on both sides speak the same language and feel that they share a common culture. This made integration easier. Dawit just went to the camp for registration and proceeded to Shire, where the family rented an apartment. They lived on the rations from the camp, the income generated by family members working in the service sector in town, and some support from relatives in the diaspora. The children attended the local school.

Newly arrived refugees with financially well-off relatives move on to Addis to wait for their asylum or migration papers. Looking at the ease with which the new arrivals move in and out of the camp, and seeing the assets they bring, they are called “tourists on a stopover” by those who, like Bereket, have been worrying about their protection for years and those who, like Hassan, feel stuck due to a lack of alternatives. Many refugees have endured long periods of waiting for a durable solution. Even after the Ethiopian policy of encampment had changed to an out-of-camp-policy (OCP), most refugees staying in the camps saw no alternative but to stay put.

Adi Harush refugee camp. Photo by Markus Rudolf.

Without connections to the diaspora abroad capable of paying for the daily expenses of their family members in transit, life outside the camp was simply too expensive. “We stayed in Addis, but life is too expensive there. I had to bring my family back to the camp,” another of Bereket and Hassan’s neighbours explained. Like many other Eritrean refugees in Addis, Bereket is only able to pay his rent thanks to relatives abroad. Kin in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, or Norway finance whole neighbourhoods of Addis where only Eritreans (and Ethiopians) with access to remittances can afford the high rents, exploding prices, and soaring inflation. Dawit had to move farther away to the outskirts of Addis even though his family can count on the support from his brother-in-law living in the US.

The risks of encampment

Many of the Eritrean refugees who fled on their own to Amhara or Addis Ababa were nevertheless forced to return to the camp at the behest of the central government. Bereket explains that Eritrean refugees were held by the IOM in a large hall with guards on all exits when they first arrived in Addis: “I told them – all of us told IOM – we do not want to go back. But they forced us – it was against our will”. Not only had armed conflict, violence and killings – the very conditions they fled from – caught up with the refugees at the very spot they had come for protection; on top of it they were forced to leave relative safety again.

“I told them – all of us told IOM – we do not want to go back.

But they forced us – it was against our will”

Bereket

Just as Bereket, Hassan had to leave the camp due to the conflict. He made it to Addis, but he could not shoulder the high costs of living there and chose to return to the newly established camp Dabat. A few days/weeks/months later, he disappeared. Bereket assumed that he was taken by Eritrean forces. “He disappeared. They took him. His wife does not know his whereabouts. They can come and sneak in and take you at night”. His worries are not unfounded, as an investigation by Reuters has documented. Some who have heard the story suspect that Hassan may have been mistaken for a Tigrayan due to speaking the same language and killed by the Amhara militia, while others believe that he simply got unlucky and was caught up in a shootout between the TPLF and Amhara militias (called FANO).

The mountains refugees had to pass. Photo Markus Rudolf.

Between a rock and a hard place

Since the conflict in Tigray started, Eritrean refugees – and Tigrinya speakers especially – remain trapped between a rock and a hard place. As Bereket recounts: “On one side was the TPLF and on the other the federal [soldiers]. They were shooting over our heads. We wanted to escape but they shot at us. Many refugees are dead. Those who escaped, they caught them and brought us back to the camp where they imprisoned us.” He continues: “Then they released us again. Everybody on his own. I walked through dead bodies. Soldiers were left at the side of the path. Both TPLF and federals … There was no water. We had to go through the mountains. My feet are still injured. In the mountains there were many others [refugees]. The mountains [close to Ethiopian highest peak Ras Dashen] were very high and steep. They attacked the women. They raped them. We could not do anything. They beat us.” Looking somewhere into the distance, he recalls these memories: “I saw terrible things on the way. They are in my head.” Refocusing on the here and now, his gaze becomes firm when he asks, “How to get them out?”

“On one side was the TPLF and on the other the federal [soldiers]. They were shooting over our heads. We wanted to escape but they shot at us. Many refugees are dead”

Bereket

The prospects for Eritrean refugees in Ethiopia do not hold much hope. They increasingly see only one option for escaping their enduring loss of access to rights and livelihoods – moving to more peaceful and stable countries outside the region. Dawit explains that he and his family have relied entirely on remittances for the past 18 months, since he is no longer able to work in Shire. His hopes now rest on resettlement in a country in the Global North: “Our children go to school here. It is peaceful. But we cannot work, because we have no work permit. Hopefully, in a few months, our family will be in the USA.” Bereket, in contrast, has managed to find work in Addis despite the formal hurdles. But he does not see any local prospects either and keeps hoping for resettlement: “Here there is not change. Corona is not the problem, but politics [is]. [In the] Horn of Africa – as its name indicates – [there is] always fighting. We live in a state of fear. What can we do – maybe it is our destiny.”

Disclaimer: This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant No. 822453 and would not have been possible without the kindness and openness of those sharing their stories.

About the author

Markus Rudolf is a senior researcher at the Bonn International Centre for Conflict Studies with interest and experience in conflict management pertaining to humanitarian aid, crisis management and post-crisis assistance, Markus’ research focuses on forced displacement, human rights, youth at risk, gender-based violence, conflict management and the political economy of violent conflicts. He previously worked as a conflict researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (MPI) and as a consultant for humanitarian issues for various intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations. He graduated in sociology, social psychology, and social anthropology from universities in Saarland, Colorado and Berlin.

Displacement and Invisibility Strategies in Postwar Burundi

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Cover photo by author. Peace village outside Gitega

Series Introduction

This post is a part of a series introducing the recent anthology Invisibility in African Displacements (Zed Books 2020). The book was edited by Simon Turner and AMMODI co-founder Jesper Bjarnesen, and offers new analytical ideas for understanding migrant in/visibilisation. In each post, the contributors present their chapter in a more accessible format, either by selecting one empirical example or aspect or by relating their central argument to broader societal concerns or debates.

For an outline of the overarching idea behind the book, see the introducing blog post by the editors here.

by Andrea Purdekova

Peacetime Displacements: A typology of (in)visibilities

Graveyard and memorial in Bugendana. Photo by author

Between 2002 and 2005, in the wake of the civil war in Burundi, hundreds of thousands of Burundians have returned to their homeland from protracted, multi-generation exile. They hailed mostly from Tanzania in a mass repatriation exercise considered a major success by the UNHCR. The reintegration challenges were nonetheless plenty. Many came back to their ancestral lands only to find them occupied, while others were resettled in purpose-built reintegration villages. A decade after the mass repatriation, the dust seems to have all but settled. ‘We are in a war-like situation!’ emphasized a widow in a resettlement ‘peace village,’ referencing the heated conflicts on the inside. ‘Peace is not there yet!’ exclaimed an IDP respondent, referencing widespread fears around government’s intent to disperse inhabitants of the informal site.

In academic research and policy thinking alike, powerful labels such as ‘post-war,’ ‘post-conflict’ and ‘peacetime’ tend to create assumptions about a straightforward path from the end of conflict to return and resettlement. After the war and before the recent crisis (2005-2015), Burundi has often been synonymous with mass return of refugees from protracted exile, with important scholarship exploring the challenges of reintegration and continued land conflict in rural areas. Though the emphasis on resettlement has been made for good reasons, this dominant frame nonetheless obscured the continued experiences of displacement and unsettling in post-war Burundi.

My research thus looks at what remains invisible from this dominant lens on post-war space. The invisibility produced through dominant labels and actual interventions must be seen alongside the diverse strategies people deploy to subvert or embrace invisibilisation in order to stake their own claims. Invisibility thus works at two levels at least: a structural form of invisibility that does not negate but simply obscures experiences of dislocation during peacetime, and more micro-level and enabling strategies of invisibility that people use to stake their claims to place in the post-war order. In what follows, I will look at how these disabling and enabling forms of invisibilisation intertwine among returnees resettled in ‘peace villages’ and among IDPs who resist pressures to leave their informal sites.

Powerful labels such as ‘post-war’, ‘post-conflict’ and ‘peacetime tend to create assumptions about a straightforward path from the end of conflict to return and resettlement

Peace Villages: Dislocations of ‘Resettlement’

Peace villages in post-war Burundi were established as a way to resettle returning refugees (principally from Tanzania) who were unable to access their ancestral lands. In this context, the notion of ‘peace’ referred to the purposefully inter-ethnic nature of these villages as spaces where all ethnicities would live side by side. But during my visits to peace villages like Mutambara in Bururi province in the south of the country, the name proved to be misleading. Mutambara village was beset by conflict, which ironically became a source of renewed displacement.

Women walking outside Gishubi. Photo by author.

The conflict that emerged, however, had precious little to do with inter-ethnic tensions. Instead, the conflict in Mutambara revolved around land, dispossession and livelihoods and was tied to the peace village resettlement project as such. First of all, the resettlement site of Mutambara, just like many others across the country, was established on a previously inhabited site. The former residents were said to be illegally occupying the land and were dispersed, only to mount a protest within the peace village, erecting mud house structures right next to the new purpose-built houses. In this act of protest, residents were attempting to make their displacement directly visible and to stake their claims to the site.

As I was entering Mutambara for the first time, inhabitants of the adjacent area pressed on me to interview them too. This was known as the ‘burned area’ and its inhabitants faced an eerily similar predicament to the original settlers of Mutambara. As in the past, the local authorities tried to expel the residents by force to clear the area for a new construction project; this time, the construction of the Makonde peace village.

The ‘occupation’ of the village by former displaced residents created tensions and open conflict between the families of residents and returnees, and led to articulations by former refugees of a desire to flee back to exile. Both sides in this confrontation were trying hard to make their dislocations visible, in the face of silence in the local and national press and the lack of awareness from of politicians, donors and scholars. The Mutambara residents who had their houses ‘occupied’ pooled money to send a representative to Bujumbura to speak directly to the Ministry of Solidarity, Social Affairs, Human Rights and Gender, to little effect.

There were other forms of invisible displacement happening within the villages as well. Most of the beneficiaries questioned whether these sites were viable spaces of resettlement where sustainable livelihoods could be created. The small plots, arid land and few employment options led many to either plan for or dream of returning to exile in Tanzania, and some had already left.  Resettlement villages were thus quite literally sites of active unsettling.

IDP Sites: Resisting Return and Relocation

The post-war focus on return and resettlement obscured another lingering displacement, namely the continued existence of about 120 IDP sites in Burundi almost a decade after the signing of the Arusha peace agreement, sites mostly inhabited by ethnic Tutsi. Despite a lack of international attention, these sites were not invisible in Burundi itself. In fact, the sites were considered undesirable by the government and pressure was mounted by the government for the inhabitants’ dispersal and return back to their hills of origin.

Outside Butengana settlement. Photo by author.

Similar stories around forced dispersal emerged at a number of sites, but no community seemed more acutely worried at the time of my research trips than the IDPs at Bugendana, in central Burundi, about an hour’s drive out of the city of Gitega. Bugendana is an unofficial, precarious settlement with about 500 houses spreading away from an informal memorial graveyard to 670 victims of a vicious attack on the camp in 1996, allegedly perpetrated by then CNDD-FDD rebels, now the dominant political party in power. At Bugendana, the authorities have announced a plan to develop the site into a second national airport, in line with broader plans to develop Gitega into the capital of Burundi. The inhabitants of Bugendana were worried not only about physical removal and forced return but also about the erasure of memory that the redevelopment of this site would entail. They read a range of ulterior motives into the decision to clear the site and forcibly remove them.

Child in Bugendana settlement. Photo by author

Bugendana’s inhabitants, as those of many other sites, resisted dispersal and return to what they believed were unsafe spaces in their home communities and used a variety of strategies to stay put. They actively claimed visibility by protesting the government’s plans as forced displacement, by insisting that a return to their rural homes would maintain their predicament as internally displaced. At the same time, however, they also tried to actively invisibilise themselves as internally displaced in a bid to assert their right to stay.

In their narratives, they purposefully worked to redefine their informal sites as homes and legitimate settlements, even likening them to ‘peace villages.’ ‘Since you are building a peace village over there,’ an old woman in the Mworo Ngundu site suggested, pointing across the road, ‘you should just extend it [to here]…you could provide us with iron sheets and we can build right here. And then we can live in harmony, a Hutu would come and establish a house here…[T]he community is [in fact] mixed, [there are] even Hutu, even Batwa over there.’ Across Burundi’s lingering IDP sites, people were actively drawing on the state’s own rhetoric around the importance of inter-ethnic integration in order to subvert its push for dispersal.

Across Burundi’s lingering IDP sites, people were actively drawing on the state’s own rhetoric around the importance of inter-ethnic integration in order to subvert its push for dispersal

Conclusion: An Unsettling Peace

These examples from my chapter in Invisibility in African Displacements point to the multiple dislocations and displacements operating not simply alongside return and resettlement, or despite peace, but as integrative part of the post-war re-ordering of space and social relations in peace village resettlement sites or lingering IDP sites. Brand new resettlement sites displace prior settlers and become sites of displacement in their own right for the returnees intended to inhabit them. In the meantime, IDP site inhabitants resist active pressures to disperse in the name of social integration and development. Even as they highlight their precarity and inability to return, they also try to invisibilise their status as ‘displaced’ in an attempt to stay put.

Road in Bugendana settlement. Photo by author.

Even though Mutambara and Bugendana reference very different forms of war-related experience – one of mainly Hutu returnees from exile in Tanzania, the other of mainly Tutsi internally displaced – they both point to the unsettling nature of peace in post-accord Burundi. The returnees and IDPs I interviewed questioned the nature of the state-citizen link re-established after the war, and questioned whether there was indeed the sort of security that would enable them to return, and to stay.

About the author

Andrea Purdekova is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Politics, Languages & International Studies (PoLIS) at the University of Bath. She holds a DPhil in International Development from the University of Oxford where her dissertation explored the Rwandan government’s attempts to build unity after the 1994 genocide. More broadly, her research explores the political dynamics of states emerging from mass violence, specifically the politics of reconciliation and nation building, the politics of memory, and the politics of displacement, settlement and camps. Her regional focus is the Great Lakes Region of Africa and she has conducted most of my research in Rwanda and Burundi. Purdekova is the author of Making Ubumwe: Power, State and Camps in Rwanda’s Unity-Building Project (Berghahn Books, 2015), which was shortlisted for the 2016 Bethwell A. Ogot Book Prize awarded annually by the African Studies Association.

Post-slavery and the invisibility of female (e)motions in migration, displacement and refugee studies

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Cover photo by Alessandro Vannucci via Flickr

Series Introduction

This post is a part of a series introducing the recent anthology Invisibility in African Displacements (Zed Books 2020). The book was edited by Simon Turner and AMMODI co-founder Jesper Bjarnesen, and offers new analytical ideas for understanding migrant in/visibilisation. In each post, the contributors present their chapter in a more accessible format, either by selecting one empirical example or aspect or by relating their central argument to broader societal concerns or debates.

For an outline of the overarching idea behind the book, see the introducing blog post by the editors here.

by Lotte Pelckmans

Tabass is a woman from southern Niger. She figures in no statistics, no big databases or reports on migration, displacement or refugees. Nevertheless, over the course of her lifetime she will embody all of these movements. Tabass features in a documentary, which shows her involved in a heated discussion between three women on the continuities of slavery in Niger. During the discussion, she describes her own experiences of enslavement. You can see her in the documentary film here, at 56 minutes.

My chapter in Invisibility in African Displacements, entitled ‘Fugitive emplacements: Wahayu Concubine Visibility Tactics through Fugitive Cross-border Mobilities, Niger-Nigeria’ zooms in on the ways in which women with slave status who have been forcefully moved for marriage decided to move out. They thus flee from their forced marriage and from having been concubines. I argue that their flight is a way of ‘voting with their feet’, a form of refuge to protest against dire, unacceptable conditions. Their fugitive mobility expresses discontent with the dramatic continuities in historical forms of exploitation based on slave status in the post-slavery borderlands of Niger and Nigeria. By the notion of fugitive emplacements, I point to how these fugitive women gained new forms of belonging in a village hosting several wahaya refugees in Southern Niger, called Zongon Ablo.

Post-slavery in Niger-Nigeria Borderlands

Niger legally abolished slavery in 1905 and criminalized the discrimination and exploitation of people with slave status in 2003. However, as someone labelled of “slave descent” by her community, Tabass’ body still bears the daily burden of a cultural normalization of descent-based slavery. Niger is a post-slavery society, meaning that not only legacies but also continuities of African slavery have survived well after abolition. Tabass was forcibly moved from her home village in Southern Niger across the border to a compound in Northern Nigeria, a few hundred kilometres away, for a forced marriage.

The Niger-Nigeria borderlands. Map from Wikipedia

Tabass had moved only a short distance and she did so alone. No statistics counted her, but her mobility moved her across dramatic social, cultural and emotional distances. Small distances can have big consequences. It is hard to count how many borders and boundaries Tabass was moved across as a bride: country, language, religion, culture, colonial history. She was moved from a former French to a former British colony, from a Zerma to a Hausa speaking community, from a rural village where women hardly veil themselves to an urban compound where she was highly secluded, and instead of moving into the role of a wife, she became a worker.

(E)motions

Emotions move people. They can be decisive in forced or voluntary movements, on small and large scales. Indeed emotions and feelings of affect (love, care, fear), can be drivers of mobility; they can set things in motion. However, some types of movement, related to  large-scale, amplified events like war, disaster and terrorism, have gained more attention than others. Indeed, it is mostly crisis-related collective mobilities, generated by strong universal ‘emotions’ such as fear and physical threat that have been exposed, and in some cases made hypervisible, in migration studies and international media. In contrast, we do not often consider subtler movements driven by ‘softer’, individual and contextual emotions, such as the love for a child who is not at home; the need to move in with a partner in order to protect one’s status and/or virginity; travelling in order to care for sick loved ones.

Such ‘soft emotions’ also motivate people to move across both small and large spatial distances, but they are much less visible, because they are more individualised and often rather small-scale. A common example of such soft (e)motions is the way in which, in many societies, women have been married off and moved from one camp or village to another, maybe only 10-50-100 kilometres away. In this case, it is in the name of the emotions of love and care that they are moved or choose to move from one community/place to another. Such movements would not be counted as migrations or displacements and thus have remained largely under the radar in migration studies, unless they are abnormal, or more visible, spectacular and international (such as Thai brides in Denmark). Why are soft (e)motions driving small-scale mobilities/motions less worthy of description, analysis, or attention? The distances travelled may be short, and the brides may move one by one, not en masse, but the impact upon lives and the frequency of such marriage moves are high.

Questioning in/visibility

Invisible in big data and displacement statistics, the above-mentioned (e)motions are generally overlooked and neglected as important forms of migration/displacement. Movements related to marriage are a good example of such overlooked (e)motions, which do indeed move the women involved both physically and emotionally, but are rarely registered as an official migration from A to B. Emotionally, women are moved across social borders, breaking existing ties, changing their environment and altering their future life course: a displaced bride (such as Tabass) will hardly be in touch with her family and friends back home and is not supposed to return unless for special and important occasions. Her movement is an initiation into a new set of circumstances, not only in spatial terms, but also in the temporal, symbolic and social sense of becoming and belonging. After the move, the displaced woman becomes a wife, a daughter-in-law, a stranger that needs integration in terms of language, cultural and food habits, and maybe she becomes a mother, a co-wife and so on.

Which mobilities beyond the amplified dramas of disaster, beyond large-scale physical distances, and beyond the high numbers of people being pushed on the move in groups are worthy of our analytical attention? The emotional labour of moving for commonplace affective life events, such as the (micro-)moves of women for marriage which currently go under the radar, tell us just as much about the politics of households and families and the drama or joy of what it means to move.

Fugitive displacement and emplacement

‘Hadijatou’ official poster

Tabass fled her marriage out of protest, driven by emotions of fear and anger. In the chapter, I have defined her (e)motion as fugitive displacement. Similar movements of her peers have usually remained invisible, surrounded by silence and remaining under the radar of mobility studies. But while Tabass indeed almost certainly does not figure in a UNHCR or IOM report, or any other form of migration report or statistics, she exceptionally did gain some visibility and does figure in a small report, published in 2012, by a Nigerien NGO called Timidria that fights legacies of descent-based slavery in West Africa. In that report, she is defined as a wahaya, an Arabic term meaning “fifth wife”; a woman who has been forcefully married as a concubine to men with high status. She figures among the stories of eight other wahaya women who have been forcefully married.

Tabass was also filmed as a woman of slave descent who ended up in a village of refuge, called Zongon Ablo, in the documentary ‘Hadijatou’ by the Spanish documentary maker Lala Goma (see link to excerpt above). The visibility afforded to Tabass is exceptional and related to the advocacy and activism against legacies of slavery by the organization of Timidria who interviewed her. Tabass’ visibility is the exception rather than the rule and her fugitive displacement tells us a whole lot about the difficult fate, predicaments and strong emotions similar Wahaya – women in concubine positions in West Africa – have to navigate, cope with and act upon. Tabass chose to voice her discontent by fleeing towards a community of other fugitive people of slave descent in southern Niger. Upon her arrival, she tried to restore her dignity by recreating a family through emplacement, generating a new place of attachment and belonging. The hard emotional labour behind the different spatial moves in Tabass’ life deserve recognition and attention.

About the author

Lotte Pelckmans is an anthropologist interested in the crossroads between migration and slavery studies. She obtained her master’s degree from Leiden University, her PhD at the African Studies Centre in Leiden and has worked in Dutch, French, German and Danish academia. Her work focuses on mobilisation, conflict, social media, rights and the intersecting social and spatial mobilities of people with slave status, as well as anti-slavery movements in post-slavery West Africa and the West African diaspora. Based at the Centre for Advanced Migration Studies at the University of Copenhagen, she is currently working on social media and anti-slavery activism in the diaspora, and their intersections with Mali’s contemporary displacements related to descent-based slavery in Kayes for the SLAFMIG/EMIFO project.

Displacement agriculture: neither seen nor heard

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Cover photo by author. Burundian labour migrants outside Nyarugusu refugee camp.

Series Introduction

This post is a part of a series introducing the recent anthology Invisibility in African Displacements (Zed Books 2020). The book was edited by Simon Turner and AMMODI co-founder Jesper Bjarnesen, and offers new analytical ideas for understanding migrant in/visibilisation. In each post, the contributors present their chapter in a more accessible format, either by selecting one empirical example or aspect or by relating their central argument to broader societal concerns or debates.

For an outline of the overarching idea behind the book, see the introducing blog post by the editors here.

Displacement agriculture: neither seen nor heard

by Clayton Boeyink

My mother, who grew up on a farm in rural Iowa, USA in the 1960s told me that my grandfather would tell her when company was over to ‘be seen and not heard’. I knew this clearly misogynist injunction, which I came to learn is a 15th century English proverb, meant for her to behave and be quiet, but the literal meaning did not make sense to young Clayton. Why not just tell her to be quiet or ‘not heard’? Why make any visual reference at all? I later learned that it comes down to recognition; she had to be recognized or seen as part of the family, as long as she was docile and behaved, which is also expected of migrants and refugees operating outside of the ‘visibility field’ of the humanitarian apparatus along the Tanzanian borderlands.

In my contribution to Invisibility in African Displacements, I draw inspiration from Amanda Hammar’s work on ‘displacement economies’ that explores the ‘physical, social, economic and political spaces, relations, systems and practices’ that are a result of displacement. I analyse the extensive ‘displacement economies’ of land rental and agricultural labour systems outside of Nyarugusu refugee camp in north-western Tanzania. Despite it being illegal under Tanzania’s strict encampment and migration laws and policies, Tanzanians near the camp rent out land or shambas (Swahili: fields) to refugees living in the camps. Burundian refugees and (male) circular labour migrants whose families remain in Burundi work as paid labourers for Tanzanian landowners and refugee land-renters.

Sufficiently invisible and invisibly self-sufficient

Satellite photo of Nyarugusu refugee camp. The green surrounding the camp shows abundant farmland.

Due to the constricted economic environments in Burundi and the camps, migrants and refugees must be ‘invisibly self-sufficient’ and find livelihoods in forbidden agricultural spaces. They must be ‘sufficiently visible’ in order to network and meet local Tanzanians to rent land or get a job, yet be ‘invisible enough’ to evade the increasingly hostile police who occasionally patrol outside of the camp. Unlike migrants and refugees living in cities, full strategic invisibility is impossible for migrants and refugees because in rural Kigoma region, where the camps are located, the demographic make-up of the ‘host community’ is nearly homogenously of Ha ethnicity. As such, non-Ha ‘outsiders’ are instantly recognized. Linking to my mother’s childhood silencing above, I speak with Axel Honneth and others’ work on the philosophy of recognition to argue that the migrant and refugee actors are minimally ‘cognized’ or seen, but they are not heard. They are not fully recognized to be worthy of rights of employment, mobility and inclusion. However, levels of recognition are not uniform across the groups of actors or across the history of this system of displacement agriculture. In general, Burundians have a poor reputation among the local population and are mistrusted vis-à-vis Congolese refugees who are more well-regarded locally dating back to colonial labour hierarchies.

More specifically, Burundian labour migrants live most precariously of all. They have made the journey for generations due to scarcity of land and jobs in Burundi. Many I spoke with said that during the latest displacement episode in 2015, they could not afford the transportation costs or the bribes to police and migration officials necessary to bring their entire families on the journey. In contrast, refugees are more shielded in the camp from the police where renters and labourers can market safely within the bounds of Nyarugusu where they are allowed to be. Moreover, they have their overhead expenses mostly covered for food and shelter so they can take jobs on the farm for lower wages, which have depressed the wages for migrants. Migrants are more visible and exposed as they must live in makeshift huts on the shamba or in nearby forests and must network in villages and towns where they are more likely to be caught by the police.

Tanzania’s refugee governance in historical perspective

Hut made by migrant labourers on the farm where they cultivate.

Regimes of recognition have not been stable in Tanzania over time. For example, in colonial Tanganyika, both the German and British occupiers oscillated between opening and shutting their arbitrarily constructed borders. This strict regulation was a means of protecting the profitability of the colonial project. They blocked inflows from neighbouring Portuguese and Belgian colonies with harsher labour conscription regimes because they feared that their own coercive labour tactics within Tanganyika would impel similar outflows away from their territories. Out migrations of colonial subjects meant loss of potential taxable and labouring bodies. During labour shortages, however, they actively recruited from their neighbours and throughout the boom of the extractive sisal industry, both Burundi and Kigoma were primarily recognized as labour reserves.

After independence President Julius Nyerere was known to have an ‘open door’ for refugees and was active in supporting dissidents fighting white settler regimes in Zimbabwe, South Africa, Namibia, Angola, and Mozambique. These ‘freedom fighters’ were given the freedom of movement and rights to employment. Rwandan and Burundian refugees fleeing internal war and genocide were provided uncleared land in sparsely populated areas of Western Tanzania. These displaced populations were exploited through mostly unpaid labour spent cultivating unproductive land producing cash crops marketed and benefitting the state. By the 1990s, the agricultural refugee settlement model made way to strict encampment policies where refugees were not provided land or the right to livelihoods outside of the camp and were made dependent on humanitarian aid for food and shelter. This transition to one of the strictest encampment policies in the world was caused by a failing economy, coupled with structural adjustment that crippled state capacity, and the displacement of over a million refugees from Rwanda, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The same encampment laws remain to this day.

Poor economic conditions are forcing people into increasingly dangerous displacement agriculture outside of the camps to be invisibly self-sufficient when self-reliance inside the camp is nearly impossible

Since 2015, the year President John Magufuli was elected and the latest displacement episode of Burundians fleeing repression and intimidation from the state and allied militias sent more than 200,000 new arrivals across the border, the state has only further constricted the space of asylum. In August 2017, the state abruptly shut down a successful and popular World Food Program cash transfer programme and, in 2019, closed all camp markets. This assault on refugee livelihoods coincided with dwindling international funding and reduced food rations. Furthermore, all of my informants agree that President Magufuli cracked down on their displacement agriculture system more than any other administration they could remember. These poor economic conditions are forcing people into increasingly dangerous displacement agriculture outside of the camps to be invisibly self-sufficient when self-reliance inside the camp is nearly impossible.

The Magufuli regime’s climate of terror

Since the publication of Invisibility in African Displacements, things are looking worse for encamped refugees, and for Burundians in particular. Since mid-2020, there have been reports of Tanzanian security officers abducting, ransoming, and illegally repatriating wealthy Burundian refugees in coordination with Burundian state agents. This intimidation and abuse of wealthy businesspeople has led to an exodus of wealthier people, which has stripped the camps of valuable financiers. Human Rights Watch released an alarming report that those who were disappeared were being deprived of food for weeks in police stations; beaten, hung from ceilings,  and had chillies rubbed on their wounds and genitals. A climate of terror now permeates the spaces of the camps and many feel they have no choice but to return to Burundi before they feel it is safe and economically viable to do so.

Those involved in displacement agriculture are forced to be invisibly self-sufficient when humanitarian aid is insufficient, yet sufficiently visible enough to acquire land and jobs outside of the camp. In other words, actors in displacement agriculture are invisible to legally accepted livelihoods supported by humanitarian interventions, yet illegally outside the camp, they present themselves to land owners and renters and thus potentially expose themselves to police patrols. On the shamba, in/visibility is less enacted than it is endured. As less-than-voluntary repatriations are increasing in this restrictive political and economic environment, it appears that endurance is wearing thin. This (among many other obvious privileges) is a key difference from what my mother was told by my grandfather.

Today, the Tanzanian state does not want refugees to exist in the national polity at all

Despite not being fully recognized as a valued contributor worthy of being heard, she still belonged as part of the family. Tanzania has a complicated history of using and abusing migrants and refugees since colonialism. This includes coercive labour recruitment, exploitative rural refugee settlements, forced repatriations, and encampment policies which severely limits livelihood opportunities. Today, the Tanzanian state does not want refugees to exist in the national polity at all. The government is making this point clear through implorations to leave as well as deeper crackdowns of livelihood opportunities including illicit agricultural practices outside the camps and even kidnapping and torture. Despite these conscriptions, refugees are still remaining even if they should be neither seen nor heard.

About the author

Clayton Boeyink is a Research Fellow at with Social Anthropology and the Centre of African Studies at the University of Edinburgh. His work interrogates the politics, practices, and coloniality of refugee self-reliance and livelihoods in refugee camps in Tanzania. His is currently part of the multi-sited GCRF Protracted Displacement project focusing on improving healthcare at the intersection of gender among Somali and Congolese Internally Displaced People (IDPs) in Somalia and Eastern DRC respectively, and Somali and Congolese refugees and asylum seekers in Kenya and South Africa.

Introducing “Invisibility in African Displacements”

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Series Introduction

This post is a part of a series introducing the recent anthology Invisibility in African Displacements (Zed Books 2020). The book was edited by Simon Turner and AMMODI co-founder Jesper Bjarnesen, and offers new analytical ideas for understanding migrant in/visibilisation.
In each post, the contributors present their chapter in a more accessible format, either by selecting one empirical example or aspect or by relating their central argument to broader societal concerns or debates.

Introducing Invisibility in African Displacements

Jesper Bjarnesen & Simon Turner

African migrants have become increasingly demonised in public debate and political rhetoric in Europe over the past decade. There is much speculation about the motivations and trajectories of Africans on the move, and much of this attention is more or less explicitly geared towards discouraging and policing their movements. Especially since the so-called European refugee crisis in 2015-16, these debates and political concerns have shone the spotlight on irregular migration to the EU, in what may seem like an endless scrutiny through news reports and op-eds.

What is rarely understood or scrutinized, however, are the intricate ways in which African migrants are marginalised and excluded from public discourse; not only in Europe but in migrant-receiving contexts across the globe. Despite the heightened attention towards the issue of irregular migration to Europe, African migrants are still rarely heard in public debates, and their portrayal is usually restricted to a set of standardised templates. It is not only in show business that the brightest spotlights cast the darkest shadows; in the over-exposure of African migrants in European public debates, many important issues tend to be left in the dark.

This imagery, of a spotlight rendering some things seen and others unseen, suggests how visibilisation and invisibilisation can happen simultaneously; the way such seemingly opposite processes can be two sides of the same coin. These are the kinds of paradoxes that we wanted to explore in the book Invisibility in African Displacements. In addition to trying to think differently about irregular African migrants to Europe, this interest in in/visibilisation also inspired us to seek contributions exploring African migration in contexts that are far removed from the spotlight of European immigration politics. We wanted to bring case studies from both sides of the Mediterranean Sea into conversation, since the most overwhelming blind spots of the European spotlight on African migration undeniably concerns all the different kinds of movement that are not necessarily directed towards Europe.

Understanding in/visibilisation

As we began to think more about dynamics of in/visibilisation, in conversation with the authors of the book’s chapters, we also became aware that exposure and concealment were obviously not just something imposed upon African migrants from the outside. Migrants also actively engage in strategies of visibilisation – for example through advocacy for migrant rights, or simply by making themselves known to national or humanitarian authorities. Similarly, migrants may also engage actively in strategies of invisibilisation – for example by going underground in a country they have no formal right to live in, or by trying to blend in to host communities. In this way, we ended up with a conceptual framework that, to put it simply, combined four dimensions of in/visibilisation. Migrants are made invisible by others, for example when they fall between the cracks in the asylum system or are made unworthy of protection and assistance in other ways. This might lead migrants to use strategies to make themselves visible – allowing them to make claims and stake their rights. Another strategy might, however, be to make oneself invisible to the public eye. Invisibility may be a strategy of protection. Opposed to this are the strategies of states, NGOs, churches and local communities to seek out migrants and make them visible and hence governable.

In/visibilisation works on specific aspects of a migrant’s being; most often their legal status, but also their origins or their intentions. Avoidance, in this way, is not necessarily about not being seen at all, but for example about keeping one’s undocumented status unknown, or about choosing not to register as a refugee with humanitarian agencies. Learning the local language and customs, or living in cities where one may disappear in the crowd are key examples of such avoidance strategies. In/visibility, in other words, is contextual; it is about specific aspects or qualities being seen or not seen.

As a final nuance to this line of thinking, in/visibilisation is also relational. In most cases, one might be visible to some but not to others. When migrant activists claim recognition, it is usually towards national authorities or other actors representing the power to grant that visibility. And undocumented migrants are not necessarily hiding their status from fellow migrants or other people in their immediate surroundings, but rather from the gaze of the police or other authorities who could get them deported. Indeed, often, they will want to remain visible to potential employers. Similarly, authorities may highlight human smugglers while turning a blind eye to irregular labour.

In/visibilisation effects

The effects of these diverse dynamics of in/visibilisation may seem difficult to grasp. But a brief example involving a member of the AMMODI network should serve as an illustration of how invisibilisation may change a person’s life trajectory. In 2017, Liberian author, activist and migration scholar Robtel Neajai Pailey reflected on her own experiences of growing up as an undocumented migrant in Washington DC, having left Liberia at the age of six. In an Al Jazeera opinion piece, entitled ‘Legal invisibility was the best thing to happen to me’, she wrote:

”While I was physically present (visible) in the US, I remained absent (hidden) from the entitlements that legal visibility affords. The privileges and protections that most Americans take for granted – authorisation to work, go to school or access healthcare – were unreachable”.

Robtel now traces her intense bond to Liberia and her passion for scholarship on African history and politics to her formative years; ”It was certainly the bittersweet days of living under the radar that moulded me into a fully minted itinerant Liberian with an American twang”. When Robtel was 20, her mother abandoned her Liberian citizenship for an American one, primarily in order to achieve a legal status for her daughter, thereby also granting her ‘… the freedom of movement that comes with legal visibility’.

Among her many engagements, Robtel has authored two children’s books and recently published Development, (Dual) Citizenship and Its Discontents in Africa with Cambridge University Press. While her personal story may not be representative of undocumented migrants everywhere, it does bring into powerful relief how in/visibilisation can play out in life-changing and unexpected ways, which resonates strongly with the overarching message of our book.

The contributions all engage with visibility and invisibility in all its complexity – challenging our received wisdoms about marginalised migrants, illegality and control. On the one hand, they shed light on migrant movements that usually go below the radar in migration studies – such as enslaved runaways in West Africa described by Lotte Pelckmans and domestic workers in Botswana, as shown by Joyce Takaindisa on the basis of a chapter co-written with Ingrid Palmary. On the other hand, they show how invisibility is used actively by migrants. For example, Clayton Boeyink explains how Burundian refugees leave the camps to sell their labour to local Tanzanians, making themselves ‘visible enough’ to be hired while ‘invisible enough’ to avoid being caught by the police. With this book, we hope not only to open the readers’ eyes to forms of African migration that are rarely considered or understood, but also to challenge the often polarising and fairly simplistic ideas about African migrants in public debates.

About the authors

Jesper Bjarnesen is a Senior Researcher at the Nordic Africa Institute since September 2013. He has worked primarily on the grey zones between forced and voluntary migration in West Africa, in the context of the 2002-2011 civil war in Côte d’Ivoire. Within this context, his research has considered the generational variations of displacement; the dynamics of integration among urban youths; and the broader themes of urban resettlement and transnational families. His current research focuses, firstly, on the effects of migration governance in terms of the in/visibilities produced by specific legal statuses and, secondly, on the ‘soft infrastructures’ of labour mobilities across and between secondary cities in West Africa. With Franzisca Zanker, he is the co-founder of the African Migration, Mobility and Displacement (AMMODI) research network.

Simon Turner is Associate Professor at the Centre for Advanced Migration Studies at the University of Copenhagen. His research interests include masculinities in relation to migration and displacement; refugee camps and humanitarian organizations; ethnic conflict and genocide; diaspora; invisibility, secrecy, rumours and conspiracy theories, all with a primary geographical focus on Burundi and Rwanda, as well as on Burundian refugees in Nairobi, Kenya. He is the author of Politics of Innocence. Hutu Identity, Conflict and Camp Life (2010), and is one of the editors of the Journal of Refugee Studies.

From Campus to Camp and Back

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Note from the field from a humanitarian humanities practitioner

“Since I have started learning global history, I listen to the news differently. Now, when I listen to Aljazeera I understand much more,” says Joseph Doggale and smiles as we are standing outside of the classroom. It is one of those gratifying moments when, as a lecturer, you feel you have made a difference in your students’ lives. I smile back at him and am satisfied knowing that there is true value in teaching humanities in emergency situations, despite the many challenges that come with the endeavor.

This is not an ordinary classroom and Joseph is not an ordinary student. Joseph is a refugee from South Sudan residing in Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya. In the fall of 2016, he enrolled in the Global History Lab, a massive open online course (MOOC) offered by Princeton University on edX. For several years, Professor Jeremy Adelman has been teaching the history of the world 1300 to the present to Princeton students and thousands of learners worldwide. As the teaching assistant for Kenya, I rolled out the course to 19 refugees of eight different nationalities in Kakuma camp with logistical support from InZone. Our Kakuma classroom was truly multilingual and multicultural, encompassing students from South Sudan, Sudan, Somalia, Rwanda, Burundi, Ethiopia, Congo DRC, and Uganda. That afternoon, when Joseph told me how reflecting upon more than 700 years of history around the globe together with students not only from different African countries but all over the world had changed the way he perceived the world around him, he was back for more. This time, he was taking part in an intensive life history workshop which I offered in September 2017 as a pilot to a new project.

1st cohort of Global History Lab students in Kakuma refugee camp, September 2016. Source: InZone/Global History Lab

Some students were adamant that they did not want to be reduced to consumers of history but were keen to contribute to the production of history themselves

The idea for the History Dialogue Project was born after speaking with Joseph and other students about the importance of exploring history as it touched on the lives of the students in such multilingual, multiethnic, multinational and transient yet permanent places like Kakuma refugee camp. Some students were adamant that they did not want to be reduced to consumers of history but were keen to contribute to the production of history themselves. In the words of student Gera Tefera, resident of Kakuma refugee camp:

History should be the privilege of all of us so as to understand, dignify and uplift humanity. Both past and future are the concerns of all people. History is not made by few historians, can’t also be created by only a few historians, it is a co-creation process. Monopolizing the creation of historical narratives is one way of monopolizing power.

Gera Tefera, history student in Kakuma refugee camp

We can effectively empower students for instance by providing them with the training and knowledge to support them to undertake research situated in their lives and communities. By using their location advantage and their migration experience and understanding of life in the camp, learners produce compelling historic narratives that are of interest to both their communities and audiences beyond. Gera, for instance, has meanwhile applied to the National Geographic Society for a grant to be able to tell the history of Kakuma camp from the perspective of long-term residents.

Only 1 % of all refugees have access to higher education – compared to 36 % of all learners worldwide

Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: “Everyone has the right to education. (…) higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.” The Sustainable Development Goals echo the sentiment in Goal 4 which reads: “Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.” These are noble but currently illusory goals for refugees. Only about 1% of all refugees are as lucky as Joseph and his Kakuma classmates, according to UNHCR estimates. The UNHCR’s stated goal is to increase this number to 15 percent by 2030. Much needs to change. Online courses with a blended learning component, combining online with offline sessions, have much to offer to refugee learners. Many of those living in refugee camps or otherwise barred from studying at institutions in their host countries have little access, especially to courses in the humanities. Yet, creativity, curiosity, critical thinking, and empathy are crucial qualities a humanities education can foster. At Geneva university a summer school regularly brings together practitioners working in higher education in emergencies and crises. Initiatives such as Historians Without Borders have made it their mission to bring together political and academic actors to discuss history across conflict zones. The Global History Lab at Princeton University seeks to bring both initiatives together to teach history in humanitarian emergencies.

The History Dialogue Project: history made in the camp

The new pilot project situated at Princeton’s Global History Lab that emerged out of the engagement with learners in Kakuma and beyond is called the History Dialogue Project. Seven of Joseph’s fellow students are currently enrolled in this small private online course (SPOC). They are learning how to conduct and present their own history research projects together with five refugee students from the MENA region based at Kiron and 11 refugee and host country students based at Kepler in Rwanda. The classroom brings together refugee learners in camps and urban settings with host country students; we have 23 students from nine countries, presently residing in six different countries in sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East.

Online and offline learning are both important in a blended learning approach such as the one adopted by the courses at Princeton University’s Global History Lab. Source: InZone/Global History Lab

I designed this nine-month online course to introduce students from a variety of backgrounds and disciplines to a toolbox of approaches to research, writing, and presenting. The toolbox then allows students to frame, conduct, and present their own history research projects under the guidance of the teaching staff. The course is divided into five segments ranging from research methodology and ethics to storytelling and supervised research, interpretation, and production of final papers and presentations. I am currently teaching the online sessions and am liaising with the international partner institutions and guest lecturers involved. Presently Princeton University, Kepler, Kiron, and the UNHCR in Kakuma are contributing learners and infrastructure to make the History Dialogue Project possible. Students get intensive individual supervision through a buddy system with other learners as well as through the involvement of three Princeton University teaching assistants who regularly interact with their assigned students one-on-one and through regional WhatsApp groups and make sure they do not fall behind due to technical or content challenges.

Online learning: Collaborative education?

The History Dialogue Project allows for bringing together different learners across countries, cultures, language barriers, but also across disciplinary boundaries and socio-economic backgrounds. They learn together and support each other in conducting individual research projects. This transnational, digital setup helps students not only to see through the eyes of their classmates from different contexts but also to problem solve together. Student Placide Mwizerwa from Rwanda states:

It is very important to me [to be in a classroom with students from many nationalities] since we are living in a globalized life where we have to work or live with many people from around the globe. So, the first advantage is that I got to know how they speak, they think and the way of living in their countries. Secondly, I got to have their contact for chatting even after the classroom activities and this can be great opportunities for sharing what can be done in either country

Placide Mwizerwa, history student in Kakuma refugee camp

We are currently in the third phase of the course, and students are conducting their research on diverse topics, among them: the history of the Burundian drum 1850-present; the history of fashion in Rwanda; the impact of migration on Twa culture in Burundi and Rwanda 1959-2019; thirty years of Kakuma camp in Kenya; the history of the Darfurian community in Kakuma camp; the history of the boda boda transportation system in Kakuma refugee camp; the history of female leadership in Juba, South Sudan; and East African migration to Yemen.

History Dialogue Project learners in Kakuma camp are engaging in an oral history interview exercise during the in situ workshop. Source: History Dialogue Project

Five months in, we have only lost one student, who won a scholarship to get a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Lisbon University. The other students are going strong, despite the many challenges they continue to face. Those include technical challenges like instable internet connections and restrictions on internet use. They include language and content challenges like taking a course in English which to some has never been their language of instruction and learning to think like an oral historian which, for someone coming in with a background in computer science or business, requires rethinking her definition of research. And lastly, they are of personal nature. Students, some of whom continue to live in instable and dangerous surroundings, have to create time for independent study and research among the many challenges of creating a life for themselves and their families. Together we have to weigh what stories can and cannot be told safely. Moreover, they are committing to an unusually long course in what can be erratic and instable lives, albeit as part of a group of learners that sets out together to expand their horizons through historic research.

Online class session still of the History Dialogue Project. Source: History Dialogue Project

It is too early to say what conversations the research of these students will spark both within the Global History Lab, where their research will be available as case studies to future learners, and within their communities. It is safe to say that the research has already engendered lively debates among the research buddies, among students and their TAs, as well as in the classroom. As we are all growing together as an online community, teaching and writing history across borders, we are certain of one thing: humanitarian humanities are met by a strong commitment from the refugee learners who demonstrate every day the importance of democratic access to the creation of histories from the global South.

About the author

Dr. Marcia C. Schenck is currently a visiting research fellow at Princeton University’s history department and its Global History Lab. She has accepted a position as Professor for Global History at the University of Potsdam, starting on January 1st, 2020. Presently, she is researching the history of the Organization of African Unity’s refugee convention of 1969. Her research interests include the history of migration and processes of refuge seeking, labor history, education history, oral and life history, African and global history and the history of international organizations.

 

Africa at the gates: Europe’s lose-lose migration management plan

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Cover photo by Irish Defense Forces.

by Loren B Landau and Iriann Freemantle

Europe has not been this scared of Africans since Hannibal drove his war elephants over the Pyrenees. Since the summer of 2015, the question of how to stem the flows from Africa and the Middle East is at the centre of increasingly existential debates about the very future of Europe. Mobilising the full portfolio of its hard and soft powers, Europe is flexing its enforcement muscle to reach deep into the African continent. Working together with African political elites, the results will be reconfigured politics, norms and conceptions of rights north and south of the Mediterranean. This will worsen Africans’ ability to cope with climate change, economic precarity, and other challenges by heightening oppression and limiting resilience. In the process, it will lessen Europe’s moral standing and the strength of its union.

Ministerial meeting on Libya (16 May 2016). Photo by European External Action Service.

Following the 2015 ‘migration crisis’, Europe has launched a series of extraordinary initiatives to stem the ‘migrant tide’. Most famous is its billion Euro Turkey deal. But even more elaborate and expensive are collaborations with governments (or those that claim to be) across North Africa to build African-based detention centres to hold would-be migrants. That is just one of many steps. Europe is also working hard to prevent migrants from ever even reaching the sea. To achieve this, Europe is empowering military regimes with undeniable disregard for human rights such as Omar Al Bashir’s Sudan. To themselves and the world, European leaders justify these actions with an elaborate apparatus of technocratic explanations about the universal benefits of ‘orderly’ migration. Intermittently, they also deliver low blows such as alleging that the discarded clothes of migrants pose a public health risk.

It dedicates billions of Euros to collecting migration data and improving border security. While the EU indefatigably assures us that these interventions will make migration ‘safer and better managed’, the primary goal is, undoubtedly, to limit movement northward. Yet global inequalities mean people will continue to move. And when they do so, European interventions make migrants far more violable, not safer. A few years ago, Pope Francis already called the Mediterranean ‘a vast cemetery’. In 2018 alone, more than 2100 people have died or are missingwhile attempting to cross the sea.

Whichever way it is looked at, not ‘managing’ migration is presented as a lose-lose scenario. Recognising the expense and limits of fortification alone, Europe now supports a growing range of initiatives intended to address ‘root causes’. The idea, as an agreement hashed out at a summit in Brussels in June 2018 put it, is to generate ‘substantial socio-economic transformation’. This includes tackling endemic poverty and fertility rates that outstrip African labour markets’ capacity to absorb. Taken together, these initiatives intend to bring about something that might best be characterised as ‘containment development.’ Under this rubric, developmental success becomes less about promoting human development as an end in itself. Instead, development becomes a means to prevent mobility.

Taken together, these initiatives intend to bring about something that might best be characterised as ‘containment development’

Some of what is envisaged by containment development initiatives – such as support for vocational training, reproductive health facilities, and other economic enterprise – will undoubtedly have positive effects on African lives. However, the approach also has multiple flaws that, if not addressed, will ultimately harm Africans and do little to ‘protect’ Europe from the perceived security and other threats migrants pose.

The first flaw is a fundamental misreading of African demography and the possibilities of creating the jobs needed to absorb surplus labour. Second, such approaches underestimate the potential of migration to be a mitigating effect against both economic and environmental precarity. Indicative of Europe’s containment development plans, the recently published German Marshall plan with Africa, thus argues that ‘it is vital that Africa’s young people can see a future for themselves in Africa.’ Third, by seeking to fragment African economic development into national rather than continental (or even global) supply chains and labour markets, people will be trapped in areas that are economically unviable. This will not only mean sustained poverty, but also intensify practices that further denude agricultural lands and forests. In either case, as is well documented, development is more likely to spur migration than stem it. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, these plans ignore what is perhaps the most important limit on African development and human security: the state itself. The confinement of migrants to the status of ‘irregularity’ in the de facto absence of legal migration avenues is the singularly most significant obstacle to migrants’ safety and productivity.

The confinement of migrants to the status of ‘irregularity’ in the de facto absence of legal migration avenues is the singularly most significant obstacle to migrants’ safety and productivity

So far, European approaches have not worked, at least not in the way they are officially supposed to. Africans have not stopped coming. The ‘Turkey Deal’ has been more ‘successful’, in large part because of Turkey’s institutional capacity and the distance between its borders with Syria and the EU. By supporting police and militaries to close trans-Saharan migration routes, Europe is effectively bisecting the continent into north and south, putting a heavily militarized border across an invisible line that was previously permeable and largely unregulated. Yet if the United States’ experience on the Mexican border is anything to go by, enhanced border controls have limited effect on the numbers of people moving. Instead, they tend to generate increasingly elaborate mechanisms to subvert such controls.


Austrian chancellor (then minister) Sebastian Kurz attends the simulation of a border control mission on a FRONTEX vessel (24 March 2017). Photo by Dragon Tatic, Bundesministerium für Europa, Integration und Äußeres.

And this is what we already see. Across the Mediterranean, militarized borders have set off a kind of arms race between states and smugglers, with increasing collusion between the two. The Libyan slave marketsare the most notorious of examples, but within Sudan, Niger and elsewhere state and state-like authorities are forming profitable smuggling partnerships. The European military and security industryas well as international organisations implementing the EU’s migration management agenda benefit from ongoing ‘irregular’ migration and the threat supposedly emanating from it. Not only do they benefit, in more than one way they actively contribute to sustaining the ‘migration crisis’.

Throughout all this, Europe claims that its approach to governing migration is fundamentally ‘migrant-centred’and its relationship with Africa ‘characterised by equality and the pursuit of common objectives’.But Africans clearly don’t buy into the idea that their continent is about to brim with new opportunities or that Europe is working on their behalf. Indeed, Europe’s policies are almost entirely self-serving, adding to a long and appalling track record of Europeans furthering their interests under the guise of helping poor Africans. Europeans have previously found ways to justify abducting and enslaving Africans as the rescue of their heathen souls. Today, Europe pushes Africans out and back in the name of Africa’s development and progress. Tragically, European efforts to limit African mobility through coercion and containment development will ultimately save neither continent but only threaten lives in both Africa and Europe. That this is done with African leaders’ complicity truly makes this a lose-lose scenario.

About the authors

Loren B Landau is the South African Research Chair in Human Mobility and the Politics of Difference based at the University of the Witwatersrand’s African Centre for Migration & Society (ACMS). A publically engaged scholar, his interdisciplinary work explores human mobility, community, and socio-political transformation.

Iriann Freemantle is an Associate Researcher with the African Centre for Migration & Society (ACMS) at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Over the past decade, Iriann has worked extensively on migration, xenophobia and social cohesion in South Africa. Her current work focuses on the role of the European Union and international organisations in the governance of mobility in Africa.

Recent publications

L.B. Landau. 2019. ‘A Chronotope of Containment Development: Europe’s Migrant Crisis and Africa’s Reterritorialization,’ Antipode 51(1):169-186. 

L.B. Landau and C.W. Kihato. 2019. ‘The Future of Mobility and Migration Within and From Sub-Saharan Africa,’ Foresight Reflection Paper. Brussels: European Policy Analysis and Strategy System.