The Perils of Belonging: Autochthony, Citizenship, and Exclusion in Africa and Europe - Brossura

Geschiere, Peter

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0226289656 ISBN 13: 9780226289656

Casa editrice: University of Chicago Press, 2009

Riassunto

Despite being told that we now live in a cosmopolitan world, more and more people have begun to assert their identities in ways that are deeply rooted in the local. These claims of autochthony—meaning “born from the soil”—seek to establish an irrefutable, primordial right to belong and are often employed in politically charged attempts to exclude outsiders. In The Perils of Belonging, Peter Geschiere traces the concept of autochthony back to the classical period and incisively explores the idea in two very different contexts: Cameroon and the Netherlands.

In both countries, the momentous economic and political changes following the end of the cold war fostered anxiety over migration. For Cameroonians, the question of who belongs where rises to the fore in political struggles between different tribes, while the Dutch invoke autochthony in fierce debates over the integration of immigrants. This fascinating comparative perspective allows Geschiere to examine the emotional appeal of autochthony—as well as its dubious historical basis—and to shed light on a range of important issues, such as multiculturalism, national citizenship, and migration.

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull?autore

Peter Geschiere is professor of African anthropology at the University of Amsterdam and the author of The Modernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa.

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The Perils of Belonging

Autochthony, Citizenship, and Exclusion in Africa and EuropeBy PETER GESCHIERE

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Copyright © 2009 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-28965-6

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments.................................................................................ixCHAPTER 1. Introduction: Autochthony-the Flip Side of Globalization?........................................1A Primordial yet Global Form of Belonging?..................................................................2Autochthony's Genealogy: Some Elements......................................................................6Autochthony Now: Globalization and the Neoliberal Turn......................................................16Autochthony and the Tenacity of the Nation-State............................................................21Historical Construction, Political Manipulation and Emotional Power.........................................26Approach: From Identity to Subjectivation and Aesthetics....................................................31Chapter Overview............................................................................................35CHAPTER 2. Cameroon: Autochthony, Democratization, and New Struggles over Citizenship.......................39Belonging to a Nonexistent Province.........................................................................41Elite Associations and Autochthony: Different Degrees of Citizenship?.......................................43The "Sea People" Protected by the New Constitution..........................................................49Debates in the Cameroonian Press............................................................................53Autochthony's "Naturalness": The Funeral as a Final Test for Belonging......................................55A Tortuous History..........................................................................................57An Empty Discourse with Segmentary Implications.............................................................63Conclusion..................................................................................................64CHAPTER 3. Cameroon: Decentralization and Belonging.........................................................66The East and the New Importance of the Forest...............................................................69The New Forest Law..........................................................................................72Participation in Practice...................................................................................74The Elusive Community.......................................................................................76The Community as Stakeholder: Belonging and Exclusion.......................................................81Village or Grande Famille?..................................................................................83The Halfhearted Belonging of the External Elites............................................................86Discovering Allognes at Ever Closer Range..................................................................89Conclusion..................................................................................................94CHAPTER 4. African Trajectories.............................................................................97Ivory Coast: Identification and Exclusion...................................................................98Elsewhere in Africa.........................................................................................117"Pygmy" Predicaments: Can Only Citizens Qualify as Autochthons?.............................................124CHAPTER 5. Autochthony in Europe: The Dutch Turn............................................................130The Dutch Switch: From Multiculturalism to Cultural Integration.............................................134Overview: How the Netherlands Became an "Immigration Country"...............................................137National Consensus and Its History-the Dutch Way............................................................139Alternative Solutions.......................................................................................142A More Forceful Integration.................................................................................144Allochtonen: A New Term on the Dutch Scene..................................................................147Elusive Autochthony.........................................................................................153History and Culture.........................................................................................155Comparisons.................................................................................................162CHAPTER 6. Cameroon: Nation-Building and Autochthony as Processes of Subjectivation.........................169Nation-Building as an Everyday Reality......................................................................172Rituals of Belonging: The Funeral at Home as a Celebration of Autochthony...................................190CHAPTER 7. Epilogue: Can the Land Lie? Autochthony's Uncertainties in Africa and Europe.....................212Varying Patterns of Nation-Building in Africa and Their Implications........................................213Autochthony and the Search for Ritual in Europe.............................................................218Notes.......................................................................................................225Bibliography................................................................................................263Index.......................................................................................................279

Chapter One

Introduction

Autochthony-the Flip Side of Globalization?

This book addresses the "return of the local" in a world that believes it is globalizing. The New World Order so proudly announced by George H. W. Bush in 1989 upon the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the cold war seemed to evoke a world of free-floating cosmopolitans. Yet since then, cosmopolitanism and globalization have followed quite surprising trajectories. The world in which the earlier Bush's son plays such a central role is marked by entrenched forms of communalism, celebrating difference and exclusion, both in the North and in the South. Rather surprisingly, the trend toward a growing cosmopolitanism has been overshadowed by what Tania Murray Li (2000) aptly calls "a global conjuncture of belonging." Religion plays a front-stage role in this quest for belonging. But in many contexts there seems to be also an inherent link between globalization and a return of the local in unexpected forms and with equally unexpected force. This "local" is of course deeply marked by ever intensifying processes of globalization, summarized well by Roland Robertson (1992) in his notion of "glocalization"-maybe a less elegant term, but then this return of the local often takes less elegant forms.

This book tries to address the return of the local not only as some sort of screen for ongoing globalization-although it is true that even the harshest forms of localist thinking often turn out to express struggles to gain or retain access to the global. My purpose is rather to take localist thinking seriously and try to trace its complex implications, often hidden behind apparent self-evidence, by following its different expressions. I focus on a particularly pregnant expression of the local: the idea of autochthony-"to be born from the soil" -and its highly variable manifestations which proved to have such mobilizing force in very different corners of our globe. To Anglophone readers this notion may appear somewhat exotic and even quaint. It does figure in the Oxford English Dictionary, but it is certainly not a familiar term. Yet there are two reasons why it is of special importance. First of all, it seems to represent the most authentic form of belonging: "born from the earth itself"-how could one belong more? This means that the notion not only condenses the essence of the idea of belonging but also highlights in a particularly pregnant form its inherent ambiguities. A second reason to study it is its impressively wide but fragmented spread: it turns up at highly different moments and places, without a clear link, yet assuming everywhere the same aura of self-evidence.

A Primordial yet Global Form of Belonging?

The claim to be autochthonous is certainly not the only kind of belonging that people tend to stress in the present-day context of globalization. As noted, religious belonging has become, also quite surprisingly, at least as important in our modern world. Yet, certainly to its protagonists, autochthony-the special link with the soil-seems to have some sort of primordial quality. In a seminal article, Jean and John Comaroff, following up on the botanical connotations the term autochthonous seems to have in English (see note 3 above), emphasized its "naturalizing capacity," which makes it "the most 'authentic,' the most essential of all modes of connection" (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001:658-59). Precisely its natural appearance, with the soil as a powerful referent, turns the claim of autochthony into a kind of ur-belonging. All the more reason to emphasize that underneath this self-evidence it hides basic inconsistencies that seem to beset most other claims to belonging as well-ambiguities that acquire particular impact in this most essentialist claim to belong.

Autochthony's global spread, noted above, is equally remarkable. Precisely because the upsurge of this notion seems to be linked to specific local factors, it is all the more important to emphasize that lately it has become a truly global phenomenon-even though autochthony explosions in different parts of the world do not seem to be related. For some time the notion was especially associated with Francophone Africa, as various countries there became the scene of violent struggles between self-styled "autochthons" and strangers (often citizen of the same nation-state). The brutal exclusion in Ivory Coast of allognes (or allochtons)-the "Other" for the self-defined autochthon-splitting the nation in two and leading to the economic implosion of this once so successful country, became world news. A particularly blatant example of where preoccupations with autochthony can lead was the Opration Nationale d'Identification launched by Laurent Gbagbo shortly after he became Ivory Coast's new president.

* * *

In 2002-in a situation of growing hatred and violence between southern autochtones and northern immigrants (who come from both the northern parts of the country and neighboring states)-the Gbagbo regime, pushing the autochthony idea to its very limits, announced its intention to oblige all Ivorians to return to their village "of origin" in order to be registered there as citizens. Abidjan, the country's megapolis, was not to be considered a "village of origin" except for the Ebri, "historical autochthons." All persons who could not claim a village of origin within the country were to be considered as immigrants and would therefore lose their citizenship.

Thus, the Ivorian National Identification Campaign became a most pregnant example of the trend, everywhere in the continent, that the preoccupation with belonging-the fear of becoming someone "without bearings"-brings a retour en force of "the" village. As Mr. Sry Wayoro, "director of identification" in this opration, explained: "Whoever claims to be Ivorian must have a village. Someone who has done everything to forget the name of his village or who is incapable of showing he belongs to a village is a person without bearings and is so dangerous that we must ask him where he comes from" (quoted in Marshall 2006:28).

Ruth Marshall (2006:26) describes the rage of the northern "rebels" at their roadblocks when people present IDs with the new marks-how they violently tear up these papers that threaten to rob them of their very citizenship. For the time being this opration has been executed in only mitigated form [see chap. 4 below], but the basic idea is still very much around. It is clearly at the heart of the frightening violence that in subsequent years has marked everyday life, especially in the southwestern parts of the country. * * *

In Ivory Coast the defense of autochthony may have taken on especially violent forms under the inspired leadership of Gbagbo and his wife, with the Jeunes Patriotes as their storm troopers. But similar struggles over the exclusion of "strangers" (often citizens of the same country) plague Cameroon, the two Congos, and Senegal-to mention just a few examples.

It is small wonder that the term autochthonous gained special currency in Francophone Africa, since it is an inherent part of the French colonial heritage: the term was introduced to the continent around 1900 by French empire builders-often at the same time administrators and ethnographers-in a determined effort to gain control over the kaleidoscopic jumble of groups and communities that confronted them in the newly conquered territories (see below). But recently it has been spreading into Anglophone parts of the continent as well. Moreover, although I propose to focus first of all on areas where the term itself is cropping up, it is clear that similar issues of belonging have become highly explosive in other parts of the continent as well. Issues like the xenophobic reaction in present-day South Africa against the Makwere-kwere ("strangers" from across the Limpopo; see Landau 2006 and chap. 4 below) or the ways in which questions of belonging affected political competition in Zambia and Malawi play on similar registers as the autochthony craze in Francophone Africa.

However, it may be even more important to emphasize that such confrontations are not unique to the African continent-indeed, this is one of the main aims of this book. Since the 1970s, the Dutch and the Flemings adopted a similar terminology of autochtonen versus allochtonen in their efforts to deal with ever more pressing immigration issues. Other protagonists of the New Right in Europe play with the same notions. These notions are now very present also in the Pacific and have a longer history in Canada, though with quite a different meaning. It is striking-and this is a central theme of this book-that the same notions seem to apply in such varying situations. Even more remarkable is that they can have such strong emotional appeal and mobilizing force in highly different settings.

Indeed, this book is born from a coincidence that did surprise me. In spring 1996, I returned from Cameroon quite impressed by the vivid images on Cameroon TV of the large demonstrations of the Sawa ("sea people") in Douala, the country's main port and economic hub. The local Sawa people were clearly enraged that in the municipal elections-the first since democratization and the reinstatement of a multiparty system-Bamileke immigrants had been elected as mayors in four of the five municipalities of the city. The demonstrators' language-in their songs, slogans, and posters-was clear: they were the autochtones; these "strangers" (allognes) should go back home and vote there, and not try to rule in the land of their hosts. Clearly the new style of democratic elections had created a true panic among the small coastal groups, the Douala (the original inhabitants of the city) and other "Sawa": they had foreseen that they would be outvoted in their own hometown by the much more numerous immigrants from the interior, and this was indeed what happened in this city, as in many other cities in the continent. Thus, the democratization wave of the early 1990s had the unexpected effect in Cameroon and in many other African countries of triggering fierce autochthony movements and often quite violent efforts to exclude "strangers" (who are often citizens of the same nation-state).

Back home, I switched on the radio and-this was the surprise-suddenly realized that I was hearing exactly the same slogans, but now in good Dutch. It was a program on the Vlaams Blok, a New Right party in Belgium (Flanders) that recently had had striking electoral successes. Its main leader, Filip de Winter-often described as looking like "the ideal son-in-law"-explained the aims of the party in terms that seemed to come straight from the autochthony demonstrators in Cameroon: Eigen volk eerst (your own people first); the need to protect the "ancestral heritage" that risked being "soiled" by "strangers." Even the central term was the same: in Dutch/Flemish, the term autochtoon has become a rallying point, initially for the New Right but in recent years also for middle-of-the-road parties, now that concerns over how to address the issue of new immigrants and their "integration" have become ever more general.

Striking in all this is that even though the Cameroonian and the Flemish/Dutch contexts are completely different, the autochthony discourse seems to come across as self-evident, almost "natural," in both situations. Precisely this self-evidence seems to give it considerable mobilizing impact. This panacea quality and its apparent capacity to emerge at completely different points in our globalizing world makes autochthony a fascinating notion for understanding present-day preoccupations with belonging. Since we are seeking to understand its impressively wide applicability, it would be counterproductive to work from a strict definition of this quite enigmatic notion. My intention is rather to try to follow what meanings and associations people in strongly different situations attach to it, and how it can retain its apparent self-evidence and thus its plausibility in such different contexts.

Clearly the sudden upsurge of notions of autochthony in highly different parts of the globe has to be placed in a broader context: the "global conjuncture of belonging" mentioned before. I borrow this expression from the Canadian anthropologist Tania Murray Li, who launched it in her studies of conflicts over "indigeneity" in Southeast Asia (Li 2000). Her notion of "conjuncture" is especially apposite since she shows how all sorts of apparently unrelated trends converge into turning belonging into a pressing issue. Her studies focus on the global attention to "indigenous peoples" and "disappearing cultures," but also global concern over loss of biodiversity and ecological knowledge, as major trends in making people obsessed with the question of who "really" belongs (and even more so, who does not). Elsewhere other tendencies may promote such preoccupations: in Africa, democratization and decentralization, the two main issues on the neoliberal agenda, have the paradoxical effect of triggering an obsession with belonging (hardly in line with what one would expect from earlier versions of liberalism); in Europe, meanwhile, it is popular dissatisfaction over increasing immigration and the idea that the second generation of immigrants refuses to "integrate" that triggers similar concerns (see chap. 5).

Strikingly, discourses of belonging seem to be able to gloss over such crucial variations, turning questions like who belongs? and how one can prove belonging? into truly worldwide concerns. Autochthony's capacity to crop up in quite dispersed moments and places across the globe makes for an intriguing difference with the parallel notion of indigenous, which made a similar comeback in recent decades (see Ceuppens and Geschiere 2005). While indigenous became increasingly centered in its meaning-roughly referring to the "tribal other"-autochthonous became employed in much more variable ways. Its use is no longer restricted to marginal areas, since even majority groupings within the West came to defend their position in the name of their "autochthony." It is the free-floating profile of this term, combining apparent self-evidence with great ambiguity and variation in its meaning, that makes it of particular interest for unraveling the general conundrum of belonging in our globalizing world. A brief digression into history can highlight the ambivalences in autochthony discourse underneath its show of authenticity.

Autochthony's Genealogy: Some Elements

Two crucial moments in autochthony's long and tortuous history may be of particular interest here. Both highlight certain inherent inconsistencies in this apparently so self-evident a notion. So what may seem here to be an overly long detour through history will help to outline key dimensions for analyzing the issue of autochthony and belonging in present times.

While I was working on this book, the complex historical vicissitudes of the notion became ever more intriguing to me. As noted, I started to dig into autochthony because I was struck by the coincidence that the same jargon quite abruptly became highly politically charged in such different contexts as Cameroon and the Netherlands. However, following the central notion of autochthony turned out to be quite an adventurous journey. I had certainly not expected that it would take me to widely different spots in the world and in history: it was like a magical bird, turning up in unexpected places. Leading thinkers have used it and still do so, though in quite different ways. Claude Lvi-Strauss (1958:238) gave it a central place in his analysis of the Oedipus figure. Martin Heidegger (1934-35/1989) proposed the heavy term Bodenstndigkeit as a translation of autochthony and used it to defend a more communitarian form of nationalism for Germany, in contrast to Anglo-Saxon and French versions of an all too individualistic nationalism (unfortunately, but probably not accidentally, this was also in the days that he made overtures to the Nazis). Derrida (1997:95, orig. 1994), on the other hand, criticized autochthony as a mark of a too limited (even "phallic") form of democracy that we urgently need to surpass for a more universalistic version.

(Continues...)

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Dettagli dell?edizione

• Editore: University of Chicago Press
• Data di pubblicazione: 2009
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0226289656
• ISBN 13: 9780226289656
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 296
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile