‘Sons of the Soil’ and Contemporary State Making: autochthony, uncertainty and political violence in Africa

Abstract

The employment of autochthony discourses has become a prominent feature of contemporary politics around the world. Autochthony discourses link identity and space, enabling the speaker to establish a direct claim to territory by asserting that one is an original inhabitant, a ‘son of the soil’. Drawing from recent African examples, this contribution argues that the employment of autochthony discourses is an attractive response to the ontological uncertainty around political identities within the postmodern/postcolonial condition. Autochthony discourses can resonate deeply with populations longing for a sense of primal security in the face of uncertainty generated by a variety of sources, from the processes of contemporary globalisation to the collapse of neo-patrimonial structures. Yet this sense of security is inevitably fleeting, given the instability and plasticity of autochthony claims. The contribution examines why these discourses are often characterised by violence, and argues that autochthony is frequently linked to the desire for order inherent in contemporary state making, which invariably relies on multiple manifestations of violence.

Notes

This contribution has benefited from insightful comments and criticisms from Morten B⊘ås, Tatiana Carayannis, Jodi Dean, Kathleen Jennings, Iver Neumann, Paul Passavant, Stacey Philbrick Yadav, Vikash Yadav and audience members at the 2008 International Studies Association meeting in San Francisco, March 2008 and at Fafo in Oslo. I would also like to thank the editors of this volume, Mark Berger and Heloise Weber. All mistakes and absurd claims are clearly my own.

1 Ironically, in most African cases, the ‘autochthon’ does not actually claim to have come from the territory, but rather to have arrived there first, or perhaps even second. In Central Africa, for example, ‘autochthons’ claim to have arrived after the Batwa (ie Pygmies), but before the ‘Nilotic’ invasion.

2 B Meyer & P Geschiere, ‘Introduction’ in Meyer & Geschiere (eds), Globalization and Identity: Dialectics of Flow and Closure, Oxford: Blackwell, 1999, p 9.

3 See M Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism and the Genocide in Rwanda, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.

4 The invasion was often portrayed as part of an ongoing Tutsi plot to control Central Africa, referred to as ‘Opération Termite’ in one autochthonous pamphlet, Les Populations du Nord-Kivu Avant et Apres L'Immigration des Banyaruanda. See S Jackson, ‘Sons of which soil? The langauge and politics of autochthony in Eastern DR Congo’, African Studies Review, 49 (2), p 109.

5 See T Turner, The Congo Wars: Conflict, Myth and Reality, London: Zed, 2007; and Jackson, ‘Sons of which soil?’, pp 9–43.

6 See R Banegas & R Marshall-Fratani, ‘Cote d'Ivoire: negotiating identity and citizenship’, in M B⊘ås & K Dunn (eds), African Guerrillas: Raging Against the Machine, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2007.

7 A Appadurai, ‘Dead certainty: ethnic violence in the era of globalization’, in Meyer & Geschiere, Globalization and Identity, p 322.

8 My use of this term draws from the work of Mahmood Mamdani, who distinguishes political identities from market-based identities or cultural identities. Market-based identities tend to be founded on class or division of labour, a distinction between rich and poor or between cultivators and cattle keepers. Cultural identities are social constructs based on things like common language, common religion, and so on. Under colonialism, cultural identities—which are multiple and cumulative—became the foundation for political identities, which are enforced within a territorial state and reproduced through the mechanism of the law, and are produced as singular and uni-dimensional. See M Mamdani, ‘African states, citizenship and war: a case-study’, International Affairs, 78 (3), 2001, pp 493–506; and Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers.

9 Appadurai, ‘Dead certainty’, p 307.

10 A Mbembe, ‘Ways of seeing: beyond the new nativism’, African Studies Review, 44 (2), 2001, p 1.

11 Meyer & Geschiere, ‘Introduction’, 1999, p 2.

12 Mbembe, ‘Ways of seeing’, p 5.

13 These new developments need to be seen against the longer historical background of capitalism in Africa, where the imposition and maintenance of capitalist labour relations required not only the freeing of labour but also its containment and compartmentalization. See P Geschiere & F Nyamnjoh, ‘Capitalism and autochthony: the seesaw of mobility and belonging’, Public Culture, 12 (2), 2000, pp 423–452.

14 Ibid, p 423.

15 J-F Médard, États d'Afrique Noire: Formations, Mecanismes et Crises, Paris: Karthala, 1991; and Médard, ‘Patrimonialism, neopatrimonialism and the study of the postcolonial state in sub-Saharan Africa’, in HS Marcussen (ed), Improved Natural Resources Management—The Role of Formal Organisations and Informal Networks and Institutions, Roskilde: Roskilde University Press, 1996, pp 76–97.

16 K Dunn, ‘MadLib #32: The (blank) African state: rethinking the sovereign state in International Relations theory’, in K Dunn & T Shaw (eds), Africa's Challenge to International Relations Theory, London: Palgrave, 2001; and E Braathen, M B⊘ås & G Sæther, ‘Ethnicity kills? Social struggles for power, resources and identities in the neopatrimonial state’, in Braathen, B⊘ås & Sæther (eds), Ethnicity Kills? The Politics of War, Peace and Ethnicity in Sub-Saharan Africa, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000, pp 3–22.

17 R Marshall-Fratani, ‘The war of “who is who”: autochthony, nationalism, and citizenship in the Ivoirian crisis’, African Studies Review, 49 (2), 2006, p 20.

18 K Dunn, Imagining the Congo: The International Relations of Identity, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

19 See B⊘ås & Dunn, African Guerrillas; and M B⊘ås & A Hatl⊘y, ‘Getting in, getting out: militia membership and prospects for re-integration in post-war Liberia’, Journal of Modern African Studies, 46 (1), 2008, pp 33–55.

20 Marshall-Fratani, ‘The war of “who is who”’, p 31.

21 See K Dunn, ‘Contested state spaces: African national parks and the state’, European Journal of International Relations, forthcoming.

22 RL Doty, Anti-Immigrantism in Western Democracies: Statecraft, Desire and the Politics of Exclusion, London: Routledge, 2003, p 12. Emphasis in original.

23 Dunn, ‘Contested state spaces’.

24 Ibid.

25 S Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, London: Phronesis, 1989.

26 Jackson, ‘Sons of which soil?’, p 116.

27 Z Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991.

28 TM Li, ‘Articulating indigenous identity in Indonesia: resource politics and the tribal slot’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 42, 2000, pp 149–179.

29 Geschiere & Nyamnjoh, ‘Capitalism and autochthony’, p 424.

30 P Geschiere & S Jackson, ‘Autochthony and the crisis of citizenship: democratization, decentralization, and the politics of belonging’, African Studies Review, 49 (2), p 3.

31 Ibid, pp 5–6.

32 Jackson, ‘Sons of which soil?’, p 112.

33 Ibid, p 115.

34 Geschiere & Jackson, ‘Autochthony and the crisis of citizenship’, p 6.

35 Marshall-Fratani, ‘The war of “who is who”’, p 37.

36 Geschiere & Jackson, ‘Autochthony and the crisis of citizenship’, p 6.

37 See P Richards, Fighting for the Rain Forest: War, Youth & Resources in Sierra Leone, Oxford: James Currey, 1996; Appadurai, ‘Dead certainty’; and Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.

38 Appadurai, ‘Dead certainty’, p 310.

39 L Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania, Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1995, p 88.

40 Marshall-Fratani, ‘The war of “who is who”’, p 38.

41 Jackson, ‘Sons of which soil?’, p 115.

42 Marshall-Fratani, ‘The war of “who is who”’, p 35.

43 Dunn, Imagining the Congo; Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers; and Turner, The Congo Wars.

44 F Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, New York: Grove Press, 1965.

45 A Mbembe, ‘A propos des écritures africaines de soi’, Politique Africaine, 77, 2000, p 36; quoted in Marshall-Fratani, ‘The war of “who is who”’, p 36.

46 Appadurai, ‘Dead certainty’, p 318.

47 Doty, Anti-Immigrantism in Western Democracies, p 13.

48 Appadurai, ‘Dead certainty’, p 320.

49 Marshall-Fratani, ‘The war of “who is who”’, p 11.