Translocality (Studies in Global Social History)

Translocality Studies in Global Social History Series Editor Marcel van der Linden International Institute of Social...

Author: Ulrike Freitag | Achim Von Oppen

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Translocality

Studies in Global Social History Series Editor

Marcel van der Linden International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Editorial Board

Sven E. Beckert Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

Philip Bonner University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa

Dirk Hoerder University of Arizona, Phoenix, AR, USA

Chitra Joshi Indraprastha College, Delhi University, India

Amarjit Kaur University of New England, Armidale, Australia

Barbara Weinstein New York University, New York, NY, USA

VOLUME 4

Translocality The Study of Globalising Processes from a Southern Perspective

Edited by

Ulrike Freitag and Achim von Oppen

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2010

Cover illustration: World Map by al-Idrisi, 1154 A.D. Oxford Pococke Manuscript, The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford (MS. Pococke 375, fols. 3c–4r). This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Translocality : the study of globalising processes from a southern perspective / edited by Ulrike Freitag and Achim von Oppen. p. cm. — (Studies in global social history, ISSN 1874-6705 ; v. 4) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-18116-8 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Emigration and immigration—Social aspects. 2. Africa—Emigration and immigration-Social aspects. 3. Asia—Emigration and immigration—Social aspects. 4. Middle East-Emigration and immigration—Social aspects. I. Freitag, Ulrike. II. Oppen, Achim von. JV6121.T73 2010 304.8’2—dc22 2009046271

ISSN 1874-6705 ISBN 978 90 04 18116 8 Copyright 2010 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments .............................................................................. List of Contributors ........................................................................... List of Maps ........................................................................................ Note on Transliteration ....................................................................

ix xi xvii xix

Introduction: ‘Translocality’: An Approach to Connection and Transfer in Area Studies .............................................................. Ulrike Freitag/Achim von Oppen

1

PART ONE: MARGINAL MOBILITIES

Wodaabe Women and the Outside World ................................... Elisabeth Boesen

25

Chinese Women in the New Migration Process to Europe: Marginal or Main Actors? ........................................................... Carine Pina-Guerassimoff

55

Proud Fighters, Blind Men: World War Experiences of Combatants from the Arab East ................................................. Katharina Lange

83

‘Following the Hills’: Gold Mining Camps as Heterotopias ...... Katja Werthmann

111

PART TWO: SPACES ON THE MOVE

Mapping the Ocean: Visual Representations of the Indian Ocean in the Swahili Military Press during World War II .............................................................................................. Katrin Bromber

135

vi

contents

Regional Attractions: World and Village in Kabylia (Algeria) .......................................................................................... Judith Scheele

159

Translocal ‘Kinship’ Relations in Central African Politics of the 19th Century ........................................................................... Beatrix Heintze

179

PART THREE: LOCALITY AND BEYOND

Autochthony: Local or Global? ....................................................... Peter Geschiere

207

Heritage and the Making of (Trans-)local Identities: A Case Study from the Curonian Spit (Lithuania) ................. Anja Peleikis

229

Shifting Globalities—Changing Headgear: The Indian Muslims between Turban, Hat and Fez .................................... Margrit Pernau

249

Reclaiming the African City: The World and the Township ..... Terence Ranger

269

PART FOUR: ALTERNATE GLOBALITIES

‘Alternate’ Globalities? On the Cultures and Formats of Transnational Muslim Networks from South Asia ................. Dietrich Reetz

293

Globalisation in the Making: Translocal Gendered Spaces in Muslim Societies ....................................................................... Gudrun Lachenmann

335

About ‘Turks’ and ‘Germans’: The Turkish Press in Germany and the Construction of Multiple Memberships ..................... Christoph Schumann

369

contents

vii

Bibliography ........................................................................................

401

Indices .................................................................................................. Index of Personal Names ............................................................. Index of Place Names ...................................................................

441 441 444

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This volume is in more than one sense a collective effort. The concept of Translocality, as discussed in this volume, has been developed and applied in an extensive research programme at Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO), Berlin. We express our gratitude to the main sponsors of this programme, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and the Senate of Berlin. All those who participated in this programme in its different stages between January 2000 and June 2008 as research fellows, visiting scholars or lecturers, have contributed considerably to the gradual development of the concept and its ramifications. We are particularly grateful to everyone who took part in the Conference “Translocality: An Approach to Globalising Phenomena?” held at ZMO (September 26–28, 2006). Although it was not possible to include in this volume all papers presented at that conference, their discussions were crucial to the shaping of this book. The process of turning a set of papers into a book is always lengthy and arduous. Had it not been for the patient and good-humoured support and co-ordination by Bettina Gräf, Sarah Jurkiewicz and Leyla von Mende, the editors might well have been lost in the process. Joy Adapon did most of the language-editing. We are grateful to Marcel van der Linden for the inclusion of this volume into his Studies in Global Social History series, and to Nienke Brienen-Moolenar and Hylke Faber for their support at Brill. The Editors, Berlin and Bayreuth, June 2009

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Elisabeth Boesen studied Social Anthropology at Freie Universität Berlin and at the University of Bayreuth where she obtained her Ph.D. on the topic of “Identity and Symbolic Forms of Expression among the Fulbe of Northern Benin”. As a member of a research group on modern migrations among Sahelian nomadic populations based at the Centre for Modern Oriental Studies in Berlin she continued working on the Fulbe and especially the Nigerien Wodaabe. Recently she joined a research project on identity and memory at the Université du Luxembourg. Her publications include Mobilité et nouveaux urbains dans l’espace Sahara-Sahel: Un cosmopolitisme par le bas (2007; co-edited with Laurence Marfaing). Katrin Bromber received her Ph.D. in African Linguistics from the University of Leipzig (Germany) and her habilitation degree from the University of Vienna (Austria). She specializes in Swahili Studies with a methodological preference for text linguistics and discourse analysis. Currently she works as a research fellow at the Centre for Modern Oriental Studies in Berlin. Her books include The Juristiction of the Sultan of Zanzibar and the Subjects of Foreign Nations (2001), Kala Shairi: German East Africa in Swahili Poems (2003, co-edited with Gudrun Miehe, Said Khamis and Ralf Großerhode), and Globalisation and African Languages: Risks and Benefits (2004; co-edited with Birgit Smieja). Ulrike Freitag studied History and Islamic studies at Bonn, Damascus and Freiburg, where she obtained her Ph.D. with a thesis on Syrian historiography in the 20th century. She then taught at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London from 1993 until becoming director of the Centre for Modern Oriental Studies (ZMO) in 2002, in combination with a chair at the Department of Islamic Studies of the Freie Universität Berlin. Among her publications on the modern history of the Middle East and beyond is Indian Ocean Migrants and State Formation in Hadhramaut (2003), based on extensive research in Jemen, Singapore and Java and Hadhrami Traders,

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list of contributors

Scholars and Statesmen in the Indian Ocean, 1750s–1960s (1997; coedited with William Clarence-Smith). Peter Geschiere is professor of African Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam (earlier at Leiden University). Since 1971 he undertook historical-anthropological field-work in various parts of Cameroon and elsewhere in West Africa. His publications include The Modernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the Occult in Post-colonial Africa; Globalization and Identity: Dialectics of Flow and Closure (1997; coedited with Birgit Meyer); The Forging of Nationhood (2003; co-edited with Gyan Pandey); and The Perils of Belonging: Autochthony, Citizenship and Exclusion in Africa and Europe (2009). He has also written numerous essays on various aspects of economy, society, and culture in West Africa. Beatrix Heintze has been researcher and editor of the Frobenius Institute in Frankfurt am Main from 1969 to 2004. She published many historical and anthropological studies and source editions on West Central Africa, among them the books Fontes para a História de Angola do Século XVII (1985–1988), Deutsche Forschungsreisende in Angola (1999/2007), Pioneiros Africanos: Caravanas de carregadores na África Centro-Ocidental (entre 1850 e 1890) (2004), Angola nos séculos XVI e XVII: Estudos sobre Fontes, Métodos e História (2007) and Angola on the Move: Transport Routes, Communications, and History (2008; co-edited with Achim von Oppen). Gudrun Lachenmann has been a professor at the Faculty of Sociology in the Sociology of Development and Research Centre at Bielefeld University since 1992, emerita since March 2006. She studied Sociology, Political Science, and Economics at the University of Konstanz, Germany. There she received her doctorate in 1982 and her habilitation in 1989 from Freie Universität Berlin. Her current research interests include global and local networking for engendering development policy, civil society, transformation processes, women’s and peasant movements in Africa, engendering the embeddedness of economy, and the methodology of multi level field research. Her publications are i.a. Negotiating development in Muslim societies: Gendered spaces and translocal connections (2008; co-edited with Petra Dannecker) and Die geschlechtsspezifische Einbettung der Ökonomie: Empirische Untersuchungen über Entwicklungs- und Transformationsprozesse (2001; coedited with Petra Dannecker).


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Katharina Lange studied Social Anthropology at the University of Tübingen, Reed College (USA) and the University of Leipzig where she obtained her Ph.D. in 2002 with a thesis on approaches to the indigenisation of Arabic anthropology. Since then she has done fieldwork on memory and representations of history in Syria, working on representations of tribal history and social change, as well as memories of the world war period. Currently she works as a research fellow at the Centre for Modern Oriental Studies in Berlin. Her publications include „Zurückholen, was uns gehört“: Indigenisierungstendenzen in der arabischen Ethnologie (2005). Achim von Oppen is professor of African History at Bayreuth University (Germany). He has worked and published widely about social and spatial history in Central and East Africa. Between 2001 and 2007, he has been deputy director of the Centre for Modern Oriental Studies (Berlin), where he has coordinated the research programme. There, he was also involved in a collaborative research project on Muslim and Christian practices of conversion in 20th century Tanzania, while also teaching History of Africa at Humboldt University, Berlin. Among his publications is Terms of Trade and Terms of Trust: The History and Contexts of Pre-colonial Market Production around the Upper Zambezi and Kasai, c. 1790 to 1910 (1993). Anja Peleikis is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Social Anthropology at Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg, where she co-directs the project “After the Survivors: Performing the Holocaust and the Jewish Past in the New Yad Vashem Museum and in the Jewish Museum, Berlin.” She gained her Ph.D. degree from the University of Bielefeld and led research projects at the Centre for Modern Oriental Studies, Berlin and the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle/Saale. Her research interests include translocal migration, memory, tourism and the anthropology of museums. She has carried out fieldwork on these topics in West Africa, Lebanon, Lithuania and Berlin/Jerusalem. She is author of the book Lebanese in Motion: Gender and the Making of a Translocal Village (2003). Margrit Pernau is senior researcher at the Centre for the History of Emotions (Director Prof. Dr. Ute Frevert) at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. She studied History and Public Law at the University of Saarland and University of Heidelberg where she obtained her Ph.D. in 1991. 1997–2003 Margrit Pernau conducted

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research in Delhi on “Plural Identities of Muslims in Old-Delhi in the 19th century” and has been research fellow at the Social Science Research Centre Berlin and at the Centre for Modern Oriental Studies in Berlin. Beside the history of emotions her areas of interest include modern Indian history, the history of modern Islam, historical semantics, comparative studies, and translation studies. Among her publications is Bürger mit Turban: Muslime in Delhi im 19. Jahrhundert (2008). Carine Pina-Guerassimoff holds a Ph.D. in Law and Economic Development Studies, is a sinologist and politologist. She is working on Chinese international migration policies and relations between migration and development. She is an affiliated fellow at the Laboratory SEDET (Société en Développement dans l’Espace et dans le Temps), CNRS-UMR 7135. University of Paris VII, actually researcher for and at UE/Equal Programme “Long March” on the migration process of Chinese women. Her publications include “Le renouvellement des perspectives transnationales de la Chine,” Critique Internationale 32 (2006), 39–52 and “Genre et réseaux migratoires: Jalons pour une approche institutionnaliste des nouvelles migrations chinoises,” Migrations-Société 18 (2006), 17–32. Terence Ranger is emeritus professor of African Studies at the University of Oxford. He has been working on southern Africa since 1957 focusing especially on the modern history of Zimbabwe. His ten monographs and twenty edited collections have explored African resistance, the creation and consciousness of peasantries, the dynamics of African religion and its interaction with Christianity, landscape and its interaction with politics and society, violence and memory, ethnicity and ‘tradition’, epidemic and ideas. Since 1999 he has been working on Zimbabwean urban history and is completing Bulawayo Burning: The Social History of a Southern African City, 1893–1960. The publication that brought Terence Ranger fame also in non-africanist circles was The Invention of Tradition (1983; co-edited with Eric Hobsbawm). Dietrich Reetz is research fellow at the Centre for Modern Oriental Studies and senior lecturer (Privatdozent) of Political Science at Freie Universität Berlin. His specialisation is international politics and modern history of Islam in South Asia with its global connections. He is currently co-ordinating a collaborative project on Muslims in Europe


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and their countries of origin in Asia and Africa. His latest monograph is Islam in the Public Sphere: Religious Groups in India, 1900–1947 (2006). Judith Scheele is a social anthropologist and post-doctoral research fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. Her doctoral research focussed on notions of knowledge, political legitimacy and community in Kabylia, a Berber-speaking area in north-eastern Algeria. Current research investigates trans-Saharan connections of all kinds, including legal and illegal trade, migration, and scholarly links, with particular emphasis on southern Algeria and northern Mali. She has conducted extensive fieldwork in both countries. Her publications include Village Matters: Knowledge, Politics and Community in Kabylia (2006), and various related book chapters and articles. Christoph Schumann is professor of Politics and Contemporary History of the Middle East at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany. His publications include Radical Nationalism in Syria and Lebanon: Political Socialization and Elite Formation, 1930–1958 (2001 in German); From the Syrian Land to the States of Syria and Lebanon (2004; co-edited with Thomas Philipp); and Liberal Thought in the Eastern Mediterranean: Late 19th century until the 1960s (2008; ed.). Katja Werthmann is assistant professor at the Department of Anthropology and African Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany. She has done fieldwork in Nigeria on Islam, gender segregation, and urban identity; and in Burkina Faso on land rights, development issues, interethnic relations, and informal gold mining. She is currently working on Islam in western Burkina Faso. Her most recent publications include “Islam on Both Sides: Religion and Locality in Western Burkina Faso,” in Dimensions of Locality: The Making and Remaking of Islamic Saints and their Places, eds. Samuli Schielke and Georg Stauth (2008), 125–147; “Working in a Boom-town: Female Perspectives on Gold-mining in Burkina Faso,” Resources Policy 34 (2009), 18–23; and Staatliche Herrschaft und kommunale Selbstverwaltung in Afrika: Dezentralisierung in Kamerun (2008; co-edited with Gerald Schmitt).

LIST OF MAPS

1. Travel Destinations of Wodabee maagani-Vendors (Cartography: Elisabeth Boesen) ..............................................

38

2. People’s Republic of China’s Administrative Provinces (Cartography: Carine Pina-Guerassimoff ) .............................

60

3. East African Colonies (Kenya, Uganda, and Northern Rhodesia) and Tanganyika Territory, in Askari (July 25, 1946), 3 .........................................................................

147

4. Indian Ocean, in Heshima (August 11, 1943), 7 ...................

150

5. Japanese and Allied Held Areas in the Pacific Ocean (Vectorised Map), in Heshima (June 27, 1945), 4 ................

152

6. Pacific (Vectorised Map), in Heshima (June 20, 1945), 3 ...

153

7. Bay of Bengal (Andaman Islands), in Heshima (December 15, 1943), 3 .............................................................

154

8. Kabylia and Other Places Mentioned in the Text (Cartography: Judith Scheele) ..................................................

161

9. Principal Long-distance Caravan Routes in West Central Africa (1850–c. 1890), in Beatrix Heintze and Achim von Oppen, eds., Angola on the Move: Transport Routes, Communications and History, Frankfurt a.M.: Lembeck, 2008, p. 146 ..................................................................................

182

10. The Curonian Lagoon Region and the Position of Nida (Cartography: Jutta Turner, Max-Planck-Institut, Halle/Germany) ..........................................................................

231

NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION

This volume contains contributions quoting from a variety of nonEuropean languages and scripts. As the authors also come from different philological traditions, the editors decided after some deliberation to forsake the usual imposition of one coherent set of transliteration. We have tried to ensure, however, that each contribution is coherent in itself.

INTRODUCTION ‘TRANSLOCALITY’: AN APPROACH TO CONNECTION AND TRANSFER IN AREA STUDIES Ulrike Freitag/Achim von Oppen1

“What”, asked the eminent historian of Africa, Frederick Cooper, a few years ago, “is the concept of globalization good for?”2 Cooper’s criticism of the concept does not argue with the quest to understand how different parts of the world have been interconnected. However, he criticizes the lack of historical depth implicit in many uses of the term, and the often underlying assumption of a single process encompassing the whole world. This perspective, Cooper argues, obscures the very unevenness of a variety of processes which create cross-territorial linkages and flows. This vision also obfuscates that such processes go hand in glove with specific limitations to and blockages of such connections. Obviously, historians of global history have attempted to grapple with some of the shortcomings of globalisation theory. Thus, Janet Abu Lughod confronted the clearly eurocentric focus of world system theory, which implicitly still underlies much of globalisation theory. She argued that before the capitalist world system discussed by Wallerstein, there already existed an earlier, Islamic world system encompassing and linking much of the “old world” of Asia, Africa and Europe.3 More recently, global history has been understood as a history of entanglement and interconnectedness. This meant to break up both the limitations of nationalist historiographies as well as a historical

1 We thank Elisabeth Boesen, Katrin Bromber, Bettina Gräf, Sarah Jurkiewicz and Dietrich Reetz for their contribution and comments on this chapter. As it is the outflow of ZMO’s research programme, the chapter is a truly collective effort and the authors only take credit for summing up collective work and discussions. 2 Frederick Cooper, “What is the Concept of Globalization Good for? An African Historian’s Perspective,” African Affairs 100 (2001), 189–213. 3 Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System, 3 vol. (San Diego, 1974, 1980, 1989); Abu Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350 (Oxford, 1989).

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ulrike freitag/achim von oppen

meta-narrative of “global” developments.4 This approach—to be distinguished from “globalisation history”, which studies the emergence and transformations of connectedness on the global level5—has been elaborated on quite different scales. A regionally limited but highly refined—if methodologically perhaps overly complex—variant is the concept of Histoire Croisée which was developed for the investigation of Franco-German relations in history, relating both to the history of events and to historical perceptions.6 On a larger and therefore less detailed scale, the “new imperial history”, influenced by postcolonial studies, builds on notions of cultural influences operating quite independently of the economic and political developments which used to be highlighted by conventional historiographies of empire and imperialism.7 Another approach to overcoming the monopolar and eurocentric vision of globalisation is the attempt to study global connections of specific historical actors as well as historical moments of global importance. Such global moments often sparked international networking as, for example, the Russo-Japanese war of 1905 or Wilson’s declaration of the right to self-determination.8 Such approaches have opened important new perspectives on entangled and/or shared histories. Moreover, they can, as the study of non-Western experiences of the World Wars illustrates, significantly

4 Literature in this field is abundant and cannot be reviewed here in detail. Useful surveys with abundant bibliographical detail can be found in Bruce Mazlish and Akira Iriye, eds., The Global History Reader (London, 2005), see also A.G. Hopkins, ed., Globalization in World History (New York, 2002). On entangled history, see Shalini Randeria, “Entangled Histories of Uneven Modernities: Civil Society, Caste Solidarities and the Post-Colonial State in India,” in Unraveling Ties, eds. Yehuada Elkana et al. (Frankfurt a.M., 2002), Sebastian Conrad and Shalini Randeria, “Einleitung: Geteilte Geschichte—Europa in einer postkolonialen Welt,” in Jenseits des Eurozentrismus, eds. idem (Frankfurt a.M., 2002), pp. 9–49 and Sebastian Conrad and Andreas Eckert, “Globalgeschichte, Globalisierung, Multiple Modernen,” in Globalgeschichte: Theorien, Ansätze, Themen, eds. idem and Ulrike Freitag (Frankfurt, 2007), pp. 7–49. 5 E.g. Jürgen Osterhammel and Niels P. Petersson, Globalization: A Short History (Princeton, 2005). 6 Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, eds., De la comparaison à l’histoire croisée, (Le Genre humain) 42 (Paris, 2004), pp. 15–49. 7 For example Kathleen Wilson, ed., A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840 (New York, 2004). 8 Erez Manela, “Dawn of a New Era: The ‘Wilsonian Moment’ in Colonial Contexts and the Transformation of World Order, 1917–1920,” in Competing Visions of World Order: Global Moments and Movements, 1880s–1930s, eds. Sebastian Cornad and Dominic Sachsenmaier (New York, 2007), pp. 121–149 and Rebecca E. Karl, “Creating Asia: China in the World at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century,” American Historical Review 103 (1998), 1096–1118.

introduction: ‘translocality’

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enhance our understanding of global social history.9 What they are less apt at doing, however, is to establish links between the multitude of connections and flows below the elite level which are encountered by historians, anthropologists, geographers or political scientists working on various regions of this world, past and present. To do so seems of particular relevance for those whose investigation focuses on regions outside ‘the West’ (or ‘the North’). Here, perhaps, it is less easy than in the Western context to relate connections between regions and places to the grand processes of ‘globalisation’ due to the assumed rootedness of these processes in ‘the North’. If, however, one takes seriously the claim to ‘global’ in global history, one will need to consider the role of actors, places and processes in those regions which are commonly not discussed in the context of ‘History’ but of ‘histories’ discussed by scholars of Asia, Africa and Latin America.10 This volume is an exercise in taking such a perspective from regions in Asia, Africa and the Middle East which have a long history of connections both within each of these regions as well as between them. This requires firstly a particular methodological sensorium for detecting connections beyond the ‘local’, which has been privileged in studies of the non-European world. They present an important challenge for the area studies of those regions, which have long promoted localism and regional limitation while, at the same time, being methodologically so well equipped for in-depth empirical enquiry. Secondly, what is also needed is an intermediary concept which helps to better understand and conceptualise connections beyond the local which are, however, neither necessarily global in scale nor necessarily connected to global moments. What we want to offer here as a terminological approach towards such a concept is ‘translocality’. In the following, we understand ‘translocality’ both as a descriptive tool that seems to be more adapted to the specific empirical realities in Africa, Asia and the Middle East than related terms established with regard to the West, and as a perspective to conceptualise research on these realities.11 While only part of the contributions in this volume explicitly 9 Heike Liebau, Katrin Bromber, Katharina Lange, Dyala Hamzah, and Ravi Ahuja, eds., The World in World Wars: Experiences, Perceptions and Perspectives from Africa and Asia (Leiden, forthcoming). 10 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ, 2000). 11 This understanding of ‘translocality’ has been elaborated through a series of research programmes at the Zentrum Moderner Orient (Berlin) funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, between 2000 and 2007.

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refer to this term, all of them share the theoretical and methodological concerns expressed by it.12 This volume is organised in four sections, each of them combining a variety of different regional and historical contexts under one particular theme. Each of them implicitly addresses one particular aspect of the ‘globalisation’ paradigm and offers alternative perspectives which can be subsumed under ‘translocality’ as we understand it. ‘Marginal Mobilities’ (Section One) explores modes of movement and mobility by seemingly marginal, “local” actors which are often regarded as erratic, accidental, and hence at odds with mainstream globalisation. Despite the lack of attention, or even repressive intervention, by more dominant social actors, these mobilities can be seen to constitute significant and lasting connections between particular places and regions. Section Two, ‘Spaces on the Move’, shows how very specific (rather than simply ‘global’) spaces and scales are created through marginal as well as non-marginal flows of peoples, goods and ideas, and how they change historically in accordance with a variety of internal and external developments. The complicated relationship between locality and translocal connectedness is the theme of Section Three. Its chapters show that localising tendencies are not opposed to but strongly rely on trans-local connections of sometimes even a global reach. Instead of producing inclusive, truly cosmopolitan cultures of place, however, these connections have often been translated into social exclusion and hierarchy. The fourth and last section of the book is dedicated to the discussion of a number of significant notions of globality emanating from Asian and African contexts, notably shaped by Islam. Here it is argued that such notions cannot be understood, as they sometimes present themselves, as fundamentally different from ‘Western’ ones; different globalities should therefore rather be seen as ‘alternate’ to and intersecting with each other. As ‘translocality’ is used as a key to the common concerns of this book, this introduction needs to offer a more systematic discussion of this conceptual approach than the individual contributions can provide. As stated earlier, ‘translocality’ is used here to account better

12 Most contributions to this volume were originally presented and discussed at a conference on “Translocality: An Approach to Globalising Phenomena?”, held at Zentrum Moderner Orient in 2006. They were selected for this volume as they help to illuminate the particular systematic aspects of translocality spelled out here.


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for the diversity of Asian and African experiences and agency in the transformatory process often subsumed under the blanket term of globalisation. Thus, any attempt at defining translocality needs to relate it to kindred concepts such as locality, transnationalism and globalisation. As translocality very consciously attempts to transcend the elitist focus of much of global history, its contribution to a social history ‘from below’ is then discussed, before methodological considerations related to the application of the concept are presented. To illuminate these conceptual and methodological considerations, the different sections of this volume and specific contributions will be referred to in the following discussion where appropriate.

Translocality as an Object of Enquiry and as a Research Perspective13 The notion of ‘translocality’ both as a tool to describe certain empirical phenomena, and as a perspective to conceptualise research on these phenomena, differs and, we would argue, is wider and theoretically more ambitious than the employment of the term by other authors who have spoken of ‘translocalities’ as specific areas or border zones with intense interaction.14 In the descriptive sense, we refer to translocality as the sum of phenomena which result from a multitude of circulations and transfers. It designates the outcome of concrete movements of people, goods, ideas and symbols which span spatial distances and cross boundaries, be they geographical, cultural or political. Translocality as a research perspective, in contrast, more generally aims at highlighting the fact that the interactions and connections between places, institutions, actors and concepts have far more diverse, and often even contradictory effects than is commonly assumed. Drawing on a number of related new conceptual approaches to this topic,

13 The following argument is based on Ulrike Freitag and Achim von Oppen, “Translokalität als ein Zugang zur Geschichte globaler Verflechtungen,” H-Soz-u-Kult (June 10, 2005), http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/forum/type=artikel&id=632 (accessed June 27, 2009). 14 Arjun Appadurai, “Sovereignty without Territoriality: Notes for a Postnational Geography,” in The Geography of Identity, ed. Patricia Jaeger (Ann Arbor, 1996), pp. 40–58. Appadurai’s use of translocality here approaches that of the non-place discussed above. Cf. Peter Mandaville, “Territory and Translocality: Discrepant Idioms of Political Identity,” Paper presented at the 41st Annual Convention of the International Studies Association, Los Angeles, March 14–18, 2000.

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‘translocality’ therefore proposes a more open and less linear view on the manifold ways in which the global world is constituted: through the trans-gression of boundaries between spaces of very different scale and type as well as through the (re-) creation of ‘local’ distinctions between those spaces. As can be seen from the following chapters in this book, the perspective of translocality encourages empirical research of globalising processes in a number of important directions. Research about translocality, for instance, addresses connections and flows of people and goods, but also processes of cultural exchange and transfer, such as the notions of heritage discussed by Anja Peleikis, or of gender concepts and norms between local contexts and global discourses, as in the contribution by Gudrun Lachenmann. It also situates social actors in translocal and transnational networks as well as in the different local contexts in which they operate. This is well exemplified by the contributions to Section One of this volume which discuss the cases of the Woodabe nomadic women (Elisabeth Boesen), of Chinese immigrant women in France (Pina-Guerassimoff ) or workers in the mines of Burkina Faso (Katja Werthmann). They also show, however, that translocality is no mere synonym for spatial mobility or cultural transfer.15 This becomes clear, for instance, in Katharina Lange’s chapter on the often very local experiences of Arab combatants in the World Wars. Rather, the term refers explicitly and critically to the local adaptation, re-structuring and limitation of translocal experiences in particular settings. Thus, it breaks with the tradition of studies of the ‘local’ as a self-contained unit which developed its inherent structures and events. Instead, it looks at the ‘local’ from the perspective of the aforementioned spatial movements. Such an approach might not surprise in the case of the mining camps in Burkina Faso. It appears perhaps more surprising in the case of cities which are studied not as microcosms of their own but from the vantage point of their integration into migratory networks. Thus, their spatial and administrative organisation is considered primarily from the perspective of migration, which opens a wide potential for innovative questioning.16

15 For the latter use of the term, see Stephen Greenblatt, “Culture,” in Critical Terms for Literary Study, eds. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (Chicago, 1995) (1st ed. 1990), pp. 225–232. 16 See the forthcoming volume by Ulrike Freitag, Malte Fuhrmann, Nora Lafi and Florian Riedler, Migrations and Urban Government in the Ottoman Empire. See also,


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The above examples further point to one important aspect of research on translocality, namely the processes of the establishment and institutionalisation of cultural, social and political structures resulting from translocal practices. These processes are interpreted as attempts by the actors to develop or conserve specific patterns or models of action and communication, i.e. a certain order, in an overall situation which is characterised by mobility, flows and transition. However, it needs to be noted that connectedness does not necessarily result in new order, institutionalisation, socio-economic or political development. Rather, it seems that translocality is often marked by transient, non-permanent and unordered spaces. This can be noted in border zones such as refugee camps, it can also be observed among nomads such as the Wodaabe. Spaces which are characterised by the transit of large numbers of people, such as airports and shopping malls, have been conceptualised as “non-places”.17 It might be worthwhile to consider the extension of this concept to a wider variety of transient structures as well. An historical example could be the quarantine stations founded in 19th century attempts at the international control of epidemics, while the camps of migrant labourers in Algeria18 or on the outskirts of Spanish cities19 are more recent illustrations of this point. The idea that translocality finds expression in spaces of its own has a prominent example in the case of the Indian Ocean. Here, recent research has conceived the notion of a seascape, i.e. a space the shape of which was developed through concrete interactions, rather than geographical determinism (such as “areas adjacent to the Indian Ocean”).20 A similar translocal space (a desertscape, as it were) is constituted

Florian Riedler, “Public People: Seasonal Work Migrants in Nineteenth Century Istanbul,” in Public Istanbul: Spaces and Spheres of the Urban, eds. F. Eckardt and K. Wildner (Bielefeld, 2008), pp. 233–53; Malte Fuhrmann and Lars Amenda, Hafenstädte: Mobilität, Migration, Globalisierung, special issue of Comparativ—Zeitschrift für Globalgeschichte und vergleichende Gesellschaftsgeschichte 17, 2 (2007); Nelida Fuccaro, “Understanding the Urban History of Bahrain,” Journal of Critical Studies of the Middle East (Critique) 17, 2 (2000), 49–81. 17 Marc Augé, Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (London, 1995). 18 See the project on “The Emergence of New Translocal Labor Markets in Algeria” by Dalila Nadi at ZMO (2006–2008). 19 See the ongoing research project “Migration als postkoloniale Praxis: Lebensgeschichte und Gesellschaftstheorie aus der afrikanisch-europäischen Grenzzone” by Knut Graw at ZMO. 20 Jan-Georg Deutsch and Brigitte Reinwald, eds., Space on the Move: Transformations of the Indian Ocean Seascape in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century (Berlin, 2002).

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by transsaharan networks which have attracted another set of studies in recent years. With regard to Africa, these investigations have also highlighted the need to differentiate patterns of translocality north and south of the Sahara.21 These reflect the different political and economic relations and interests of the populations, as well as the different layers of migration from slavery to legal and illegal migration, which produce different spaces of economic and cultural exchange. In this book, the chapters contained in Section Two exemplify some of the dimensions and ramifications of such a dynamic understanding of geographical space. Thus, Bromber’s contribution on visual representations of the Indian Ocean during World War II takes up the notion of seascape. The dynamics of migration by Kabylian villagers in Algeria (Judith Scheele) illustrates the plurality of spaces and scales created by translocal connections. The construction and representation of kinship relations among precolonial rulers in Central Africa (Beatrix Heintze) illustrate the shifting scales of political spaces. Other studies have pursued the overlapping of religious spheres created by the advance of both Islam and Christianity in modern East Africa.22 These works provide ample evidence not only of a widening of spatial horizons and of a transgression of spatial boundaries, but of the establishment of new frontiers, differentiations and regulations which impose new limitations and exclusions. Thus, translocal processes can lead to the emergence of widely disparaging experiences and practices of space—a differentiation which would hardly emerge if one were to use the far wider label of ‘globalisation’. The perspective of translocality, it should have become clear by now, focuses neither exclusively on movement, broadly conceived, nor on a particular order, real or imagined. Rather, it investigates the tensions between movement and order. In comparison to the discussions under the paradigm of globalisation, which emphasise mobility, flows and the transgression of boundaries, translocality conceptually addresses the attempts to cope with transgression and with the need for localizing some kind of order. This aspect comes out particularly well, for instance, in Lachenmann’s contribution, in which she avoids both

21 Laurence Marfaing and Steffen Wippel, eds., Relations transsahariennes aux 20ième et 21ième siècles: Réorganisations et revitalisations d’un espace transrégional (Paris, 2004). 22 See the project on “Islamic Missions in the Multireligious Context of East Africa” by Chanfi Ahmed, Achim von Oppen and Tabea Scharrer at ZMO (2004–2007).


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a linear consideration of mobility as well as a priori value judgements about the pros and cons of movement and mobility. We now turn to several related concepts or paradigms which need to be mentioned as referents for our perspective of translocality.

Transcending the Local The term ‘translocality’ points out that, in the opinion of the authors of this volume, the notion of the ‘local’ remains a critical one. Criticism of the earlier view of places, communities and cultures as bounded and fixed localities sparked numerous debates.23 It has become mostly accepted by now that locality is “produced” socially and culturally, often in contexts of heightened mobility of different scale, and of transgression of boundaries, which were already noted to be central to translocal perspectives on localities.24 However, bounded identities of place or region and related senses of belonging are often fuelled by increased mobility of people and transfers of goods, values and discourses. Section Three of this book discusses how localising responses to translocality may assume very different forms or ‘modes’ in different situations. One kind of response, for instance, is an emphasis on the essence of locality, notably place and land, to which notions of ‘authochtony’ are becoming attached. While Peter Geschiere’s contribution theorises this process with special reference to Africa, Anja Peleikis shows the contributions of a variety of actors from different places to the making of ‘local’ heritage in a Lithuanian village. Her chapter not only demonstrates the similarities of such processes in very different global peripheries, and thus introduces a crucial comparative perspective in a volume otherwise centring on non-European developments. It also illustrates how the distance of actors from

23 Eric Wolf, “Inventing Society,” American Ethnologist 15 (1988), 752–761; Marc Augé, Orte und Nicht-Orte: Vorüberlegungen zu einer Ethnologie der Einsamkeit (Frankfurt a.M., 1994); George Marcus, “Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography,” Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995), 95–117; Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, “Discipline and Practice: ‘The Field’ as Site, Method and Location in Anthropology,” in Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science, ed. idem (Berkeley, 1997), pp. 1–46. 24 Arjun Appadurai, “The Production of Locality,” in Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, ed. idem, Public Worlds 1 (Minneapolis, 1996), pp. 178–199.

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a certain locality is not only a spatial but also a temporal category—in other words, somebody who returns to a place after an absence does so as a changed person returning to a changed place. In consequence, this necessitates a spiral conception of the production and reconfiguration of spaces. Peleikis’ study of developments in Lithuania thus builds conceptually on work relating to Lebanese migrants in West Africa and their links to their village or origin.25 Locality can also become associated with an outdated past that needs to be transcended, often in the name of a newly found globality. This has also been demonstrated in research on conversion or on global Islamic reform movements.26 Margrit Pernau’s chapter approaches the issue of locality equally from a global perspective: she describes how Indian Muslims effectively localised a headgear that was conceived to be a symbol of Islamic unity. Finally, Terence Ranger’s chapter restores the African city, or more precisely African urban dwellers, to their place in history by framing them in the same terms as urbanites elsewhere. By describing them as “simultaneously global and local people”, he recognises their translocal position, against attempts to see them as a priori alien to an urban milieu. Frontiers as well as urban contexts often provide privileged spaces for the manifestation of translocality. Recent discussions about cosmopolitanism seem to point to a related, and interesting, framework.27 However, a closer investigation reveals cosmopolitanism to be a concept fraught with strong normative judgments, be they positive, as

25 Anja Peleikis, Lebanese in Motion: Gender and the Making of a Translocal Village (Bielefeld, 2003). 26 Chanfi Ahmed, Les conversions à l’Islam fondamentaliste en Afrique et au sud du Sahara: Le cas de la Tanzanie et du Kenya (Paris, 2008). 27 See the contributions in Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen, eds., Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context, and Practice (Oxford, 2002); Ulrich Beck, “The Cosmopolitan Perspective: Sociology in the Second Age of Modernity,” pp. 61–85; Ayşe Çağlar, “Media Corporatism and Cosmopolitanism,” pp. 180–190; and also Sami Zubaida, “Cosmopolitanism and the Middle East,” in Cosmopolitanism, Identity and Authenticity in the Middle East, ed. Roel Meijer (Surrey, 1999), pp. 15–33; Thomas Turino, Nationalists, Cosmopolitans, and Popular Music in Zimbabwe (Chicago, 2000); Werner Schiffauer, “Cosmopolitans are Cosmopolitans: On the Relevance of Local Identification in Globalizing Society,” in Worlds on the Move, eds. J. Friedman and Shalini Randeria (London, 2004), pp. 91–101; Henk Driessen, “Mediterranean Port Cities: Cosmopolitanism Reconsidered,” History and Anthropology 16, 1 (2005), 129–141(13), as well as with specific reference to port cities the contributions in Lars Amenda and Malte Fuhrmann, eds., Hafenstädte: Mobilität, Migration, Globalisierung, special issue of Comparativ 17, 2 (2007).


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in the current context of globalisation, or negative, as in the ages of nationalism, fascism and socialism.28 This ideological baggage, mainly developed in the European Age of Enlightenment and—later—the emergence of nation states opposed to groups and individuals with strong links and loyalties beyond the borders—makes the transmission of the concept to non-Western societies particularly problematic. Moreover, although the concept of cosmopolitanism was partly developed with reference to the Ottoman Empire,29 comparable concepts did not emerge outside the specific European context. It is all the more interesting that in its drive to mobilise African soldiers for out of area missions during World War II, Britain propagated the educated, travelling and modern—i.e. in all but name cosmopolitan—African soldier as (almost) equivalent to the British, who were otherwise portrayed as members of a superior colonial race compared to Africans with a limited and localised outlook.

Translocality and Transnationalism The choice of the term ‘translocality’, rather than the more common ‘transnationalism’, is not the result of a fashionable neglect of the nation-state in the age of globalisation. Nor does it reflect a tendency to privilege places or regions over states. Rather, it emerged as a consequence of the study of Asia, Africa and the Middle East. The socalled nation-states of these regions were usually created in the 20th century, and correspond even less to “imagined (national) communities” (Anderson) than this might be the case in Europe. Many authors tend to merge ‘translocality’ and ‘transnationality’, notably when dealing with modern political realities.30 This is partly due to disciplinary

28

For contributions with strongly positive normativity, see Beck, “The Cosmopolitan Perspective,” p. 414 and Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York, 2006). For a discussion of nationalism and cosmopolitanism see Friedrich Meinecke, Cosmopolitanism and the National State (Princeton, 1970) and Brett Bowden, “Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism: Irreconcilable Differences or Possible Bedfellows?” National Identities 5 (2003), 235–249, where the potential dangers of both paradigms are discussed. 29 Linda T. Darling, “Ottoman Politics through British Eyes: Paul Rycaut’s The Present State of the Ottoman Empire,” Journal of World History 5 (1994), 71–97. 30 Peter Mandaville, Transnational Muslim Politics: Reimagining the Umma (London, 2001) and idem, “Territory and Translocality: Discrepant Idioms of Political Identity,” Paper presented at the 41st Annual Convention of the International Studies

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conventions, notably among political scientists who usually deal with present-day states. However, it can also be found among historians.31 Even when used for Europe, where nation-states were formed earlier than in the regions privileged in this collection, the term ‘transnationalism’ can be highly problematic. It not only presupposes the existence of nation-states but also privileges the perspective of national elites. What, for example, of the internal cultural boundaries in France between Paris and the regions which were rather forcefully subdued in the 19th century and nevertheless reappeared in the context of a “Europe of the Regions” in the late 20th?32 In contrast, links between Paris and Berlin sometimes seem to be of more importance than those of the capitals to their respective hinterlands. There is of course the rather obvious observation that nation-building processes outside Europe did not only occur later, but have proven to be even more precarious. Apart from this, however, translocality also emphatically emphasises the fact that political boundaries might be one of many potentially significant boundaries for the processes at stake. This is not to deny the states’ well recognised means of regulation. Nevertheless, the concept of translocality assumes a multitude of possible boundaries which might be transgressed, including but not limiting itself to political ones, thus recognising the inability even of modern states to assume, regulate and control movement, and accounting for the agency of a multitude of different actors. As outlined above, it takes many different possible spatial orders as its starting point, and most notably pays close attention to the notions of the relevant historical and present actors. Transnationalism in this perspective appears more as a special case of translocality than as its equivalent. The interaction between ‘transnational’ and other crosscutting relationships is addressed in a number of contributions to this volume, e.g. those by Scheele, Geschiere and Peleikis.

Association, Los Angeles, March 14–18, 2000; John R. Bowen, “Islam in/of France: Dilemmas of Translocality,” Paper presented at the 13th International Conference of Europeanists, Chicago, March 14–16, 2002. 31 See the very title of the web portal geschichte.transnational (http://geschichtetransnational.clio-online.net/), but also Jürgen Osterhammel, “Transnationale Gesellschaftsgeschichte: Erweiterung oder Alternative?” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 27 (2001), 464–479, Sebastian Conrad and Jürgen Osterhammel, Das Kaiserreich transnational (Göttingen, 2004). 32 For a description of this process, see Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford, 1976).


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Translocality and Globalisation Our emphatic distinction between translocality and globalisation does not exclude, of course, that the two concepts cannot be tested for their connections. Like transnationalism, globalisation can be regarded as one form of translocality. A privileged site of investigation are translocal networks which form part of processes which can be squarely placed in the context of the economic and political processes commonly regarded as globalisation since the age of empire. Thus, networks of merchants or migratory movements inspired by imperial expansion fall squarely into an investigation of both translocality and globalisation.33 In the Muslim world, scholarly networks have become an important link between people living in different regions and continents. Sometimes, these networks served to strengthen the ties of diasporic communities across continental divides, as in the case of the South Yemeni Hadhramis or the Indian Ismailis.34 In other instances, translocal networks of learning or more formal institutions such as Sufi orders have established far-reaching connections.35 Nowadays, their cross-cutting role is often taken by the new movements described 33 See, for example, Ulrike Freitag, Indian Ocean Migrants and State Formation in Hadhramaut (Leiden, 2003); Ravi Ahuja, “Mobility and Containment: The Voyages of South Asian Seamen, c. 1900–1960,” International Review of Social History 51 (2007), 111–141; Ulrike Freitag, “Inter-Oceanic Migrations from an Indian Ocean Perspective,” in Connecting Seas and Connected Ocean Rims, eds. Marcel van der Linden, Dirk Hoerder, and Gisela Mettele (Leiden, forthcoming); Edward Simpson and Kai Kresse, eds., Struggling with History: Islam and Cosmopolitanism in the Western Indian Ocean (London, 2007). 34 Freitag, Indian Ocean Migrants; Engseng Ho, The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean (Berkeley, 2006); Christine Dobbin, Asian Entrepreneurial Minorities: Conjoint Communities in the Making of the World-Economy, 1570–1940 (Richmond, 1996); J.C. Penrad, “La présence isma’ilienne en Afrique de l’est: Note sur l’histoire commerciale et l’organisation communautaire,” in Marchands et hommes d’affaires asiatiques dans l’Océan Indien et la Mer de Chine 13e–20e siècles, eds. Denys Lombard and Jean Aubin (Paris, 1988), pp. 221–236. 35 For scholarly networks, cf. Michael F. Laffan, Islamic Nationhood and Colonial Indonesia (London, 2003); Ahmed Chanfi, “Entre Da’wa et Diplomatie: Al-Azhar et l’Afrique au Sud du Sahara d’après la revue Madjallat al-Azhar dans les années 1960 et 1970,” Islam et Sociétés au Sud du Sahara 14–15 (2000–2001), 57–80; for Sufi orders, e.g. Rex S. O’Fahey, Enigmatic Saint: Ahmad Ibn Idris and the Idrisi Tradition (London, 1990), for modern movements see Dietrich Reetz, “The ‘Faith Bureaucracy’ of the Tablighi Jama‘at: An Insight into their System of Self-Organisation (Intizam),” in Colonialism, Modernity, and Religious Identities: Religious Reform Movements in South Asia, ed. Gwilym Beckerlegge (Oxford, 2008), pp. 98–124; Marloes Janson, “Roaming about for God’s Sake: The Upsurge of the Tabligh Jama‘at in The Gambia,” Journal of Religion in Africa 35, 4 (2005), 450–481 and the contributions in Dietrich Reetz and

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by Dietrich Reetz in this volume which promote specific theological and/or ideological and political positions. While this phenomenon has led John Voll to assume the existence of a religiously and culturally based “Muslim world system”, Engseng Ho has, perhaps more convincingly, shown how a counter narrative of globality can emerge in such circles.36 The emergence of alternate globalities, i.e. of different types of globalising processes which are often competing with each other and, commonly, with ‘the West’, is the focus of the chapters in Section Four. It focusses on processes which either emanate from non-Western countries (Dietrich Reetz) or which demonstrate the interaction between non-Western and Western societies (Gudrun Lachenmann and Christoph Schumann). This can occur on a large scale, as in the case of the South Asian religious movements studied by Dietrich Reetz, however, it might also occur on the micro level. At the discursive level, some of the movements studied here can be described as ‘alternate’, in the sense of seeing themselves in opposition to western-led globalisation while adopting an increasingly global outreach of their own. Even where they promote notions which are discussed globally—as in the case of the concepts of gender described by Lachenmann—they need to be careful not to be associated too closely with the West in order not to lose their credibility in a world where ‘the West’ is often perceived as a cultural and political challenge or even threat.37 A key resource for present-day globalising actors of any denomination are new media of mass communication that are capable of operating across political and geographical boundaries. For most inhabitants of the world, globality is very much a mediated experience.38 Where in earlier times legal opinions were demanded over long distances only in cases of serious dispute, and obtained through the sending of letters which sometimes took months to arrive, websites such as the webportal Islam.Online.net, supported by the so-called global mufti Yusuf

Bettina Dennerlein, eds., South-South Linkages in Islam, special issue of Contemporary Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 27, 1 (2007). 36 John Voll, “Islam as a Special World System,” Journal of World History 5, 2 (1994), 213–226; Engseng Ho, “Empire through Diasporic Eyes: A View from the Other Boat,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 46 (2004), 210–246. 37 Cf. Henner Fürtig, Abgrenzung und Aneignung in der Globalisierung: Asien, Afrika und Europa seit dem 18. Jahrhundert. Ein Arbeitsbericht (Berlin, 2001). 38 See Ulf Hannerz, “Media and the World as a Single Place,” in idem, Foreign News (Chicago, 2004), pp. 15–38.


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al-Qaradawi, have turned the process into a matter of a few hours or days at most.39 In recent years the mobilising power of internationally operating media has been recognized.40 The mobilisation following Salman Rushdie’s publication of the Satanic Verses (1988) or the controversy about the publication of carricatures of the Muslim Prophet Muhammad in Denmark (2005–2006) provide only the most striking illustrations of how ‘alternate’ globalities can be mobilised and actualised.41 In most translocal cases, however, media play a far less dramatic, if not less formative role. Christoph Schumann’s chapter shows how, over the past few decades, the importance of such media—in his case study the Turkish press in Germany—has contributed to and accompanied the process of the transformation of temporary Turkish immigrants into Germany into a community distinct both from German and Turkish majority societies. Indeed, globalisation and new technologies of communication and transport have enabled groups such as the ‘Germano-Turks’ to act as brokers of knowledge in all directions— among themselves, with regard to the societies they inhabit and with the ones they originate from. Thus, the press as well as other translocal media such as radio, satellite television and most recently the internet are now a crucial factor in the generation and reproduction of shared identities and multiple claims for membership in an increasingly globalised world. Schumann’s chapter raises the question as to what extent they actually help to collapse boundaries of time/space, as well as of geo-political, national and territorial spaces. Do they create translocal spaces that represent a terrain of its own, with their own modes of inclusion and exclusion, and can we even begin to talk about 39 For the earlier practice, see Nico Kaptein, ed. and introd., The Muhimmât alNafâ’is: A Bilingual Meccan Fatwa Collection for Indonesian Muslims from the End of the Nineteenth Century (Jakarta, 1997), for the latter, Bettina Gräf, “IslamOnline.net: Independent, Interactive, Popular,” Arab Media and Society (January 2008), http:// www.arabmediasociety.com/?article=576 (accessed November 10, 2008). 40 Birgit Meyer and Annelies Moors, eds., Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere (Bloomington, 2006); Naomi Sakr, Satellite Realms: Transnational Television, Globalization and the Middle East (London, 2001) and idem, Arab Television Today (London, 2007). 41 See Anne Schönfeld, Islamdebatten in der deutschen Öffentlichkeit (unpubl. MA thesis, Freie Universität Berlin, 2008); Farish A. Noor and Sophie Lemiere, “Charting the New Jihadi-scape of Political Islam: The Pan-ASEAN Reaction to the ‘Muhammad Cartoon Controversy’ of 2005–2006 and its Mediatic Dimension,” Paper presented at “Translocality: An Approach to a Globalising Phenomen?” Tenth Anniversary Conference of Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO), Berlin, September 26–28, 2006.

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mediated identities as a distinct analytical category? Many Muslims, at any rate, have begun to place fresh emphasis on translocal connectivity and globalised concepts of belonging at different scales—from ethnicity and citizenship up to the umma—in their own discourses and politics.

The Contribution of Translocality to Global Social History As the preceding development of the concept of translocality has shown, we consider it to be a suitable tool to grapple with a variety of cross-territorial linkages and flows, as well as with the specific limitations to such connections. It thus contributes to a better understanding of a multitude of different processes which—in their overall addition—constitute a global web of layers of connectedness. Obviously, not all the different aspects of this process are relevant to social history in the more conventional sense. This impression changes, however, once the very foundations of social history are understood to be constituted by translocal processes. The above discussion of cities and migration is a case in point. Pina-Guerassimoff illustrates not only the link between local situations in China and France and Chinese women’s decision to migrate. By discussing working life in Paris through the lens of the Chinese immigrants, a social milieu as well as strategies for economic and social advancement in a precarious social situation become visible which more conventional social history might not even touch. The very fabric of cities not only in their socio-economic, but even their physical set-up is questioned by urban street camps and the ostentative foreignness of the Woodabe women in Burkina Faso investigated by Elisabeth Boesen. The investigation of such translocal practices needs to be the first stepping stone for an exploration aiming at identifying what has been called the “new proletariat”.42 It may not only be the lack of freedom to dispose of one’s labour, the absence of industrial employment, and the need to consider families and households as the primordial units of analysis, but also conditions of precariousness and informality which shape the experience of many involved in translocal migration. In addition, the questions relating to translocal identities and consciousness shaped by

42 Marcel van der Linden, Global Labour History: The IISH Approach (Amsterdam, 2002), http://www.iisg.nl/publications/globlab.pdf (accessed October 26, 2008), p. 7f. and idem, Workers of the World: Essays toward a Global Labor History (Leiden, 2008).


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media, so pertinently discussed by Christoph Schumann, also need to be considered when social actions are to be understood properly. Finally, global social history investigates transnational modes of labour control. However, of equal interest might be the translocal negotiation of international norms relevant to labour organisation. Lachenmann’s discussion of concepts of gender in translocal contexts not only contributes to this issue, but also raises important questions pertinent to other contexts where international norms are localised, namely to the respective and intricate processes of negotiation at all levels relevant for the generation, dissemination and application of such norms. Her contribution shows how only a close reading of interaction at a variety of levels explains the genesis and regional variations of such norms. The above are only some of the most pertinent contributions which a concept of translocality can make to global history. It demands attention to concrete processes and networks, rather than abstract local processes. We thus hope that this volume will contribute to the advancement of global social history, but also to a differentiation of developments commonly lumped together as ‘globalisation’.

Methodological Considerations for Research on Translocality While the above discussion argues for a privileging of the concept of translocality for research on processes of spatial connectedness, such an approach has, however, a number of important methodological preconditions. Many of these should have become visible in the above discussion and will be exemplified further in the following chapters. Still, they deserve more explicit mention. Without claim to comprehensiveness in what is and—we would argue—by its very nature must be an approach encompassing various disciplines and regional expertises, we wish to conclude this introduction by raising three specific types of reflexivity which seem to be needed for a translocality perspective. A first important methodological impulse in the field of history doubtlessly emanates from the already mentioned approach of Histoire Croisée.43 In many ways it follows what has been postulated in discussions 43

See note 4 and also Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, “Beyond Comparison: Histoire Croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity,” History and Theory 45 (2006), 30–50.

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of social and cultural anthropology, namely that research into crossborder processes has to reflect the plurality of perspectives related to the various locations, and should confront these with each other.44 This need for a multiperspectivity concerns, first of all, the perspectives of the sources and historical or contemporary actors—be they written or oral. To reflect the polysemy of the historical situation seems particularly relevant in historical contexts where actors come from widely differing semantic and symbolic contexts.45 Such contexts seem to be particularly numerous in the modern history of encounters between ‘Southern’ and ‘Northern’ actors. Consequently, in cases where the transfer of knowledge and the formation of concepts of reform are concerned, specific attention to semantics is necessary. Lachenmann’s discussion of the connotations attached to terms such as ‘feminism’ or ‘gender’ in different regional contexts serves to elucidate this point. Similarly, concepts such as ‘secular’, ‘modern’ or ‘reform’ require as careful a semantic context analysis as do sartorial codes, as is so aptly demonstrated by Margrit Pernau in her article. The need for reflexivity concerns, on a basic level, the categories used for analysis, which need to be reflected in their temporal and spatial boundedness.46 The ‘crossing’ of such bounded perspectives also requires close attention to the role, position and concepts of the observer. Marcus has pointed to the “circumstantial activism” which may result in the researcher’s involvement due to manifold transgressions of boundaries, the formation of a multitude of relations and the need for regular repositioning, all resulting from the requirements of multisited ethnography.47 The close cooperation with partners from ‘the field’, or, if possible, the joint conduct of research particularly reflected upon in Lachenmann’s contribution, adds to this need, but also helps to include this reflexivity in every step of the research process. A second central demand which has been alluded to a number of times in this introduction is again owed to the proponents of Histoire Croisée. It concerns the need for the systematic linking of different 44 Cf. James Clifford, ed., Routes: Travel & Translation in the Late 20th Century (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 299–347. 45 E.g. Ulrike Freitag, “Der Orientalist und der Mufti: Gelehrtenbeziehungen im Mekka des 19. Jahrhunderts,” Die Welt des Islams 43, 1 (2003), 37–60. 46 Philipp Sarasin, “Diskurstheorie und Geschichtswissenschaft,” in Handbuch Sozialwissenschaftliche Diskursanalyse, 1 (Opladen 2001), pp. 53–79. 47 Marcus, “Ethnography in/of the World-System.”


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scales, both at the level of observation and at that of analysis. This jeu d’échelles (Revel) also permits us to see ‘local’ and ‘global’ not as two differing poles but rather as the intersection of connections and horizons of action and perspective of very different reaches. A translocal perspective usually requires multi-sited fieldwork or, as Boesen has practised in her work with the Woodabe, mobile fieldwork. This not only influences the position of the researchers and has methodological implications for ‘participant observation’, but adds to the need for reflexivity on a variety of levels both on the part of the researcher and those observed by him.48 In general, the study of ‘shifting locations’ instead of ‘bounded fields’ requires a greater flexibility by the researcher and a greater openness for a variety of methods.49 This leads to a third level of reflexivity in translocal research, namely a more systematic reflection on the methods and concepts in the social sciences and humanities that have to be adapted across disciplinary boundaries. This need for a reflective interdisciplinarity most prominently concerns History, Anthropology, Human Geography and Economics. That multisitedness is not just a problem of anthropologists and sociologists, but concerns historians as well becomes clear once we approach Asian or African history. Once historians decide to give up their exclusive reliance on colonial archives and to ‘cross’ that perspective with local views, they find themselves often enough forced to embark on veritable fieldwork in the quest for local sources, which are not necessarily as neatly preserved in national archives as students of European history would expect. They thus need to ‘create’ their ‘archives’ through seeking access to private papers and recording oral history. In practice, this frequently leads to a rapprochement of the approaches used by historians and anthropologists.50 It might go without saying, and is illustrated by a number of contributions to this volume, most notably perhaps by those by Scheele, Heintze and Pina-Guerassimoff, that the concept of ‘network’ enjoys a particularly prominent position in the research on translocality. While 48 On multi-sited fieldwork and its implications see Clifford, Routes, pp. 52–91, Gupta and Ferguson, “Discipline and Practice” and David Parkin, “Fieldwork Unfolding,” in Anthropologists in a Wider World, eds. Paul Dresch, Wendy James and David Parkin (New York, 2000), pp. 259–273. 49 Gupta and Ferguson, “Discipline and Practice.” 50 Baz Lecoq, “Fieldwork ain’t always Fun: Public and Hidden Discourse on Fieldwork,” History in Africa—A Journal of Method 39 (2002), 272–283.

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strictly empirical and analytical network analysis based on quantitative data is often well nigh impossible as such data often simply cannot be obtained, a looser, qualitative and metaphorical approach to network analysis is highly valuable for the understanding and description of translocal connectedness. Usually, qualitative network analysis needs to be combined with a host of different methods and approaches to yield insights about the quality of relations across boundaries.51 In conclusion, it can be noted that ‘translocality’ provides a useful conceptual perspective for multi-range analysis which allows to bridge the gap between approaches in both anthropology and history that focus on either the ‘local’ or the ‘global’ or on an assumed polarity between the two. For the disciplines of history, political science and economy, most notably, this means that they have to widen their scope not merely geographically. They cannot simply write a kind of broadened history of expansion, a story of globalising markets and modernising societies and politics, but must question the linearity and limitation of established perspectives and thus of some basic tenets of their disciplines, both conceptually and methodologically. Today, as global phenomena and ‘globalisation’ dominate the agenda, ‘translocality’ redirects our attention to the fact that this is a much more complex and contradictory process than is often assumed. The dialectics of movement and institutionalisation, of transfer and rejection need to be given special attention, in order to avoid a simplistic and teleological account of ever-increasing ‘integration’. The debate on new types of border-drawing and distancing provides an important corrective to this trend.52 The global world consists of multiple spaces and connections. These partly overlap with, partly counteract each other.53 Such multiplicity and contradictions are to be found not only in the ‘North’, but perhaps even more in the ‘South’. Translocality

51

Roman Loimeier, Die islamische Welt als Netzwerk: Möglichkeiten und Grenzen des Netzwerkansatzes im islamischen Kontext (Würzburg, 2000), notably article by Cilja Harders, “Dimensionen des Netwerkansatzes: Einführende theoretische Überlegungen,” pp. 17–51. 52 See James Ferguson, “Of Mimicry and Membership: Africans and the ‘New World’ Society,” Cultural Anthropology 17, 4 (2002), 551–569 with his criticism of Charles Piot, Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa (Chicago, 1999). Cf. Ho, “Empire through Diasporic Eyes.” 53 Michael Mann, “Globalizations: An Introduction to the Spatial and Structural Networks of Globality,” (2000), www.sscnet.ucla.edu/03F/soc197h-1/Globalizations. htm (accessed October 8, 2008); Beck, “The Cosmopolitan Perspective.”


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encompasses a variety of truly multipolar processes, and the following chapters provide compelling evidence of this. To “provincialise Europe” (Chakrabarty) by taking Asia, the Middle East and Africa as their vantage points for global processes is both an initial concern and a result of these studies.

PART ONE

MARGINAL MOBILITIES

WODAABE WOMEN AND THE OUTSIDE WORLD Elisabeth Boesen Université du Luxembourg

Migration and Female Sedentarity Interest in female migration has grown steadily in the last few decades. Today we dispose of a significant number of studies on female immigration in Europe and North America and on the situation of mobile women in other parts of the world, e.g. West Africa.1 This profusion of studies has not, however, led to general recognition of the inherent gender aspect of migration processes. In 1984, Mirjana Morokvasic made the observation that “in spite of the growing evidence of women’s overwhelming participation in migratory movements” research on migration is still characterised by a male bias.2 Her findings twenty years later were almost identical, stating that “la féminisation des courants migratoires” is still presented as a novel phenomenon and the

1 See i.a. Aderanti Adepoju, “Patterns of Migration by Sex,” in Female and Male in West Africa, ed. Christine Oppong (London, 1983); Mirjana Morokvasic, “Women in Migration: Beyond the Reductionist Outlook,” in One Way Ticket: Migration and Female Labour, ed. Annie Phizacklea (London, 1983); Lynne Brydon, “Who Moves? Women and Migration in West Africa in the 1980s,” in Migrants, Workers, and the Social Order, ed. Jeremy Eades (London, 1987); Marta Tienda and Karen Booth, “Gender, Migration and Social Change,“ International Sociology 6 (1991), 51–72; Sylvia Chant and Sarah A. Radcliffe, “Migration and Development: The Importance of Gender,” in Gender and Migration in Developing Countries, ed. Sylvia Chant (London, 1992); Cindi Katz and Janice Monk, eds., Full Circles: Geographies of Women Over the Life Course (London, 1993); Gunilla Bjerén, “Gender and Reproduction,” in International Migration, Mobility and Development: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, eds. Tomas Hammar et al. (Oxford, 1987); Jacqueline Knörr and Barbara Meier, eds., Women and Migration: Anthropological Perspectives (Frankfurt a.M., 2000); Dennis Cordell and Victor Piché, “Un siècle de migration au Burkina: Inclusion ou exclusion,” in Être étranger et migrant en Afrique au XXe siècle: Enjeux identitaires et modes d’insertion, 2, Dynamiques migratoires, modalités d’insertion urbain et enjeux d’acteurs, ed. Cathérine Coquery-Vidrovitsch (Paris, 2003); Christine Catarino and Mirjana Morokvasic, “Femmes, genre, migration et mobilités,” Revue européenne des migrations internationales 21 (2005), 7–72. 2 Mirjana Morokvasic, “Birds of Passage are also Women,” International Migration Review (special issue: Women in Migration) 18 (1984), 899.

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category of ‘gender’ largely ignored in mainstream migrant research.3 It would be futile to join in this long-standing complaint and lament that female migrants have been utterly neglected or at best viewed as dependants. It seems more compelling to consider the persistent male bias in migration theory in the context of general post-modern cultural and social theory. The mobile protagonists presented as paradigmatic in this theoretical strand also bear conspicuously male traits. Even more so than in the conception of the migrant, these traits appear in the metaphors designed to inform us of the fundamentally mobile nature of post-modern man, for instance that of the ‘traveller’ by James Clifford.4 The author himself acknowledges that the notion of “travel” is gender-specific—and class-specific—in that it is strongly influenced by the old form of “gentlemanly occidental travel”, and that his endeavours to free the “term ‘travel’ from a history of European, literary, male, bourgeois, scientific, heroic, recreational meanings and practices” were never quite successful.5 Closely related to the ‘traveller’ is the figure of the ‘ethnographer’. It too is endowed with male characteristics. Both represent the romantic idea of the personal grandeur and accomplishment gained by travelling to far away places and, especially in the case of the ethnographer, by enduring physical hardship.6 Another ubiquitous figure is the ‘nomad’.7 In both instances, movement is presented as a process of appropriation; unlike the traveller and the ethnographer, however, the nomad does not take possession of the world through contemplation but by employing cunning and

3

Catarino and Morokvasic, “Femmes, genre,” p. 7f. James Clifford, “Traveling Cultures,” in Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, ed. idem (Cambridge, Mass., 1997). According to Janet Wolff, the metaphors of space and movement characterising post-modern theory are evidence of an “exclusionary move in the academy”; “. . . just as women accede to theory, (male) theorists take to the road . . . The already-gendered language of mobility marginalises women who want to participate in cultural criticism”; Janet Wolff, “On the Road Again: Metaphors of Travel in Culture Criticism,” Cultural studies 7 (1993), 234. 5 Clifford, “Traveling Cultures,” pp. 31, 33. 6 Cf. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, “Discipline and Practice: ‘The Field’ as Site, Method, and Location in Anthropology,” in Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science, eds. idem (Berkeley, 1997), p. 17. 7 Cf. Tim Cresswell, “Imagining the Nomad: Mobility and the Postmodern Primitive,” in Space and Social Theory: Interpreting Modernity and Postmodernity, eds. Georges Benko and Ulf Strohmayer (Oxford, 1997). 4

wodaabe women and the outside world

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tactics and even violence.8 Finally, yet another prominent and similarly male character should be mentioned here, the ‘flaneur’.9 The essay of Felicitas Edholm on a female flaneur, a young woman from the lower classes who lived in Paris a few decades after Baudelaire, the prototypical flaneur, is revealing in our context in as much as this woman’s capacity to ‘appropriate’ urban space is decidedly limited, giving her far more in common with the female migrants under review here than with Baudelaire. She cannot afford to stroll casually along the boulevards or let her eyes wander, since the risk of being abused, particularly in terms of sexual harassment, forces her to be constantly on the alert and to avoid certain places and the gazes of male passers-by.10 It seems remarkable that the occidental notion of travel and its association with ideas of male autonomy and self-realisation11 should have such an impact on current debates on mobility and on migrant research in particular. Are we to conclude from this that women have as yet been unable to free themselves from their genuine sedentarity? Although they have managed in many instances to overcome immediate physical restraints—ranging from seclusion to bodily mutilation12—one could gain the impression that they have failed to free themselves of their more fundamental bonds. Paradoxically, this impression is also produced by studies that focus on female migration. By concentrating primarily on the domestic consequences of migration, i.e., on the problem of linking reproductive and productive functions, plainly visible in the phenomenon of ‘transnational

8 Cf. Michel de Certeau, L’invention du quotidien, 1, Arts de faire (Paris, 1980); Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrenie (Paris, 1980). 9 See for example Zygmunt Baumann, “Vom Pilger zum Touristen,“ Das Argument 36 (1994), 389–408. 10 Felicity Edholm, “The View from Below: Paris in the 1880s,” in Landscape, Politics and Perspectives, ed. Barbara Bender (Oxford, 1994). 11 Cf. Eric J. Leed, Die Erfahrung der Ferne: Reisen von Gilgamesch bis zum Tourismus unserer Tage (Frankfurt a.M., 1991). 12 Think of the Chinese ‘lotus foot’ or the adiposity of Berber women—cultural predilections elaborated on the female body are not only supposed to underline the idle status of noble women but must also be seen as a sign of female immobility; see Shirley Ardener, “Ground Rules and Social Maps for Women: An Introduction,” in Women and Space: Ground Rules and Social Maps, ed. idem (New York, 1993), pp. 21f.

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motherhood’,13 these studies contribute “à enfermer les femmes migrantes dans le rôle de ‘mères nourricières’ ”.14 One of the key questions treated in studies on female migration is whether mobility has an emancipating effect. Is it true that women migrants gain more social and economic autonomy?15 Recent research has increasingly questioned the idea that women are first and foremost the passive companions or dependants of male migrants. The authors explicitly criticise the “victimization des femmes en migration”16 and the associated confinement to certain sectors of female migrant activities, i.e., caring or household chores.17 Even the classic victim role, such as that of the prostitute, involves female ‘agency’ according to the authors.18 This different mode of perception also implies that migration is no longer identified with a radical change between two lifestyles, e.g., rural versus urban life, and as inevitably involving a biographical break.19 Female migration and in particular female urban migration has undoubtedly increased in recent years but does not represent an altogether new phenomenon. One example of long-standing female economic migration in West Africa are the Jola of the Casamance, where the young women were among the pioneers of urban migration and

13 Cf., for instance, the contributions to ‘Global Women’, Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild, eds., Global Women: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy (New York, 2002). 14 Catarino and Morokvasic, “Femmes, genre,” p. 14. Male migrants who, like women, cannot divest themselves of their reproductive function also remain comparatively invisible in research, although it is these marginal or “small migrants” who, according to Alain Tarrius, constantly bring about new “territories of circulation”; Alain Tarrius, Les nouveaux cosmopolitismes: Mobilités, identités, territoires (Paris, 2000); cf. Schmoll on ‘cosmopolites de circonstance’; Camille Schmoll, “Cosmopolitisme au quotidien et circulations commerciales à Naples,” Cahiers de la Méditerranée 67 (2003), 345–360; idem, “Pratiques spatiales transnationales et stratégies de mobilité des commerçantes tunisiennes,” Revue européenne des migrations internationales 21 (2005), 131–154; but see also Hily and Rinaudo on the relation between ethnicity and cosmopolitanism; Marie-Antoinette Hily and Christian Rinaudo, “Cosmopolitisme et altérité: Les nouveaux migrants dans l’économie informelle,” Tsantsa 8 (2003), 48–57. 15 Cf. Tienda and Booth, “Gender, Migration.” 16 Catarino and Morokvasic, “Femmes, genre,” p. 16. 17 See, for instance, Ehrenreich and Hochschild, eds., Global Women. 18 See, for instance, Pittin on Hausa women in Katsina, Nigeria; Renée Pittin, “Migration of Women in Nigeria: The Hausa Case,” International Migration Review (special issue: Women in Migration) 18 (1984), 1293–1314. 19 For a critique of this idea see Mirjam de Bruijn, Rijk van Dijk and Dick Foeken, Mobile Africa: Changing Patterns of Movement in Africa and Beyond (Leiden, 2001).


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successfully defended their new mobility against the various attempts at its restriction.20 Traditional forms of female movement, such as the namadé system of the Malian Bambara, where young girls are allowed to provide for their dowry by engaging in mobile seasonal agricultural work21 have been ignored to a large extent in migrant research up to now. The fact that female migration has hitherto received scant attention is perhaps related to the notion of specific female migration motives, for example the desire for an appropriate dowry. The social and economic relevance of these motives was considered secondary to the responsibilities of the male breadwinner. Although we know that male migrant remittances are often negligible22 and that, on the other hand, more and more female migrants provide for their families back home, ‘female-specific migration’ is primarily identified with personal, familial or even mental problems—sexual repression being regarded as a personal motive—whereas male mobility is seen as related to ‘external factors’, i.e., to economic and political circumstances. Another form of female mobility should be mentioned in this context, namely the move from the parents’ to the husband’s house, which in many instances entails considerable spatial mobility. Women appear here as passive wanderers, as objects of exchange, while in reality marriage is frequently a conscious act of migration. The Muslim Hausa women of Northern Nigeria are a case in point. With their choices of marriage partners, these women bring about a move to the city. This induced Renée Pittin to refer to them as “permanent migrants” despite the fact that most of the women in question live in seclusion.23

20 Cf. Alica Hamer, ”Diola Women and Migration: a Case Study,” in The Uprooted of the Western Sahel: Migrants Quest for Cash in the Senegambia, eds. Lucie Gallistel Colvin et al. (New York, 1981); Michael C. Lambert, Longing for Exile: Migration and the Making of a Translocal Community in Senegal, West Africa (Portsmouth, 2002). It is not rare for women to form the vanguard of a more general migratory wave; cf. Schmoll, “Pratiques spatiales,” see also Schiffauer on Turkish immigrants to Germany; Werner Schiffauer, Die Migranten aus Subay: Türken in Deutschland: Eine Ethnographie (Stuttgart, 1991), p. 201; the reasons for this are frequently associated with the visa regulations of the receiving countries. 21 Cf. Arjan DeHaan, Karen Brock and Ngolo Coulibaly, “Migration, Livelihoods and Institutions: Contrasting Patterns of Migration in Mali,” in Labour Mobility and Rural Society, eds. Arjan De Haan and Ben Rogaly, Development Studies 38 (London, 2002). 22 Cf. David A. Cleveland, “Migration in West Africa: A Savanna Village Perspective,” Africa 61 (1991), 222–246; Hans Peter Hahn, “Zirkuläre Arbeitsmigration in Westafrika und die ‚Kultur der Migration‘,” Afrika Spectrum 39 (2004), 381–404. 23 Pittin, “Migration,” p. 1298. Cf. Cooper’s characterisation of Hausa women as “perennial migrants”; Barbara Cooper, “Gender, Movement, and History: Social and

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Another example that stems from a society influenced by Islam, where women play an extremely active part in marriage arrangements and the spatial mobility that goes with them, are the Fulbe-Wodaabe from Niger, who will be examined more closely in the following pages. Suffice it to say for the moment that the Wodaabe practise two distinct, even contradictory forms of marriage. The first marriage of a woman is always an endogamous union (koobgal) arranged by the parents, where the marriage partners themselves have no say in its establishment. This type of marriage is characterised by a high degree of immobility in so far as the woman as well as her heritage, that is, her cattle, are prevented from leaving the patrilineage. Parallel to this the Wodaabe practice a customary form of second or further marriage, the so-called teegal, which, contrary to the first type, must be exogamous, i.e., it is only legitimate when the partners belong to different maximal lineages. This marriage variant endows the woman with a more active and more mobile role. Although she is considered as being taken by another man (o tee’aama), the marriage itself being associated with theft (guyka debbo), in actual fact the woman often leaves her husband and her group by fleeing to another man, another lineage (o dillii)—without, however, ultimately dissolving the bond with her first husband (koowaado). The woman’s flight and re-marriage often entails long spatial separation from her family and group of origin, which finds expression in the designation debbo ladde, ‘woman of the bush’, used to characterise these runaway women, who themselves describe running away from their lineage as “going into the bush”. The example of Wodaabe marriages shows that female mobility is, on the one hand, constitutive of social relations. By creating exogamous unions, runaway women are an important factor of social cohesion on the level of the Wodaabe society as a whole. On the other hand, their movement must also be regarded as profoundly anti-social; they simply leave their husbands and children and go ‘into the bush’. This ambivalence is also mirrored in migrant research findings. Women are presented as more sedentary, their ties to the community of origin in the case of migration are more solid, and, as regards remittances, are considered more reliable.24 At the same time, it has been established

Spatial Transformations in 20th Century Maradi, Niger,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 15 (1997), 195–221. 24 Cf. Morokvasic, “Birds of Passage,” p. 896.


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that women are more prepared to undertake definitive migration, i.e., to settle in a new place25—a fact that some authors in turn interpret as proof of the genuine sedentarity of women, who, contrary to men, do not invest in translocal networks but are eager to settle down in the given place.26 In other cases, such as the one under review, we are confronted with female migrants who have no desire to settle, or, more precisely, with women who settle down in mobility, as it were.27 They lead their lives between their families in the region of origin and their various migrant places. These women develop “un goût de voyage”, as Schmoll formulates with a view to female Moroccan merchants; they cannot endure staying at home for long but need to set out again on their commercial journeys.28 It follows from what has been said that generalisations about female migration should be viewed with caution. First of all, however, it has become quite clear that women are not immobile by nature. The migrations of Wodaabe women, to which I will now turn, represent an extreme case in some respects, but are nonetheless highly suited to challenging the idea of female immobility. My contribution is based on fieldwork in various Nigerien Wodaabe groups or lineages. Apart from several stays in Central Niger (especially in the regions of North Dakoro and Abalak) my investigation included travelling with female migrants and brief research visits to several urban migrant localities (Bamako, Dakar, Freetown). Accordingly, my method entailed ‘following the people’.29 Whether it can be considered ‘multi-sited fieldwork’ and, if so, in what sense is debatable. The object of my research was neither a village nor a region but an ethno-cultural group, the Wodaabe, who are genuinely mobile. The changes of place modified

25 See Ludwar-Ene on the mobility of Nigerian women; Gudrun Ludwar-Ene, “Sind Frauen urbaner als Männer? Eine These zum Urbanisierungsprozeß im subsaharischen Afrika,” in Ethnologische Stadtforschung: Eine Einführung, eds. Waltraud Kokot and Bettina C. Bommer (Berlin, 1991). Hellermann presents a more distinctive approach in her study on female immigrants in Portugal; the attitudes and aspirations of these women are highly dependent on their economic obligations vis-à-vis their families back home; Christiane Hellermann, “Gendered Margins: Immigrant Women in Portugal,” Ethnologia europaea 34 (2004), 17–28. 26 Catarino and Morokvasic, “Femmes, genre,” p. 12f. 27 “Des femmes qui migrent pour ne pas partir”, as Catarino and Morokvasic put it; Catarino and Morokvasic, “Femmes, genre,” p. 11. 28 Schmoll, “Pratiques spatiales,” p. 138. 29 George E. Marcus, “Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography,” Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995), p. 106.

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this object as new facets became visible, but they did not bring forth a new object. In view of the specific commercial activities of Wodaabe migrants, such an emerging object might have been ‘transnational medicines’, in other words the mobility of a limited group of medicine sellers could well have been the starting point for a study on global systems of medical ideas and practices. However, the Wodaabe and their forms of mobility were to remain the centre of my research endeavour. Another trait of the ‘traveller’, which makes this figure an inadequate metaphor for certain mobility phenomena, is the fact that he appears as an individual, or even, in a sense, epitomises the process of individuation. As we will see in the following, Wodaabe migrants, and perhaps female migrants in particular, are, in a specific sense, ‘alone’. Although travel is realised collectively, it is an overtly particularistic endeavour which implies a certain degree of rivalry and secrecy among the migrants and contrasts with the communal ethos of the pastoral lineage. At the same time the individual migrant is part of a phenomenon which is essentially collective. The ‘exodus’ of Wodaabe women at the end of the rainy season, the sight of huge migration groups camping in car terminals and of long-distance buses brimming over with Wodaabe are all unmistakable manifestations of the communal and ethnic dimensions of these migrations. The following description of female migrants and their mobility practice will treat the tension between the community and the tendency for individual autonomy or even isolation—one could also say, between asabiya (Ibn Khaldun) and ‘the freedom of the migrant’.30 As will become clear, this tension is at the base of a certain mode of foreignness (Fremdheit), i.e. of resistance against the identificatory power of place. Following a short description of Wodaabe women’s seasonal migration, its historical context and socio-economic impact, the contribution treats the savoir circuler and the specific sociability of these women. The concluding remarks will be on the relation between social embeddedness and autonomy which emerges in these female mobility processes.

30 Villem Flusser, Von der Freiheit des Migranten: Einsprüche gegen den Nationalsozialismus (Cologne, 1994).


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Intermittent Cosmopolitans The Wodaabe (sing.: Bodaado) belong to the Fulbe people scattered throughout West Africa, extending across the continent to the eastern parts of the Republic of Sudan. They represent a relatively small group compared to the Fulbe as a whole, numbering hardly more than a hundred thousand of a total population estimated at between nine and seventeen million.31 Most of the Wodaabe live in the Republic of Niger; smaller groups are found in northern Cameroon and Nigeria. As the ‘pure’ nomads among the Fulbe, the Wodaabe enjoy a unique status in Fulbe ethnography; at the beginning of the 1950s they became the subject of the first field research on the Fulbe.32 Their marked mobility, however, is quite a recent phenomenon. It emerged as a result of the jihad that afflicted the area of present-day Northern Nigeria and Northern Cameroon in the nineteenth century and of the colonial ‘pacification’ of the region.33 Mobility has since become a key element of Wodaabe identity and has remained so despite the devastating droughts of the 1970s and 1980s. Impoverished as a result of these droughts, herd owners began to develop new forms of mobility rather than turn to agricultural activities; alongside their pastoral nomadism, many of them—and especially Wodaabe women—undertake seasonal trade journeys to urban centres such as Dakar or Abidjan. These modern migrations have rarely been the subject of ethnographic research up to now, although occasional hints at new mobile forms of economic diversification and crisis management can be found.34 Neither has general migration research taken note of the new forms of mobility developed by African pastoralists.35 This is even more 31 Victor Azarya, “The Nomadic Factor in Africa: Dominance or Marginality,” in Nomads in the Sedentary World, eds. Anatoly M. Khazanov and André Wink (Richmond, 2001), p. 263. 32 See Marguerite Dupire, Peuls nomads: Etude descriptive des Wodaabe du Sahel nigérien (Paris, 1962) and Derrick Stenning, Savannah Nomads (London, 1959). 33 Cf. Bonfiglioli’s study on the migrant history of a Wodaabe family; Angelo Bonfiglioli, Dudal: Histoire de famille et histoire de troupeau chez un groupe de Wodaabe du Niger (Oxford, 1988). On the Fulbe population of Central Niger in general see Elisabeth Boesen, “Identität und Pluralität: Die Fulbe in Zentralniger,” Paideuma 50 (2004), 101–126. 34 Cf. Cynthia White, “The Effect of Poverty on Risk Reduction Strategies of the Fulani Nomads in Niger,” Nomadic Peoples n.s. 1 (1997); Kristin Loftsdóttir, “Knowing What to Do in the City,” Anthropology Today 18 (2002), 9–13. 35 On labour migration among Fulbe societies from Burkina Faso see Kate Hampshire and Sara Randall, “Seasonal Labour Migration Strategies in the Sahel: Coping

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true with regard to female migrants.36 The social and economic situation of Wodaabe women has on the whole received little academic attention,37 an astonishing fact considering their complicated marriage practices, which allow women to have two legitimate husbands at one and the same time.38 All in all, we must conclude that not only have nomadic women been more or less invisible where relations with the ‘outside world’ are concerned—there is no mention of female involvement in trade activities, for instance, in Khazanov’s classic work—but they have also been unduly ignored in studies on internal relations.39

with Poverty or Optimising Security,” International Journal of Population Geography 5 (1999), 367–385; Kate Hampshire, “Fulani on the Move: Seasonal Economic Migration in the Sahel as a Social Process,” Journal of Development Studies 38 (2002), 15–36 and Werner Heuler-Neuhaus, “Mit den Frauen verliert auch die dörfliche Gemeinschaft die Initiative: Gesellschaftliche und ökologische Auswirkungen von Emigration in der Provinz Yatenga (Burkina Faso),” in Wandern oder bleiben? Veränderung der Lebenssituation von Frauen im Sahel durch die Arbeitsmigration der Männer, ed. Elke Grawert (Münster, 1994). On the significance of wage labour among East African pastoralists see Louise Sperling and John G. Galaty, “Cattle, Culture, and Economy: Dynamics in East Africa,” in The World of Pastoralism: Herding Systems in Comparative Perspective, eds. John G. Galaty and Douglas L. Johnson (New York, 1990); on Tuareg migrations see Georg Klute, “Flucht, Karawane, Razzia: Formen der Arbeitsmigration bei den Tuareg,” in Systematische Völkerkunde: Völkerkundetagung 1991, eds. Matthias S. Laubscher and Bertram Turner (München, 1994); on urban-based pastoralism in East Africa cf. also Mohamed A. Mohamed-Salih, “Pastoralist Migration to Small Towns,” in The Migration Experience in Africa, eds. Jonathan Baker and Tade Akin Aina (Stockholm, 1995) and Anders Hjort af Arnäs, “Town-Based Pastoralism in Eastern Africa,” in Small Town Africa: Studies in Rural—Urban Interaction, ed. Jonathan Baker (Uppsala, 1990). 36 For an exception to the rule, see Schultz on Turkana women; Ulrike Schultz, Nomadenfrauen in der Stadt: Die Überlebensökonomie der Turkanafrauen (Berlin, 1996); idem, “‘One Day We Will Return Home’: Turkana Women Migration and Remigration,” in Women and Migration: Anthropological Perspectives, eds. Jacqueline Knörr and Barbara Meier (Frankfurt a.M., 2000). 37 See however Dupire’s early article on Wodaabe women; Marguerite Dupire, “Situation de la femme dans une société pastorale (Peul WoDaaBe, nomade du Niger),” in Femmes d’Afrique Noire, ed. Denise Paulme (Paris, 1960). 38 Cf. Dupire, “Situation de la femme”; idem, Peuls nomades, pp. 247ff.; see also Stenning, who suggested the term “cicisbean marriage” for the second type of marriage; idem, Savannah Nomads, p. 140ff. 39 On the economic situation of Fulbe women in Burkina Faso see Mirjam de Bruijn, “Nobility and Survival: Coping with Insecurity of Pastoral Fulbe Women, Central Mali,” Unpubl. paper presented at the meeting of the “International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences” (Lucca 1995); idem, “The Hearthhold in Pastoral Fulbe Society, Central Mali: Social Relations, Milk, and Drought,” Africa 67 (1997), 625–651; Solveig Buhl and Katherine Homewood, “Milk Selling Among Fulani Women in Northern Burkina Faso,” in Rethinking Pastoralism in Africa: Gender, Culture, and the Myth of the Patriarchal Pastoralist, ed. Dorothy L. Hodgson (Oxford, 2001); Solveig Buhl, “Gender Equality? No! What Fulbe Women Really Want,” in


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What we do find are some scattered hints at the mobile activities of women in other Fulbe groups, e.g., the repairing of calabash-recipients,40 an activity that is pursued by Fulbe and especially Wodaabe women in Central Niger as well41 and should be regarded as the starting point of their itinerant commerce. That the city of Niamey has become the seasonal residence of the female members of certain Fulbe groups from the south-western parts of Niger should also be mentioned in this context. Together with their small children they make an effort to earn a living in town as beggars. This sparse information indicates that in the context of crisis and migration Fulbe women tend to engage in non-productive activities, and in this sense preserve an attitude that originated when Fulbe pastoralists were relieved of manual labour by members of dependent groups. Up to a point this attitude is independent of concrete material relations of dependency, in other words, it does not necessarily become obsolete in situations of crisis as they have been provoked by the Sahel droughts.42 The status relations in question are shaped i.a. by the geographic/ ecological conditions of the region, i.e., by what Gallais called the condition sahelienne43 which is at the base of the highly opportunistic territorial behaviour of the different Sahel populations.44 This behaviour includes mobile trade activities as well as diverse and reciprocal itinerant services. The sphere of these services has hardly been studied up to now, which partly explains that the category of ‘peripatetics’ is rather narrowly defined, and more or less identified with caste-like client

Rural Resources and Local Livelihoods in Africa, ed. Katherine Homewood (New York, 2005). On ‘the myth of the patriarchal pastoralist’ see Dorothy L. Hodgson, “Gender, Culture and the Myth of the Patriarchal Pastoralist,” in Rethinking Pastoralism in Africa, ed. idem (Oxford, 2000). 40 See de Bruijn, “Nobility and Survival ” on the Fulbe of the Hayre, Mali. 41 Cf. Loftsdóttir, “Knowing What to Do.” 42 See de Bruijn, “Nobility and Survival” on crisis strategies of Fulbe women in the Hayre, who at best accept begging; see also Lohnert on Kunta women, whose noble status implies that begging is the only activity they can turn to once they have become impoverished as a result of drought; Beate Lohnert, “Städtische Marginalität und Sozialpolitik: Die Lebenswelt von Dürreflüchtlingen im Sahel. Beispiele aus Mopti/Mali,” in Staat und Gesellschaft in Afrika, ed. Peter Meyns (Münster, 1996). 43 Jean Gallais, Pasteurs et paysans du Gourma: La condition sahelienne (Paris, 1975). 44 Cf. Mirjam de Bruijn, Han van Dijk and Rijk van Dijk, “Cultures of Travel: Fulbe Pastoralists in Central Mali and Pentecoastalism in Ghana,” in Mobile Africa: Changing Patterns of Movement in Africa and Beyond, eds. Mirjam de Bruijn, Rijk van Dijk and Dick Foeken (Leiden, 2001).

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groups in the West African context.45 Inter-ethnic exchange relations in the West African Sahel and the associated territorial practices of the different groups suggest, however, that the concept of peripatetics should be delineated more broadly and the rigid differentiation between farming, pastoral and peripatetic groups discarded.46 The case under review is illuminating in this regard in that the Wodaabe must be considered a paragon of the proud, independent pastoral nomad, but are at the same time engaged in peripatetic activities. Other examples which call for a rethinking of the concept of the peripatetic are the post-modern nomads that have increasingly become the focus of migration studies, like for instance Polish charwomen in Berlin47 or Romanian maids in Portugal.48 Translocal Medicine Sellers The Wodaabe are also deserving of attention in so far as they have developed forms of mobility that can be rightly regarded as extreme. Although this is true for both their modern and their pastoral migrations, I will limit my remarks to the former. The demographic dimensions of their urban migrations, the spatial distances covered, and not least the fact that migrants are mostly women and that elderly women were the pioneers make the case unique. The economic specialisation of Wodaabe migrants is also remarkable. While continuing to offer the classic services such as calabash repairs and hair-braiding, the Wodaabe are on the move today primarily as traders, concentrating on one particular commodity, namely traditional medicines and charms, which are designated by the Hausa term maagani.49 This commerce

45 See Michael Bollig, “Ethnic Relations and Spatial Mobility in Africa: A Review of the Peripatetic Niche,” in The Other Nomads: Peripatetic Minorities in Cross-Cultural Perspective, ed. Aparna Rao, Kölner ethnologische Mitteilungen 8 (Cologne, 1987); idem, “The Metamorphosis of Peripatetic Peoples in Africa,” in Customary Strangers: New Perspectives on Peripatetic Peoples in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, eds. Joseph C. Berland and Aparna Rao (London, 2004). 46 For a standard definition of ‘peripatetic people’ see Aparna Rao, “Des nomades méconnus: Pour une typologie des communautés péripatétiques,” L’homme 95 (1985), 97–120; idem, “The Concept of Peripatetics: An Introduction,” in The Other Nomads: Peripatetic Minorities in Cross-Cultural Perspective, ed. idem (Cologne, 1987). 47 Malgorzata Irek, Der Schmugglerzug: Warschau—Berlin—Warschau: Materialien einer Feldforschung (Berlin, 1998). 48 Hellermann, “Gendered Margins.” 49 Migrants also use the respective local Fulfulde terms, e.g., saafaare or lekki.


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and the travels that go with it are called tigu, a term meaning ‘trade’ and ‘peddling’ in other Fulbe communities as well.50 Similar to the other activities mentioned above, this trade originally led Wodaabe women to neighbouring regions, i.e., to Hausa villages and towns in the border zone of Niger and Nigeria. The migrations lasted merely a few weeks, with trade carried out essentially in the form of direct exchange and the women’s remuneration consisting principally of small amounts of millet. As early as the beginning of the 1960s, some Wodaabe women started travelling to the big coastal cities. The Sahel droughts of the 1970s and 1980s finally turned the long-distance itinerant maagani trade into a mass phenomenon. Ever since, men and young women have also engaged in these activities. What is more, almost all Wodaabe lineages from Central Niger have now been pulled into this kind of mobile activity. The example of one group (the Taanira’en Isaw of the Kasawsaawa lineage), where women and men have been active maagani sellers for several decades, may give an impression of the economic and social significance of these migrations. Over fifty percent of the adults in more than one hundred households interviewed had regularly undertaken tigu journeys of several months in the previous five years. Although it is evident that migration involves the entire Wodaabe community of Central Niger, general statements on the economic situation of the migrants, their average income and the effects of migration on the economic development of the household are almost impossible to make. In our context it is important to underline that female trade journeys cannot be regarded as part of a strictly organised ‘household economy’.51 On the whole, women manage their journeys and activities independent of their husbands. The latter do not normally object to their wives’ travelling and would in fact be unable to prevent them. One factor that hampers women’s mobility is their concern for the well-being of their children.

50 Cf. Christiane Seydou, Dictionaire pluridialectale des racines verbales du peul (Paris, 1998), p. 711. 51 Compare Chant and Radcliffe, “Migration and Development” on the ‘household strategies approach’ as the most appropriate model for research on ‘gender selective mobility’; see also de Haan, Brock and Coulibaly, “Migration”. For a feminist critique of the ‘livelihood strategy’ approach see Rebecca Elmhirst, “Daughters and Displacement: Migration Dynamics in an Indonesian Transmigrant Area,” The Journal of Development Studies 38 (2002), 143–166.

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Niger

Mali Senegal

Dakar

Tahoue

Niamey

Bamako

Freetown Sierra Leone Liberia

Dakoro

Benin Ivory Coast

Ghana

Nigeria

Cameroun

Map 1. Travel Destinations of Wodabee maagani-Vendors (Cartography: Elisabeth Boesen)


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While babies accompany their mothers on the journeys, young children remain in the custody of an older sister, a grandmother or an aunt. They may also stay with the mother’s co-wife. In many polygynous households wives travel in shifts, taking care of the children and the household in rotation. Not infrequently, however, the husband is charged with these tasks. Hence, in the Wodaabe case, men not only tolerate female migration but occasionally support it actively. Many of the elderly Wodaabe recount that their fathers performed the household chores during their childhood while their mothers were away. Another means of supporting their wives is to supply the necessary seed capital for their journey. The women in turn have social obligations and are more or less exposed to the demands of their husbands and other family members. Successful female traders pay for staple food (i.e., millet) and provide their families, relatives and neighbours with clothes and other desired goods. Nonetheless, they are free to dispose of their income as they see fit and can invest, for instance, in their own household equipment52 and the dowry of their daughters. The money can also be used to buy cattle and build up a herd of their own. Hence these trading journeys offer Wodaabe women the prospect of acquiring economic independence from their husbands. It should be stressed, however, that the circumstances of the women and their motivation to travel vary widely. In one case regular travels might be crucial to the subsistence of the household, in another a woman may see her income primarily as a—possibly temporary—subsidisation of animal husbandry, while in a third her wish to travel could be motivated by individual consumer desires. The example of two women from the same camp is revealing in this respect. One, the mother of eight children, travels to Northern Nigeria (Sokoto) several times a year, whereas the other has no children and undertakes one long journey during the dry season, preferably to Accra. In a discussion between these two women about the advantages and disadvantages of the itinerant maagani trade, the former declared milk-selling—an insignificant business among most of the Wodaabe groups in Central Niger—to be a respectable activity she would be very glad to practice instead of having to sell maagani, which she described as mere deceit (Fulfulde: fewre). The other woman claimed it would be embarrassing

52 See Elisabeth Boesen, “Gleaming Like the Sun: Aesthetic Values in Wodaabe Material Culture,” Africa 18 (2008), 582–602.

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if other Wodaabe saw her carrying a milk calabash to the nearby markets, whereas a woman trading in faraway cities could not be seen. The profits migrant women make are as variable as their motives. In the eyes of the Wodaabe income is more dependent on the cleverness and energy of the traders than on the quality of their products. Luck also plays a role but is itself subject to the effects of maagani, the substances and forces each seller employs to his own advantage. Among the members of a tigu group I met in Dakar in 2004 individual gains from two months’ work varied between 100 000 francs CFA (ca. €150) and 750 000 francs CFA. In the latter case the person concerned was a woman but certain male traders are also reputed for their trading skills which allowed them to build up big herds of cattle. Nevertheless, the itinerant trade certainly awards far greater social recognition to women than to men. As we have already seen, the motives of women to undertake a trade journey vary a great deal; a woman can be driven by sheer need or the desire for luxury goods. In both cases her motivation is regarded as legitimate. A woman’s honour is not affected when she travels to the cities in order to be able to feed her children—the grandmothers and great-grandmothers of today’s migrants did the same. The same holds true for journeys inspired by the desire for certain goods. In marked contrast, the journeys of male Wodaabe, especially of elderly men, who are struggling to maintain their families by selling maagani, amount to an admission of failure. If, on the other hand, men consider their journeys as a form of pastime or are inspired by consumer desires, they are seen as neglecting their domestic tasks, especially the care for the well-being of the cattle. Contrary to what one would expect, the mobile activities of a trader are more compatible with the role of the mother and housewife than with the position of the household head. This discrepancy is of a more general nature and evident in status relations as well; different from women, men experience the joint migration travel, and above all the spatial proximity of younger men, as humiliating and inconsistent with their social status. Hence for men in particular, the mobile maagani trade is an ambivalent activity. This explains in part why it is still considered a female activity, although there is only one lineage in which maagani-selling has remained an exclusively female occupation. In general, this type of commerce and the associated divination and healing practices do not constitute a female domain in West Africa. In Dakar, for example, male Hausa traders from Niger and Nigeria offer products and serv-


41

ices similar to those of the Wodaabe.53 In the case of the latter, however, these can be characterised as the female domain, based on female skills and relations. The medical and magic knowledge of Wodaabe women is related to specific sectors,54 first and foremost infant illnesses and sufferings. Wodaabe women are known to possess remedies for teething troubles or retarded walking, as well as talismans that protect children from the effects of envy. This knowledge opened up a lucrative trading sector to early migrants and is still in demand today. Although migrants now sell all kinds of remedies, their reputation is based on this sphere and some of the elder female traders still restrict themselves largely to it. Wodaabe are also said to dispose of special knowledge in matters of love, a reputation due in part to their notorious theft marriages, but also to the fact that Wodaabe men allow their wives to go on long journeys to distant places in all tranquility—a scandal according to the standards of neighbouring groups. As mentioned earlier, the female pioneers of the early period were followed since the 1970s by a growing number of male migrants, who have also been inspired by medicine sellers and healers from other groups. Many of the early male migrants encountered in the foreign places Hausa healers (Hausa: boka) who subsequently became their mentors. The latter not only taught them practical skills, e.g., divination techniques, but also introduced them to their social networks, even sharing clients with them. The range of products and services provided by Wodaabe maagani traders increased and today ranges from simple remedies for constipation to divination and spirit exorcism. Although women and men by and large offer the same products and practices today, the contrasting processes of “initiation” into this domain lead to the expectation that their commercial habits and relations to clients and other urban inhabitants might reveal interesting differences as well.

53 On Hausa medicines see Allan C. Darrah, A Hermeneutic Approach to Hausa Therapeutics: The Allegory of the Living Fire (PhD thesis, Northwestern University, Ann Arbor, 1980). Cf. Gemmeke on female Senegalese healers; Amber Gemmeke, “The Map of Magic: Migrating Marabouts in Dakar,” in Les nouveaux urbains dans l’espace Sahara-Sahel: Un cosmopolitisme par le bas, eds. Elisabeth Boesen and Laurence Marfaing (Paris, 2007). See also Knut Graw, “Ritual Praxis as Access to the World: Migration, Globalization, and the Mediation of Prospect in Senegambian Divinatory Praxis,” unpubl. paper presented at ZMO, Berlin, May 2006. 54 Marguerite Dupire, “Pharmacopée Peule du Niger et du Cameroun,” Bulletin de l’IFAN 19 (1957), 382–417.

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Circulatory Knowledge Extensive trade journeys have become part of Wodaabe tradition (tawaangal Wodaabe) and maagani sellers now dispose of knowledge related to these journeys, which has been handed down to them by their parents and grandparents. They know the travel routes, speak several West African languages to a certain extent (mainly Hausa, Dioula and Wolof ), are more or less acquainted with the topography, including the social topography, of various urban centres as well as with the practical and legal conditions of travel, such as international border controls, customs regulations, and exchange rates. In fact, there is no compulsion for each individual traveller to master this knowledge, since, unlike other commercial migrants, Wodaabe normally form large travel groups of twenty or more people (Fulfulde: laawngol), who live in close proximity throughout the journey. Each group is guided by a mawdo, a head or leader, who can either be a woman or a man. The latter not only possesses the knowledge referred to but is also skilled in social intercourse, particularly with strangers. As spokesman or spokeswoman of the group, this person is its representative in relations with the outside world, for instance, with the jatigi, the urban ‘host’ or ‘intermediary’ of the travellers.55 Vital aspects of Wodaabe urban migrations are similar to those of their pastoral movements.56 In both cases they move as a collective under the guidance of a mawdo, who represents the group in certain respects without having decision-making power; travel routes and stops are decided on collectively and on an almost daily basis. Similar to the pastoral group, the migration group normally consists of close relatives. It will become clear however, that there are significant differences between female and male migrants in relation to the forms and foundations of such ephemeral communities.

55 Concerning the function of the jatigi see e.g. Jean Schmitz, “Des migrants aux « notables» urbains: Les communautés transnationales des gens du fleuve Sénégal (Sénégal/Mali/Mauritanie),” in Les nouveaux urbains dans l’espace Sahara-Sahel: Un cosmopolitisme par le bas, eds. Elisabeth Boesen and Laurence Marfaing (Paris, 2007); Mirjam de Bruijn, E.A. van Wouter and Han van Dijk, “Antagonisme et solidarité: Les relations entre Peuls et Dogons du Mali Central,” in Peuls et Mandingues: Dialectiques des constructions identitaires, eds. Mirjam de Bruijn and Han van Dijk (Paris, 1997). 56 See Elisabeth Boesen, “Pastoral Nomadism and Urban Migration: Mobility Among the Fulbe-Wodaabe from Central Niger,” in Cultures of Migration: African Perspectives, eds. Hans Peter Hahn and Georg Klute (Hamburg, 2007).


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It goes without saying that there are both advantages and disadvantages to collective travelling. Travelling in a group gives a sense of protection and safety in a foreign country. On the other hand, moving around unnoticed and dissimulating is impossible in a group of twenty people.57 Itinerant maagani trade and the accompanying status of stranger is not without its dangers. Apart from the usual perils of the cities, such as theft, this occupation entails specific risks. The products offered could turn out to be inefficient or even noxious, so that the foreign trader becomes a source of evil in the eyes of the locals. Many maagani traders describe situations where they were confronted with anger and even collective rage. The outbursts of mass hysteria provoked by the so-called ‘penis-shrinkers’ or rétrécisseurs de sexe 58 at the end of the 1990s in several regions and cities of West Africa are an example of this.59 The Wodaabe were among the strangers accused of bringing about the shrinking or complete disappearance of someone’s sexual organs simply by greeting the person. Entire migration groups were expelled from towns or had to be taken into protective custody. Another example stems from Freetown, where in 2003 a quarrel between a maagani seller and his client turned into general uproar. The Wodaabe in the city were obliged to take refuge in a Hausa mosque. Female maagani vendors, while not completely safe from this kind of reaction, as a rule incite mistrust and fear to a lesser degree than men. Elderly women or women with children are regarded as relatively harmless. The story of two Wodaabe men who were among the first male Wodaabe to venture into Dakar in the 1960s is revealing in this respect. Their strange attire—leather apron, long braided hair and a straw hat covered with ostrich feathers—caused irritation and fear among the citizens, and led to a dangerous situation. Luckily for them, some elderly Wodaabe women arrived on the scene and succeeded in calming the excited crowd. The fact that in many peripatetic societies, e.g., among the gypsies, direct contact with customers and clients is

57 Cf. Boesen on the urban camps of Wodaabe migrants; Elisabeth Boesen, “Des localités nomades: Les ‘maisons’ Wodaabe en brousse et en ville,” in Les nouveaux urbains dans l’espace Sahara-Sahel: Un cosmopolitisme par le bas, eds. Elisabeth Boesen and Laurence Marfaing (Paris, 2007). See also Schmoll, “Pratiques spatiales,” p. 143. 58 Mamadou Diouf, “Engaging Postcolonial Cultures: African Youth and Public Space,” African Studies Review 46 (2003), p. 10. 59 See also Ndoye on the foreign réducteur de sexe; Omar Ndoye, Le sexe qui rend fou: Approche clinique et thérapeutique (Paris, 2003), p. 14.

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entrusted to women must be seen against this general background.60 Women, in particular those with small children, are not only harmless but even need protection; it is difficult to send them away. One cannot, for example, make them leave a train, as Malgorzata Irek shows in her study on the smuggler train that connected Warsaw with Berlin after the opening of the frontier in the early 1990s.61 Here, the weakness and vulnerability of women no longer appears as a handicap to movement but, on the contrary, as an advantage or pouvoir migratoire.62 This specific quality of female travellers suggests that we might also find specific knowledge, a female savoir circuler.63 I will not dwell on the tricks and ploys migrants develop in the face of the authorities and other obstacles; “tactics”64 which seem to be more or less universal.65 Suffice it to say that the Wodaabe technique—female and male alike— is first and foremost self-stigmatisation. Maagani sellers, for example, describe how they manage to keep away customs officers, gendarmes, etc. by deliberately neglecting their outward appearance or by feigning the dull.66 Women excel in these roles; they sit or lie down in their dirty clothes on the customs officer’s camp beds at the control posts, in order to dissuade the latter from undertaking a thorough search through their luggage. They can be confident that, as women, whether old and honourable or young and attractive (though dirty), they are fairly safe from the anger of these men. One specific advantage of Wodaabe women lies in the fact that they are deemed to be particularly attractive. Many of them come close to the widespread beauty ideal usually associated with the Fulbe: a clear complexion, delicate facial traits and long smooth hair (an attribute that explains their success in selling 60 Cf. Sharon Bohn Gmelch, “Groups that Don’t Want In: Gypsies and Other Artisan, Trader, and Entertainer Minorities,” Annual Review of Anthropology 15 (1986), 307–330. For immigration politics of European countries, see Schmoll on Italy: “Les femmes, particulièrement les femmes mûres, attireraient peu l’attention: elles obtiendraient facilement les documents necessaires. . . .”; Schmoll, “Pratiques spatiales,” p. 139. 61 Irek, Der Schmugglerzug. 62 Schmoll, “Pratiques spatiales,” p. 139. 63 Tarrius, Les nouveaux cosmopolitismes. 64 Cf. de Certeau, L’invention du quotidien. 65 See, for instance, Schmoll on “féminité comme tactique de traversée des espaces” and on the “ruses féminines” of the Morrocan female traders she is studying in Naples; idem, “Pratiques spatiales,” p. 145. 66 Cf. Gmelch on the “impression management” of gypsies; Gmelch, “Groups that Don’t Want in.”


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maagani for hair growth). But their attractiveness is not due solely to these physical traits but also to the reputed inaccessibility of the women. They are an enigma; not only do they travel alone, i.e., without a male escort, but they seem to have no interest in men at all. Their reserve makes them intriguing and heightens the strangeness to them. But Wodaabe women are desirable for yet another reason; contact, especially sexual contact, with them is regarded as beneficial, at least in certain West African regions. This beneficial power is also perceived as inherent in their products, which are regarded by many urbanites as more authentic than the products presented by male traders. All things considered, it is not surprising that in certain circles, especially among members of other Fulbe groups, Wodaabe women enjoy a very different, almost reverse reputation, namely that of being responsible for the high degree of HIV infection among Nigerien Wodaabe. This view is in accordance with the old topos that equates female urban migration with prostitution.67 Our case is remarkable in so far as ideas and opinions on female Wodaabe migrants are extremely divergent, extending from contempt concerning their reputed prostitution to fascination caused by their uncommon reserve and restraint. A first and preliminary conclusion would be that the simultaneous presence of such highly disparate attributes brings about one fundamental quality, namely that of the ‘stranger’, and it might be asked whether women experience and enact this quality differently from men. Female Sociability Travel groups formed by Wodaabe women are generally large, uniting thirty or more individuals. Unlike the members of male migrant parties, women are not necessarily linked by agnatic relations. They are mothers and daughters or sisters as well as close friends, who come together for the purpose of travelling. By doing so, they form a kind of counterpart to the wuro or pastoral camp, the most fundamental entity in Wodaabe social life, which is characterised by patrilineal descent, rigid status relations and an overall reglementation of social intercourse. Even mixed groups, where women travel with men, display a special female commonality. Women are integrated in a closely-knit

67 Cf. Kenneth Little, African Women in Towns: An Aspect of Africa’s Social Revolution (Cambridge, 1973).

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female net; not only does each woman spend her leisure time in the morning and evening in this female group, she is also accompanied by a female friend (possibly her mother or a sister) on her selling tours.68 The intimacy and exclusiveness among the women extends to a certain degree to their clients. Although they sell their products to men, their main customers are women. In contrast to male traders, who set up for sale by the roadside, women peddle from door to door. This type of interaction is based on their gender identity; unlike men, women can venture into unfamiliar houses or courtyards and try to get acquainted with the female inhabitants. In spite of the social and cultural differences and possible linguistic barriers that may exist, traders and customers share a common ground of understanding based on general female predicaments and afflictions. Apart from the above-mentioned child diseases this means above all social and socio-psychic problems, i.e., jealousy, witchcraft, spirit possession. Women also address male healers in these matters, but the fact that they can have recourse to the services of Wodaabe women in the privacy of their own houses is a significant advantage for some. That the transactions between women are often in the nature of barter is a further advantage; in exchange for their products Wodaabe women accept clothes, household articles, jewellery etc. If female customers are not obliged to procure money, transactions can be carried out unnoticed by a husband, a co-wife, or a mother-in-law. This again enhances the intimacy between trader and client. Moreover, additional female contacts emerge as a result of this kind of barter, since Wodaabe women sell most of the products given to them to other women. The camps they install on the street, frequently in the vicinity of a mosque or, in rare cases, in the courtyard of a private house, can acquire the character of a second-hand market. What women obtain during the daytime is examined collectively in the evening, and part of it sold immediately to neighbours and passers-by. This ‘business’ leads to a certain liveliness among the women, temporarily transforming their desolate and somewhat uncongenial dwelling into a selling place.

68

Cf. Schmoll on the “hotel-life” of Moroccan female migrants; Schmoll, “Pratiques spatiales,” p. 147, but see also Hellermann on female Rumanian migrants in Portugal who tend to restrict as far as possible social intercourse with their compatriots; Hellermann, “Gendered Margins,” p. 25.


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Whereas Wodaabe women call on their female customers in the private sphere of their houses, they themselves can only be visited in the quasi-public space of their urban camps. Apart from the fact that the private or domestic life of the traders takes place on the street, exposed to the gaze of others, the individual woman is also literally embedded in her own group.69 The migrants share a very narrow space; their crude resting places, consisting of nothing but small plastic mats, are close together so that each woman finds herself in a tight circle of other women. With the exception of the selling tours, migrants spend their time exclusively in this circle. They eat and sleep here, produce their amulettes, sell the clothes they earned, and, in rare cases, receive clients. In sharp contrast to female travelling groups which are characterised by closeness and relative ease; male migrants are compelled to observe a certain degree of avoidance. As in other contexts, Wodaabe men depend for urban migration on their close agnatic kin; the travel groups consist of brothers, cousins, even father and son, and are thus highly affected by the rules of seniority and respect. Women, on the other hand, can choose between alternative travel groups; rather than join their agnatic relatives or their husband’s family, they frequently prefer, as described above, to be in the company of a uterine group. Due to exogamous marriages, these women belong to different lineages in many instances and may live in different grazing areas, but unite on the occasion of seasonal migration. What has already been shown in the context of marriage practices, i.e., that women in a certain sense dispose of greater social freedom than men, becomes obvious here too. They are allowed to move between different families and groups, and may even constitute exclusively female temporary communities that ignore the patrilineal order of Wodaabe society. Their female migration groups are, so to speak, another variant of ‘going into the bush’. This high degree of autonomy and freedom is, however, accompanied by strict confinement to their group.70 As is evident in the spatial structure and public nature of their urban dwellings, female Wodaabe

69 Cf. Boesen on the “public privacy” of Wodaabe urban camps; Boesen, “Des localités nomads.” 70 Compare Marques et al. on female migrants from the Cape Verde islands, who, according to the authors, seek for an “embedded autonomy”, “a balance between closure and disclosure”; Margarida M. Marques et al., “Ariadne’s Thread: Cape Verdean Women in Transnational Webs,” Global Networks 1 (2001), 292.

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migrants are almost completely restricted to the narrow circle of their companions. Men, in contrast, are not only more willing but to a certain degree compelled to engage in individual relationships with others, e.g., with the jatigi or a particular trading partner.71 In interaction with customers and other inhabitants of the city the female trader’s relevant quality is her gender identity; although she is a stranger, she is above all a woman. On the one hand, this quality binds her to other women, i.e., makes her part of a community of understanding and solidarity; on the other hand, as we have seen, it renders her desirable and even beneficial. The situation of the men is profoundly different; they are first and foremost strangers, that is, potentially dangerous. For this reason they have to reveal and identify themselves more explicitly than women—as Muslims, as Fulbe, as herders and victims of the drought.72

Female Travellers: Embedded Autonomy and Foreignness The Wodaabe maagani trade represents a rather special case of migration—special also because of the prominent role played by women in these mobile activities. Despite its particularity, the Wodaabe case is of great interest and instructive when questioning the notion of a genuinely female sedentarity. Wodaabe women refute the idea that specific impediments render women more or less immobile, and challenge the stereotype of female sedentarity even in the traditional setting. As we have seen, Wodaabe women are able and willing to leave their family of origin and their lineage to join another group.73 This means that women in comparison to men are potentially unsteady. Long years of marriage and the birth of several children do not necessarily lead to

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Most men in migration cherish the hope of a large coup, for instance a business deal with one of the bulk purchasers who export huge quantities of maagani to Paris or New York. 72 In sharp contrast to Hausa or other West African medicine-sellers or healers, Wodaabe maagani-sellers do not however seek to establish their medicinal competence on acquired, so to speak, academic knowledge by claiming e.g. formal training in a Nigerian institute for pharmacopee or even more intensive mystic studies in India or elsewhere; the grounds of Wodaabe knowledge remain unspecified, somehow linked to a vague notion of remoteness and a state of uncorrupted naturalness. 73 Many women would rather describe this form of mobility as a necessity (Fulfulde: doole) because it is the only way to bring about a separation from a man no longer loved.


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their social fixation. Although the ties that bind a woman to her group of origin cannot be ultimately dissolved, i.e., women do not become ‘homeless’ by going ‘into the bush’, the status or quality of ‘stranger’ ( janano) is in a sense inherent in them. In other words, the frontiers of their primary social space do not coincide with the limits of the lineage. Women live within a space of potential relations, i.e., of movement, constituted by the Wodaabe community as a whole. The female space of activity is thus differently defined to that of men.74 This also affects the domain of migration. The problem of “transnational motherhood” mentioned at the beginning is not completely unknown to the Wodaabe in so far as women and children suffer as a result of being separated for several months. There are, however, certain forms of shared child care that enable individual mothers to travel for limited periods of time. Thus in the Wodaabe case, the motherchild bond does not constitute an effective restriction on female mobility—a fact that already became apparent in the description of marriage practices, i.e. the so-called ‘theft marriages’. The same is true for other aspects of the female status. The itinerant maagani trade, regardless of whether it is motivated by subsistence needs or consumer desires, is neither inconsistent with female family tasks nor does it impair the socio-cultural status of Wodaabe women. Men, on the contrary, experience migration as an ambivalent activity that conflicts with the role of cattle-breeder and household head. The greater flexibility of women is also evident in their freedom to form uterine migration groups, which imply the suspension of the strict patrilineal order. In the Wodaabe case, we are led to recognise the high degree of social autonomy associated with the spatial mobility of women and hence to ask how this autonomy impacts on relations between migrants and inhabitants of the city. The comparison between female and male travellers has shown that Wodaabe women accommodate themselves differently to men in the role of stranger. On the one hand, they are more familiar with the local inhabitants, their gender identity allows for interaction and a certain intimacy, expressed, e.g., by the intrusion into unknown houses. On the other hand, however, women set clearer boundaries to their interaction with others. They leave their

74 Cf. Ardener on “social maps”, Ardener, “Ground Rules”; compare also Schultz on the “social flexibility” of Turkana women; Schultz, “One Day We Will Return Home.”

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street camps solely for the purpose of trade. Although devoid of walls or other boundaries, these camps are more or less inaccessible to outsiders. Hence the women are close and at the same time unattainable, and it is this ambivalence that reveals the fundamental boundary between migrants and city dwellers. The urban street camps of the Wodaabe women could be characterised as expressing a refusal to engage in interaction and an ostentation of foreignness. While migrants refrain from building up relations with urban inhabitants, their internal relations are to a great extent hidden from the outside world. Female migrants are known to be married but they never appear with their husbands. This is even true of mixed travel groups, where the rapport between marriage partners is imperceptible to the outsider. This, however, is not merely an act of concealment. As I have attempted to show, migrant women actually live in a different social universe, where the complex status relations and rules of conduct that characterise the Savanna camps are absent. Embedded in a close circle of female relatives and comrades, these women experience the suspension of relations that normally govern their lives. This autonomous state allows for unrestricted ardour, i.e., a devotion free of social and moral scruples to the real purpose of travel, namely trade. However, it also implies deprivation, as illustrated by the utmost frugality of the camp and its complete lack of shelter. Wodaabe women are able to expose themselves to the gaze of others and camp in the street without a roof over their heads because they have nothing to hide. They abstain from their material equipment as well as from the multiple, in part highly formalised, interactions which shape the everyday life in the pastoral wuro. In this sense, their urban camps resemble the ‘places of transit’ described as non-lieux by Marc Augé, meaning by non-lieu “un espace qui ne peut se définir ni comme identitaire, ni comme relationnel, ni comme historique.”75 It would, however, be misleading to equate the street camps with airports or other hyper-modern places which inspired Augé, since these camps are created by the Wodaabe themselves. Hence the latter do not entirely lose the ability to express their socio-cultural identity and manifest themselves spatially while being in town. In their case, the appropriation of urban space does not merely occur as a symbolic transforma-

75 Marc Augé, Non-lieux: Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité (Paris, 1992), p. 100.


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tion,76 but rather as a direct physical occupation of space. Nevertheless, the individual migrant does have a certain performative role to play in this process. This role is, as it were, the inversion of his representational function in the pastoral camp; instead of wealth and community he is now manifesting deficiency, non-participation and foreignness. In both cases, the part played by women, i.e. their specific performative function, is particularly complex.77 As we have seen, the female migrant’s behaviour in town is ambivalent. She is both near and far, familiar and foreign, an inconsistency which entails that she violates the urban social order governed by a clear distinction between inner and outer, or public and private space more strikingly than men. Here we rediscover that essential quality of the nomad, which has inspired the adoption of the latter as a ubiquitous metaphor, namely his resistance to the order of sedentary society and ultimately to the state. But here, the nomad is predominantly female. Wodaabe women’s attitude of refusal also implies personal privation. The female traders refrain from certain forms of interaction and modes of personal identification. What is more, their attitudes and ways of acting in town also affect the relations among group members. The individual enters a certain isolation and solitude, shown most obviously in the fact that a fundamental form of communality, namely commensality, is abandoned; in town, each woman eats separately.78 Here, we see clearly that, in the Wodaabe case, migration does not only imply a change between different localities—bush and town—but also between different social states. Wodaabe migrants experience seasonal variations of the social morphology comparable to those described by Marcel Mauss (1904–5) concerning Eskimo societies. The rainy season spent in the northern grazing areas of the Nigerien Sahel, with its intensive social and ceremonial life constitutes what Mauss calls des moments d’apogée, whereas the stays in the streets of 76 As an example see Diouf on the mobile Senegalese Murides who in every new place recreate their sacred town of Touba and the ritual community of the Murides; Mamadou Diouf, “Senegalese Murid Trade Diaspora and the Making of a Vernacular Cosmopolitanism,” Public Culture 12 (2000), 679–702. See also Bruno Riccio, “ ‘Transmigrant’ mais pas ‘nomades’,” Cahiers d’études africaines 46 (2006), 95–114. 77 On the spatial order of the Wodaabe camp see Boesen, “Des localités nomads.” 78 The communal meal from one pot and with one spoon, which is normal and obligatory among Wodaabe, would destroy the efficacy of the magical remedies employed by the individual migrant in order to enhance his luck in trade. The activities pursued in town, i.e. the maagani trade, are thus incompatible with the social obligations and needs guiding Wodaabe behaviour in general.

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Dakar or Bamako during the dry season are accordingly des moments d’hypogée.79 As in the Eskimo case, we are confronted with two different cultures (civilisations); the social relations, the moral orientations and norms are different. According to Mauss, this morphological alternation between phases of divergent spatial density and of varying degrees of social as well as religious and ceremonial intensity is a general feature of social life, a law, while seasonal conditions possibly represent merely accidental circumstances and not causal influences. This alternation is worth being considered in other cases of migration as well, even in those where the separation from the place of origin is of a more lasting nature. The notion of alternation also allows for a slightly different view on the practices of other migrant women. Could it be that they pass through the periods of shortage and deficiency and privation differently from men—for instance, by restricting themselves, like Wodaabe women, to a close female circle, which permits a high degree of detachment from the outside world and an equally high degree of individual autonomy? With regard to the alternation between scarcity and affluence, I will briefly mention an aspect of migration that has not been dealt with in this article, namely consumer practices. Women’s travel is often associated with the purchase of certain goods, and one might suspect that the places to which they migrate could be identified with affluence, and with the opportunity to obtain desirable objects. However, in the case of Wodaabe female travellers a closer look at the nature of their purchases reveals that the women barely take note of the consumer offerings of the city.80 Their sojourns in town are inspired to an important degree by their striving for the beautification and enrichment of their mobile pastoral camps in the Nigerien Sahel. Their actual consumer wishes are directed above all towards goods which could be characterised as objets trouvés, like pieces of scrap iron and other shiny materials that may serve to embellish their homesteads, i.e. for the aesthetico-symbolic expression of the affluence of the pastoral world. Here again we see that the women’s autonomy is founded on their pro79 Cf. Mauss: “A une communauté réelle d’idées et d’intérêts dans l’agglomération dense de l’hiver, à une forte unité mentale, religieuse et morale, s’opposent un isolement, une poussière sociale, une extrême pauvreté morale et religieuse dans l’éparpillement de l’été.” Marcel Mauss, “Essai sur les variations saisonnières des sociétés Eskimo: Etude de morphologie sociale,” L’année sociologique 9 (1904–5), 72. 80 On the consumption patterns of Wodaabe migrants see Boesen, “Gleaming Like the Sun.”


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found socio-cultural embeddedness. They are more mobile and, in the sense expounded above, freer than men, since they set up more rigid boundaries to their interactions. For them, the relevant social space corresponds to the community of the Wodaabe—a restriction revealed in their material desires as clearly as in their matrimonial choices.

Conclusion In conclusion, I want to emphasise that this limitation and self-limitation must not be seen as yet another proof or result of an inborn female sedentarity. As we have seen, Wodaabe women are highly mobile both in a spatial and in a social sense. Thus they are a well chosen case to show that claims on a general female immobility are without foundation. Even allegedly “natural” impedimenta, namely the reproductive function of women, first and foremost their mother tasks, do not render women immobile. In our case, the role of the mother and housewife is more in accord with spatial mobility than the role of the male household head. What is more, the example seems to suggest that women are vagrant in a more genuine way. In their youth Wodaabe women may ‘go to the bush’, i.e. to men belonging to strange lineages; later, even in rather advanced stages of their lives, they may travel to foreign places and countries in order to procure foodstuffs like millet or to earn money. Apart from the fact that Wodaabe women make an exception from the classic association woman/house/private/sedentary, their example also shows that spatial mobility does not necessarily go along with transcending boundaries, with an opening up, with new tendencies or modernisation. In spite of their high mobility these women’s social and cultural orientations remain strikingly stable and focussed on their own community. Rather than being an element of change they are one of maintenance and conservation—by subsidising mobile pastoralism, by preserving Wodaabe material culture and, last but not least, by restricting their matrimonial choices to the exclusive circle of Wodaabe men. However, here too we should refrain from rash generalisations.81 81 See, for example, the female migrants from Marokko described by Schmoll who, in contrast to Wodaabe women, are very much interested in new consumer products and function in this regard as modernisers; Schmoll, “Pratiques spatiales.”

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Here as in other cases, the categorical differentiation mobile / sedentary turns out to be of rather limited analytical value.82 The Wodaabe case hints to another seeming dichotomy which might however be of general significance in the context of migration, namely that between individual autonomy and social embeddedness. A comparative analysis of these conflicting tendencies or forces and their socio-cultural manifestations might also allow for interesting insights on gender and mobility. Here again, Wodaabe migrants constitute an illuminating starting point in so far as the tension between individual autonomy or freedom on the one hand and the actual embeddedness of the women and their sense of belonging to their own group on the other entails a certain degree of real isolation. Our analysis of the migrants’ urban space made this predicament plainly visible; their street camps do not allow for the enactment of internal social relations, while they cannot be invested with new relations either. The state these female migrants live in can thus rightly be characterised as enduring liminality. Again it could be argued that the Wodaabe case is an exception in that it combines, as we have seen, highly diverse and conflicting attitudes and orientations. On the other hand we may claim that it is exceptionally well suited for the investigation of the more general relation between individual and collective aspects of migration; it shows, besides other things, that we have to go beyond rigid conceptual approaches, like network analysis, meso-level observation, etc.83 by according more importance to the communal or ethnic dimension of migration.

82 Cf. de Bruijn, van Dijk and Foeken, Mobile Africa; Arjan de Haan and Ben Rogaly, eds., Labour Mobility and Rural Society, (Development Studies) 38 (London, 2002). 83 See Schmitz, “Des migrants aux «notables» urbains”; Thomas Faist, The Volume and Dynamics of International Migration and Transnational Social Spaces (Oxford, 2000); idem, Transnationale Migration als relative Immobilität in einer globalisierten Welt, (Working Papers, Center for Migration, Citizenship and Development) 11 (Bielefeld, 2006).

CHINESE WOMEN IN THE NEW MIGRATION PROCESS TO EUROPE: MARGINAL OR MAIN ACTORS? Carine Pina-Guerassimoff SEDET Laboratory, CNRS/Université de Paris VII

In the beginning of the twenty-first century, the citizens of the People’s Republic of China made up a huge part of the new migrants moving through the five continents. Since the 1980s, continental China has considerably liberalised international movement of its citizens. In 2003, 220 million people crossed the frontier. Chinese authorities said they delivered four million passports. Partly due to a liberal handling of exit visas which gives individuals the chance, China is reviving the tradition of overseas migration with a migration policy dated from the nineteenth century.1 Since the 19th century and to this day, North America has always been the preferred destination for these new migrants. Europe, and France in particular, was for a period in the beginning of the 20th century an arrival area for Chinese migrants. These countries are once again becoming a valued destination.2 The current migrants are taking part in the general movement of globalisation, becoming actors of translocality, defined as “phenomena resulting from circulation and transfer i.e. from specific movements of people, goods, ideas and symbols which occur regularly and cross distances and borders”.3

1 Carine Guerassimoff-Pina, L’état chinois et les communautés chinoises d’outremer (Paris, 1997) especially pp. 14–23; and for the contemporary policy idem, “Le renouvellement des perspectives transnationales de la Chine,” Critique Internationale 32 (2006), 39–52. 2 Carine Guerassimoff-Pina, Eric Guerassimoff, and Nora Wang, La circulation des nouveaux migrants économiques chinois en France et en Europe (Paris, 2002); Chloé Cattelain, ed., Les modalités d’entrée des ressortissants chinois en France (Paris, 2002); Yun Gao and Véronique Poisson, Le trafic et l’exploitation des immigrants chinois en France (Genève, 2005). The first two studies were made on the cover of French institution funds, showing, during this ‘gold’ period, the great interest of the French administration to improve the knowledge on this new ‘immigrants’. Thus, these three fieldworks were the main pioneer studies. None were published in their initial form, but all were then reworked for articles. 3 Elisabeth Boesen and Laurence Marfaing, “Marginal Actors and Transfers in Mobility Processes,” Unpublished panel introduction, International Conference

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This new population trend is also part of a relatively ‘new’ and important phenomenon: the growing presence of women in international population movements.4 Recent scholarship in the human sciences (history, geography, area studies, gender studies) denounces the fact that women were, and sometimes still are, the voiceless, minor and forgotten actors/subjects of social/economic/cultural and political movements, including migration.5 In fact there are two linked phenomena: on the one hand there is a growing feminisation of international migration flows, and on the other the input of the social sciences is to reinterpret all women’s migration movements, allowing us to analyse them anew. Certain actors and categories of actors in mobility process are marginal in the sense that they are dependents of the main actors, or that their economic contribution is regarded as relatively unimportant, their activities are not in accord with social norms or violate notions of decency, they are socially and politically undesired and so on.6

Despite the rise of very recent scholarship on women in migration, including Chinese women,7 they seem to always correspond to this definition. There appears to be a lack of practical and theoretical knowledge concerning their roles in the institutions that facilitate migration (migration agencies). In the departure society, generally dominated by patriarchal principles as in all developing societies, women’s migration is perceived as an anomaly: only the socially excluded women (such as prostitutes) are leaving on their own. Also, women are generally not seen as economically active agents: earning money and having salaried work in the public sphere is considered a man’s role and not for women. If the women are leaving instead of the men to make ends meet, the men effectively lose all their attributes (albeit imaginary ones). When women are leaving and the men are staying, men are then left in charge of domestic activities, including sometimes childcare. Thus gender relations are overturned by the process of women’s “Translocality: An Approach to Globalising Phenomena?”, Berlin, Center for Modern Oriental Studies, September 27–28, 2006, 1 p. 4 UNFAP, Vers l’espoir: Les femmes et la migration internationale (Genève 2006). 5 Christine Verschuur and Reysoo Fenneke, eds., Genre, nouvelle division internationale du travail et migrations (Paris, 2005), pp. 14–16. 6 Boesen and Marfaing, “Marginal Actors and Transfers in Mobility Processes.” 7 Délia Davin, Internal Migration in Contemporary China (New York, 1999), pp. 230–240; Jan Ryan, “Chinese Women as Transnational Migrants: Gender and Class in Global Migration Narratives,” International Migration 40 (2002), 93–114.

chinese women in the new migration process to europe

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migration. Has there been a silencing of women’s voices because their border crossing process is closely connected with the internationalisation/globalisation of certain kinds of economic activities (especially ‘gendered’ ones)?8 Based on recent fieldwork, the aim of the present article will be to present the profile of Chinese women in migration, to examine their socio-economic profiles and their activities in the host countries. I will explore how they are still often considered as marginal, even socially deviant, and yet they contribute greatly in maintaining the economic viability of the practice of migration.

A Silent Cohort with Diverse Profiles Since the beginning of the 1990s, migration involving Chinese women to Europe became more significant than migration by men. While official data taking into account women/men in Chinese migration were on the time of the fieldwork not available, once can see by the bias of our own data the number of women rising and becoming numerous then men. Then, some OECD’s states data began to take into account the two categories and the fact was officially established.9 When China launched its reform of migration law at the end of the 80s, authorities 8 Carine Guerassimoff-Pina, “Gender and Migration Networks: New Approaches on Chinese Migration to France and Europe,” Journal of Chinese Overseas 2 (2006), 134–145. 9 Chinese men, the traditional pioneers in the economy and migration, are now competing with growing female mobility, as has been confirmed by recent fieldword (see note 2). Until recently, Chinese women did not appear in official European migration data, and it seems that their recent separate mention reflects their growing presence. The latest OECD migration tendency reports highlight the respective numbers of Chinese women and men in some European States, and even if these data can only be taken as indicating a trend (due to the high number of illegal sojourner), they confirm the above observation For example, in the Netherlands, in 2002, they were 6 700 women for a total of 11 200 persons. Their number rose to 7 500 in 2003 for 13 300 persons, and in 2004 to 8 400 women for 14 700 Chinese citizens. In 2002, Ireland reported a total of 5 800 Chinese people, with 2 400 women. In Finland, Chinese women represented half of the total of Chinese population: 1 100 for 2 100 in 2002, 1 200 for 2 400 in 2003 and 1 400 for 2 600 in 2004. In Portugal, Chinese women presence was 3 100 in 2002 (out of a total of 8 300), 3 300 (of 8 700) in 2003 and 2 500 (of 9 200) in 2004. Data given by Spain reported 20 200 women in 2002 (of a total of 45 800), 24 700 in 2003 (of 56 100) and end 32 400 in 2004 (of 71 900). Unfortunately, there was still no gender data concerning Chinese population for France, Germany, Italy and Great Britain. OCDE, Database on Immigrants in OECD (DIOC), http:// www.oecd.org/document/51/0,3343,en_2649_33931_40644339_1_1_1_1,00.html

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allowed only a restricted number of persons to migrate. Then with the growing integration of China, the reconnection of migration networks, people from migration provinces began to migrate, even illegally, and in classical ways with a majority of men. This was the main situation in Europe from the 1980s until the end of the 1990s. In the Mission interministérielle de Recherche et d’études (MiRe) survey (2000) of 987 persons interviewed, 536 were women and 451 men, indicating a tendency for more women than men to migrate.10 In this section I raise three main questions that will contribute to building a profile of these new migrants, showing their great diversity and the way they are entering the global phenomenon of international (women’s) migration: Who are they? Why are they migrating? How are they migrating? A Profile of Chinese Women Migrants Chinese originating from different areas in China have shown different migration patterns as far as gender is concerned, accentuated through the particular migration configurations. As discussed below, migrants come from various regions of origin, and a wide range of socio-demographic as well as professional backgrounds. A Growing Diversification of their Region of Origins Zhejiang remains the principal area of origin of the Chinese women migrants in France and the rest of Europe, but there are growing numbers from other regions. In 1995, Chinese official data estimated emigration from Zhejiang to be 300,000 persons (240,000 from Wenzhou and 60,000 from Qingtian).11 The Zhejiang migration flows in the 1980s–90s demonstrates the vitality of old migration centres (Qiaoxiang).12 Data furnished by ASLC (Association de Soutien Linguistique et Culturel) for 2003–2004 concerning Chinese migrants registered as asylum seekers in this association (administrative domicile) also show

(accessed June 11, 2009), november 2008–OCDE; OCDE, OECD, SOPEMI, Perspectives des migrations internationales-Rapport annuel 2006 (Paris, 2006). 10 Carine Guerassimoff-Pina, Eric Guerassimoff and Nora Wang, La circulation des nouveaux migrants économiques chinois en France et en Europe (Paris, 2002). 11 These data are based on delivery of passports by official authorities and are, for this reason, certainly fewer in number than total departures. 12 Poisson Véronique, “De la diaspora aux groupes transfrontalières. L’exemple des entrepreneurs en provenance du sud du Zhejiang (1884–2006),” Migrations Société 18, 107 (2006), 171.


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the predominance of people from Zhejiang. Of the 5,831 in the sample, 2,782 people came from this province. Women appeared to be in an almost equal proportion to men. As they usually followed only when men were already established, this shows a certain ‘maturation’ of the Zhejiang migration to Europe. The second major stream of PRC women migrants, who arrived since the mid-1990s, are from the Northeast Chinese provinces. They originated from Liaoning, Shandong and Heilongjiang/Jilin, commonly known as the Dongbei region (dong means ‘north’ in Chinese). Cities of origin which were quoted most often were Qingdao and Yantai (Shandong), Fushun and Shenyang (Liaoning). Recent interviews from associations and social workers in Paris confirm that Chinese women from Dongbei are still arriving in France and in Europe. None of the localities cited by Chinese Dongbei women are identified as international Qiaoxiang (localities with cultural migration). But it seems that they are nonetheless connected with an important first internal migration. The women from Dongbei also came following a first internal (rural/urban) migration, sometimes dating from the beginning of the twentieth century. Other recent Chinese scholarship reveals that women from Shandong were also used to cross-border migration with East Siberia. Nonetheless, as we will explore in detail below, it seems that this new international migration is closely linked to the economic downturns of those old Chinese industrialised regions. A very different range of Chinese localities composes the third group of Chinese women migrants, sustaining the idea of a popularisation of migration in Chinese society.13 Big urban centres like Shanghai, Tianjin, Guangzhou and Beijing are furnishing a growing number of women migrants to France and Europe accompanied by people from regions that were not concerned until now with international migration, such as Guangxi, Hebei, Jiangsu and Jiangxi. In Europe, one can also find Fujienese women migrants who have a real tradition of migration overseas but who until recently mainly went to Southeast Asia and North America. The arrival of these migrants from the

13 For a complete view of Chinese migration in Europe during the 80s and 90s, trends and diversity, see in particular: Frank Pieke and Gregor Benton, eds., The Chinese in Europe (Basingtoke, 1998); Pal Nyiri and Igor Saveliev, eds., Globalizing Chinese Migration: Trends in Europe and Asia (Aldershote, 2002); Frank Lascko, ed., Understanding Migration between China and Europe, special issue of International Migration 41 (2003).

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Map 2. People’s Republic of China’s Administrative Provinces (Cartography: Carine Pina-Guerassimoff)


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Fuzhou/Fuqing area (Fujian province) illustrates the reverse process of Europe gradually being incorporated into a global migratory flow. If the origin of Chinese women migrants contributes to quite a diversification of Chinese migration trends, one can also observe important changes in their demographic profiles. Older and Married Women Compared with Young Single Women Fieldwork and scholarship conducted on Chinese migrants in France and Europe tend to focus on two different topics. On the one hand, there is a relative ageing of the Chinese migrant population, especially among the Chinese women from Dongbei. Migrants between the ages of 30 and 39 made up the largest group, followed by those aged 20 to 29, only slightly more than those aged 40 to 50. The Chinese women from Northeast China seem to be setting the trend. On the other side of the scale, a growing proportion of Chinese migrants, including female, were aged 18 or younger.14 About 80% of the 1000 women I interviewed declared that they were married before leaving China. The remaining women were either single or divorced. The great majority of the women interviewed mentioned that they had children, most of whom remained in China. Concerning the Dongbei women, interviews revealed that for many of them, their main link with China was the children. But quite a number of Chinese women (from Zhejiang provinces) also declared that they had children both in China and in France. New Chinese migration trends to Europe also involved women migrants across a much broader spectrum of social origin. Chinese Women’s Socio-professional Backgrounds Scholarship on Chinese migrants, including my own survey, pictures a growing diversification among socio-professional categories of Chinese women migrants. Nevertheless, the distinctions among them can be related to their regions of origin. Zhejiang women are globally less skilled than their Dongbei counterparts. In China, many worked in small private enterprises, mainly in the garment and textile industries. Some of them also came directly out of schools teaching them needlework. Other young women were employed as saleswomen, factory workers, office workers, nurses, and carers for children, as well

14

See MiRe survey.

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as being housewives or university students. A significant number of them were also entrepreneurs, artisans or traders in large family enterprises. Finally, others worked in restaurants, cafes, etc. A few Zhejiang women said they worked in the family farms. But there were also women who had no regular activities and who had been laid off, similar to women from the northeastern provinces. Many of these women were previously employed in state-owned enterprises or public administration in activities requiring more professional qualifications than those occupied by the Zhejiang women; they worked as accountants, secretaries, and company staff. There were also engineers, artists, nurses, and primary school teachers, among other professions.15 Before choosing to migrate, they generally occupied low paid jobs for several months in different insecure sectors, such as in entertainment. Some of them also tried to open small private shops without success. A third group were metropolitan women migrants: these were women with quite a good economic standing such as entrepreneurs, restaurant or shop owners, employees of international firms with high salaries, with diverse high qualifications. Finally, it would be a mistake to ignore Chinese students, particularly female, who constituted a migratory flow that is not unrelated to other flows of ‘new migrants’ from China. Why Are They Migrating? It is quite difficult to distinguish clearly what women’s main reasons are for going abroad because their reasons can often be intermeshed. If economic explanations are quite simple to determine, they are also embedded with social, individual and gender issues. Some simplifications are nonetheless useful to facilitate a fuller understanding of their conditions. A Family Strategy Even when women are migrating alone, or when they are not from a ‘cultural’ region of migration, they tend to be ‘sent’ to foreign countries 15

Carine Guerassimoff-Pina, “Circulation migratoire chinoise, informations et échanges,” in Migrations internationales, mobilités et développement au sud: les migrants chinois, ouest africains et mexicains, ed. Eric Guerassimoff (Paris, 2004), pp. 169–189.


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as part of a household strategy of maintaining, improving or changing the economic/social/cultural situation of all the members of the family. It is seemingly rare to encounter a female (or male) migrant who leaves China without previously having calculated the benefits and/or the risks encountered by the whole family in this adventure. This is rather important in cultural migration trends. This view depicts people who leave and people who stay as sharing their gains from migration in accordance with a logic of co-insurance. Migration is seen in terms of a set of contracts, implicit or explicit, which form the basis of migration transactions between the migrants and their families (non-migrants).16 This family strategy of surviving seems even more important in the insecure context of socio-economic changes in China. With the massive withdrawal of Chinese State funding from a large range of social fields (education, health, housing, farming and employment), many families are rediscovering or are obliged to count (only) on household (defined in large scale) support.17 This constitutes the main reason given by Chinese women migrants for their departures: economic goals. From Economic Insecurity to Cultural Migration As described above, many northeastern Chinese women we met in migration were laid off or were about to be (xiagang) from their work unit. Northeast China has gone through huge changes in their economic structures. Till 1949 these provinces were the basis of the biggest and the more important state-owned enterprises, especially in industrial sectors. Because of economic reforms, quantitative as well as qualitative, many of them closed, downsized or went bankrupt. Many people were laid off or were kept in a situation where they were still officially employed but had no work nor salary nor social insurance.18 Women were the first victims of these reforms. Not only in employment, the 16 Eric Guerassimoff, Les dynamiques migratoires chinoises. Propositions pour un renouvellement des approches historiques (Paris, 2004), pp. 41–49; Christophe Guilmoto and Frédéric Sandron, “Approche institutionnelle de la migration dans les pays en développement,” Economie rurale 252 (1999), 47–54. 17 Mark Selden, “Families Strategies and Structures in Rural North China,” in Chinese Families in the Post Mao Era, ed. Deborah Davis and Harrell Stevan (Berkeley, 1993), pp. 139–164. 18 Jean-Louis Rocca, La Condition chinoise: Capitalisme, mise au travail et résistances dans la Chine des réformes (Paris, 2006). See in particular Chapter 3 “Marchandisation et précarisation des ouvriers,” pp. 105–176. A detailed description of Chinese workers’ precarious situation is made pages 119 to 139.

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women’s situations became even worse: as many state-owned enterprises closed, many social services offered by the work unit (danwei) also closed, forcing even more women back home. Known as gender-based activities, these were services such as health offices, schools, nurseries, and crèches. Although many of these employed women had been well-qualified, their qualifications were no longer considered sufficient in the new Chinese economy or the women were deemed to be too old for retraining. Jobs offered to them were low paid, unsecured, and generally more in the entertainment industry (and/or prostitution) where the competition with younger, rural and more ‘liberated’19 women was becoming even harder. Working in a foreign country seemed to be the only solution. Economic reasons linking with reforms and insecurity can also be found for the Zhejiang women migrants. Nonetheless, their departures are also closely linked with a cultural character of migration. Some villages and townships in Zhejiang province have integrated internal as well as international mobility into their families’ or their village’s economic strategies to improve their social welfare. What exists is a sort of chain migration, wherein people from these counties benefit from networks that help them gain information, social and economic opportunities in France and elsewhere in Europe. Emigration becomes a way of life for the community. It takes on a character of its own, overruns economic/political reasons which explained the initial departure, and finally forms a specific transnational space where women become more and more important. Their arrival abroad slots them into an ethnic economic niche demand in France as in other parts of Europe and is fuelled by their own desire for better opportunities to improve their living standards which were not available to them in China.20 Scholarship on Chinese women in the reform era is currently depicting their situation in the labour market as becoming less and less com19

Compared with women aged 40–50, these young rural women were more exposed to western customs. For example, having sexual relations before marriage was no longer unthinkable, and they might also have more than one boyfriend. Working and travelling were considered better than marriage. Divorce was also considered a reasonable thing. Having money, being consumers, became supremely important. So exchanging money for sexual services was not a difficult thing to do, and they more readily participated in the sexual industry than the older generation. 20 Antonella Ceccagno, “Compressing Personal Time to become Successful Migrants: Ethnicity and Gender among the Chinese in Italy,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 33 (2007), 635–654.


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fortable. In the early years of reform, absolute numbers of women employed in state and collective enterprises increased but official periodicals noted a tendency for urban women workers with small children to be furloughed at partial pay—sent, as Tamara Jacka puts it, “back to the wok”.21 Job discrimination against women in numerous sectors is associated with perceptions that women’s household and child rearing duties incur extra costs for the work unit and make women less productive workers or even that women belong in the domestic domain.22 Women continued to be clustered in collective rather than state-owned enterprises and in lower-paying sectors that could be regarded as an extension of the gendered domestic division of labour: catering, textiles, health, and early childhood education.23 Furthermore, in the 1990s and beyond, in response to management pressure, women retired at earlier ages and at higher rates than men and were laid-off in higher numbers. Yongping Jiang points to increased labour-market stratification, both between men and women and among women (married vs. unmarried, migrant vs. local).24 Middle-aged and older women, regarded as unskilled and perhaps untrainable, have been treated as the most superfluous of all workers often encountering downward mobility into paid domestic labour. The situation of the urban labour market for women can in a great part explain why a growing number of urban women migrated to foreign countries. Their economic insecurity is also connected with their ‘individual’ situations.

21

Tamara Jacka, “Back to the Wok: Women and Employment in Chinese Industry in the 1980’s,” Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 24 (1990), 1–23 and in particular 1–15. 22 William L. Parish and Sarah Busse, “Gender and Work,” in Chinese Urban Life under Reform: The Changing Social Contract, eds. Wenfang Tang and William L. Parish, (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 209–231 and in particular pp. 216–220 for a detailed description of women discrimination in the Chinese labour market. 23 Yianjie Bian, John Logan, and Xialoling Shu, “Wage and Job Inequalities in the Working Lives of Men and Women in Tianjin,” in Re-Drawing Boundaries: Work, Households and Gender in China, eds. Barbara Entwisle and Gail Henderson (Berkeley, 2000), pp. 111–133. 24 Yongping Jiang, “Employment and Chinese Urban Women under Two Systems,” in Holding up Half the Sky: Chinese Women, Past, Present, Future, eds. Jie Tao, Bijun Zheng, and Shirley Mow (New York, 2004), pp. 207–220. “Statistics from the second survey of the social status of Chinese women conducted by All-China Women’s Federation and the State Statistics bureau show that in 2000, the employment rate for urban Chinese women between the age of eighteen and forty nine was 72.0 percent, a decrease of 16.2 percentage point from 1990”, p. 208.

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Gender Explanations As many studies now depict, Chinese women migrants often had ‘individual’ reasons to leave China. We can explain these individual reasons according to a ‘gender’ bias. In the reform era, changes continue to occur in China concerning gender relations. A growing number of Dongbei Chinese women were divorced, or they had difficulties with their husbands. In the reform era, divorce seemed to rise: almost two thirds of the divorces initiated by women were on the grounds of incompatibility or a search for more fulfilment.25 At the same time, divorce is often portrayed as disadvantageous for women (especially materially and also concerning child bearing), because of the patriarchal and patrilineal aspects of marriage. Once divorced, many women lose their material advantages such as housing and social insurance. They must also continue to look after the education and entertainment of the children, even if they remain with the husband’s family (always the case when the child is a boy but not always when it is a girl). Without being divorced some of the women met in surveys also spoke of resurgent difficulties in their relations with their husbands. Because of the age of the children, their own wishes, and social pressure, they did not want to divorce but would rather spring on an opportunity to fly away (i.e. to migrate abroad). These relationship conflicts were often linked to domestic violence, a subject that is discussed more and more in the public Chinese sphere.26 Young women from urban areas also wanted to escape some heavy patrilineal family contexts. Even if marriage was now based on free choice, the family often wanted to interfere in this matter. To escape this social pressure, young women often chose to ‘study’ in a foreign country, to take a ‘breath of fresh air’. Nonetheless, during discussions with them, it also appears that marriage (or the expectation of it being imminent) is or can contribute to their reasons to wish to migrate. In China, marriage is always an ‘economic’ strategy for many families (both urban and rural), even in the reform era. In the 1990s, among urban Shanghainese women, James Farrer found that higher up on 25 Yu Xiong, “The Status of Chinese Women in Marriage and the Family,” in Holding up Half the Sky, eds. Tao, Zheng, and Mow, pp. 172–178. See in particular pp. 173–175. 26 Xingjuan Wang, “Domestic Violence in China,” in Holding up Half the Sky, ed. Tao, Zheng, and Mow, pp. 179–192. The author developed a special chapter on Chinese society view of the phenomena pp. 188–192, entitled: “Indigenization in Chinese Research and Theory.”


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the social scale, pressure to marry was defined in terms of the market economy.27 Since women are the first to be laid-off when enterprises downsize, they look to men for material security while simultaneously stressing the importance of emotional expressiveness and connections in making a good match. Urban women have also begun to entertain the possibility of transnational upward mobility through marriage to a foreign citizen. Chinese women may represent ‘traditional’ values of support and nurture to bride-seeking men from other Asian states,28 while overseas Chinese and foreign men represent the possibility of modernity and wealth to urban Chinese women.29 Marriage to a country-fellow with overseas connections is also a reason advanced by young Zhejiang women for coming to Europe. In this case, their migration-marriage often enters a family strategy to establish close ‘economic’ links with economic partners. Nonetheless, many Zhejiang women were previously married before leaving China, and they often had a child. Apart from economic reasons (family enterprises, etc.), these women often explained that they (and their families) wanted to escape the Chinese one child policy. Migration to a foreign country signified the possibility of having more children and above all sons. Despite a real liberalisation of Chinese birth control, especially in the countryside, the desire for more children collided with the re-emergence of the household as a fundamental unit of production and the dismantling of rudimentary collective welfare guarantees.30 The growing revival of the conception of patrilineal society also raised the importance of having sons versus daughters. Because girls do not have ‘economic’ importance for their family (she normally will leave it for her husband’s family), a son is 27 James Farrer, Opening Up: Youth Sex Culture and Market Reform in Shanghai (Chicago, 2002). See in particular pp. 46–47; p. 211 and next for a description of marriage attempts with a foreigner for Chinese young ladies. 28 Constance D. Clark, “Foreign Marriage, Tradition and the Politics of Borders Crossing,” in China Urban: Ethnographies of Contemporary Culture, eds. Nancy N. Chen, Constance D. Clark and Suzanne Z. Gottschang (Durham, 2001), pp. 104–122. See in particular pp. 107–109: “Marriage to a foreigner (shewai) or the securing of a Shenzhen permanent residence permit are two of social mobility through which many women attempt to realize their personal goal”, p. 108. 29 Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham, 1999), see in particular pp. 43–44 and pp. 48–51. 30 The more members a household has, especially male ones, the more the wellbeing of all members can be guaranteed for the future. Each member is a potential for extra income, a connection to a social network, a safeguard against illness, a way to assure education for the youngest etc.

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an insurance for the future. Chinese birth control also, unfortunately, evolved in this sense: as noted by White,31 in the course of the 1980s and 1990s, a policy that had begun as gender-neutral—one child per family—became deeply gendered: a son for every family possible. How many children a woman should bear and the disposition of an individual pregnancy have not been understood in China as a woman’s individual reproductive choice or as a religious issue but as a matter that affects and is legitimately affected by the family and the state. Many interviewed women simply spoke of their wish to see something different outside, joining the “fever” of leaving China (Chuguo). This movement reveals the important changes occurring in Chinese society, closely enmeshed with China’s inclusion in the world society, showing their citizens how people live outside by the great diffusion of information. Despite the fact that all Chinese women can be confronted in China with these situations, and may have the same dream of an outside experience, not all of them can afford to migrate. Migration is still reserved for a small number of the whole Chinese population, particularly Chinese women. How Are They Migrating? Two questions remain important to understand the process of Chinese women’s migration: how do they, in China, make their plans to migrate and how do they realise these plans? Answers differ among Chinese women involved in migration agencies, such as in the Zhejiang ones and others, but they all take advantage of the liberalisation of Chinese migration policy. Chinese Migration’s Institutions Compared with other Chinese women migrants, it was quite easy for Zhejiang women to migrate because they had access to a migration institution (agency) or a migration configuration: “the sum of the social institutions and networks in sending, receiving and transit area that maintain and direct migratory flow. It thus constitutes

31 Thyrene White, “Domination, Resistance and Accommodation in China’s OneChild Policy,” in Chinese Society: Change, Conflict and Resistance, eds. Elisabeth J. Perry and Mark Selden (London, 2003), pp. 183–203; pp. 193–194.


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a transnational social cultural space populated not only by migrants, but also travel agents, smugglers, government officials, immigration lawyers, immigration services, companies,”32 and information circulation. Theoretical literature on migration has now depicted the great importance of information in the building and the realisation of the migration project including among the Chinese.33 Because of the presence of country fellows, prospective migrants knew if there were opportunities to migrate (economic, social, etc.) and they knew how to achieve it (obtaining the necessary documents, especially invitation letters). Numerous women told us they obtained information about the way to migrate and the conditions of migration through a family member already in France or in Europe. Belonging to these networks also facilitated the needed monetary funds (composing the debt) to realise the whole migration project. These migration configurations were confirmed by examining the ‘official’ means of sojourn of Chinese migrants to France, obtained mainly through data from the OMI (Office des Migrations Internationales, which recently was renamed ANAEM—Agence Nationale de l’Accueil des Etrangers et des Migrations) and OFPRA (Office Français pour les Réfugiés et les Apatrides), at the end of the 90s and the beginning of the twenty-first century. A considerable proportion of women migrants entered France by means of family reunification (real or built). Between 1990 and 1999, the arrival of 5,601 Chinese migrants were recorded. Among the 2,697 migrants joining their spouses living in France, 78 per cent were women. Another important group includes Chinese migrants whose statuses were regularised through an amnesty proclaimed in 1997. Between 1997 and 2001, 7,674 Chinese migrants benefitted from the amnesty (Haut Conseil à l’intégration, 2001), where considerations such as family ties established in France were taken into account, making Chinese women one of the largest group among them. This also seems to be the case with the recent amnesty (launched in June 2006) for foreign families with children who are engaged in the French school system.

32 Frank Pieke, ed., Recent Trends in Chinese Migration to Europe: Fujienese Migration in Perspective (Geneva, 2002), p. 32. 33 Carine Guerassimoff-Pina, “Circulation migratoire chinoise, informations et échanges,” in Migrations internationales, mobilités et développement au sud: les migrants chinois, ouest africains et mexicains, ed. Eric Guerassimoff (Paris, 2004), pp. 169–189.

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Using Private Migration Intermediaries On the other hand, the Dongbei women, especially the pioneers, had to build and realise their migration process on their own. They largely obtained the necessary information and documents (passports/visas/ invitation/language training) through special migration enterprises. As the migration demands exploded, even in the Northeastern Chinese provinces, it became a very lucrative market attracting a wide range of professionals. Some were official legal firms who supplied services, like travel agencies or work-overseas agencies. Others belonged to the ‘grey’ sector, or were illegal, offering migration services because they were well connected with some administration (export/import) that could provide the necessary information and appropriate documents. Of course illegal networks of professional smugglers also tried to attract potential migrants. Some of these agencies provided useful information and services; others painted only partial or totally inaccurate pictures of the host countries. They all tried to attract customers through advertisements in the local newspapers or on local TV. Many women who passed through their hands had generally no real idea (and sometimes very wrong ones) of what they would find once in France or in Europe. We also met some women who told us that they had no choice, nor knowledge of their destination before obtaining visas: all depended on the possibilities of the intermediary and of course on the money they could offer. Emigration as a Positive ‘Political’ Project The existence of these migration agencies, legal and ‘illegal’, is explained mainly by the great liberalisation of Chinese government migration policy. Since the beginning of the nineties, Chinese authorities, national and local, pursued an official policy of allowing a large number of citizens to migrate legally to foreign countries. This was facilitated mainly by the easy way Chinese citizens, especially those from urban areas, could obtain a passport. Furthermore, since the 1980s, Chinese authorities more systematically informed its citizens about the different aspects of the emigration/immigration processes. News on the delivery of visas by foreign consulates and embassies, on language tests and visa interviews, on student opportunities, are now regularly and currently published in newspapers and other media and is also available on the internet. The Chinese emigration policy was facilitated by the positive view of Chinese immigration existing in certain foreign countries, notably in Europe. In the expectation of


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growing exchanges with the dynamic Chinese market, since the eighties many European governments offered quite a large number of visas for Chinese citizens.34 It is also worth mentioning the importance that migration has been for Chinese authorities, especially the provincial and local ones, in the project to link it with development goals. Improving emigration and at the same time maintaining links with migrants to benefit directly or indirectly from the manifested returns (remittances, direct investment, foreign economic networks, political lobbying, work supply) are a few of the objectives of the political interest in the Chinese. Because this policy has always been seen as a male-oriented one, the reconsideration of the importance of Chinese women’s migration will certainly have an impact in future. Once in France or in Europe, after the expiration of their visas if they had any, the women first incurred what we would consider a precarious administrative status, generally as asylum seekers, and then as illegal migrants. Nonetheless, despite these migration conditions and the relatively important silence around them, Chinese women are major players in the institution of Chinese migration.

Silent Players in the Institution of Migration Under the influence of some new theoretical approaches in the human sciences (micro history, new cultural studies, post-colonial studies and, of course, gender approaches), it is important to give voice to the actors/actresses who for a long time and because of a wide range of reasons remain unheard. These trends, enmeshed with the growing presence of Chinese women in current migration streams, renew the analysis as does an understanding of their respective places in the institution of migration. In fact, these studies enable us to define two main roles sustained by Chinese women in migration: reproduction and production. Reproduction is generally defined as procreating, education, and transmission of cultural and identity values, and this activity is generally

34 Carine Guerassimoff-Pina, “République populaire de Chine-Union européenne: Vers un partenariat stratégique en matière migratoire?” Hommes & Migrations (special issue Chinois de France, ed. Véronique Poisson) 1254 (2005), 65–73.

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located in the private sphere. On the other hand, production refers to pursuing economic activities, is generally associated with contractual wage labour activity, and is settled in the public sphere. This was a much more unusual (or even unknown) occupation for women. If the second kind of role seems, at first glance, not to be particular to women (the same functions are also expected of men), the way women have come to fulfil this role is in fact gendered. Both roles interconnect and raise the importance of Chinese women in the dynamics of Chinese migration. Re-discovering the Major Impact of Chinese Women in the Migration Institution Since the end of the 1980s, works on migration history, women’s history or gender studies have also expanded in Chinese area studies.35 They have shed light on the quantitative and qualitative importance of women in migration flows since the nineteenth century. Nancy Green points out that such findings have seriously challenged the commonly held notion that men migrate and women stay behind to look after the home.36 Historical studies of Chinese women’s migration are very recent and emphasise cases of host countries situated in Southeast Asia or the United States37 because of the existence of rather important archives. Results of these works emphasised the economic role of these voiceless agents. Chinese women were already contributing their labour in the private sphere as well as in the public sphere. Already in the nineteenth century, this kind of Chinese women migrants played an active role in the migration network, especially when they maintained cultural and family cohesion, which were essential elements.38 The historiography on Chinese women’s migration shows a preliminary categorisation of women’s roles in Chinese migration, which seems to 35 For a complete, detailed and commented bibliography on the subject, see Gail Hershatter, “State of Field: Women in China’s Long Twentieth Century,” The Journal of Asian Studies, 63 (2004), 991–1065. 36 Nancy Green, Repenser les migrations (Paris, 2002), pp. 105–120, p. 107. 37 One can cited between these new studies based on American archives the work done by Judy Yung, Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (Berkeley, 1995); Anthony Pfeffer, If They Don’t Bring Their Women Here: Chinese Female Emigration before Exclusion (Urbana, 1999); and on Southeast Asian ones: James Francis Warren, Ah Ku and Karayaki-san: Prostitution in Singapore 1870–1940 (Singapore, 1993). 38 Huping Ling, Surviving on the Gold Mountain: A History of Chinese American Women and their Lives (New York, 1998), see in particular pp. 83–112 and pp. 128–138.


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follow a kind of chronology. This classical approach reveals a changing role with diverse time sequences in migration and makes a distinction between three main groups of Chinese women ‘in migration’. The first one comprises those who stayed behind in their homes performing domestic functions (economic, educational, cultural, social), to enable the men and families to realise their plans for migration. Women’s immobility is rarely mentioned as a way of controlling the migrant. In fact, this situation forces migrants to come back, and makes unmarried men choose a wife in their home village.39 The second group consists of women who migrated with or after their husbands or left their counties to be married with a country-fellow. The third group of women consists of those who left China on their own. In the nineteenth century, these migrants were made up of students and prostitutes, two categories with particular forms of contractual mobility. Such categorisations or classifications, found in historical scholarship, provide useful and interesting background knowledge for the analysis of contemporary Chinese women’s migration. Agents of Production versus Gender Activities Chinese women migrants in France and other parts of Europe can be firstly defined as economic actors, and the term breadwinners can also be applied to many of them, especially the Dongbei women. Nonetheless, for the greater part of them, the way they enter the ‘public’ sphere is still closely connected with gender activities. Their occupations are predominantly divided among small-scale jobs in their ethnic economic niche and as domestic help or child-minders. Only highly qualified women seemed to have opportunities to search for other employment. Ethnic Economic Niches New Chinese women migrants in France, and the rest of Europe, mainly find jobs in their ethnic economy built by their Chinese country fellows. They thus increasingly form an ‘ethnic’ economy which is closely tied to specifically ‘ethnic’ products such as Asian food. In the eighties and nineties, their main economic sectors were the garment/

39 See one of the oldest and best documented fieldwork done on the subject of families relations in migration: Da Chen, Emigrants Communities in South China (New York, 1940).

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textile industry, catering and food services. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, a growing number of them also found jobs in the entertainment industry (massage parlours, karaoke bars, coffee shops) and also in import/export activities. The entertainment sector seems to have grown recently, attracting young women from urban origins who had sometimes also previously done these kinds of jobs before leaving China. The boundaries between these massage/entertainment activities and prostitution seem very fuzzy, as seen below. Women’s bosses generally belonged to the same ‘ethnic’ groups. Because of the pyramidal structure of the garment industry in France and in Italy, some Chinese women were employed by Turkish or Italians.40 They found their jobs through the intermediary of other Chinese people. Women employed as seamstresses could work at ‘home’ or in illegal factories. They did piecework, which is also the way women were paid for making jiaozhi (Chinese dumplings). Working as waitresses in Chinese-owned catering businesses or restaurants was another possibility. Tending Chinese groceries or tourist shops (in Spain) were also jobs occupied by these women. A lot of the women we met in fact held two or three jobs at the same time in these different sectors. Many of them dreamt of one day having the opportunity to be their own boss in this ethnic economy. Because of their lack of linguistic skills, they could not enter the employment market to find work in other sectors. Nannies-domestics Dongbei women had some different employment experiences in their host countries. Many of them talked of their disappointment in their job opportunities. They thought they could easily be employed in the European labour market, but their qualifications and their language abilities were insufficient. Their administrative status also played a role in their lack of job opportunities. Many dreamt of learning the French language, or training in other fields to find new work opportunities, but the necessity of earning wages for the family set these dreams aside until an unexpected future. Dongbei women mainly found jobs as nannies or domestics in Zhejiang families. This kind of activity is very hard: bad conditions, hard

40 Antonella Ceccagno, “Compressing Personal Time to become Successful Migrants: Ethnicity and Gender among the Chinese in Italy,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 33 (2007), 635–654.


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work, and low pay. They generally had no rest or just a half day a week free. They could be woken up at any hour to take care of the children, or their parents (making dinner or other tasks). One could also say that the Dongbei women were often very displeased with working for Zhejiang people, who had a bad reputation (as peasants). For a great number of them, they hoped to be employed by a local family. On the other hand, Dongbei women seemed to have a reputation for being ‘not hard working persons’, of rather being ‘intellectuals’ who push Zhejiang people not to employ them in their main economic activities. Because of this lack of opportunities, some Dongbei women explained that they ‘preferred’ to prostitute themselves (since it was well paid) rather than work as nannies.41 Chinese Women’s Prostitution Since the end of the 1990s, in some Paris streets, one could see groups of Chinese women walking side by side, in twos or threes, dressed in as unsophisticated a way as possible; they offer sexual services. Recent fieldwork, scholarship and interviews reveal that some of these Dongbei women enter this occupation without any previous experience in their home countries.42 Most of them have other jobs in the ethnic economic sector and they pursue this activity because of the money they could earn. These prostitutes are now mainly found in local massage or karaoke bars rather than on the streets, because of the new article 50 of the French criminal code (June 2006) against street walkers (accosting). It appears that these women do not belong to any criminal networks, and do not have any pimps. Sometimes, they are subject to extortion (as a kind of payment for their ‘use of the street’) by young men, from different ethnic origins. They say that they do not have nor want Chinese clients, but rather prefer men from other ethnic origins. Some get to know regular clients who, they say, are “kind” to them. They often said that they never want their family to know what they are really doing to earn money; the shame and loss of face would be permanent. In any case, they vehemently denied assimilation with professional prostitutes, even Chinese ones. This activity was at all times presented as non-permanent, a kind of dark interlude in their life, which they would like to forget once they go back to China, 41 Yun Gao and Véronique Poisson, Le trafic et l’exploitation des immigrants chinois en France (Genève, 2005), p. 81; Wei Liu, Nouvelle immigration et prostitution chinoise à Paris (Paris, 2005). 42 Ibid.

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once they repay their debt, etc. Prostitution was only a way (albeit the only one) to realise the success of their migration. Returning to China seemed to be one of their major goals. Nonetheless, some of them said they would like to find a “kind” man who will accept to marry them, even if they have to continue prostitution. They often dreamed of a freedom of movement between China and Europe. In our point of view, the cases of Dongbei prostitutes (and their experiences) can be compared to many other women migrants staying illegally in Europe, without any possibility of work other than prostitution.43 There are cases of professional Asian prostitutes (trafficked or of Chinese origins or not) who are generally managed in criminal networks, and about whom knowledge is very limited and highly dependent upon police investigation. A ‘professional’ Chinese (PRC) prostitution has been recently observed to have developed in France as well as in other places in Europe (such as Italy). Some women are entering ‘criminal’ networks of Chinese ‘mammies’ who organise their recruitment in China and the work in Europe, generally in apartments or arranged through new technologies (internet-mobile phone prostitution). This can for example be observed in Italy during recent years. But for the moment, only few details are known about these activities and the women involved in it. Another trend also appears with young urban women, who previously engaged in this activity in China, heard of better opportunities in Europe and thus continued in this work, also without pimps. These young women are recognised generally because, contrary to the Dongbei women, only a short period of time passed between their arrival and their pursuit of prostitution. They also came from big urban centres such as Shanghai or Tianjin where prostitution is of growing importance, as it is in fact in all urban Chinese areas.44 It seems here 43 There is now many studies and work done on the subject. To cite just few of them used in my own research: Sophie Day and Helen Ward, eds., Sex, Work, Mobility and Health in Europe, (London, 2004); Nicola Piper and Prapairat R. Mix, “Does Marriage ‘Liberate’ Women from Sex Work? Thai Women in Germany,” in Wife or Worker? Asian Women and Migration, eds. Nicola Piper and Mina Roces (Oxford, 2003), pp. 53–71. One can also report to the excellent and original approach and studies made by Laura Maria Augustin, Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry (London, 2007). Augustin reassembled testimonies of women from different origins which describe their migration process and the place of prostitution in them, which can be on many points compared with Chinese women migrants experiences met in my own fieldwork. 44 Elaine Jeffreys, China, Sex and Prostitution (London, 2004) see in particular Chapter 4 “Prostitution Debates and a Changing China,” pp. 96–123. Gail Hershat-


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that migration is viewed as a means to pursue a resource for higher income. But in this case too, further fieldwork must be done to know more details of these women and their experiences. Highly Qualified Women and Students: Playing an Economic Role in Two Places As we have seen, for the past few decades, France and other countries in Europe also encountered the arrival of young Chinese students or women with highly qualified backgrounds. Once in Europe, they try to improve their language skills, to acquire other university degrees, and at the same time, hold a job. As we observed, they first find jobs related with the ethnic economy where more qualifications are needed (e.g. travel agencies, computer services, import/export, and language courses). After graduating, they find employment in French or foreign firms working in China or in Asia. We also met Chinese women who, after getting the necessary long residence permit (through marriage/naturalisation, etc.), want to create their own business, between China/Asia and France/Europe. Interviews held in May 2007 with one of the most important associations dealing with women and business settings, based in Paris (IRFED—Institut de Recherche, de Formation et de Développement), show the growing number of these Chinese women migrants. The Chinese women involved with this association held high university degrees (masters or PhDs), in the fields of law, architecture, and business. The most important point to note here is that these women act outside the Chinese community, wanting to find advice and help through the global work market, becoming agents of the global economy in more ‘official’ ways. New Chinese women migrants in all these cases are economic actresses. They hold an important role in the production activities within the ‘migration institution’. Nonetheless, at the same time, many of them also fulfil, the more ‘classic’ gender role of reproduction. Actresses of Reproduction The growing engagement of Chinese women migrants in the economic sphere does not exempt them from their duties of reproduction, traditionally focusing on procreating and educating children. ter, “Chinese Sex Workers in the Reform Period”, in Putting Class in its Place: Worker Identities in East Asia, ed. John Perry (California, 1996), pp. 199–224.

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Procreating As stated above among their reasons for migration, many Zhejiang women joined their husbands or migrated to marry one of their country fellows who was already abroad. Once in Europe, many of them became pregnant very soon, even when in precarious or even illegal administrative situations. Bearing children appeared very important for successful migration. There was a remarkable rise in consultations of pregnant Chinese women at the end of the 1990s. Hospitals in Paris (St. Antoine notably), nurse services, women in social and childcare services began to employ translators, and/or cultural mediators. This was coupled with the exemption of payment for medical care introduced for immigrants. Because the existence of well developed services for pregnant women in China were linked with the one child policy, many Chinese women (even from rural areas) were used to the medical follow up and felt reassured by the French medical provisions. It seems very easy and also simplistic, to explain the importance of child-bearing in relation with French immigration law: parents of a child born on French territory cannot be deported. But, if some parents appeared to be informed of this measure during their medical consultations, one child would be sufficient to secure their case in front of the law. However, Zhejiang women continued to have more than one child. As we explain below, the main objective for them is to bear a son (or more) which would induce a great change in their ‘gender’ status in the family. Migration enables them to escape the one child policy and to fulfil their ‘main’ role of giving a son to their husband’s family. Child Bearing and Education Nonetheless, problems occur rapidly with the question of caring for the children. Women still have to work to raise their economic status, or simply to repay their debts. Their working hours (early in the morning till late in the night) are not compatible with child rearing. These families often had no social networks to help them take care of their children and give them a Chinese cultural education, which they considered important. French childcare institutions did not cater to their working hours and often, because of their precarious legal status, they dared not make contact with ‘official’ French institutions. Depending on their financial incomes and social networks, they had several options for helping them cope. If the grandparents were already in France, it was they who would take care of the children, which is also


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common in China when women work. Yet in conditions of migration, these very useful social networks were not available for the majority of women migrants. Some families could afford to have a nanny at home, but that was not the case for the majority. Most could only afford to send their children to a Chinese nanny’s home, where other children spent the whole week and their parents would only see them during the weekends. Finally, those with the lowest incomes preferred to send the children back to China to be educated by their family. Women, as child bearers in migration, were traditionally seen as the main actors to maintain ‘cultural’ links: through language and education (they were mostly in charge of the first contact with Chinese culture through stories, songs, writing and reading). Women also talked with the children about their origin in China and were in charge of their choice of education. But when becoming agents of production, they did not have enough time to fulfil this cultural role. While in a totally different situation, children’s education and care were also major goals of the migrant Dongbei women. Contrary to the Zhejiang women, who left their children behind at a very young age (under five years old), the children of the Dongbei women were teenagers, or young adults (around 20 years old). They pursued college studies and hoped to enter university. Their future, especially their training in education, was often cited by them to be a “major economic problem”. Studying at university became, during these last decades, very selective in China: selection is made through an access competition but also by means of high registration fees that must be added to daily expenses (housing/furniture/food). If their parents lost their jobs, many students had to stop studying. The departure overseas of many Dongbei was often connected with this problem. Children’s education also entered in a different way in the consideration of migration: many Chinese women of all origins said that they hoped to bring their children to Europe to offer them better training and life opportunities than in China. As pioneer migrants, they often saw themselves as trailblazers for their children. If new Chinese women migrants fulfilled their ‘traditional’ roles of reproduction and education in migration, they closely associated them with their economic productive activity which occupied an ever growing place. In sustaining these roles, they also actively participated to keep alive the links with home and their non-migrant relatives, compelled, as they were, with their contractual family obligations.

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Maintaining the Migration Institution from Abroad Just as men were, women have now become essential to running the complex of migration. Fulfilling their duties towards people who stay behind and acting as trail-blazers for future migrants, they actively promote the system of circulatory migration so essential for keeping the system running smoothly. Migrants because of Non-migrants The new Chinese women migrants in France, as in other parts of Europe, are still part of the so-called chain migration, supported by the existence of a network.45 While it mainly concerns Zhejiang migrants, some Dongbei women also now follow this pattern. Upon their arrival in France, women migrants maintain close links with China, especially during the first stage of migration, when most of them have close family members (spouses and children), as well as parents and others siblings who remain in China. It is worth noting that such links are also maintained because of the often very high debt many migrants incur before leaving China. In particular, this applies to irregular migrants who are at the mercy of smugglers who helped them go abroad. The great majority of women respondents had borrowed money to be able to leave China. Besides using their own savings, many were also able to borrow money from their families and thus avoid professional money lenders and usurers. Financial obligations were also linked with moral ones, for instance when children have been left in the care of family members in China. Contact with them is now easier than before because of the new telecommunications services: migrants can, for very low costs, keep in daily contact with home, and remain present in the everyday life of their family.46 Circulation of Remittances and Goods One of the first consequences of the maintenance of such links is financial flows. The remittances sent back to China by these women mainly served to pay off their debts. These funds are of course used

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Carine Guerassimoff-Pina, ed., Les nouvelles migrations chinoises en Europe au début du XXIe siècle, special issue of Migrations-Société 15 (2003), 17–32. 46 Carine Guerassimoff-Pina, Eric Guerassimoff, and Nora Wang, La circulation des nouveaux migrants économiques chinois en France et en Europe (Paris, 2002).


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to cover the family’s daily expenses and to take care of the children. After repaying the debt, remittances sent by women (as with men) also served to build houses, open small businesses, etc. Various means are used to transfer money back to China. Most of them are informally sent, through friends or channels offered by their employers. Some interviewed women said that they sometimes sent gifts to their family (such as perfumes), and they generally received goods from China like clothes, foodstuffs, cigarettes and medicines which are cheaper in China than in France, helping them to save more money. Circulation of Information and the Building of New Networks Chinese women migrants are now becoming major actresses in the circulation of information and the building of new networks (the cases of Dongbei). The information transmitted does not always correspond to their reality in France. Often, notably in the case of Dongbei, they keep the difficulty of their situation to themselves, both to avoid losing face if things have not turned out as well as they had hoped and to keep their families from worrying. Nonetheless, some try to paint a more realistic picture of their uneasy immigration conditions, trying to advise other members of their family and friends not to migrate. This is difficult for them especially when others (including women) return and demonstrate their success and wealth. In the case of women, this success seems to be more ‘gendered’ and is closely connected with ‘good’ marriage and having more children. Information networks are also important relays for exchanging news regarding opportunities, to ask for jobs, or to solicit letters of invitation. In the case of Dongbei, it contributes to the building of a new network. Some recent Chinese women migrants said that they got information through a “sister” who told them there were opportunities to work as nannies or in the entertainment industry. One of the questions in this field remains if we can detect a ‘gender’ bias in the information itself as in the way the information is circulating through women.

Conclusion Chinese women are, for the moment, still being considered as minor and marginal actors in Chinese migration trends, despite the reality of the growing importance of their role in maintaining the migration institution alive, as we have tried to assert here. Knowledge about

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their migration process and conditions are improving, through fieldwork and renewal of theoretical approaches about women’s migration. Nonetheless, further research is necessary in this field, to see, for example, how their migration trends contribute to the history of the Chinese migratory institution and the establishment of long-term translocal communities, if the migration process has an impact on their gender relations, and by what means can state migration policies (including the Chinese one) take into account women, and gender processes in migration. Chinese women’s migration is closely linked with the important social changes occurring in China, including changing gender roles. These changes often devalue the situation of Chinese women, even making it more insecure, while at the same time offering more ‘freedom’ or ‘individuality’ to women. Chinese women’s migration is also closely connected with the globalisation of ‘gendered’ economic activities (care, prostitution, factory work) and can be easily compared with the international migration processes of other women. In other words, the character of their migration is shaped by the migratory situation and gender relations more than by cultural factors. These explanations cannot be ignored, while they contribute to the ‘victimisation’ of women in migration. But while they are ‘victims’ in the context of a changing macrolevel,47 Chinese women also have to be understood as voluntary agents of their destiny, as major actors in the migration agencies (at meso and micro levels).48

47 Thomas Faist, “The Crucial Meso-Level,” in International Migration, Immobility and Development: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, eds. Tomas Hammar et al. (Oxford, 1997), pp. 187–218. For the presentation of the three levels’ theory, see pp. 194–197. 48 Laura Maria Augustin, “Cessons de parler de victimes, reconnaissons aux migrants leur capacité d’agir,” in Genre, nouvelle division internationale du travail et migrations, eds. Christine Verschuur and Reysoo Fenneke (Paris, 2005), pp. 109–118; Laura Osos Casas, “Femmes, actrices des mouvements migratoires,” in ibid., pp. 35–54.

PROUD FIGHTERS, BLIND MEN: WORLD WAR EXPERIENCES OF COMBATANTS FROM THE ARAB EAST Katharina Lange ZMO, Berlin

Introduction The world wars of the twentieth century, which were started in Europe, quickly extended to other parts of the world, including the Middle East. As a region of strategic importance, garrison for the warring parties, hinterland for gathering supplies and resources, object of political and propagandistic interventions, and, in consequence, partly as battlefield, the Middle East and its populations were directly affected by the wars even where no military action took place. During the Second World War, thousands of men in the Arab East—the Mashriq—alone served in armies which were fighting on both sides of the respective military coalitions. It is the experiences and memories of these Mashriq veterans of the Second World War that are the subject of this chapter. How did they live through the war years, and what lasting effects did this experience have on their lives? Following Samuel Hynes’s insistence on the significance of personal narratives of war experiences, and their distinctness from other forms of ‘remembering’,1 this chapter is devoted to uncovering some—however fragmentary—individual perspectives of Mashriq participants in the world wars. Although the focus of this chapter lies on experiences of the Second World War, examples from the First World War will be included. Clearly, the two wars differed from each other regarding their effects on the local population. Nevertheless, perceptions of the Second World War were shaped by the experience of the First as some of the accounts presented below will indicate; in many cases, combatants of the Second

1 Samuel Hynes, “Personal Narratives and Commemoration,” in War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century, eds. Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan, Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare 5 (Cambridge, Eng., 2000), pp. 206ff.

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World War were veterans of the First. In both conflicts, combatants from the region participated in a war which had been declared between ‘foreign’ powers; most—although not all—of them fought under ‘foreign’ commanders or in armies which were not ‘local’, and many of them were trained, garrisoned or deployed in areas which they had never visited before. In the course of the world wars, Europeans and Non-Europeans interacted both within and across the borders of the participating armies and military coalitions; ideas as well as people and goods were moved across geographic, national and social boundaries; identities, norms, spaces and conditions for new strategies and actions were reformulated in the liminal atmosphere and volatile circumstances created by the wars; political processes and social transformations gained new dynamism.2 Yet boundaries—political or social—by no means disappeared; rather, military discipline and action, violence and the many pressures under which war-related encounters between different actors took place frequently limited, channelled and regulated mobility rather than enhancing it. War experiences were structured by the rhythm of troop movements. Stays in garrisons or training camps, which often lasted weeks or months, were interrupted by the sudden arrival of marching orders and the ensuing troop movements to other garrisons or to the front. Soldiers as well as low ranking officers often were not informed of their units’ destination; this scarcity of information was exacerbated by lack of geographical knowledge or of language skills. Speculations and guesses about a unit’s destination relied on assumptions, rumours and passed-on information about the course of the war.3 The organisation of physical movement of individual combatants as well as troop contingents was strictly reglemented by the military bureaucracies. Travelling soldiers and officers had to carry travel permits, marching orders or permits for leave, which they had to produce at any time during travelling, at the starting points and destinations of their journeys. Violations of these rules could be sanctioned with arrest, court martial, or even death. Nevertheless, desertions and other strategies of

2 Gerhard Höpp and Lutz Rogler, “Weltkriege und Weltsichten: Arabische Wahrnehmungen des Ersten und des Zweiten Weltkrieges,” funded project proposal to the German Research Association, 2003. 3 As described in Ğūrğ Ḥ annā, Qabla’l-maġīb: Tağārub wa-d̠ ikrayāt min ḥ ayātī (Beirut, n.d), p. 160.

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seeking—at least temporary—reprieve from military service abounded especially in the First, but also during the Second World War. While earlier historiography of the world wars concentrated strongly on European perspectives, more recently non-European combatants have come into focus, yet a systematic analysis of Arab participants’ experiences is still lacking.4 The material presented here comes out of a research project on “Images of War: Arab Participant Experiences in World War I and World War II” which was conceptualised by the late Gerhard Höpp (1942–2003).5 Höpp, taking up earlier lines of research which focus on ‘military history from below’,6 proposed to investigate the experiences of Arab combatants in the two world wars of the twentieth century with a special focus on their translocal dimensions. In Höpp’s and his colleague’s, Lutz Rogler’s, conception, the “norms, rules, regulations and world views, memories and traumas, myths, images and symbols”7 which the wars with their movements of armies, goods and ideas left behind were to be at the centre of investigation. In December 2003, Gerhard Höpp passed away before he could pursue this research agenda in more depth. This article does not claim to realise his initial intentions, but it does take Höpp’s and Rogler’s conceptual layout as its point of departure, asking if, and how, personal war-narratives of Mashriq soldiers reflect the effects of the world wars on individual biographies. How have the manifold ‘translocal flows’ and movements of the world wars affected, and are echoed in, individual experiences of combatants fighting in these wars? Regarded in this way, war-narratives of combatants from the Arab East may be used as a case study which can serve to illustrate scope and limits of ‘translocality’ as outlined by Freitag and von Oppen: it characterises a specific aspect of historical (and ongoing) social or economic processes, namely the connection between regular, persisting or recurrent spatial flows—of ideas, symbols, goods, or people— and resultant social or cultural transformations at the local level.

4 For instance, contributions in Olaf Farschid, Manfred Kropp and Stephan Dähne, eds., The First World War as Remembered in the Countries of the Eastern Mediterranean, (Beiruter Texte und Studien) 99 (Würzburg, 2006). 5 The project was financed by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and was conducted at Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin between July 2004 and June 2006. 6 Wolfgang Wette, ed., Der Krieg des kleinen Mannes: Eine Militärgeschichte von unten, 2nd ed. (München, 1995). 7 Gerhard Höpp and Lutz Rogler, “Weltkriege und Weltsichten.”

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These transformations are understood very broadly: they may refer to long-term social and cultural change, such as the emergence of new normative systems or symbolic orders. But besides these deep and wide-reaching transformations, ‘consolidations’ which emerge out of translocal processes may also include “attempts by [social] actors [. . .] to develop or preserve certain spaces and patterns of action, communication and representation.”8 In order to explore these questions, I will first introduce motivations for young men from the Mashriq to join the war, relating them to the various contingents in which these soldiers served. Following that, I will turn to structural constraints and spaces of action which shaped combatants’ war experiences. Finally, it will be asked which traces these experiences left in the soldiers’ life-stories. The chapter is based on interviews with veterans in Syria and Jordan about their experiences during the Second World War which I conducted between April 2005 and February 2006, as well as archival documents and some published accounts. Syrian and Jordanian combatants’ own perspectives on the world wars may be on record in the form of autobiographical publications. However, this is mainly the case with memories of the First World War, which many Arab politicians, intellectuals and military men mention in the context of the movement for Arab independence from the Ottomans generally, and the Arab Revolt more specifically.9 The Second World War has a less prominent place in autobiographical narratives; the war years are often mentioned mainly as the last phase of the mandate period in the Middle East. In these publications, other armed conflicts in the region such as the revolt in Palestine 1936–39 or the Arab-Israeli war of 1948 often appear as deeper ruptures in the history of the region than the Second World War itself.

8 “[. . .] Einrichtungsprozesse werden zunächst als Versuche der Akteure interpretiert, in [. . .] durch Translokalität geprägten Situationen bestimmte Räume und Muster von Handeln, Kommunikation und Vorstellung zu entwickeln oder zu bewahren,” Ulrike Freitag, Achim von Oppen, “Translokalität als ein Zugang zur Geschichte globaler Verflechtungen,” H-Soz-u-Kult (June 10, 2005), 4. 9 See for instance ʿAlī Muḥammad al-ʿAğlūnī, D̠ ikrayātī ʿan at̠-t̠aura al-ʿarabīya al-kubrā (Amman, n.d.); Jafar Pasha Al-Askari, A Soldier’s Story: From Ottoman Rule to Independent Iraq—The Memoirs of Jafar Pasha Al-Askari, trans. Mustafa Tariq AlAskari, eds. William Facey and Najdat Fathi Safwat (London, 2003); Ḥ annā, Qabla’lmaġīb; and Ḫ airīya Qāsimīya, ed., Mud̠ akkirāt Fauzī al-Qāwuqğī (Beirut, 1975), for memories of military service.


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“A personal narrative of war”, Samuel Hynes writes, “is what can be made of remembered war”, rather than a ‘realistic’ account of ‘what really happened’.10 Written as well as oral accounts of war experiences are expressed from an—often considerable—temporal distance to the events that are narrated. Thus, the experiences told, as all narrated memories, are subject to later revisions, impressions, and interpretations which may be influenced by considerations located in the present. More recent political processes and circumstances, or biographical developments which occurred after the war years, may influence these accounts which make (implicit as well as explicit) reference to those later developments. Buschmann and others have suggested referring to the category of ‘experience’ in order to gain a new understanding of war perceptions. In their definition, experience is shaped not only by actual events, but also by later interpretations and meanings attributed ‘after the fact’.11 This approach, they argue, would make it possible to focus not only on the description of actual, war-related events, but also to include—at least partly—the subjective interpretations and meanings given to these events, and even point to some of the structural, nonsubjective factors which underlie these interpretations and meanings.12 The material presented in this chapter is thus not evaluated in terms of ‘factual accuracy’, but considered primarily as testimony of personal war experiences which are still emerging, being shaped, told and retold in the present, a narrative that documents the process of making sense of what was lived through.

Joining up In contrast to the First World War, when many inhabitants of the region were drafted against their will into the Ottoman army, Syrians and Jordanians who fought in the Second World War, either for the Allies or on the side of the Axis, had joined the respective armies 10

Hynes, “Personal Narratives and Commemoration,” p. 205. Nikolaus Buschmann and Horst Carl, eds., Die Erfahrung des Krieges: Erfahrungsgeschichtliche Perspektiven von der Französischen Revolution bis zum Zweiten Weltkrieg, (Krieg in der Geschichte) 9 (Paderborn, 2001). 12 Nikolaus Buschmann and Aribert Reimann, “Die Konstruktion historischer Erfahrung: Neue Wege zu einer Erfahrungsgeschichte des Krieges,” in Die Erfahrung des Krieges, eds. Buschmann and Carl, p. 262. 11

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voluntarily (although it must be asked what ‘volunteering’ to the participating armies meant in each case—or, to be exact, how much ‘free will’ was actually involved in individual decisions to join up). In many cases, soldiers and officers serving in the territorial armies of mandated Syria and Transjordan, respectively, had entered these troops in the interwar years. Many, if not most, of them were motivated by material or financial considerations. Many of the recruits came from a poor background, notably young peasants who either did not own any land themselves or who originated from a poor rural region.13 Long before the beginning of the war, Syrians were recruited to the Troupes Spéciales, local auxiliary troops of the French mandate administration. Often, ethnic minorities were strongly represented in these troops; Druze and Circassians for instance formed the main part of the well-trained and well-equipped cavalry of the Troupes Spéciales.14 When the French mandate administration in Syria sided with the Vichy government in 1940, these troops became potentially part of the forces on the Axis side. During the war, both the Axis and the Allies used Syria as a manpower reservoir. As late as July 1941, German Foreign Office official Rudolf Rahn managed to recruit 500 Syrian volunteers and swear them to an Arab flag in Aleppo, pledging to fight against the Allied troops.15 It seems that a good part of these volunteers were motivated by material rather than ideological or political considerations; Rahn noted later that “one especially enterprising freedom fighter wanted to sell some of the newly given out rifles at the fence” right after the swearing-in.16 Shortly after, it was the British army which stepped up world war recruitment in Northern Syria. In February 2006, I met Ḫ alīl, a Kurdish farmer from the village of Sheikh Hemo, who had served with the British army in World War Two. Ḫ alīl told me the story of his joining 13 For an example from the Druze mountains, see Sulaimān ʿAlī aṣ-Ṣabbāġ: Mud̠ akkirāt ḍ ābiṭ ʿarabī bi-ğaiš al-intidāb al-firansī, ed. Ibrāhīm aṣ-Ṣabbāġ, ([Damaskus], n.d.), p. 25. 14 For a more detailed account of recruitment and history of the Troupes Spéciales, see Nacklie Elias Bou-Nacklie, “Les Troupes Spéciales: Religious and Ethnic Recruitment, 1916–1946,” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 25 (1993), 645–660, and idem, “The 1941 Invasion of Syria and Lebanon: The Role of the Local Paramilitary,” Middle Eastern Studies 30, 3 (1994), 512–529. 15 Hans Werner Neulen, An deutscher Seite: Internationale Freiwillige von Wehrmacht und Waffen-SS (München, 1985), p. 364. 16 Rahn memories, quoted in Neulen, An deutscher Seite, p. 365.


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up as a consequence of his search for wage labour: an orphan since childhood, he had no land of his own to cultivate and earned his living as a wage labourer in other people’s fields. Hoping to find employment for the day or a longer period, he went into the nearby market town of Afrin where, he said, he was surprised to see a large crowd in front of a coffeehouse. A bystander explained to him that a recruitment drive for the British army had just begun. Ḫ alīl told me that he decided to volunteer when he heard that the English paid good salaries. “I went inside”, he said, “and one of them asked: You English? I said: Naʿam [Arabic: yes]—because at that time, I did not know their language.” Ḫ alīl was recruited on the spot and transferred to a training camp south of Aleppo. From there he was sent on with other Syrian volunteers, first by train to Damascus, then Palestine, then Egypt. In Suez, his unit embarked on a sea journey to Italy. They landed in Bari, where Ḫ alīl remained stationed almost until the end of the war.17 At the time of Ḫ alīl’s recruitment into the British army, Aleppo and the surrounding countryside hosted garrisons for diverse units serving with the Allies. Although military action on Syrian territory, involving the Syrian, North and West African, and French soldiers under Vichy French command, and the Allied troops—among them Free French, British, Transjordanian, and Indian combatants—who had entered Syria a month earlier, had been formally ended with the 14 July 1941 armistice, the Allied armies still feared unrest which would play out in favour of the Axis. Allied troops therefore remained stationed in Syria until 1946, despite promises of independence made by the Allies before their invasion of Syria in 1941. Northern Syria was temporary home to various troops under British command, among them the Trans Jordan Frontier Force, Australian and New Zealand troops. Their duty was to guard the border against suspected infiltration of German agents from Turkey; at the same time, local volunteers were recruited for deployment in the Mediterranean theatre.

17 Interview in the village of Sheikh Hemo, Aleppo Province (February 4, 2006). Names of villages and persons are changed. As is the case with other interviews quoted in this chapter, the description of Ḫ alīl’s wartime experiences is based on his own account. I have not been able to match the details which Ḫ alīl recollects with archival documents pertaining to his individual fate. For a more detailed discussion of war experiences in Ḫ alīl’s region of origin, see Katharina Lange, “Peripheral Experiences: Everyday Life in Kurd Dagh (Northern Syria) during the Allied Occupation in the Second World War,” forthcoming.

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French sources record British enlistment of Syrian Kurds as early as August 1941,18 yet other Syrian recruits had joined the British forces even earlier, before the Allied invasion of Syria—possibly having deserted from Syrian contingents in spring 1941.19 Shortly after the beginning of the Allied occupation, locals who were already serving in British units circulated in Kurd Dagh, having come home ‘on leave’ to promote service in the British forces and attract volunteers.20 By February 1942, at least a thousand Syrians were reported to serve with the British forces in Palestine; British recruitment of Syrian volunteers was estimated to amount to 15 to 30 young men per day.21 Ḫ alīl was one of them. In other instances, as in the case of the Transjordanian Arab Legion, the decision to join the army appears as a conscious ‘career choice’ of an aspiring new elite, motivated largely by the lack of competitive career alternatives open to graduates of the secondary schools in Jerusalem, Aley, or Salt.22 A later major general (liwāʾ rukn) of the Jordanian armed forces who signed up with the Arab Legion in 1942, for instance, told me “if we did not join the army, the only other possibility was to go into administrative service [with the British]”.23 This career choice may also have been influenced by the fact that the speaker’s older brother who had entered the army some eight years earlier had already risen quickly through the ranks.24 Former ambassador Kamāl 18 Letter from Fauqenot, Free French Délégué-Adjoint for the Governorate of Aleppo, to Lt. Colonel Summerhayes, British Political Officer in Aleppo (February 14, 1942), Centre des Archives Diplomatiques, Nantes (CADN), S-L, 1er vers., c.p., 770. 19 Bulletin d’Information from the Services Spéciaux at Afrin (November 1, 1942); cf. also Report by Captain François, Poste des Services Spéciaux Azaz (February 14, 1942), both CADN, S-L, 1er vers., c.p., 770. 20 The French observed this with suspicion; Delegation d’Alep, Bulletin Hebdomadaire d’Information N° 40 for the period from October 26 to November 1, 1942; CADN, S-L, 1er vers., rens. et presse, 1997. There is no indication why, or how, these soldiers had joined the British forces in Palestine; possibly, they had been part of the French Troupes Spéciales and were among the deserters who had crossed into Palestine before the Allied invasion of Syria; cf. Bou-Nacklie, “The 1941 Invasion of Syria and Lebanon,” p. 514. 21 This was stated by a number of recruits from Kurd Dagh, who returned on leave to their home villages and were questioned by the French security services: List of two Syrians enlisted by British military authorities in Palestine, n.d. [Feb. 1942]; Reports by Captain François, Poste des Services Spéciaux Azaz (February 14 and 17, 1942), all CADN, S-L, 1er vers., c.p., 770. 22 Interview with three Arab Legion veterans in Amman (April 2005). I would like to express my sincere thanks to Jordanian historian, Suleiman Musa, who greatly helped me by facilitating contact with the Jordanian veterans quoted here. 23 Interview in Amman (April 7, 2005). 24 Ṣāliḥ aš-Šaraʿ, Mud̠ akkirāt Ğundī ([Amman], 1985).


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al-Ḥ ammūd, one of the first Arab cadets to pass the very selective entry exam of the Arab Legion officer corps in 1940 and who, like other soldiers, made a career in the diplomatic service after the war, explained his decision with economic and social reasons: his entry salary was high enough to help support his family, and both of his parents expressed a strong preference for a military career for their son.25 According to al-Ḥ ammūd, his father’s ambition for his son to enter into military service stemmed from an experience during the First World War: during three days, their household had hosted Mustafa Kemal (later Atatürk), then an officer in the Ottoman army supervising the troops’ withdrawal from Ajlun mountains. His father, he told me, had been so impressed by this officer’s personality and comportment that he strongly wished a military career for his son.26 Formally, the Transjordanian Arab Legion, founded in 1920, whose name went back to units that had participated in the Arab revolt against the Ottomans during the First World War, was the army of the British-mandated emirate of Transjordan. Under the nominal command of ʿAbdallāh b. Ḥ usayn, the emir—later king—of Transjordan, the troops were commanded and trained by British and Arab officers,27 the weapons originated mostly with the Ottoman army and had been used in the Arab revolt. Over time, they were supplemented with weapons from British army stock. In April 1939, Major John Bagot Glubb became commander-in-chief; he commanded the army during and after the Second World War. Glubb, who had previously been employed by the British administration in Iraq, had developed a romantic interest, as well as considerable knowledge, about dialect, customs and genealogies of the larger Bedouin tribes. He changed the legion’s recruitment policy to a stronger reliance on recruits from Bedouin tribes whom he considered an example of the ‘martial races’, fighters by virtue of their cultural and ethnic background who should preferably be recruited for military service.28 In 1941, the Arab Legion

25 Personal communication by Kamāl al-Ḥ ammūd who gave the year as 1940; see also Maan Abu Nowar, The Struggle for Independence 1939–1947: A History of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan (Reading, 2001), p. 49 according to whom the exam took place in 1941. 26 Interview in Amman (April 7, 2005). 27 According to Abu Nowar, The Struggle for Independence, p. 49, the number of Arab officers was relatively small with only 40 in the beginning of 1941. 28 See Glubb’s introductory chapter, “The Martial Race,” in John Bagot Glubb, The Story of the Arab Legion (London, 1948), pp. 17ff.

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consisted of about 1800 officers and soldiers, a third of which were of Bedouin origin.29 One of the Bedouin recruits, who joined the Legion on September 15, 1938 as an infantry soldier, was Sheikh Irfaifān Ḫ ālid Ṣafūq al-Ḫ rayšā, born around 1920. My interview with him was accompanied by his eldest son, a physician living in Amman, who mediated the conversation, sometimes repeating and explaining his father’s answers to me, since Sheikh Irfaifān had suffered a stroke some time ago and his speech was still impaired. When I visited Sheikh Irfaifān in his home about 100 km south of Amman, he told me that his decision to join the army was caused by “pride” (iʿtizāz) in being a fighter. This, his son explained, was part of their family and tribal tradition, since they belonged to the al-Ḫ rayšā, the sheikhly lineage of the Banī Ṣaḫr bedouin. I was told that at the beginning of the revolt in Palestine in 1936, Irfaifān had tried to cross into Palestine to support the Arab fighters. When he was caught at the border, one of the officers of the Arab Legion told him and his friends: “Why fight a guerrilla war in Palestine? After all, we do have an army of our own. So if you want to fight, join the army.” Following this advice, Irfaifān entered military service in 1938 and had a successful military career: having started out as foot soldier, he left the army highly decorated with the rank of a brigadier-general (ʿamīd) on 12th July 1964.30 The participation in Habforce, the British force which was sent into Iraq in 1941 to suppress al-Kailānī’s revolt against the Britishcontrolled Iraqi government, was the first out-of-area deployment in military action for the Trans-Jordanian troops that had until then served primarily as a policing and gendarmerie unit. It was mainly members of the Mechanized Desert Force, a 350-strong unit equipped with reinforced Ford lorries with medium-range machine guns, that participated in the actions in Iraq and Syria in 1941.31 The Transjordanian army thus participated unmistakably on the side of the Allies, whom it supported throughout the Second World War in non-combatant duties as well as by providing troops for guard duties for British airfields and support lines in Palestine and then Iraq. This 29 30 31

Numbers according to Abu Nowar, The Struggle for Independence, p. 49. Interview in Al-Muwaqqar (April 19, 2005). Glubb, The Story of the Arab Legion, p. 259.


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policy was in contrast to popular perceptions that Axis policies might be more favorable to Arab interests, since Germany did not have any mandates or colonies in the Middle East and was fighting Britain, who did. Irfaifān, who took part in the fighting in Iraq and Syria and fought on the side of the Allies against the German and Italian armies at El Alamein, let me know that his own political sympathies, like that of many other Jordanians, were with the Germans rather than the Allies: “We liked the Germans. But there was nothing we could do [about it]. [. . .] Orders were orders.” That was military discipline.”32 Nazi Germany’s propaganda in the Middle East sought to exploit the political opposition of many Arabs to the mandate regimes, stressing the supposedly common interests of Arabs and Germans in their enmity to British and Jews, and voicing—if half-hearted and discontinuous—support for Arab national independence.33 The cooperation between Nazi Germany and Arab politicians, as well as soldiers, has met with considerable interest from researchers who have partly discussed this cooperation as a point of evidence for a supposed ideological closeness between Arabs (or, in fact, Muslims) and National Socialism.34 Yet despite this cooperation, and the distribution of Nazi propaganda in the Middle East the contingent of Arab soldiers actually serving with the Axis forces during the Second World War was considerably smaller than the number of Arabs fighting for the Allies. German recruitment of Arabs evolved slowly, partly due to political struggles between those Arab politicians in Germany involved in the creation of the unit (notably Ḥ ağğ Amīn al-Ḥ usaynī, Rašīd ʿAlī al-Kailānī and

32

Interview in Al-Muwaqqar (April 19, 2005). For instance in a radio programme transmitted on October 21, 1940 (cf. H. Felmy/ W. Warlimont, “Die deutsche Ausnutzung der arabischen Eingeborenenbewegung im zweiten Weltkrieg,” n.d. [after 1955], German Military Archives Freiburg i. Br. [hereafter called BArch-MArch] ZA 1/2257, p. 45); Gerhard Höpp, “Ruhmloses Zwischenspiel: Fawzi al-Qawuqji in Deutschland, 1941–1947,” in Al-Rafidayn: Jahrbuch zu Geschichte und Kultur des modernen Iraq, 3, ed. Peter Heine (Würzburg, 1995), p. 23 points out the relevance of a second programme transmitted on December 5, 1940, with similar content. 34 A recent review of the discussion, focussing on Palestine, is Gideon Botsch, “Neues vom Mufti? Palästina und der Nationalsozialismus,” Zeitschrift für Religionsund Geistesgeschichte 61, 3 (2009), 280–286. For an earlier comment on the debate, see Gerhard Höpp, “Araber im Zweiten Weltkrieg: Kollaboration oder Patriotismus?” in Jenseits der Legenden: Araber, Juden, Deutsche, ed. Wolfgang Schwanitz (Berlin, 1994), pp. 88ff. 33

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also Fauzī al-Qāwuqğī), but also because of political considerations between the Axis powers.35 In May 1942, only 130 Arab soldiers and non-commissioned officers were being trained by German officers.36 In late 1942, there were about 800 Arab combatants (compared to approximately 500 000 Arab soldiers on the Allied side).37 They were recruited into a special contingent of the German army, the so-called German Arab Training Detachment (Deutsch-Arabische Lehrabteilung), which in Arabic was referred to as the Free Arab Corps (al-mafraza al-ʿarabīya al-ḥ urra). It had been established in early 1942 under the auspices of Sonderstab F, a special unit of the German army which had originally been founded in 1941 as ‘Military Mission to Iraq’ for deployment in the Middle East.38 In 1955, the former commander of the unit, general Hellmuth Felmy, solicited a number of letters from former fellow officers—Arab as well as German—about their war experiences, ostensibly in order to write his memoirs of the war years (which were never published). These letters, preserved in the German military archives, show the selfrepresentation of this group ten years after the war. Through the retrospective and mediated character of these ‘war memories’, the letters should be read as a source for Arab combatants’ war experiences in the sense outlined above, rather than factual accounts of ‘what really happened’. Part of the Arab volunteers with the German army were recruited among Arab university students in Germany, a group which—according to the post-war recollections of a member of this group— had feared arrest and even deportation to concentration camps due to their unclear status in Germany since the beginning of the war.39 35 See Lukasz Hirszowicz, The Third Reich and the Arab East, (Studies in Political History) (London, 1966), pp. 250ff.; Höpp, “Ruhmloses Zwischenspiel,” pp. 26ff. 36 Hirszowicz, The Third Reich, p. 252. 37 Numbers according to Höpp, “Araber im Zweiten Weltkrieg,” p. 92. At this point, numbers can only be given as preliminary approximations. 38 See Hirszowicz, The Third Reich, pp. 250ff.; Höpp, “Ruhmloses Zwischenspiel,” pp. 26ff.; also Mallmann and Cüppers, Halbmond, pp. 90ff. for brief descriptions of these units and their genealogy. There is no comprehensive and systematic study of the German-Arab Training Detachment yet; an uncritical and descriptive account which is based largely on material of the German military archives (but does not give these references), is A. J. Munoz, Lions of the Desert: Arab Volunteers in the German Army 1941–1945, 2nd revised ed., [2000]. 39 Letter from Maḥmūd Rifāʿī to Felmy from Damascus (February 20, 1955), BArchMArch ZA 1 / 2728. Indeed in 1944 Arab students who had not joined the army were obliged to serve as labourers (Decree by the German Foreign Ministry of August 6,


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Some had come from Syria after the capitulation of the Vichy army, a few young Iraqi men were ‘sent’ by Rašīd ʿAlī al-Kailānī, although “some of them claimed after their arrival that they only wanted to study in Germany and had no wish to be soldiers”.40 A very small number were recruited from Arab civilians, notably Egyptians, who had been arrested in Germany as ‘members of enemy states’ immediately following the outbreak of the war. They remained in internment camps until June 1941 when they were released on the initiative of the German Foreign Office; the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Ribbentrop, urged that this “release” should be “exploited politically”: the former prisoners might be used “for the radio and language service”, and possibly be employed by “military authorities”. However, as Gerhard Höpp’s research shows, only very few of the released prisoners followed this ‘suggestion’; among other reasons, imprisonment had ruined some of the detainees’ health to a degree which made it impossible to enter military service—not to mention their unwillingness to fight in the service of a state which had made them suffer detention for almost two years.41 Other volunteers were prisoners of war from the British and French armies.42 For the recruits, volunteering for the German army may have appeared to offer a chance to—at least gradually—improve their situation and enhance their chances to return to their homelands, as the Arab recruits were promised to be deployed to the Middle East. However, the unit was sent to the Eastern Front where it participated in

1944, quoted in Neulen, An deutscher Seite, p. 373, n 9). Höpp’s research on Arab prisoners in German concentration camps shows that there were at least 450, probably more, Arab inmates of concentration camps; Höpp notes that the reasons given for their detainment are scarce, but names ‘political’, ‘criminal’ as well as racist reasons; Höpp, Gerhard, “Der verdrängte Diskurs: Arabische Opfer des Nationalsozialismus,” in Blind für die Geschichte? Arabische Begegnungen mit dem Nationalsozialismus, eds. Gerhard Höpp, Peter Wien, and René Wildangel, Studien Zentrum Moderner Orient, Geisteswissenschaftliche Zentren Berlin e.V. 19 (Berlin, 2004), pp. 246ff. 40 Hirszowicz, The Third Reich, p. 251. 41 Höpp, “Der verdrängte Diskurs,” pp. 220f. 42 Interned under most often detrimental hygienic conditions, the mortality rate in the POW camps was high; more than ten thousand Arab POWs had to work on German fortification constructions, armaments industry, and agriculture especially in German-occupied Southern France, receiving minimal wage compensation for eight- to twelve-hour working days, Höpp, “Der verdrängte Diskurs,” p. 299. See pp. 224–231 of the same article for an overview of the situation of Arab POWs in German camps.

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the fighting at Stalino, today Donezk, during the second half of 1942;43 in January 1943, it was transferred to Tunis by way of Sicily. With the capitulation of the German contingents in Tunisia in May 1943, a large number of their Arab soldiers were taken prisoner; the rest were evacuated, supplemented with a newly recruited German-Arab battalion and again stationed in Greece where they were charged mostly with guard duties.44 From 1944 on, the unit participated in the slow withdrawal of the German army from Greece over Yugoslavia to Austrian and finally German territory. Upon the German capitulation in May 1945, those Arab combatants of the unit who had not fled or deserted, been taken prisoner or been killed during the retreat, were given papers declaring them as ‘foreign workers’; they were left to find their way home.45 The heterogeneous background of the recruits and their mixed motives for joining up were viewed critically by more committed members of the unit, as the comment of Maḥmūd Rifāʿī, an Arab engineer who served as a lieutenant with the German-Arab Training Corps indicates: according to his memories which he conveyed in a letter written to Felmy in 1955, many of the Arab intellectuals after initial expressions of enthusiasm changed their minds about taking active part in the war, while the “persuaded” prisoners of war, former members of a “defeated” army, were neither motivated nor prepared to form a new, “orderly” army: “these people must be considered mercenaries, never freedom fighters.”46 The statement of a former German officer who claimed that “even among the volunteers, only few fol-

43 According to Höpp, “Araber im Zweiten Weltkrieg,” p. 92, only German members of the unit were involved in the fighting. 44 Neulen, An deutscher Seite, p. 373. 45 Cf. H. Felmy and W. Warlimont, “Die deutsche Ausnutzung der arabischen Eingeborenenbewegung im zweiten Weltkrieg,” n.d. [after 1955], BArch-MArch ZA 1 / 2257 and letter from G. Schacht, one of the German officers in this unit, to Hellmuth Felmy (July 21, 1955), BArch-MArch ZA 1 / 2728; see also Höpp, “Der verdrängte Diskurs,” pp. 224f. 46 “Die studierenden Araber [die bei Kriegsausbruch in Deutschland lebten] ueberlegten es sich noch einmal [. . .] Die ueberredeten Kriegsgefangenen und ehemals unter britischer Fahne kaempfenden Araber. Die nordafrikanischen Arbeiter und Kriegsgefangenen der geschlagenen französischen Armee. Daraus kann kein ordentliches Heer gestellt werden. Diese Menschen gelten als Soeldner und niemals als Freiheitskaempfer.”; Letter from Maḥmūd Rifāʿī to Helmuth Felmy from Damascus (February 20, 1955); similarly Fauzī al-Qāwuqğī in a letter to Felmy, dated Beirut (July 28, 1955), both BArch-MArch ZA 1 / 2728.


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lowed the German flag out of ideological or national idealism” echoes these perceptions.47

Languages and Identities Language borders, as well as ways to cross them, were an important factor that structured spaces of action for the combatants. Arab soldiers of the Ottoman army, for instance, often learned only during military service to understand enough Ottoman Turkish that they could follow military commands and orders.48 In the Mandate troops of the Second World War, Arabic was the common language during everyday training and military action. Some of the European officers serving in these units were able to speak Arabic (J. B. Glubb, for instance, is said to have been a fluent speaker of Bedouin dialects). Mostly, it was the duty of Arab subaltern officers to translate orders given in English, French or German to the troops. Ḫ alīl, who had an additional language barrier to cross since his native tongue was Kurdish, not Arabic, recalls similar arrangements. For aspiring recruits or cadets, knowledge of a European language was therefore an asset which could enhance their chances of employment with the army, as the autobiographical accounts of several former officers of the Arab Legion show. Of the few German officers serving in the German-Arab Training Corps who were able to speak Arabic, many were German nationals from the German-speaking settler communities in Palestine.49 Their language skills were valued by other German officers who were not capable of speaking Arabic. To them, the ‘Palästinadeutschen’ were helpful and efficient translators of military orders (which were given in

47 Warlimont in H. Felmy/W. Warlimont, “Die deutsche Ausnutzung der arabischen Eingeborenenbewegung im zweiten Weltkrieg,” n.d. [after 1955], BArch-MArch ZA 1 / 2257, p. 191. 48 See Ḥ annā, Qabla’l-maġīb, p. 144. 49 From 1868 on, a community of German pietists from Württemberg (‘Templer’) had settled in Palestine; Ralf Balke, Hakenkreuz im Heiligen Land: Die NSDAPLandesgruppe in Palästina (Erfurt, 2001), p. 9. Young men of this community were required by the German authorities to do the obligatory military service in the German armed forces which had been reintroduced in 1935. At the outbreak of the Second World War, the German authorities issued a ‘military order’ to all potential conscripts to leave Palestine for Germany. On August 31, 1939, 232 of them left the country, but a considerable number remained in Palestine and were arrested and interned by the British authorities a few days later; Balke, Hakenkreuz im Heiligen Land, pp. 74ff.

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German) and instructions. However, Arab members of the unit seem to have experienced their attitudes as colonialist and racist. Ten years after the war, one Arab officer of the unit characterised the Arabic spoken by this group as crude and offensive, and some of their orders as intentionally debasing.50 Sometimes, it seems, Arabic as the language of the Qurʾān and the first language of Islam could build a (if temporary and fleeting) bridge, linking Muslim soldiers even across enemy lines. Muḥammad ʿAlī al-ʿAğlūnī for instance, an Arab officer serving in the Ottoman army during the First World War, describes an encounter with an Indian officer who had served with the British troops and was taken prisoner by the Ottoman army. As a Muslim, the Indian officer had studied high standard Arabic so that the two officers were able to enter into a conversation. Al-ʿAğlūnī casts the Indian officer in a prophetic role: We Indian Muslims are sympathetic to the Khalifate state and hope that it will continue to exist after the war. But the sad truth is that it will lose the war, together with its ally, Germany. The end of the Ottoman Empire will be the outcome [. . .] But your [i.e. the Arabs’] hopes will be fulfilled!51

A similar example is an event from the Second World War, recounted by Ḫ alīl, the Kurdish labourer. When he and his unit were taken prisoner by the German army, probably during the fights in southern Italy in winter 1943/1944, they were taken to a prisoner-of-war camp in the mountains. Ḫ alīl still remembers the terrible situation and oppressive atmosphere during his imprisonment, which lasted, he says, three months and seventeen days. When we arrived at the camp, I looked at the fence: seven rows of wire, one after the other. The first line was ordinary wire, after that only barbed wire. [. . .] There was no bread. There was a barrel of salt in which they poured the water—now drink! [. . .] And one day, I was sitting there like this [he crouches with his arms tightly wrapped around his body]. [. . .] Of course, if you had a cigarette and they caught you with it, they would shoot you! [. . .] And there is a guard, [on a watchtower] just beside me. And—I heard him recite the Qurʾān [. . .] in a beautiful manner! Just hearing it refreshed my spirit. [. . .] And I sat upright! I said [in Arabic]: There is no God but God, and Muḥammad is his prophet. Oh God,

50 Letter from Maḥmūd Rifāʿī to Felmy from Damascus (February 20, 1955), BArchMArch ZA 1 / 2728. 51 Al-ʿAğlūnī, D̠ ikrayātī, p. 22.


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release me from this torture! [. . .] Then I saw the guard come down from his [tower]. He closed his Qurʾān and came down. He said: You Arabi? I said: No! Tcherkess? No. Christian? No. I said: Kurdi. Kurdish, Kurdish! He asked: What is your name? I said: Ḫ alīl Muḥammad. He made a gesture. I thought: Now he will kill me. [. . .] He said: Your name is Ḫ alīl Muḥammad? I said yes. [. . .] He was a German, a dark young man with a pointed mustache. A strong young man! He said: “Tu hungry?” That means: do you want to eat? I made a gesture with my hand, meaning: very! He went away—and came back with a plate—like this!—, full of rice and with a slice of margarine. And trousers, and a jacket, and shoes. He lifted me up. Did you think I was strong enough to stand up by myself?? He lifted me up, put the jacket on me and closed the buttons. Then, I put the trousers on by myself (pardon me!). I saw him thinking deeply. He went away again and brought me a pair of old socks—from where, I don’t know. Then I put on the socks and the shoes. Then he said: Ḫ alīl, when you are hungry, tell me! Then I will bring you food. Q.: in which language? A: In Arabic.52

Some time after this, Ḫ alīl was one of eleven prisoners who were let go in exchange for a number of German prisoners of war with the British army. Today, he suspects that his being Muslim may have been partly responsible for his good luck in being among the first to be exchanged.

Desertion, Avoidance and Refusal Combatants from the Arab East responded to the pressures inherent in military service during the wars with a variety of actions. Many accounts of Arab soldiers’ war experiences include attempts to avoid or escape from military service or even conscription itself. Strategies to reach an—at least temporary—respite from the Ottoman army, for instance, ranged from hiding from the recruiting crews, appealing to either supernatural beings or influential patrons to intervene for an exemption, desertion and crossing the lines to join one of the enemy armies, to simulated illnesses or even self-mutilation.53

52

Interview in Sheikh Hemo (February 4, 2006). For examples from the Ottoman army during the First World War, see ʿAbdallāh Ḥ annā, Dair ʿAṭīya: At-tārīḫ wa’l-ʿumrān min al-waqf ad̠ -d̠ arrī ila’l-muğtamaʿ al-madanī (awāḫ ir al-qarn at̠-t̠ālit̠ ʿašar—muntaṣaf al-qurn al-ʿišrīn) (Damascus, 2002), pp. 375f., 382ff.; Ğūrğ Ḥ annā, Qabla’l-maġīb, pp. 140, 156f., 163, 174f. 53

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Similar actions, albeit on a numerically smaller scale, are reported from Arab combatants serving in the Second World War on both sides. Accounts of German officers indicate instances of self-mutilation by Arab combatants in the German-Arab Training Corps which occurred out of dissatisfaction, ‘violated honour’, or out of a wish to escape briefly from military duties: Ali ben Mohamed appears before the medical officer, wishes to be transferred to the hospital. The doctor examines him, Ali is completely healthy.—Why do you want to go to hospital?—But the others go to hospital, too!—You are healthy, you will not be sent to the hospital.— Ali goes to the glass door and suddenly hits his head against four glass panels. Blood streaming from his head, he goes back to the doctor, his scalp is full of glass splinters. Sick enough now? he asks.

Another occurrence: The company is going through the drills, everything is working rather well. Suddenly, Machenith [sic!] drops his rifle, throws the steel helmet away, and falls down on the earth: I am not a soldier! he exclaims. Two hours later, out of anger and shame about this event his friend Mabrouk hits himself over the head with his bajonet so strongly that the skull bone lies bare.54

Desertions, which were a common feature in the Ottoman Army during the First World War and have been described often,55 also occurred among Arab combatants in the Second World War. During their deployment in Greece in 1943, a company of the German-Arab Training Corps including their Alsatian officer are reported to have deserted from the unit—supposedly to join the Greek partisans.56 ‘Natives’ serving in the Troupes Spéciales commanded by the Vichy French in Syria were considered ‘largely unreliable’ and ‘prone to desertion’. In fact, before and during the fighting in 1941, considerable Druze and Cir54

Letter from F.J. von Voss, a former officer of the unit, to former general H. Felmy, Brakel/Westf. (March 4, 1955), BArch-MArch ZA 1 / 2728. 55 See for instance Erik Jan Zürcher, “Between Death and Desertion: The Experience of the Ottoman Soldier in World War I,” Turcica 28 (1996), 235–258; individual examples in ʿAbdallāh Ḥ annā, Al-fallāḥ ūn yiqraʾūna tārīḫ ahum, forthcoming, Ğūrğ Ḥ annā, Qabla’l-maġīb, see also Gerhard Höpp, “Frontenwechsel: Muslimische Deserteure im Ersten und Zweiten Weltkrieg und in der Zwischenkriegszeit,” in Fremdeinsätze: Afrikaner und Asiaten in europäischen Kriegen, 1914–1945, eds. Gerhard Höpp and Brigitte Reinwald, Studien Zentrum Moderner Orient, Geisteswissenschaftliche Zentren Berlin e.V. 13 (Berlin, 2000), pp. 129–141. 56 Letter from F.J. von Voss to H. Felmy (March 4, 1955), BArch-MArch ZA 1 / 2728.


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cassian contingents deserted and joined the Free French and British forces; these desertions were facilitated by ethnic and kin ties which linked Druze and Circassian communities across the mandate borders.57 In May 1941 five Cirassian escadrons defected to the Allies with their French commander, Collet; they re-entered Syria a month later as part of the Allied invasion,58 thus placing Circassian groupements of Syrian origin on opposing sides of the front.59 Besides desertion, there were also instances of open refusal to follow military orders. In June 1941, in the course of fighting between the Vichy French forces and the Allies in southern Syria, the Circassian units who had deserted from the Vichy French some weeks before refused to follow orders: being ordered to attack the Syrian Druze contingents who opposed them on the Vichy French side of the front, the Circassian objected, stating to their commander, Collet, that they did not want to attack their own ‘countrymen’. On the other side of the front, similar phenomena could be observed: the Druze on the Vichy French side not just ‘objected’, but mutinied, refusing to attack, and deserted, encouraging other Druze to join them.60 A similar case had occurred a few weeks earlier on the other side of the lines. The deployment to Iraq in support of the British forces had created dissent among the Arab soldiers of the Arab Legion as well as the Trans Jordan Frontier Force. Near the area of ‘H4’, a pumping station on the pipeline of the Iraq Petroleum Company on the Transjordanian-Iraqi border, Arab soldiers and officers of the Trans Jordan Frontier Force refused to go on, stating that they had signed on with the force to guard and protect Jordan’s borders, but were not willing to fight against other Arabs outside of Trans-Jordanian territory. Their commanders finally gave in, the unit was drawn back.61 Another version emphasises the role of the Banī Ṣaḫr, naming their Sheikh Ḥ adīt̠a al-Ḫ rayšā—opposed to Emir ʿAbdallāh in conflicts over

57

Bou-Nacklie, “The 1941 Invasion,” p. 514, n 19. Ibid., p. 515. 59 Ibid., p. 518. 60 Ibid., pp. 519f. 61 Sulaimān Mūsā, Dirāsāt fī tārīḫ al-Urdunn al-ḥ adīt̠ (Amman, 1999), pp. 208f., Abu Nowar, The Struggle for Independence, p. 53. Syed Ali El-Edroos, The Hashemite Arab Army, 1908–1979 (Amman, 1980), p. 225, quoting Šarīf Muḥammad Ḥ āšim who participated in the action, locates the incident near H3. In his account, there is no mention of the role of the Banī Ṣaḫr. 58

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control and especially taxation—as having been the actual “instigator” of the incident. Sheikh Ḥ adīta̠ reportedly said that it was wrong for Arab troops to fight their brothers at the command of the British, and called upon the members of his section of the tribe to resign from the Arab Legion.62

Yet Irfaifān al-Ḫ rayšā, the veteran quoted previously, did not participate in this ‘mutiny’ despite his Banī Ṣaḫr origin. More than six decades later, he presented his decision to follow orders and fight against the Iraqi forces on the side of the British as a result of his loyalty to the Hashemite family: after all, ʿAbdulilāh, the regent of Iraq who had been deposed by the anti-British coup, was a cousin of the Transjordanian regent, Emir ʿAbdallāh, whose will—Sheikh Irfaifān indicates—the army was implementing by fighting in Iraq.63

Crossing Social and Cultural Boundaries: Presentations and (Self-) representations Encounters with soldiers, as well as civilians, of a different cultural or linguistic origin took place in very different contexts and situations. The veterans describe encounters across cultural or ethnic boundaries within their own military units, or with inhabitants of areas they were stationed in, or with members of the enemy armies, mostly as prisoners-of-war. Often, their descriptions can be read (or heard) as part of the narrator’s self-presentation. Experiences of racist discriminations against Arab and other Middle Eastern combatants are sometimes used to illustrate more general, sometimes political, points the authors try to make: al-ʿAğlūnīs description of ethnic and racist discrimination between Arabs and Turks in the Ottoman army, for instance, forms part of his negative picture of Ottoman rule over the Arabic provinces;64 Ğūrğ Ḥ annā, a medical doctor from Lebanese Shweifat who served with the Ottoman army during the First World War and was taken prisoner by the British in 1918, places his account of British discrimination between German and ‘Turkish’ prisoners-of-war in the context of British colonialist 62 63 64

Abu Nowar, The Struggle for Independence, p. 77. Interview in Al-Muwaqqar (April 19, 2005). Al-ʿAğlūnī, D̠ ikrayātī, pp. 24ff.


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and racist attitudes in general.65 During the Second World War, as well, Arab and other Middle Eastern combatants experienced racism and discrimination in military life, as the memories of service in the German-Arab Training Corps quoted above indicate. But surprisingly often, descriptions of ‘foreign’ superior officers or even army systems are rather positive. Positive aspects may be presented in contrast to the narrators’ own society of origin and as an implicit or explicit critique of it. Thus, the veterans paint a picture in which the European war parties are characterised by ‘order’ and a strictly observed military discipline. “Their law is law, their order is order”, explained Ḫ alīl, and statements by Jordanian veterans of the Arab Legion about their British officers echo this perspective. Similar descriptions of the British army have been formulated by veterans of the First World War. Even Ğūrğ Ḥ annā, whose account of his imprisonment with the British vividly expresses his dislike of them, describes his favourable impression of the good British organisation regarding provisions and equipment. After having suffered from the lack of resources in the Ottoman army for years, he notes his exclamation after his arrest on 27 May 1918: “By God [. . .], if the Turkish army had had just one tenth of these resources, they would have pushed the British back to the shores of their isle.”66 Similarly, Fauzī al-Qāwuqğī’s account of von Leiser, a German officer with whom he served during his time with the Ottoman army, and whom he characterises as correct, goal-oriented and well-organised, contrasts with his description of the “extremely chaotic and over-worked” Ottoman military authorities, notably the Ministry of War, which according to his portrayal “resembled a market.”67 Individual accounts give not only different perspectives and evaluations of these encounters, they also emphasise aspects which may be unexpected to a European listener while neglecting others which appear to be of greater interest. One case in point is the frequent mentioning of provisions, food, as well as ways of eating—together or apart—while everyday routines and orders or individual, war-related actions are less predominant than might be expected.

65 66 67

Ḥ annā, Qabla’l-maġīb, pp. 194ff. Ḥ annā, Qabla’l-maġīb, p. 188. Qāsimīya, Mud̠ akkirāt, 1, pp. 34f.

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Ḫ alīl’s unequivocally positive evaluation of the British is one such example: Their customs and habits are very good. [. . .] Concerning the military service, there is certainly no one better than the British in the whole world. Concerning the food: whatever you could wish for was provided. With clothes, it was the same, and the salary as well. [. . .] There was a storage building, longer than this house [about 20 meters]. From floor to ceiling it was full of clothes, all hanging down—from stockings (pardon me [for mentioning such a profane garment]) to head coverings: whatever you liked, you could take. Any clothes you wanted—they were there. And their morals are equally high. God forbid, they are not like people here: never a dirty word or a beating—that was not possible. Their morals are humane. You and the one with the 2 or 3 stars [lieutenant and captain], the colonel, the major general and the gerenol [general] and the bergedi [brigadier]—you all eat together. They eat with you, don’t they? [. . .] The gerenol [sic] has 12 000 men under his command, but he has to eat together with you!

The ‘equality’ of soldiers and officers, and especially the good material provisions, of the British army are remembered by veterans of both world wars. Irfaifān’s reminiscences of his former British commander, J. B. Glubb, also reflect a personal like and respect for him. According to Rfaifān’s recollections voiced in an interview with the Jordanian historian Sulaimān Mūsā in 1993, Glubb castigated and eventually even dismissed a recruit of sedentary background who had turned up his nose at a meal served by a Bedouin family because it did not conform to his standards of cleanliness.68 Anecdotes and quotes about Glubb show his personal qualities, especially his respect and interest for (Bedouin) Arabic culture, as well as his personal discipline and industriousness regarding his military duties. The political aspects of a British officer (who, incidentally, sent regular reports on the situation and events concerning the Arab Legion to British officials and institutions) being in charge of the— supposedly sovereign—Transjordanian army, which in 1956 led to Glubb’s eventual dismissal from Jordanian services, is downplayed in personal memories of other Arab Legion veterans as well who in con-

68 Irfaifān al-Ḫ rayšā told this anecdote on June 10, 1993 to Sulaimān Mūsā who generously gave me permission to write it down from his unpublished notes in Amman on November 22, 2005.


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versation emphasised Glubb’s personal sympathies for the Arab and, especially, Palestinian cause. Being stationed at places far from their places of origin meant that the soldiers got to know other, foreign worlds of everyday life at least briefly; descriptions of particular social and cultural circumstances are part of several personal accounts of the war years. The strange customs, habits and ways of the local population are sometimes presented in implicit or explicit contrast to the narrators’ own society of origin. An example is the account of Turkmen villages north of Alexandrette by Ğūrğ Ḥ annā. His observations ‘about the region’ in which he was stationed for several months describe the ‘primitiveness’, material poverty, lack of basic education and culture, and the resulting naiveté and ‘religious fanatism’ of the inhabitants which are a far cry from his native Lebanon. As in many other stereotypical presentations, in his account the villagers’ primitiveness goes hand in hand with their basic goodness and simpleness of mind.69 A returning theme that can be found in a number of war memories of the male combatants is that of romantic relationships with local women and girls. These accounts, it seems, add another facet to the image of the ‘masculine’ fighter as which the narrators of war memories present themselves. The described relationships cross multiple boundaries: besides the boundaries separating unmarried males and females, there are linguistic and cultural, but also religious ones. One example is Fauzī al-Qāwuqğī’s account of his relationship with a Christian woman from Beirut that lasted over several months between winter and spring 1915/1916 in Lebanon and Palestine and even detracted him briefly from his military duties.70 Ğūrğ Ḥ annā equally describes his relationship with one of the Turkmen village girls which crossed not only the boundaries of religion (Christian—Muslim), but also boundaries of language (Turkish—Arabic). Ḥ annā himself hints that this relationship, which would have been more than problematic in ordinary circumstances, was made possible by the war situation: his status as an Ottoman officer kept the girl’s relatives from intervening.71 At the

69

Ḥ annā, Qabla’l-maġīb, pp. 149ff. Qāsimīya, Mud̠akkirāt Fauzī al-Qāwuqğī, 1, pp. 25ff. al-Qāwuqğī later married a German (see also letter from F. al-Qāwuqğī to general Felmy, dated Beirut (July 28, 1955), BArch-MArch ZA 1 / 2728). 71 Ḥ annā, Qabla’l-maġīb, p. 155. 70

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same time, the relationships described are ephemeral episodes in the sense that they do not outlast the war years. The narrative of Ḫ alīl, the Kurdish veteran of the British army, gives yet another example. During his stay in the British barracks in Bari, Ḫ alīl met an Italian woman named Giuseppina with whom he began a relationship. [. . .] Two months before [his unit was transferred back to Egypt], she said: Ḫ alīl, I might be pregnant! I said: Rely on God. They call God “Madonn” [sic]. Then I left, and did not know anything else. [. . .] Now I am going to tell you something which will make you laugh. Once, I went to Aleppo. At the bus station, when I was on my way back to the village—God is my witness!—I saw people crowded around a young man. [. . .] They said: that man speaks neither Arabic, nor Turkish, nor German. We have no idea to which nation he belongs! [I went to him] and greeted him: Marhaba! [. . .] You speak Ingliz? He said no. I said: Tu parle Alemani? He said no. I said: Tu parle italiani [sic]? He said: Si! [. . .] Where are you from?—From Bari. [. . .] I asked him about his name [. . .] and his address in Bari. He said: near the cinema. Aha!! I asked: Might your mother’s name be Giuseppina? He opened his eyes wide!! He looked at me—astonished! He said yes. I told him: You are my son, my boy! The boy was completely astonished. His face changed colour. [. . .] But as he stood there before me, I was sure: he looked exactly like our Hanan [his eldest son in the village, born after he returned from the war].

This, Ḫ alīl told me, was the only time he met his ‘Italian’ son—after this chance meeting, he never saw him again. This anecdote, however it may be interpreted, illustrates the vital importance of the world war for Ḫ alīl’s biography. If it was not told, the war years would appear as a transitory, ephemeral and, at the end of the day, inconsequential episode in Ḫ alīl’s life.

In Conclusion: Localising the Translocal What does all this tell us about how translocal processes that occurred in the course of the two world wars were experienced by combatants from the Mashriq? While it seems easy to see how spatial flows caused by the world wars set not only European soldiers, technology, arms, and propaganda in motion, but also gripped Syrians and Jordanians who participated in the armies fighting in the two world wars, it is much more problematic


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to show the qualitative—much less quantitative—consequences that these movements had for the ‘consolidations’ of translocally effected transformations, or even for long-term social and cultural change. This difficulty arises mainly from the heterogeneity of the individual perspectives—a heterogeneity which is only emphasised by the diversity of the sources that were evaluated for this article. For some combatants from the Mashriq, serving in one of the world wars set the path for a military career which could last for most of a lifetime. Many of those who fought in the Second World War were veterans of the First, as (not only) the example of Fauzī al-Qāwuqğī demonstrates; equally, many who served during the Second World War continued their military career in the years following it in the armies of the newly independent Arab national states—many world war veterans for instance participated in the Arab-Israeli war in 1948/1949. Beyond the individual level, experiences and training which were accumulated during the world war years shaped the armies of independent Syria as well as Jordan, where the unchanged name and command structure of the Arab Legion demonstrated this continuity very clearly. The biographies of its veterans also show that military service in this unit contributed to the establishment of a new ‘national’ Jordanian elite which was recruited from different social backgrounds, including well-educated members of sedentary families as well as not formally qualified Bedouin. But for many other combatants—and this may especially be true for the lower ranks—participating in one of the world wars appears at first glance as a mere episode. After their military service, these soldiers returned to their places of origin and pursued their lives just as other members of their home communities. Over the years, only few of the personal relations, language skills, or material possessions dating to the war years persisted. This seems to have been the case with many rural recruits of the Ottoman army during the First World War, as cases collected by ʿAbdallāh Ḥ annā show.72 The volatileness of the war experience is also illustrated by Ḫ alīl’s biography: Shortly before the end of the war, he was asked if he would extend his service with the British army to go to a far-away place which, according to Ḫ alīl’s recollections, was called ‘the country of

72

ʿAbdallāh Ḥ annā, Al-fallāḥūn yiqraʾūna tārīḫ ahum, forthcoming.

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monkeys’. He declined this offer and decided to leave the army and go home. Back in Syria, Ḫ alīl received a pension from the British for two more years. After it stopped reaching him, Ḫ alīl’s life went on much as it would have had he never joined the army—until today he lives in his native village, farming his own small plot as well as working for other villagers. Although a considerable number of former recruits from his region of origin share his experiences, Ḫ alīl is the only world war veteran in his native village; he told me that even those former comrades from other villages of the region are now “old, sick or dead”. After I had talked to him, some of Ḫ alīl’s fellow villagers approached me, jokingly asking if he had been “telling his usual lies”. They do not doubt that his service with the British did indeed take place: older villagers still remember the day Ḫ alīl joined the British army. Rather, the stories he tells of his army service are not appreciated by his neighbours, maybe because they do not relate to any experience which they share. In a way, Ḫ alīl is an isolated figure in his native village, alone with his world war experiences. Looked at in this light, Ḫ alīl’s narrative takes on a stronger, if somewhat poignant relevance: in the absence of a more ‘public’ history of war veterans like him, and lacking material changes to show for the years he spent with the British, telling about his journey through the war is the only way to recall a significant part of his life. Thus, his and other veterans’ own words are the most obvious, and possibly the most significant manifestation of the lasting effects of the war experience: participating in one of the two world wars of the twentieth century has left traces in the combatants’ biographies which are worthwhile remembering and presenting to others. Admittedly, as an outcome or ‘result’ of translocal processes as wide-reaching as the world wars, this individualist perspective may appear anticlimactic. However, it must be taken seriously if we follow Hynes in considering that each narrative is a commemoration of “one life lived in the mass action of a modern war, [as . . .] a monument of a kind to that one soldier [. . .] and no-one else.”73 As has become evident in the preceding paragraphs, representations of cultural and geographic ‘Others’ whom the soldiers encountered through the war—be it the ‘primitive’ rural populations depicted by

73

Hynes, “Personal Narratives and Commemoration,” p. 220.


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Ğūrğ Ḥ annā or the ‘organised and just’ British reminisced about by Ḫ alīl—are given not only as disinterested descriptions of strange lands and people, but are placed in relation to the narrators’ own environment. Depending on the medium of the narration, and the time and situation in which it is written or told, implicit and explicit comparisons are made between the unknown customs described and the situation ‘at home’—in a geographic as well as temporal sense; thus accounts of the German or British military machinery may be framed as criticisms of either past or present military and administrative systems in the speakers’ native lands. Their war time encounters with foreign orders give the veterans authority to address, and evaluate, their respective local contexts. On the other hand, the authors or speakers sometimes place their own actions in the context of continuities that are presented as independent from, or predating, the conditions that were shaped to a large extent by the powers of war. An example is Sheikh Irfaifān’s emphasis on his family’s tradition as ‘fighters’ which he followed by joining the army—even if it was acting against what he may have perceived as ‘Arab political interests’; or his emphasis that participating in the British fight against al-Kailānī in Iraq in 1941 was—from his point of view—a matter of personal loyalty (to the Hashemites) and their honour-bound duty to protect their relative, ʿAbdulilāh. In other cases, ethnic or tribal loyalties and continuities, but also nationalist considerations, influenced combatants’ actions (as in the mentioned Syrian troops’ desertions from Vichy France to the Allies, and the subsequent events on the front, as well as the Transjordanian troops’ discussions and partial refusal to enter Iraq; both in 1941). Beyond being a mere description of individual motivations and thoughts, the emphasis on continuities of loyalties and convictions that are rooted in ‘local’ ground and that tie the combatants to their communities of origin in different ways, may put feelings of uncertainty, powerlessness and uprootedness experienced in the service of ‘foreign’ armies into a familiar perspective. Thus, one way of interpreting some of the narratives told by combatants from the Mashriq could be to understand them as a way of appropriating experiences of translocal processes that were caused by the world wars. As Ḫ alīl said when he explained his refusal to extend his contract with the British army: “I refused to go on. Because after all: a stranger in a strange place is like a blind man.”

‘FOLLOWING THE HILLS’: GOLD MINING CAMPS AS HETEROTOPIAS Katja Werthmann Johannes Gutenberg Universität, Mainz

Informal mining and the emergence of mining camps that may comprise tens of thousands of inhabitants has become a global phenomenon. It presently occurs all over the world, it is connected with the world market prices for diamonds, gold, and other precious metals or minerals, and it resembles other economic booms or crises that entail massive migratory movements. In the West African country Burkina Faso, a ‘gold rush’ began in the 1980s and continues to the present day. It resembles the gold and diamond booms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in North America, Canada, Australia, and South Africa. Mining is done both by local communities who happen to live near a mining site, and by a ‘floating population’ that is drawn to a new mining site in a matter of days. Mining camps are not self-evident objects of social anthropological research. Although the myth of a clearly demarcated ‘field’ that contains a culturally homogenous unit of research has been dismantled,1 informal mining camps present a particular difficulty for researchers who have to be as mobile as their field.2 Gold mining camps are

1 If there ever was such a myth. Although presented as a critique, Gupta and Ferguson seem to confirm a biased picture of what is considered to be standard anthropological field work by a few US-American anthropology departments that are accorded the status of “hegemonic centers”, while other approaches are referred to as “peripheral, heterodox, or subordinated”; Akil Gupta and James Ferguson “Discipline and Practice: ‘The Field’ as Site, Method, and Location in Anthropology,” in Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science, eds. Akil Gupta and James Ferguson (Berkeley, 1997), p. 42. 2 Katja Werthmann, Tilo Grätz and Hans Peter Hahn, “Mobilität in Afrika: Multilokale Feldforschungen. Editorial”, in Mobilität in Afrika, eds. Katja Werthmann, Tilo Grätz and Hans Peter Hahn, special issue of Afrika Spectrum 3 (2004), 325–333.

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“spaces on the move”3 or “nomadic spaces”4 in a very literal sense: they are both a physical structure and a form of social organisation that mushrooms in various places, independent of whether, or how, their founders and inhabitants are connected with each other. This is what makes them ‘translocal’:5 any concrete locality only matters as long as it provides certain resources (the metal or mineral, other profitable activities, or alternative lifestyles). Once these resources are depleted or no longer satisfactory, the sojourners of a mining camp relocate to another place where they reproduce similar structures of cohabitation and cooperation. Relocation also alters the combination of individual elements of the population that moves, but most likely some parts of it will be the same as in previous places. This article explores patterns of cooperation and cohabitation in gold mining camps in Burkina Faso, motives for migration to mining camps, and the stigmatisation of the people living in those camps.6 The stigmatisation is based on a prejudice against sojourners of mining camps who are viewed as a socially and morally deviant population.

3 Jan-Georg Deutsch and Brigitte Reinwald, eds., Space on the Move: Transformations of the Indian Ocean Seascape in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century (Berlin, 2002). 4 Michel Ben Arrous, “La translocalité, pour quoi faire?” in Les relations transsahariennes à l’époque contemporaine: Un espace en constante mutation, eds. Laurence Marfaing and Steffen Wippel (Paris, 2004), pp. 415–442. 5 Von Oppen defines ‘translocality’ both as a practice of transgression (e.g. spatial mobility) and a place or space that is characterised by this practice; Achim von Oppen, “L’évolution d’un programme de recherché: La ‘translocalité’ au Centre de Recherche sur l’Orient Moderne (ZMO), Berlin,” in Les relations transsahariennes à l’époque contemporaine, eds. Marfaing and Wippel, pp. 401–414; cf. Ulrike Freitag and Achim von Oppen, “Translokalität als ein Zugang zur Geschichte globaler Verflechtungen,” H-Soz-u-Kult (June 10, 2005), http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/forum/id=632& type=artikel&sort=datum&order=down&search=translokalit%C3%A4 (accessed July 2006, 18). Ben Arrous, “La translocalité, pour quoi faire,” p. 415, comments rather dryly that “le succès de la translocalité doit beaucoup à son imprécision” and goes on to reconstruct different meanings and applications of translocality and other related concepts. In conclusion, he points out that the common element of various definitions of translocality is “le voyage des lieux et leur fécondation réciproque”, ibid, p. 438. 6 The article is based on several field trips between 1998 and 2001, and revisits in 2004 and 2008, in a number of mining sites in the provinces of Bougouriba, Houet, Ioba, Poni and Noumbiel, but mostly in the mine of V3 Sanmatenga (Ioba). The research was part of an interdisciplinary project about the West African Savanna (SFB 268) at the University of Frankfurt/Main, Germany, financed by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. In the field, I was assisted by Sibbila Dabilgou, Souleymane Komboudry, Dominique Tiendrebéogo, and Joël B. Somé.

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I argue that mining camps are in fact “heterotopias of deviation”7— spaces that are both somewhere and nowhere. These spaces also catalyse processes of urbanisation in non-urban places: they are characterised by size, density, and heterogeneity, and accommodate individuality, even anonymity.

Present-day Gold Mining in Burkina Faso In contrast with neighbouring Ghana, industrial mining never played a significant role in Burkina Faso. Since 1925, the French tried to maximise the exploitation of gold-bearing sites in their West African colonies by way of forced labour. In 1938, an industrial gold mine was established in Poura. Due to the lack of trained personnel and recurrent technical problems, the mine never really worked productively. It was closed in 1966, reopened in 1984, and closed again after the collapse of a shaft in 1989. After EU-funded rehabilitation in the 1990s, the mine had to close again in 1999 when the price of gold dropped dramatically due to sales of gold reserves by several central banks. Over 300 mine workers were laid off. Likewise, the semi-industrial gold mine at Essakane in the north of the country was closed down, which included the dismissal of 230 mine workers.8 Non-industrial gold mining that involves tens of thousands of people is a recent phenomenon in Burkina Faso. It began in the northern parts of the country around 1980 during a drought that affected several West African Sahel and Savanna regions.9 Many people turned to gold digging as an alternative to farming, petty trading, or plantation

7 Michel Foucault, Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias (1967), http://www.foucault.info/ documents/heteroTopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en.html (accessed April 13, 2005). 8 The Economist Intelligence Unit, Country Report Burkina Faso/Niger (London, December 2000), pp. 18–19. 9 Hervé Badolo, Impact socio-économique de l’exploitation artisanale de l’or au Burkina Faso: Cas d’Essakane (Ouagadougou, 1988); Jean-Pierre Carbonnel, “L’orpaillage au Burkina Faso et au Mali,” in L’appropriation de la terre en Afrique noire: Manuel d’analyse, de décision et de gestion foncières, eds. Émile Le Bris, Étienne Le Roy and Paul Mathieu (Paris, 1991), pp. 122–130; ORSTOM, Projet de recherche pluridisciplinaire sur l’orpaillage: Compte rendu de la réunion du 5/11/1991 au centre ORSTOM de Ouagadougou (Ouagadougou, 1991); Yacouba Yaro, “Les jeunes chercheurs d’or d’Essakan: L’Eldorado burkinabè,” in L’enfant exploité: Oppression, mise au travail et proletarisation, ed. Bernard Schlemmer (Paris, 1996), pp. 135–149.

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labour in neighbouring coastal countries like Ghana and Ivory Coast. Since then, gold mining has gradually spread over several regions of Burkina Faso reaching the south and west of the country by the end of the 1990s.10 Today, gold digging in Burkina Faso is pursued both as a dry-season craft by farmers, as a full-time occupation by professional itinerant gold diggers, and as a temporary activity by an assortment of fortune-seekers. Mining camps also attract providers of various goods and services. According to IMF estimates for the year 2006, 200,000 people were working in 200 non-industrial gold mines in Burkina Faso.11 This figure, however, has been cited for years in several documents without any empirical evidence. Although access to mineral resources is officially regulated by a Mining Code,12 informal gold mining often starts spontaneously and prior to any agreement between gold miners and rural communities or state authorities. Industrial exploration and exploitation of minerals require a mining title. Artisanal mining is legal without a mining title and only requires a license from the administrative authorities, except in protected zones like national parks, near property enclosed by a wall, or in areas considered sacred by the local population.13 The Mining Code stipulates that mining administration agents may act as criminal investigation police to search for and prosecute infractions of the Code.14 In the majority of non-industrial gold mines, this function is carried out by the agents of the parastatal gold marketing company Comptoir Burkinabè des Métaux Précieux (C.B.M.P.) in cooperation

10 Katja Werthmann, “Gold Rush in West Africa: The Appropriation of ‘Natural’ Resources: Non-industrial Gold Mining in Burkina Faso,” Sociologus 50, 1 (2000), 90–104. 11 International Monetary Fund, IMF Country Report 07/320 (Washington D.C., September 2007; http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/scr/2007/cr07320.pdf) (accessed June 24, 2009); see also Eric Jaques, Blaise Zida, Mario Billa, Catherine Greffié and Jean-François Thomassin, “Artisanal and Small-scale Gold Mines in Burkina Faso: Today and Tomorrow,” in Small-scale Mining, Rural Subsistence and Poverty in West Africa, ed. Gavin Hilson (Rugby, 2006), pp. 115–134. 12 The following passage refers to the Mining Code that was in effect during the period of my research between 1997 and 2001. It has been modified since (cf. Sabine Luning, “Artisanal Gold Mining in Burkina Faso: Permits, Poverty and Perceptions of the Poor in Sanmatenga, the ‘Land of Gold’,” in Small-Scale Mining, ed. Hilson, pp. 135–147). 13 Burkina Minier 98–99, Deuxième édition, Collection essentielle, Groupement professionnel des miniers du Burkina (GPMB) (Ouagadougou, 1998/1999), Art. 56, p. 150. 14 Ibid., Art. 89, p. 161.


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with the gendarmerie and the police. Representatives of the state marketing company supervise the gold processing and buy gold from licensed gold traders. Through these agents the state tries to control the gold trade, but it is estimated that a large percentage of the gold is sold in the black market.15 Just as in the ‘Wild West’ one hundred and fifty years ago, the gold mining camps of Burkina Faso also attract desperadoes. In 1998, for instance, a small group of criminals terrorised a newly established camp in the southwest of the country. They threatened gold diggers with weapons and took their gold. Some women from the neighbouring village were raped. Eventually a military unit was sent in, and four men who had allegedly figured on the gendarmerie’s ‘black list’ were shot.16 Similar instances were reported from gold mining camps in other regions.

Migration to Mining Camps When gold mining began in the 1980s, it was a last resort for people in the northern and central regions that were most seriously affected by the drought. Since then, though, gold mining has become a permanent occupation for many men and women who have spent years ‘following the hills’, the idea being that gold miners follow the hills like pastoralists follow their cattle. However, the sojourners of mining camps are not professionally peripatetic (in spite of being frequently dubbed ‘modern nomads’ or ‘vagabonds’). Neither do they represent “cosmopolitanism from below”,17 because not all of them come from ‘below’—however that may be defined.

15 Badolo, Impact socio-économique de l’exploitation artisanale de l’or au Burkina Faso, p. 55; William C. Butterman, The Mineral Industry of Burkina Faso: US Geological Survey–Minerals Information (1996), http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/ country/1996/9250096.pdf (accessed June 24, 2009); Pierre Englebert, Burkina Faso: Unsteady Statehood in West Africa (Boulder, Colorado, 1996), p. 96; Jaques et al., “Artisanal and Small-scale Gold Mines in Burkina Faso,” pp. 122–123. 16 This incident was reported by Amnesty International as a case of extrajudicial execution. 17 Elisabeth Boesen and Laurence Marfaing, “Vers un cosmopolitisme par le bas?,” in Les nouveaux urbains dans l’espace Sahara-Sahe: Un cosmopolitisme par le bas, eds. Elisabeth Boesen and Laurence Marfaing (Paris, 2007), pp. 7–22.

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Many gold diggers admit that they stay in the mining camps “despite themselves”. Some even refer to gold mining as a kind of addictive behaviour like smoking or drinking: Even if you strike it rich and buy real estate, you won’t escape. It [gold] is like something that draws you. You are like someone who has the habit of chewing cola nuts, or of drinking alcohol.18

The main reason for staying is the experience or the hope of being one of the lucky few to earn more money in a single day than in a whole season of strenuous farm work. However, those who are most likely to earn a steady living in the mining camps are the providers of goods and services. A new mining camp, even if it is in the middle of nowhere, soon attracts a wide range of commercial activities that can normally be found in urban settings. Those who pursue these commercial activities are as mobile as the gold diggers and may similarly have spent many years in mining camps. Mining camps provide economic opportunities for men, women, and children. They also constitute a refuge for people who for one reason or another do not wish to remain in (or return to) their communities of origin. Corresponding to the national demographic composition, the majority of the inhabitants of mining camps are Mossi, but many other ethnic groups are represented too. In addition, a number of gold diggers come from the neighbouring countries of Niger, Mali, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Benin, or even Nigeria. The population of mining camp is as heterogeneous as any urban population. It consists, among others, of farmers who temporarily mine during the dry season, workers who have lost their jobs in the city, unemployed school leavers, ex-convicts, former labour migrants who had to leave Ivory Coast in the wake of the xenophobic attacks following the 1999 coup and the ensuing civil war, and even ex-civil servants. As in urban migratory settings, people from one particular region sometimes form loose networks, associations or neighbourhoods in a mining camp. Relatives or friends may help out with cash or assistance, take a sick person to the hospital, or arrange for the burial of a deceased person. Many ordinary Burkinabè consider mining camps as ‘a world apart’ where drug abuse, criminality, and prostitution prevail. Contrary to

18

Interview V3 Sanmatenga (March 8, 2001), Elhadj.


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this notoriously bad reputation, gold mining camps are not anarchic. Jaques et al. conducted a survey of 60 mining sites in Burkina Faso and found “surprisingly well-defined structures and (. . .) high degrees of organization.”19 In larger settlements, an elected representative (responsable or délégué) speaks for the gold diggers and serves as an intermediary between them, the state administration, and representatives of the gold marketing company.20 The speaker is responsible for the mediation of conflicts between the gold miners and the local communities on the one hand, and the settling of disputes among the gold diggers on the other hand. He may request that gold diggers perform communal work such as cleaning the processing and trading area. He is also entitled to demand that the pit owners make financial contributions to cover the costs of renting or buying technical equipment for the mine. Even other professional groups such as traders or butchers may be asked to contribute, since they also profit from the successful extraction of ore. A mining camp can comprise several thousand inhabitants and thus attain urban dimensions.21 Likewise, patterns of consumption and leisure are clearly urban: in the shops and stalls of a mining camp, commodities such as bottled beer, instant coffee, white bread, cigarettes, clothing and shoes, electronic gadgets and so forth are available. In video centers customers can watch Kung Fu, Bollywood, or American movies, and there are many bars and places to eat. Thus, for people from more remote rural areas, going to the mines offers access to an urban lifestyle without having to go to the cities. Young gold diggers, especially, emulate US-American popular culture and fashion. They wear jeans, T-shirts, baseball caps, and sneakers, and they carry nicknames which refer, among others, to prominent actors, athletes or politicians.22 Adopting this urban lifestyle also includes a particular kind of speech. In Burkina Faso, some of the miners’ vocabulary is 19

Jaques et al., “Artisanal and Small-scale Gold Mines in Burkina Faso,” p. 119. Katja Werthmann, “The President of the Gold Diggers: Sources of Power in a Gold Mine in Burkina Faso,” Ethnos 68, 1 (2003), 95–111. 21 During the peak season in 1999–2000, there were about 10,000 inhabitants in V3 Sanmatenga. In Bouda (Passoré province), there were about 40,000 people in 1991 (Jaques et al., “Artisanal and Small-scale Gold Mines in Burkina Faso,” p. 119). In Burkina Faso, there are two major cities: Ouagadougou (about 1 million inhabitants) and Bobo Dioulasso (about 500,000 inhabitants), and about a dozen secondary towns with 11,000 to 50,000 inhabitants. 22 Tilo Grätz, “Gold Mining and Risk Management: A Case Study form Northern Benin,” Ethnos 68, 2 (2003), 160–161; Katja Werthmann, Bitteres Gold: Historische, 20

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imported from Nouchi, a sociolect spoken by street gangs in the ghettos of Abidjan in Ivory Coast, but there are also some terms and idiomatic phrases that are used only in the gold mines. A lot of this vocabulary is related to leisure activities such as drinking. For instance, a specific brand of beer is called “donkey piss”, Pastis is called “lion’s tears”, and a mixture of Nescafé and Pastis is simply referred to as “the drug.” If a gold miner wants to get a colleague to buy him a drink, he says “I need help,” “Give me water,” or “Do something!” If someone is really drunk, he is “at the top” or “dosed.” Many women who come to the mining camps have left an unhappy marriage, refused to get married to a brother of their deceased husbands,23 could not accept a second wife, or have been accused of witchcraft. For women in these situations, mining camps offer the opportunity to earn a living to support themselves away from their relatives’ constant scrutiny.24 The most lucrative occupation for women is the supervision of a stall in the comptoir where ore is processed. Usually a pit owner erects such a stall and entrusts it to his girlfriend, who then recruits and supervises the labourers. As compensation, she gets the residual sand from the first panning that still contains gold and will be dried, mechanically ground and washed again in a sluice. Becoming the partner of a pit owner thus provides an economic opportunity for many women. In fact, some women even own mining pits themselves but leave the actual management to their male partners, since women are not allowed in the mine. Economic and social relationships in the mining camps are often based on mutual obligations and debts. What Cleary noted in mining camps in eastern Brazil also pertains to other countries: “Credit is the lubricant of the economic system in all garimpos; without it, most operations would never get off the ground.”25 Newcomers get credit from traders or shop owners; shop owners help out pit owners, pit owners lend equipment to one another, and so forth. Friends help

soziale und kulturelle Aspekte des nicht-industriellen Goldbergbaus in Westafrika (unpublished Habilitation thesis, Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz, 2003), p. 182. 23 Although prohibited by law, the levirate is still widely practiced in Mossi society. 24 Katja Werthmann, “Dans un monde masculin: Le travail des femmes dans un camp de chercheurs d’or au Burkina Faso,” in Les nouveaux urbains dans l’espace Sahara-Sahel, eds. Boesen and Marfaing, pp. 297–324; idem, “Working in a Boomtown: Female Perspectives on Gold-mining in Burkina Faso,” Resources Policy 34 (2009), 18–23. 25 David Cleary, Anatomy of the Amazon Gold Rush (London, 1990), p. 118.


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each other out with cash, buying drinks for one another or covering up for each other in cases of absence from work or when organising pilfering ore.26 When a miner is sick or has an accident, workmates or friends collect money and organise transport to a hospital or the home town. Of course this does not mean that friendship and other social relationships in mining camps are always reliable and harmonious. But it seems that petty theft, insults or brawls are forgiven more easily in the mining camps than, for instance, in the villages where the miners come from. Information circulates between different and sometimes remote mining camps. If a gold miner has accumulated debts at the end of a season, he may promise the concerned trader or shop owner to pay them back next season. The creditor, for his part, may ask the debtor to leave a pawn such as a radio or a bicycle. Sometimes the creditor keeps these pawns for at least another season before selling them. But many people move away without notifying their creditors. Should a creditor find out that the debtor has turned up in another mining camp, he may travel there to reclaim his money. If there is an elected speaker of the gold diggers, the case may be brought before him. But normally it is difficult to reclaim money from a person who has disappeared unless he or she comes back to the same camp in the next season. However, a person who notoriously disappears without settling debts will eventually be avoided and no longer gets credit from anybody in future.27

The Social Organisation of Gold Mining The organisation of mining varies according to the type of gold deposit.28 Whereas alluvial (placer) gold can be worked individually or in small teams by washing, panning or shallow-pit surface mining,

26

Werthmann, Bitteres Gold, pp. 168–169. Katja Werthmann, “Frivolous Squandering: Consumption and Redistribution in Mining Camps,” in Dilemmas of Development: Conflicts of Interest and their Resolutions in Modernizing Africa, eds. Jon Abbink and André van Dokkum (Leiden, 2008), pp. 60–76. 28 The following descriptions are mainly based on fieldwork in one mining camp in south-western Burkina Faso. See also Jaques et al., “Artisanal and Small-scale Gold Mines in Burkina Faso” and Grätz, “Gold Mining and Risk Management” for similar patterns of present-day gold exploitation in Benin. 27

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lode (reef) gold requires deep shaft mining.29 If the gold deposit forms an underground ‘mat’, the surface above the deposit is pierced by narrow tubular shafts that may branch out into underground galleries. If the gold deposit takes the form of a linear vein, tubular or rectangular shafts along the vein will eventually merge to form one large open mine. In some Burkina gold mines, vertical shafts reach a depth of more than 100 m. Claims in non-industrial gold mines are not normally established in writing. A claim is simply staked on a ‘first come first served’ basis. If anybody wants to claim a particular spot right after a discovery, he may have to literally sit on it until a friend or partner brings the tools for working it. Once individual parcels have been dug out for about one meter, ownership is normally recognised. If there is dispute about one pit, the case is brought before whatever authority is there—a police or gendarmerie post, the elected representative of the gold diggers, or whoever is recognised as a mediator by both parties, such as for instance a senior, experienced gold digger. In the beginning, individual pits are separated by a wall; later, conflicts frequently arise when someone starts removing this wall from his side of the pit and encroaches on what his neighbour considers as his part. Outbursts of violence can occur at all stages of a mining cycle, but once the mine has been there for some weeks, there will be accepted institutions or mechanisms for conflict regulation. The owner of a mining pit may run it himself, or, should he lack the financial means, lease it to a friend for a fixed period of time. This may be a temporary agreement for one week only called tour that confirms bonds between mining entrepreneurs. The owner or leaseholder hires a team of labourers who work the claim in day and night shifts. Depending on the type of deposit and the size of the pit, the crew can comprise as many as thirty or more labourers. Each crew consists of unskilled and skilled workers. There is no formal training, but someone who eventually becomes a professional gold miner typically starts with unskilled work. If he is very young and not yet physically fit for harder work, this can include bringing food to the workplace.

29 Cf. Raymond E. Dumett, El Dorado in West Africa: The Gold-Mining Frontier, African Labor, and Colonial Capitalism in the Gold Coast, 1875–1900 (Athens, 1998), pp. 29–31, 51–53; Jaques et al., “Artisanal and Small-scale Gold Mines in Burkina Faso.”


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He may then work his way ‘up the ladder’ through time, exercising different activities in the same or different mines: scooping groundwater from the shaft with containers, cutting wood for supporting beams, removing earth and gravel outside the pit, or working inside the pit with sledgehammer, pickaxe, or chisel. If he is eventually both skilled and reliable, he may become one of the few team members who are entrusted with extracting the most valuable pieces of ore. With the rare exception of some women who dress and act like men, women do not normally work in the mining pits. In Burkina Faso, French terms are used for the team members, including the pit owner patron, the leaseholder gérant, the overseer chef de groupe, the clerk commis, skilled miners tapeurs, unskilled miners manœuvres, wood cutters mainteneurs, watchmen gardiens for the pit and the storing place for ore, and someone who brings food porteur de repas (usually a boy or a woman).30 In addition to the core team, there are blast men or blacksmiths and others who provide services that are contracted on the spot. The employer is responsible for food, clothing, shelter, and—in case of accident or illness—medical treatment. He may also provide alcoholic beverages and cigarettes. Until the gold-bearing vein is reached— which can take up to several weeks or even months—the gold diggers do not receive a salary. Once the pit starts ‘producing’ they will get a share of the ore. After a certain quantity of ore has been amassed, the employer receives half of it and the crew is left to share the other half. For the most part the pit owners claim the most valuable pieces of ore for themselves, citing the overhead costs of running the mine to justify their larger share. The gold miners can sell their share of ore on the spot to professional ore buyers, or have it processed and sell the resulting amount of gold. Most gold miners do not store ore or gold. This is partly due to their need for cash, partly to avoid theft. The ore is crushed, ground, and washed in a fenced-in area, the comptoir, by people from the neighbouring villages who work in the mining camps as day labourers. Although it is officially prohibited, mercury is used to amalgamate the gold dust. The gold obtained is sold to the licensed gold traders who 30 In other francophone West African countries such as Benin, different terms may be used, such as chef d’équipe for the pit owner, or sécrétaire for the overseer; Grätz, “Gold Mining and Risk Management,” pp. 195–196.

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in turn sell it to the C.B.M.P. or another marketing company. In order to attract and keep customers, gold traders give out mercury for free, or they give credit to newcomers to the mine who are then obliged to sell their gold to them. However, a portion of the gold is also sold to black market traders. These black market traders either come from the outside or they are the same official gold traders who pursue this illegal activity at night. Black market traders acquire clients either by approaching a gold digger directly or via third parties who introduce potential clients to them. Often, these third parties are the women who run the stalls where the ore is processed. These women are normally very well informed about the production of individual mining pits, and they are acquainted with both gold diggers and gold traders. Gold traders use simple pairs of scales with coins and matches as weights. The amount of gold sold can vary considerably depending on the pit’s production. Buying prices are set by the para-state marketing company C.B.M.P. in relation to the London fixing. There is no way to establish how much an individual gold digger can earn during one season (roughly November to May).31 In May 2000, a spot check of five gold traders in the comptoir of a large mine showed that individual gold diggers had sold between 0.5 g and 10 g each that day, and this was during the end of the season when business was already low, because the rains started to fill the mining pits. In a report about mining in Burkina Faso, Guye writes: Although there are no specific statistics on revenues obtained by artisanal miners and their families in Burkina Faso, a study conducted in the sub-region (Burkina, Guinea, Cameroon) suggests that average earnings for those involved in gold mining are FF7 [c. 1€] per person per day (assuming gold is valued at FF44 per gram). The average production per person per day is 0.16g, giving an average annual production of 35g per person.32

However, these are average figures based on estimates. Such figures do not allow for seasonal variation and the ‘lucky strike’ that may in

31 For a calculation of revenues see Jaques et al., “Artisanal and Small-scale Gold Mines in Burkina Faso,” p. 122. 32 Djibril Gueye, Small-scale Mining in Burkina Faso/Études sur les mines artisanales et les exploitations à petite echelle au Burkina Faso, (Mining, Minerals, and Sustainable Development (MMSD)/International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), Paper No. 73) (October 2001), http://www.iied.org/mmsd/mmsd_pdfs/asm_ burkina_faso_eng.pdf (accessed June 24, 2009), p. 25.


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fact occur. Guye refers to the case of one gold digger who became a multi-millionaire in the gold mine of Bouda, one of the largest gold mines in central Burkina Faso that existed for almost ten years.33 This was not the only case, and it is precisely the possibility of striking it rich quickly that keeps drawing fortune seekers to the mines. Those who are moderately lucky may have enough money for a cow or a corrugated iron roof at the end of a season. This is more than they would have earned by cultivating one hectare of the main cash crop, cotton, or by working on a plantation in neighbouring countries during the same period of time. Dreams of a brand new moped maintain the drive of many young gold diggers. Although there is a clear hierarchy within the crew who works a mining pit, pit owners do not constitute a ‘dominant class’. Due to the unpredictability of chances and risks, workers can quickly become bosses and vice versa. Since everybody knows that a ‘rags to riches’ career is easily reversed, many pit owners refrain from abusing their temporary power, although there are of course some well-known ‘bad’ bosses. A good boss will see to his crew’s needs and tolerate minor cases of ore pilfering. The crew, on the other hand, will endure a lean period provided the boss will compensate them later. However, the transgression of certain limits will lead to a crew boycotting a pit owner or the boss firing a worker.34 This does not mean, of course, that cheating or theft do not occur. On the contrary, it may occur on all levels of ore processing. Gold diggers who sell their sack of ore on the spot may mix it with worthless stones in order to dupe the buyers who only take samples to estimate the sack’s value. The ore buyers, for their part, keep a poker face when paying a much lower sum than the actual value. The day labourers who crush and grind the stones may steal valuable stones—or, if they receive a wage, simply throw a portion away to lighten their workload. The women in whose stalls the ore is processed store worthless stones or stone powder in order to quickly switch it for the good ore brought by a customer as soon as his attention is diverted. Gold buyers can fool inexperienced gold diggers by manipulating their scales. Gold diggers, on the other hand, may sell counterfeit gold to inexperienced 33

Gueye, Small-scale Mining in Burkina Faso/Études sur les mines artisanales et les exploitations à petite echelle au Burkina Faso, http://www.iied.org/mmsd/mmsd_pdfs/ asm_burkina_faso_fr.pdf (accessed June 24, 2009), p. 48. 34 Werthmann, Bitteres Gold, pp. 174–175.

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gold buyers. Of course, everybody is aware of the possibility of being cheated and invents ways of guarding against these possibilities. In order to survive—and possibly prosper—in a mining camp, one has to learn the rules of the game. Moreover, one needs at least one close relative, friend or colleague who may assist in various activities.

‘People of the Hills’: Stigmatisation Regardless of the kind of profession carried out in a mining camp, all the people who live there are considered ‘gold diggers’ (Mooré: sanm tuuda) or ‘people of the hills’ (tang ramba). These are terms that carry ambivalent meanings. In the mining camps, people may refer to themselves or address each other jokingly as ‘man of the hills’ or ‘woman of the hills’. Addressing another person as ‘man of the hills’ or ‘gold miner’ in a different social context, such as for instance during an accidental encounter in the capital Ouagadougou, is understood as an insult and can provoke a quarrel. People who work in the mines often say that gold miners and other inhabitants of mining camps are viewed as criminals by the social mainstream. This view was shared by many of those working in the mines before they first got there, or, as one of them put it: “Before I started going to the hills, I would not even shake hands with a gold digger”. Therefore, many people who come to the gold mines do not inform their families of their real destination but say that they are going to Ouagadougou or to neighbouring countries for work. Where does this bad reputation come from? While mining camps offer economic opportunity and social independence to many, they are also a refuge for people who have been banished by their families. One of the main reasons for banishment is incest, which, in the cultural context of the Mossi majority, means sexual intercourse not only with blood relatives but also with specific categories of affinal kin such as wives of one’s own father or brother, or with the mother or sister of one’s own wife. Women who had sexual relations with a relative of their husband are usually divorced and sent back to their parents, whereas men who are guilty of incest are banished from their families. They may join other relatives who do not live in the same region, but they tend to leave the area altogether and migrate to the cities, to neighbouring countries or, more recently, to


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the gold mines. Other causes for banishment are murder or witchcraft, but incest seems to be the most widespread reason. One example was related to me by a diviner/healer who worked in the gold camp: a young man had come to him searching for a remedy that would enable him to ask his family’s forgiveness. He had been banished because he had impregnated a girl and then her mother as well. Later the healer learnt that the remedy apparently had not worked and that the young man had moved on to another mining camp. People who have been banished do not talk openly about this fact in the mining camps, but since they cannot avoid people from the same region altogether, there is almost always someone who knows. This knowledge, however, only surfaces when there is an argument that gives rise to an exchange of insults. Verbal offences, quarrels and brawls occur daily in the gold mines, but the worst offence that will inevitably lead to serious fighting is yaglm tııga. Literally this means ‘[you have to be] hung in a tree’ and refers to deceased persons whose corpses were not buried properly but left to rot in the bush, because they were guilty of a serious infraction of social norms such as an act of zoophilia.35 Considering the fact that in many societies in Burkina Faso (as elsewhere) funeral ceremonies are among the most important rituals, the significance of this offence is evident. During funerals, the social status of the deceased person is memorialised, the ties among the bereaved are consolidated, and the link between the living and the ancestors is confirmed. A person who is not buried properly has not only died physically but also socially and spiritually. To deny a person a proper funeral is to extinguish his/her existence altogether. Therefore, the mere allegation of belonging to this category of persons can easily provoke people into a rage. Although everyone working in the mining camps is considered a ‘gold digger’ by society at large, socio-professional groups within the camps try to maintain a certain degree of differentiation. Shop owners, butchers, gold buyers or owners of grinding machines admit that they, too, are called ‘traders of the hills’ (tang commerçant) or ‘butchers of the hills’ (tang koasa), but they try to set themselves apart from the mine workers. They deny having social relationships with the gold

35 Michel Izard, “Transgression, transversalité, errance,” in La fonction symbolique, eds. Michel Izard and Pierre Smith (Paris, 1979), pp. 289–306.

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diggers beyond economic transactions and avoid frequenting bars, cinemas, or restaurants. This strategy of distinction is most visible in the dress code: whereas many gold diggers prefer US style ‘hip-hop’ fashion (jeans, T-shirts, baseball caps, sneakers), most shop owners dress in Muslim style (long gowns and caps). This distinction between gold diggers and other inhabitants of mining camps is maintained in spite of—or precisely because of—the fluid boundary between these respective socio-professional groups. A trader may have been a former gold digger who managed to accumulate the means for establishing a business, and a gold digger may have been a trader who went broke. In any case, working in the gold mines in either profession can ruin one’s reputation at home. A fight between individual members of those socio-professional groups can lead to a conflict involving entire groups. One gold buyer gave an example of how these conflicts may evolve: For instance, you are a gold buyer and you come across a gold digger who just climbed out of the pit and is dirty all over. You insult him by telling him to go away with his dirt. If he gets angry easily, he starts shouting at you, and soon all the other gold diggers are there and you are no longer safe. At that point they won’t ask any more which gold buyer precisely insulted the gold digger, they say it was all of them.36

In cases like this, it is the accusation of being “dirty” that especially angers the gold diggers. Real and metaphorical dirt is at the heart of other people’s prejudices against gold diggers. As one gold digger remarked bitterly in an informal conversation: “The people despise gold diggers because we crawl into holes like rats.” In an effort to counter these images, many gold diggers stress that gold digging is a respectable profession like any other, and that working with one’s own hands is better than stealing.

A Translocal Community Gold booms are characterised by the astonishing speed of the rise and decline of mining camps. Because of their extreme fluidity, mining camps are not normally accorded the status of a ‘community’, as Pfaffenberger observed: 36

Interview V3 Sanmatenga (April 3, 2001), Pullo.


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Is the term ‘mining community’ an oxymoron? Any meaningful discussion must begin by challenging the myth of the isolated ‘mining camp’, in which are found—putatively—the rude cabins and tents of temporary residents, exclusively male. In place of community, or so goes this myth, there is only an aggregate of adventurous, violent men, united only by greed and the pursuit of some valuable metal. Their society, if it can be so dignified by the use of that term, is controlled and shaped by its extreme dependence on resource extraction; if the resource disappears, what passes for community also disappears. To one rather unsympathetic observer, mining and its social relations more closely resemble an ‘addictive disorder’ than a normal human community.37

Resisting these stereotypes, Douglass argued that the sojourners in North American mining camps did in fact constitute a mining community. He sees the mining community as a “community without a locus” which was spread out over a wider area and “crystallized” temporarily in places where new discoveries were made.38 Although these places were transient, the community developed social norms and structures that “transcended the experience of any single camp”,39 partly by producing second and third generation gold diggers, partly by establishing network relations to the wider society. This also pertains to what is happening in contemporary West Africa. Mining camps in Burkina Faso—like elsewhere—have been commonly perceived as “a collection of strangers rather than a community of kinsmen, friends and neighbors.”40 A closer look, however, reveals that many of its temporary inhabitants have known each other for years, because they tend to meet again in new mining camps. Even people in positions that are structurally opposed to each other, such as representatives of the para-statal marketing board and black market traders, will reminisce about times they spent together in another mining camp, or swap news and gossip about common acquaintances. Sojourners of mining camps may appear as a haphazard combination of individuals, but many of them do develop friendships or partnerships that may continue beyond one particular locality or activity.

37 Bryan Pfaffenberger, “Mining Communites, Chaînes Opératoires and Sociotechnical Systems,” in Social Approaches to an Industrial Past: The Archaeology & Anthropology of Mining, eds. A. Bernard Knapp, Vincent C. Pigott and Eugenia W. Herbert (London, 1998), p. 291. 38 William A. Douglass, “The Mining Camp as Community,” in Social Approaches to an Industrial Past, eds. Knapp, Pigott and Herbert, p. 106. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid., p. 100.

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The awareness of being despised by the social mainstream leads to a ‘stigma management’ that is expressed through the use of the name ‘people of the hills’.41 ‘People of the hills’ are united through the exploitation of a specific resource in changing localities, through relationships that continue beyond one particular locality, and through an urban life-style in spite of the remoteness and transience of some localities. In contrast with transnational migratory phenomena, mining communities are not diasporas where ethnic, religious, or territorial identity is (re-)constructed through ‘inventing tradition’. On the contrary, within the mining camps ethnic or regional origin is downplayed, while the nation-state or local rural communities may have an interest in the expulsion of ‘strangers’.42 According to Cohen, community is “a largely mental construct, whose objective manifestations in locality or ethnicity give it credibility”,43 and at the same time a “modality of behaviour”44 that defies the homogenising forces of nation-states or globalisation processes. Cohen’s concept of community stresses its function as a place where one acquires culture and a “sense of a primacy of belonging.”45 Although he points to the perpetual transformation and reconfiguration of the communities that serve as examples in his book, he primarily refers to ethnic or local communities from where individuals originate. Clearly, contemporary non-industrial mining communities in West Africa or elsewhere lack both locality and ethnicity as defining features. If we use the term community in the narrow sense of ‘community/locality of origin’, social formations such as mining communities are excluded. But if we use the term ‘community’ in the broader sense of a group of people who have something in common which distinguishes them in a

41

Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1963). 42 In Burkina Faso, as elsewhere, there have been cases of violent clashes between villagers and gold miners, or expulsion of foreign nationals from gold mining areas; Katja Werthmann, “Gold Diggers, Earth Priests, and District Heads: Land Rights and Gold Mining in South-Western Burkina Faso,” in Landrights and the Politics of Belonging in West Africa, eds. Richard Kuba and Carola Lentz (Leiden, 2005), pp. 119–136. 43 Anthony P. Cohen, The Symbolic Construction of Community (London, 1998), p. 198. 44 Ibid., p. 117. 45 Ibid., p. 15.


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significant way from other groups,46 mining camps in Burkina Faso do qualify. ‘People of the hills’ are united through an economic goal—the exploitation of a specific natural resource and associated commercial opportunities in changing places—and through the pursuit of alternative life-styles and social relations. In a way, the ‘mining community’ is as much a community as the ‘academic community’. Both of them are virtual in the sense of having no concrete physical or social boundaries. The academic community is a dispersed, imagined community that communicates via certain media and temporarily aggregates physically at conferences. The conference venues do not matter as such (although some of them clearly attract more participants than others). What matters there is my activity (or self-presentation) as a fellow academic, not my family tree, regional origin, biography, or other social roles I may play. The existence of the academic community does not depend on my actual physical presence at conferences or whether I count myself (or am counted by others) as a member or not. In a similar way, sojourners of mining camps share a common knowledge about a set of regulations of cohabitation and cooperation in a mining camp, regardless of whether they are actually staying there at a given moment. Individuals can opt in and out of this community, although not everybody has other options. Pre-existing social categories and ways of relatedness such as ethnicity, friendship, or kinship may shape evolving dyadic relationships, but these relationships are, in principle, independent of more conventional ways of belonging. Informal gold mining in Burkina Faso thus has led to the emergence of a poly-ethnic, multi-national, fluctuating and extremely mobile translocal community. It is a “community without a locus”,47 an “aspatial community”48 that temporarily aggregates in boom regions, an “occupational community”49 defined by the distinct social

46 Ibid., p. 12; see also Dieter Goetze, “Gemeinschaftsbegriffe in der Soziologie und Sozialanthropologie,” in Gemeinschaften in einer entgrenzten Welt, eds. Reinhart Kößler, Dieter Neubert and Achim von Oppen (Berlin, 1999), pp. 13–33. 47 Douglass, “The Mining Camp as Community,” p. 106. 48 Barry Wellman and Barry Leighton, “Networks, Neighborhoods, and Communities: Approaches to the Study of the Community Question,” Urban Affairs Quarterly 14, 3 (1979), 363–390. 49 M.I.A. Bulmer, “Sociological Models of the Mining Community,” Sociological Review 23 (1975), 78.

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organisation of exploiting a resource, and a “symbolic community”50 whose members call each other tang ramba—‘people of the hills’. It is not a network although relationships formed in mining camps may eventually result in a number of networks. The decision to join a mining camp may be more or less voluntary. Nevertheless, mining camps do give rise to a certain consciousness of particularity, even if it is by ascription (through stigmatisation), or because their inhabitants ‘get hooked’, or because they do not have the option to return to their communities of origin.

Mining Camps as Heterotopias The establishment of mining camps does not entail the construction of localities that become saturated with identity, relationality, and history,51 although individuals may talk nostalgically of their stay in one particular mine. On the other hand, mining camps are not ‘non-places’ as defined by Augé52 either, since they are not places of transit. (Augé, however, writes from the perspectives of transients. People who spend most of their day in ‘non-places’ because they work there probably do develop a sense of identity, relationality, and history with regard to those places.) In contrast with non-places such as airports or shopping malls which are permanent physical structures even if their users are transients, mining camps themselves are transient. After the boom, what remains may not even be a ‘ghost town’ but simply holes in the ground where there were none before. By ordinary citizens, mining camps are seen as places that differ significantly from what is considered as normal and respectable. Consequently, many people who go to work there camouflage their activities as just another form of labour migration or trade journey, or they use a pseudonym, in order to avoid a bad reputation. Others have nothing to lose, or no place else to go, or are attracted to mining camps pre-

50 Cohen, The Symbolic Construction of Community; Albert Hunter, Symbolic Communities: The Persistence and Change of Chicago’s Local Communities (Chicago, 1974). 51 Marc Augé, Orte und Nichtorte: Vorüberlegungen zu einer Ethnologie der Einsamkeit, (Frankfurt, 1994); Arjun Appadurai, “The Production of Locality,” in Counterworks: Managing the Diversity of Knowledge, ed. Richard Fardon (London, 1995), pp. 204–225. 52 Augé, Orte und Nichtorte.


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cisely because they offer alternative ways of self-realisation, or at least tolerance vis-à-vis those who are ill-adapted to the social mainstream: men and women who refuse to comply with rigid social norms, whose consumption of alcohol surpasses what is normally accepted, who have a reputation of being violent, or who were banished by their families. In this sense, mining camps are ‘counter-sites’ or ‘heterotopias’,53 where ‘normal’ social behaviour is not only contradicted but sometimes inverted. Mining camps correspond with Foucault’s subtypes of ‘heterotopias of crisis’ and ‘heterotopias of deviation’: places where society isolates people who are in a state of transition or who are not consistent with general norms and expectations: rest homes, psychiatric hospitals, prisons, or retirement homes. One can easily add other kinds of spaces for parallel, deviant, or illicit activities and life-styles such as ghettos, red-light districts, or virtual worlds in the internet. Faubion pointed out the similarities between Foucault’s hétérotopie and Turner’s concepts of communitas and liminality.54 In fact, mining camps in Burkina Faso and elsewhere55 are sometimes identified with sites for initiation into adulthood/manhood, or called ‘worlds apart’ where alternative modes of being are possible. Other concepts (or rather metaphors) for spaces that are open for alternative, ‘hybrid’, or deviant ways of life are ‘borderland’, ‘frontier’, or ‘liminal zone’.56 All of these metaphors have been criticised on the grounds of implying a center-periphery model of society where cultural ‘impurity’, as well as creativity, is attributed to marginal zones. The concept of heterotopia seems more appropriate for this case, because heterotopias are both somewhere and nowhere. Although mining camps are physical arrangements that provide a point of aggregation for a dispersed 53

Foucault, Of Other Spaces. Faubion attributes the simultaneous emergence of these concepts to “the intellectual ecology of the turbulent drift from the 1960s into the 1970s”; James D. Faubion, “Heterotopia: An Ecology,” in Heterotopia and the City: Public Space in a Postcivil Society, eds. Michiel Dehaene and Lieven De Cauter (London, 2008), p. 35; see also Kevin Hetherington, The Badlands of Modernity: Heterotopia and Social Ordering (London, 1997), pp. 32–34. 55 Cf. Filip De Boeck, “Domesticating Diamonds and Dollars: Identity, Expenditure and Sharing in Southwestern Zaire (1984–1997),” in Globalization and Identity: Dialectics of Flows and Closures, eds. Peter Geschiere and Birgit Meyer, special issue of Development and Change 29, 4 (1998), 777–810. 56 Ben Arrous, “La translocalité, pour quoi faire?” and Ulf Hannerz, Flows, Boundaries and Hybrids: Keywords in Transnational Anthropology, (WPTC-2K-02) (Stockholm, 2002), http://www.transcomm.ox.ac.uk/working%20papers/hannerz.pdf (accessed June 24, 2009). 54

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community, they are outside society in a similar way as red-light districts to which they are often likened in conversations with ‘ordinary’ citizens. Mining camps in Burkina Faso are not recognised as cities in the sense of administrative units, but many of them are characterised by the standard features size, density, and heterogeneity. Life in mining camps clearly differs from life in the rural, face-to-face communities that still prevail in much of present-day Burkina Faso. Thus, mining camps appear as the ‘Other’ to generalised social and cultural norms that derive from the rural context. One of the most palpable differences is that people in mining camps interact with each other much more on the basis of roles, work relations, and assumed or invented identities, than on the basis of kin or ethnic bonds. Mining camps do not only offer economic opportunities, but— among other things—alternative life styles and anonymity. In this sense, mining camps are also spaces for catalysing processes of urbanisation. Even if it is not considered as a real city, a mining camp offers the opportunity to acquire the city as a state of mind (Park 1967), and the possibility to live and behave as an urbanite even if it is in the middle of nowhere.

PART TWO

SPACES ON THE MOVE

MAPPING THE OCEAN: VISUAL REPRESENTATIONS OF THE INDIAN OCEAN IN THE SWAHILI MILITARY PRESS DURING WORLD WAR II Katrin Bromber ZMO, Berlin

It is true that Ceylon is an outpost of East Africa, but it is also in India’s front line, and the presence of the K.A.R. in Ceylon should suggest how unimportant frontiers are and geographical terms, or even Oceans and Continents, when the common nature of the cause is understood.1

Introduction Academic interest in the history of the Indian Ocean has not only resulted in an astounding number of publications and conferences, but also triggered a major change in its historiography in the last two decades. While earlier works mainly focused on structures, recent publications have put agency to the forefront. This perspective nourished the tendency to conceptualise the Indian Ocean as ‘pluralised space’ with overlapping spatial and temporal layers.2 Thus, the Ocean can neither be defined by its geographic borders, nor is there any possibility to identify a single periodisation. Instead, it is conceptualised as a dynamic space, the changes of which are defined by concrete social practices. Using this conceptual approach, this contribution attempts to discuss maps which appeared in army newspapers for East and Central African soldiers, as part of the British military propaganda to legitimise

1 Editor, “The K.A.R. in Ceylon,” East African Standard (May 13, 1942), Under the Standard Clock, 3. K.A.R. is the abbreviation for The King’s African Rifles. 2 For a critical review of recent literature on the Indian Ocean see Ravi Ahuja, Katrin Bromber, Jan-Georg Deutsch, Margret Frenz, Patrick Krajewski and Brigitte Reinwald, “Neuere Literatur zum Indischen Ozean: Eine kritische Würdigung,” Periplus. Jahrbuch für außereuropäische Geschichte 15 (2005), 141–172 and Markus P. M. Vink, “Indian Ocean Studies and the ‘New Thalassology’,” Journal of Global History 2, 2 (2007), 52–58.

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the deployment of the so-called askari3 outside the continent during World War II. The first part of the paper seeks to outline those conceptual aspects of spatial production which link spatial representations to power relations. It continues by briefly sketching the incorporation of East African troops into the imperial forces, describing the areas of their deployment and giving a cursory outline of the journals and newspapers produced for East African soldiers during the Second World War. The third part discusses Indian Ocean maps in army newspapers as discursive attempts to provide the readership with arguments that give meaning to their out-of-area deployment. Arguably, they reproduced the dominant spatial scheme of a coherent British Empire in order to streamline the soldiers’ perception of their deployment within this wider framework. The contribution concludes with an attempt to relate the empirical findings about cartographical representations with a clear persuasive function to the concept of the social production of space and the translocal aspects of ‘movement’ and ‘sedimentation’.

The Social Production of Space—Some Theoretical Implications The emphasis on non-territorial aspects of space provides a fruitful approach in at least two ways. First, it counters the inclination to handle the Indian Ocean as a mere “heuristic device”,4 as an ad hoc working concept which needs no further theoretical explanation, or to see it as an unchangeable geographical designation. Second, and conceptually of greater importance, it escapes the trap of seeing space as a container that one fills up with objects. Embedded into the Newtonian tradition of conceptualising spaces as homogenous and finite entities, the container-image contravenes a notion of space constituted by social processes. As an alternative to the concept of ‘absolute’ space in the Kantian sense, a ‘relativistic’ understanding of space has emerged over the past three hundred years especially in the field of philosophy

3 Askari is the Swahili term for soldier which in the East African colonial context exclusively referred to African military personnel. It also became the name of the army newspaper of the East Africa Command. 4 David Parkin and Stephen C. Headley, eds., Islamic Prayer Across the Indian Ocean: Inside and Outside the Mosque (London, 2000), p. 2.

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and physics.5 As a result, space was conceptualised as a relational configuration of permanently moving objects (including living creatures) and, thus, linked to aspects of time and agency. The relation of the subject to space is of a transformative quality. Space does not become comprehensible to the subject by its being the space of movement; rather it becomes space through movement, and as such, it acquires specific properties from the subject’s constitutive functioning in it.6 The fact that the ‘constitutive’ is not ‘arbitrary’ was convincingly shown in Martina Löw’s attempt to conceptualise agency and structure as entangled aspects in the production of space. She argues that if “spacing” of objects or creatures results in permanent and normative acts of spatial syntheses, which are reified by rules and institutions, spatial structures emerge.7 As other social structures, spatial structures are inseparable from power relations.8 Dominance is crucial in the production of space at all levels. Although they should not be rendered exclusive and unchallenged, the power of dominant spatial schemes should not be underrated. They often find their lasting expression in maps, which are the pre-occupation of this paper. Elaborating on the issue of the social production of space, the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre developed the idea that space is multifaceted, produced and maintained by the relations that govern the interactions within a society. Space as a social product reveals the multitude of ways in which such space might be configured. Thinking further in this direction, one can say that individual actors and groups produce their unique spaces which overlay one another. This approach should not be read as a subjectivist one, which states that there are as many spaces as there are individuals, and, thus, would make conceptualising spatial relations impossible. It rather emphasises the consideration of multiple perspectives and “the dialectical understanding of ‘space’ as a dynamic as well as unitary (yet by no means homogenous)

5 This development is extensively described in Martina Löw, Raumsoziologie (Frankfurt a.M., 2001), pp. 27–35. 6 Elizabeth Grozs, Space, Time and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies (N.Y., 1995), p. 92. 7 Löw, Raumsoziologie, p. 164. 8 The studies by Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu are still considered path breaking in this field.

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phenomenon”.9 In Lefebvre’s words, this process can be described as “interpenetrating” or “superimposing” one layer of space upon or into another.10 Focusing on the social production of space does not only strengthen the perspective on agency, which is understood as a collective or individual acting out within structures, but links spatial categories to the individual level. Here, Henri Lefebvre outlined a three-dimensional space. He distinguishes between “lived”, “perceived” and “conceived” space. By “lived” or “representational space” he understands the “space as directly lived through the associated images and symbols, and, hence the space of the ‘inhabitants’ and ‘users’ [. . .] it is the dominated—and hence passively experienced—space which the imagination seeks to change and to appropriate.”11 “Perceived space” or “spatial practice” has a “certain cohesiveness” and can be observed in the “specific spatial competence of every society member”.12 Lefebvre’s notions of “conceived space” or “representations of space” are defined as “conceptualised space”, which is rendered in intellectual abstractions. “Conceived space” is the “space of scientists, planners, urbanists, technocratic sub dividers [. . .] all of whom identify what is lived and what is perceived with what is conceived.”13 He further argues that conceived or conceptualised space, which materialises in representations of space, is dominant in every society and invested with knowledge (savoir), which he describes as a mixture of understanding (connaissance) and ideology. It is exactly the representational level which allows the link of Lefebvre’s spatial theory with aspects of communication, in our case persuasive communication, namely military propaganda. Instead of narrowing down propaganda to the notion of temporally concentrated and limited campaigns, recent studies have conceptualised it as a process which is shaped by the interaction between persuasive messages

9 Ravi Ahuja, Pathways of Empire: Circulation, ‘Public Works’ and Social Space in Colonial Orissa, (c. 1870–1914) (Hyderabad, 2009), p. 21. 10 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. by Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford, 1991), p. 86. 11 Lefebvre, Production of Space, p. 39. 12 Lefebvre, Production of Space, p. 38. 13 Ibid.


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and their addressees.14 This interaction is characterised by perception, appropriation and reaction. Within the process of appropriation, the persuasive messages are ordered according to the individual experiences.15 Although this paper will not focus on the perception of the military propaganda, one has to keep in mind that their producers— British intelligence, social welfare officers as well as African educational personnel—had to be aware of the African soldiers’ potential reactions in order to increase the effectiveness of their work. Representations of space, such as maps, are a part of social and political practice because they follow a logic which establishes relations between people and objects, and which aims at long term effects.16 Military maps are drawn from a distinctive point of view; emphasising not simply the topographical, but also the political and moral.17 It is this ‘conceived space’ that the military enhances in order to unite its personnel around a desired spatial practice. Using Lefebvre’s notion of ‘conceived space’, I will discuss cartographical representations of space as part of imperial military propaganda for East and Central African soldiers to legitimise their out-of-area deployment with an imperial attitude. I will argue that forceful discursive strategies were designed as attempts to structure the self-positioning of East African soldiers within an Indian Ocean ‘territorial’ space, which the majority of the soldiers experienced as a permanently changing ‘warscape’.18 The argument continues that destructive encounters and violent power relations in everyday military life were legitimised in the propaganda by linking material individual experiences of African soldiers overseas to spatial representations.

14 Stanley B. Cunningham, The Idea of Propaganda: A Reconstruction (London, 2002). 15 Rainer Gries, “Zur Ästhetik und Architektur von Propagemen: Überlegungen zu einer Propagandageschichte als Kulturgeschichte,” in Kultur der Propaganda, eds. Rainer Gries and Wolfgang Schmale (Bochum, 2005), p. 23. 16 The term objects is understood in a broad sense which includes structures, institutions, etc. 17 Daniel Cosgrove, ed., Mappings (London, 1999). 18 The late historian Gerhard Höpp and Lutz Rogler, specialist in Islamic studies, coined this term to describe translocal landscapes which are produced by flows of military manpower, know-how and resources, and which produce more or less lasting institutions, e.g. military camps, newspapers, norm and regulations, myths, symbols.

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katrin bromber East African Soldiers in Out-of-Area Deployment

Seen in a long term perspective, the use of East and Central African soldiers outside East Africa was not peculiar to the Second World War. Nyasaland troops, for example, already did garrison duties on Mauritius and on the Gold Coast in the late nineteenth century.19 In contrast to World War I, when soldiers of the King’s African Rifles and members of the Carrier Corps were employed in the East African theatre only, in the Second World War nearly 25 per cent of the troops, which amounted to 325,000 men, experienced out-of-area deployment.20 After successfully completing the Abyssinian campaign (1940–41), where African contingents gained a reputation as excellent combat units, and facing a territorial expansion of the war, Winston Churchill ordered the transfer of East and Central African soldiers to theatres outside the continent.21 Arguably, this order is also linked to the fall of Singapore in early 1942 and, last but not least, to the forceful call for independence from the Indian subcontinent. Especially the latter aspect increased British fears that Indian troops might drop out of Allied (British) Command. Thus, men who were recruited in the East and Central African British colonies were to be turned into loyal soldiers to reinforce British positions elsewhere. These men came from Kenya, Uganda, Nyasaland (Malawi) and the mandated Tanganyika. They were grouped together with members of the Somaliland Camel Corps, the Northern Rhodesia Regiment and Rhodesian African Rifles within the East Africa Command which was formed in 1941. In the course of war, a considerable number of them were transferred to North Africa, the Middle East, Madagascar, Reunion, Mauritius and Southern Asia, i.e. Ceylon, Northeast India, and Burma. The overwhelming majority of the men were transported by warships and had almost no experience of maritime life. What is more, a substantial number of them were reluctant to cross the Ocean. In 19 Risto Marjomaa, “The Martial Spirit: Yao Soldiers in the British Service in Nyasaland, 1895–1939,” The Journal of African History 44, 3 (2003), 428. 20 Timothy Parsons, The African Rank-and-File: Social Implications of Colonial Military Service in the King’s African Rifles, 1902–1964 (Oxford, 1999), p. 35. 21 David Killingray, “Guarding Modern Empires,” in Guardians of Empire: The Armed Forces of the Colonial Powers c. 1700–1964, eds. David Killingray and David Omissi (Manchester, 1999), p. 4.


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February 1942 four battalions which had been deployed in Abyssinia and Eritrea openly revolted to be transferred to places outside the East Africa Command.22 In an attempt to counter this attitude, the newspapers not only depicted the “travelling soldier” as a hero who fought alongside his British counterparts, but as somebody who had acquired knowledge. The following quote from a letter to the editor of Heshima described the deployment as something positive—as a unique chance. “Well my comrades and friends, I thank our British government which educated us about the modern world by sending us to places and showing us things unknown to our grandfathers and fathers”23 Askari, the newspaper of the East Africa Command, recurrently reminded the soldiers of their duty to take an active role in postwar developments. They should invest the knowledge they had gained elsewhere to improve their home societies, because “[. . .] the young people of today will be the elders of tomorrow and, thus, should know about the civilisational progress in other countries.”24 The voyage was presented in text and visuals as a rite de passage leading to the higher ranks of manhood. Similar to propaganda material as well as individual photographs elsewhere, the African soldiers on board were usually depicted as cheerful troops. They showed African military personnel on leave in the Middle East or South Asia visiting famous places like the holy sites in Palestine or bargaining on the market in Calcutta. With two exceptions, the pictures did not reveal any trouble, fear or simply fatigue which are characteristics of a transfer under war conditions.25 One reason that often led to feelings of insecurity amongst the men was the fact that they did not know the area of deployment before boarding the vessels. For security reasons the destination was revealed to the troops only after departure. The danger of attacks by air or sea was permanently present and felt, especially after the destruction of the SS Khedive Ismail by Japanese torpedoes in February 1944. 22 2/4 KAR, War Diary, February 1942, PRO WO 169/7027; Kevin K. Brown, The Military and Social Change in Colonial Tanganyika: 1919–1964 (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Michigan State University, 2001), p. 244. 23 Basi jamaa zangu na rafiki tafadhalini, nami naishukuru serikali yetu ya Kiingereza ambayo ilituelimisha dunia ya leo na kutupitisha katika miji ambayo wababu na baba zetu hawajapita, na kuona mambo kama haya tuyaonayo sisi watoto. “Barua za Askari”, Heshima (May 30, 1945), 6. 24 [. . .] vijana wa sasa watakuwa wazee, na kwa hivyo yafaa kujifunza ustaarabu wa nchi nyingine. “Barua kutoka kwa askari wetu,” Askari (February 21, 1945), 10. 25 Picha za Vita (February 1944), 1.

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The vessel shipped from Kilindini harbour, near Mombasa, eastwards to Colombo carrying 1,511 people, the majority of them East African soldiers. They were to reinforce the 11th East African Division in the Burma Campaign which had commenced earlier that year. The ship was attacked on the 12th February 1944, half way between Seychelles and Maldives. It sank within two minutes. No less than 1,297 people lost their lives.26 Three days later, Major General C.C. Fowkes, Commander of the 11th East African Division addressed his troops: On the way to CEYLON, a ship carrying our troops has been torpedoed and sunk by a Japanese submarine, and of the East African Forces on board 150 Officers and other British Ranks, over 60 Nurses and W.T.S. and nearly 700 Africans lost their lives as well as many brave Sailors and W.R.N.S. These men and women were our comrades coming to join us and now they have given their lives to the cause for which we fight. May they rest in Peace. So the Japanese has scored against us first and we must mercilessly pay him back with bullet and steel. Let us do our damndest to getting ready for the Day—not far off now—when we shall meet our enemy face to face. This is not the time for personal grievances; it is not the time for personal consideration of any kind. We must all British and Africans alike sacrifice everything to the plain duty, which our comrades handed to us, of driving these yellow hyenas back to the island dung heap whence they came. Not till then can decent people live their lives in peace and travel the seas in safety.27

Similar to this address, the rhetoric of the newspapers and broadcasts increasingly linked garrison duties in Ceylon and the actions lying ahead in Burma to the topos of safeguarding the Ocean. Keeping the enemy out of the Western Indian Ocean meant to protect one’s own family and community. However, the ‘conceived space’ of the propaganda material might have often clashed with the soldiers’ individual perceptions during the passage, the stay in military camps or at the frontlines, the ‘lived space’. Confined to a small bounded ‘territory’— the ship, the camp, the trench—their experiences were marked by

26 Brian James Crabb, The Sinking of the S.S. Khedive Ismail in the Sea War against Japan (Stampford, 1997); India and S.E.A.C.: East African Forces (1944), Public Record Office (PRO); London, WO 106/4501. 27 Special Order by Major General C.C. Fowkes (February 15, 1944), PRO,WO 172/6536.


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being crowded together, becoming (sea) sick, and their general uncertainty about the destination and actions lying ahead.28 Intelligence, welfare and education sections published personal propaganda, suitable descriptions of the sea voyage and, with regard to possible destinies, ethnographies or histories of places where other troops had already been employed.29 Hence, the newspapers produced a spatial configuration for the soldier with an attempt to control his perception of space. Since the area of potential deployment corresponded with the scope of news and distribution, the respective newspapers’ spatial concepts and its terms of reference varied and changed accordingly. The Second World War, arguably, accelerated two parallel spatial trends which also left their traces in the content of military propaganda. The first of these trends was expansion: the Indian Ocean as socially produced space was more closely integrated with the interior by an increasing movement of people and strategic goods. In East Africa, for example, thousands of soldiers were transferred to the coast by rail, and thousands of civilians fled from coastal towns with strategic importance, i.e. Mombasa and Dar es Salaam.30 The second tendency was fragmentation. From the military point of view the Indian Ocean was part of three Command Areas: The Middle Eastern Command (MEC),31 the East Africa Command (EAC)32 and the South East Asia Command (SEAC).33 What was designed and acted

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The Journey of 1/1 Bn. K.A.R. from Yatta to Mombasa by Train and thence by Ship to Madagascar and the Reaction of the Troops to their New Experience, PRO WO 169/7020. 29 The publication of an African soldier’s account of the Burma Campaign is an exception to the rule that only ‘abstract’, emotionless war news informed the African readership about the course of war. Sgt. J. Sebanja, “Brigedi Yetu Vitani Burma,” Heshima (June 27, 1945), 1. 30 In May 1942 the East African Standard made the problem of ‘voluntary evacuation’ from Mombasa and Dar es Salaam one of its prime issues. 31 The Middle Eastern Command was established in 1939 and based in Cairo with responsibility for the Middle East theatre which included North Africa, East Africa, Persia, the Middle East and British troops in Greece and on the Balkans. 32 East Africa Command, with headquarters in Nairobi, came into being in September 1941. Its purpose was to free the Commander-in-Chief, Middle East, from East African affairs. The new command comprised Ethiopia, Eritrea (for a short time only), Italian Somaliland, British Somaliland, Kenya, Zanzibar, Tanganyika, Uganda, Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia and the Island Area (Madagascar, Reunion, Seychelles). 33 In August 1943, the Allies created the combined South East Asian Command to take over from British India Command strategic responsibilities and command of the separate national commands in the theatre.

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out on the Command level as division according to strategic space, projected onto parts of two continents adjacent to the Indian Ocean by the necessities of Allied warfare, might not have been felt in the same way by the African soldiers. The combat units especially saw rapid transfer from the Horn of Africa to Madagascar or Ceylon and from there to the Burma theatre—and a stopover in Kenya was in most cases included. The fragmentation they might have experienced was a sense of movement within and permanent observation of bounds and separation from home for a considerable period of time. What seemed to unite for the ‘common cause’, as the initial quotation of this chapter suggests, also seemed to separate for the same reason. The spatial coherence of the ‘common cause’ turned out to be one of the main strategies of a propaganda which was purposely designed for East and Central African soldiers. Using Swahili and Nyanja as means of communication, the military produced newspapers, broadcasts, films, lectures and posters as attempts to influence the self-positioning of the African troops in a space absolutely dominated and structured by strategic considerations. The military necessity of keeping East African troops informed and motivated not only led to the emergence of an impressive mediascape34 for its own sake. It had a spatial expansion covering the Western Indian Ocean realm, North, East, South and Central Africa, the Levant and South Asia;35 it was also the place to invoke and test a distinct repertoire of symbols or audio-visual representations of a space offered to large numbers of East African soldiers. The following section will demonstrate how cartographical representations were made part of this repertoire which constitutes a spatial notion conceived by the military with an attempt to structure the soldiers’ war experiences in line with the Imperial project.

34 With the term mediascape I refer to Arjun Appadurai’s definition of the term in his essay “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” Public Culture 2, 2 (1990), 9. 35 For a detailed description of the media production for East African troops see Katrin Bromber, “Blühende Medienlandschaften: Britische Informationspolitik für ostafrikanische Truppen während des Zweiten Weltkrieges,” Sozialgeschichte.extra (Dezember 10, 2007), http://www.stiftung-sozialgeschichte.de/?selection=17 (accessed July 2, 2008).


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Indian Ocean Maps as Arguments for Strategic Intra-oceanic Movement The front-page of the fourth issue of the weekly Heshima shows an African Sergeant of the East African Army Education Corps (EAAEC) in front of a map of the Greater Indian Ocean and Asia. His index finger points at Ceylon, where the troops listening had just arrived a few weeks ago. According to the subtitle the Sergeant explains to the soldiers the progress of war in the Southeast Asian theatre. The article explains that this kind of lecture is given once a week in the information room.36 Picture and text hint to the fact that the intellectual skill of map reading was not only demanded from specialised African personnel but was expected to a minimum degree of all troops. This was especially true for the infantry platoons who prepared for jungle warfare. Apart from the physical training, literacy courses, as well as language and arithmetic classes,37 the soldiers were instructed in jungle navigation, involving map reading and the use of a compass.38 Army education officers serving the Nyasaland troops, for example, trained their African personnel in topographic terminology and the use of cartographic symbols. The relevant vocabulary had to be learned by heart.39 Thus, it is not surprising that maps found their way into the military press and other propaganda material designed for the soldiers. There was Askari, the weekly of the East Africa Command, which was distributed to all units irrespective of the Command area they were actually attached to. Pamoja and its Nyanja Version Pamodzi were produced in Diego Suarez and addressed to the East African troops serving in the Island Area (Madagascar, Seychelles, and Reunion). Habari Zetu was printed by the Directorate of Printing and Stationary Services, Addis Ababa, and designed for the soldiers who fought during the Abyssinian Campaign. Heshima, the weekly for the 36

“Yako Maswali?” Heshima (August 25, 1943), Maswali na Majibu, 5. Especially during World War II, the army provided basic education for thousands of East African soldiers. For further information see Timothy Parsons, “Dangerous Education? The Army as School in Colonial East Africa,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 8, 1 (2000), 113. 38 Timothy R. Moreman, The Jungle, the Japanese and the British Commonwealth Armies at War, 1941–45: Fighting Methods, Doctrine and Training for Jungle Warfare (London, 2005), p. 14. 39 I am grateful to Timothy Lovering, who had interviewed former colonial army officers, for this information. 37

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troops serving in South Asia, was printed in Colombo and, later, in Calcutta. Out of these, only Askari and Heshima made use of maps, with a majority published in the latter. With the exception of a Burma map, Askari used them as mere icons. In 1945 maps of the East African colonies (Kenya, Uganda, and Northern Rhodesia) and Tanganyika Territory were attached to the header of the home news sections (map 1). The link between cartographical representations and texts was never made explicit, but rather derives from the simple fact that the map is followed by news from the respective home territories. The pattern of these ‘cartographic icons’ is uniform. The colonial or mandated territory is placed as a white contour drawing in the centre of the map with major cities and rivers indicated. The neighbouring territories are hatched. A scale is always added in one of the four corners, as well as the name of the territory itself, which is centred. Since the soldiers were, in the first place, identified by the military authorities according to colonial territories, one could argue that these icons were used as means of integration—as one strategy of building a ‘national myth’.40 For the East African reader these ‘cartographic icons’ could have served as markers to find the relevant home news more quickly, which meant that the soldiers would identify the icon with ‘home’. This would presumably meet the editors’ intention to serve a post-war imperial project that increasingly emphasised the colonial state. These icons could consequently be seen as attempts to legitimise colonial power in that maps “connect territory with the social order.”41 In the context of Indian Ocean history one might argue that it was the out-of-area deployment which created an excellent opportunity for imperial (post-war) policy makers to inscribe in the soldiers’ minds the notion of belonging to a bounded political entity, the colonial territory. This was worth defending and supporting in civilian as well as military post-war projects. In his study on Malawian soldiers during World War II, the British Historian Timothy J. Lovering shows that the war was an important source of developing a shared ‘Nyasa’

40 Winfried Speitkamp, “Grenzen der Hybridisierung? Symboltransfer in postkolonialen Staaten Afrikas,” in Kommunikationsräume—Erinnerungsräume: Beiträge zur transkulturellen Begegnung in Afrika, ed. Winfried Speitkamp (München, 2005), pp. 277, 289. 41 David Turnbull, “Cartography and Science in Early Modern Europe: Mapping the Construction of Knowledge Spaces,” Imago Mundi 48 (1996), 7.


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LF DO RU L.

NORTHERN FRONTIER

TURKANA

KE N

KITALE

NAROK

0

50 Miles

100

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Y

A

MERU

EMBU EORT MALL NAIROBI KITUI MACHAKOS KATIADO

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IC TOR IA

ELDORET AAPSABET KISUMU

Azhi

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MOMBASA

Map 3. East African Colonies (Kenya, Uganda, and Northern Rhodesia) and Tanganyika Territory

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experience and a Nyasa/Malawian consciousness.42 Hence, the spatial propaganda could have contributed to this development. The use of ‘cartographic icons’ also served the spatial strategy of homogenisation. Since all maps in question followed the same pattern, the spatial representations produced a notion of we-are-all-in-the-same-boat. They were introduced into the newspaper precisely when the preferential treatment of contingents from Uganda and Kenya threatened the discipline within the forces. The produced space was political and institutional. On the first inspection it appears homogeneous; and indeed it serves those forces which make a tabula rasa of whatever stands in their way, of whatever threatens them—in short, of differences.43

Whereas in the beginning of the war British military propaganda preferred ethnic differentiation, dividing people into ‘martial races’ rather than playing the spatial card, they explicitly linked troops to the colonial (home) territory when demobilisation was put on the agenda.44 However, the majority of maps used in the Swahili military newspapers were thematically linked to the actual course of war. That most of them visualised the Southeast Asian and the Southwest Pacific theatres of war might be explained by the fact that they appeared in Heshima. The weekly was published for the African soldiers of the 11th East African Division which was attached to the SEAC. In contrast to Askari, where editors paid little attention as to whether a map matched the text to which it was linked, Heshima impresses by an excellent text—map—coherence. Whereas Askari only called the reader’s attention to the map while reading a text which often covered a much larger territory than visualised, Heshima produced a meta-language which carefully led the reader through the text—map—composition. Maps that represented the Indian Ocean as a ‘whole’ not only emphasised the connectedness between its western and eastern parts,

42 Timothy J. Lovering, “Military Service, Nationalism and Race: The Experience of Malawians in the Second World War,” in The World in World Wars: Experiences, Perceptions and Perspectives from Africa and Asia, eds. Heike Liebau, Katrin Bromber, Katharina Lange, Dyala Hamza, Ravi Ahuja (Leiden, forthcoming). 43 Lefebvre, Production of Space, p. 285. 44 Initially, the composition of the units mainly relied on British assumptions of tribal fighting qualities and inter-tribal relations. It was especially during World War II, when the inappropriateness of the whole idea of martial races became apparent.


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but also showed the strategic link to the Southwest Pacific.45 Representations of this kind made the Indian subcontinent and especially Ceylon the centre of the Indian Ocean as a strategic space. Facing the Japanese entrance into the war and their successful and rapid westward advancement, the military importance of this area was made one of the prime news topics. In the second issue in August 1943, Heshima published a ‘relational’ Indian Ocean map with Ceylon clearly at its centre (map 2). Lines, which link major port cities, are inscribed with the distances in miles. On the visual level, locations are brought into relations with each other in order to produce a spatial notion of an Indian Ocean which is held together by strategic necessities. This concept stood in contrast to its lived fragmentation caused by the war, especially the long-term separation from home. Since the lines indicated distance and not sea routes they presented the connectedness on a completely abstract level. The interpretation of the map itself was structured by its subtitle and the text on the opposite page. The following subtitle puts the main message to the soldiers in a nutshell: This map shows the island of Ceylon which is half-way between Africa and those countries like Burma, Thailand and Sumatra which are captured by the Japanese.46

The text on the opposite page spins this spatial argument further. It links the visual representation to the three main reasons for deployment of East African military personnel on the island. First, the enemy had to be approached half-way instead of waiting until he would invade East Africa. Second, Ceylon was not to be captured by the Japanese since that would enable them to dominate the Western Indian Ocean. As a consequence, all the fabrics and food that came from the Indian subcontinent could no longer be shipped to East Africa lest they would be seized by the Japanese. Third, Ceylon was near Burma, where East African units reinforced Imperial troops. Since the natural conditions were similar to a large extent to the potential area of the next battle contact, the island provided an excellent training terrain for jungle

45 For the Allied Command level conception of South East Asia forming a subsidiary theatre in the wider Pacific War see Timothy R. Moreman, The Jungle, p. 1. 46 “Ramani inaonyesha kisiwa cha Ceylon kilicho nusu ya njia toka Afrika na nchi zile kama Burma, Thailand na Sumatra zilizokamatwa na Wajapani.” (Editor, “Sababu tatu kwa nini tumekuja Ceylon” Heshima (August 11, 1943), 7.)

Map 4. Indian Ocean

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warfare.47 However, whereas the map presents the greater Indian Ocean as a unity with Ceylon and the Indian subcontinent as its centre, the text stresses fragmentation in that it communicates an India-Ceylon frontier. It is, as the initial quotation of this paper says, an “outpost of East Africa”, and this legitimated the island’s protection by East and Central African soldiers. Comparing the ‘protection argument’ of the text with the represented space on the map, it is striking that East Africa is hardly visible; a fact which might have undermined the argument itself. ‘Relational’ maps not only reveal a sense of distance but also of movement, i.e. shifting battle fronts. In the course of Allied military success in 1944, Heshima increased this effect by publishing ‘vectorised’ maps. Huge vectors pointing from the margins (territories successfully liberated by the Allied forces) to the centre (Japanese held positions) indicating that the Allied forces now began to ‘squeeze’ the enemy (map 3). Interestingly, some ‘vectorised’ maps were additionally invested with radar half circles, which make them appear like radar pictures for air craft navigation (map 4). Since their appearance in the newspaper is restricted to the second half of 1945, it could be argued that they also represent the mastering of this new kind of technology. In maps which contain both ‘relational’ and ‘vectorised’ aspects, the latter exclusively signifies real movement of troops while the former visualises the potential threat of (mostly) air borne attacks. Vectors always indicated who was in control of the situation. With regard to the Southeast Asian theatre, the strategic importance of islands was permanently stressed in both text and cartography. In December 1943 Heshima published a map showing the Andaman Islands as its centre (map 5). Lines with inscribed mileages point at major cities in the Gulf of Bengal (Calcutta, Madras) and Colombo. The attached text especially referred to the Japanese air raids against Calcutta exactly ten days before the publication of the issue. Thick, bent arrows show the east-west advancement of the enemy forces. Military advancement by ‘isle hopping’ was a successful Japanese strategy, since islands form perfect military bases for invading large mainland territories. Thus, 47

Editor, “Sababu tatu kwa nini tumekuja Ceylon,” Heshima (August 11, 1943), 6–7. Jungle warfare training was not only restricted to Ceylon. In the winter of 1944, the 28th (EA) Independent Brigade got refresher training at Imphal and the 11th (EA) Division at Ranchi.

Map 5. Japanese and Allied Held Areas in the Pacific Ocean (Vectorised Map)

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Map 6. Pacific (Vectorised Map)

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Map 7. Bay of Bengal (Andaman Islands)


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the text responded accordingly: “[. . .] if we launch our major attack it will be necessary to occupy these islands.”48 Arguably, whenever the Indian Ocean was conceived from a strategic perspective, e.g. navigation, piracy, invasion, the importance of islands was highlighted in textual and visual representations.49 With a few exceptions, Indian Ocean historiography largely marginalised islands to the point of their being completely left out.50 In the military context, ‘vectorised’ and ‘relational’ maps visualised the islands’ strategic importance. Since East and Central African troops were also based in Ceylon in order to guard the island, these maps stressed the importance of the geographical position of the East African troops. The men were in the right place. They guarded the island and prepared themselves for further eastward movement. The to-be-in-the-right-place strategy was to counter increasing uneasiness by the troops about their extended stay on the island instead of being immediately transferred to the battle front. We have already seen that lines with mileages indicated distance across the Ocean and the inherent danger, i.e. the potentiality of attacks. We have also seen that vectors represented movement control and control of the military situation. Maps, however, which were invested with different symbols of strategic connectivity and fragmentation, such as roads, railway tracks and rivers, could obviously dispense with additional visual indicators. It was the attached texts which streamlined the spatial presentation in two ways. First, they highlighted the function of this infrastructure as connections between the Ocean with the hinterland, or vice versa, and, through this representation, indicated directed movement. Second, explanations in the texts about frontlines made use of rivers, railway tracks and roads as spatial mark-

48 “[. . .] tutakapoanza shambulio letu kubwa itakuwa lazima tuvikamate visiwa hivyo,” Editor, “Mashambulio Karibu na Ceylon,” Heshima (December 30, 1943), Habari za Vita, 3. 49 For a critical discussion about islands in historiography see Rod Edmond and Vanessa Smith, Islands in History and Representation (London, 2003). 50 For a critique on the marginalisation of islands in recent Indian Ocean paradigms see Walter Schicho, “Die französische Kolonisierung der Inseln im Indischen Ozean: Der Mythos vom Glück und der leichten Liebe,” in Der Indische Ozean: Das afro-asiatische Mittelmeer als Kultur- und Wirtschaftsraum, eds. Dietmar Rothermund and Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik (Wien, 2004), p. 228. The argument of the ‘allround connectivity’ of the islands in general and in the Indian Ocean in particular was pronounced by Michael Pearson, “Littoral Society: The Concept and the Problems,” Journal of World History 4 (2006), 356.

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ers. This might be due to the fact that frontlines often coincided with roads, rivers or railway tracks. Apart from air supply, which gained a tremendous importance especially for the Burma front, movement of troops, strategic material and information vitally depended on an infrastructure which was linked to the sea.51 In the Ceylonese case, Heshima explicitly pointed to this connection: “If you look at the map you see that all railway tracks end in Colombo.”52 Hence, one could argue that concepts of the Indian Ocean from the strategic point of view always included adjacent territories. However, in the Burma case one has to bear in mind that it was especially the African soldiers’ duty to hack open new paths into the jungle. All in all, the cartographic representations of the Indian Ocean or parts of it as can be found in the army newspapers generally included large parts of the interior. They went beyond the movement of particularised entities like people, objects, ideas and the like, simply by including the notion of permanent spatial shifts. From a cartographic point of view, it seems that the soldiers were presented with an Indian Ocean which stretched from the recruiting areas as far as Northern Rhodesia to the Southwest Pacific. However, whereas the ‘watery territory’ of the Ocean appears homogeneously, landmasses were not included or connected as such, but were only presented as particular networks of transport. In this respect, the Indian Ocean is conceived as a set of multilayered relations between concrete localities, which are constituted by transport networks.53

Conclusion This article discussed how the Indian Ocean as a ‘space on the move’, a constructed and spatially varying concept, was transmitted by British military propaganda for East and Central African soldiers in order to support a dominant, spatial scheme—a coherent part of the British

51 For techniques and training of East African troops regarding air supply see Moreman, The Jungle, p. 168. 52 “Ukiangalia ramani utaona njia za reli zinafika Colombo zote,” Editor, “Kisiwa cha Ceylon,” Heshima (August 4, 1943), 4. 53 Löw, Raumsoziologie, p. 111.


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Empire. Maps, as cartographic representations of space, presented the Indian Ocean as a space with a connectivity that was determined by strategic necessities. On the visual level, this conception has led to the following aspects: it produced a strong visual link between the Eastern and Western Indian Ocean with a further extension to the Southwest Pacific. Furthermore, it suggested a centre, i.e. the Indian subcontinent and Ceylon both as a base (place within) and as a frontline (border of the Ocean) at the same time. Coastal towns and harbours were conceptualised as gateways and, thus, military targets. Islands were presented according to their special priority as the military bases per se. The maps represented adjacent land masses as connected to the ‘watery territories’ by networks of transport with strategic importance and with a signifying potential as frontiers. Maps of East and Central African colonial states served as icons and turned them into symbols of the post-war Imperial project by linking the movement and agency of the African military personnel in other parts of the Indian Ocean to demobilisation. On the textual level, editors used spatial arguments, which were produced in map-text-compositions, in order to legitimise out-ofarea deployment, i.e. expansion of war theatres, the shrinking distance between the front and home, or the strategic importance of islands. All in all, they supported the argument that East and Central African soldiers abroad were in the right place, not only for current developments in the theatres of war, but also for the future of their home territories. The empirical findings show that the British military propaganda for East African soldiers produced space on the conceived level in two ways. On the one hand, they presented the connectivity of the Indian Ocean as a ‘network of distances’ on the sea, which were connected to land routes by gateways on the coasts and overlaid by networks of military movements and attacks; this suggested the notion of a ‘structured space’. On the other hand, the military propagandists conceived of the Indian Ocean as an unbounded and ever expanding entity— amorphous and permanently changing. Both trends support the idea that in times of war the Indian Ocean underwent reconfiguration to the extreme with regard to expansion, connectivity and fragmentation. The fact that the addressees of such conceptions were soldiers who had various and mostly mainland identities, also gives rise to the assumption that wars set masses of people in motion, who would not occupy

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the same spatial realm under peace time conditions. If we conceptualise translocality as dialectical process of ‘movement’ and ‘sedimentation’, one could argue that such representations helped to produce a lasting sense of group identity among East and Central African soldiers, which was based on their deployment ‘elsewhere’. The other side of the coin is that people like Indian Ocean trading communities, whose peace time biographies are characterised by a high degree of mobility across the Ocean, were faced with restrictions or prevention of movement in this direction. Instead they had to move further inland, especially if they were living on strategically important coastal towns. With regard to the circulation of ideas and information, it was definitely World War II which increased the sheer amount of news and its transmission over huge distances by a rapidly advancing information technology. This process resulted in the spread of a body of already existing or newly created symbols among the East African military, but also tried to structure their self-positioning as an attempt to counter the uncertainty of belonging in a social space under permanent and drastic reconfiguration.

REGIONAL ATTRACTIONS: WORLD AND VILLAGE IN KABYLIA (ALGERIA) Judith Scheele All Souls College, Oxford

Manifestation et instrument d’un pouvoir organisé sur l’espace territorial et sur les gens qui y vivent, la frontière a pu prendre en effet, selon les époques et selon les domaines géographiques, des visages aussi divers que ceux des Etats eux-mêmes et des sociétés concernées. Il n’est pas de réflexion sérieuse sur le thème de la frontière qui ne conduise à porter l’investigation jusqu’au cœur même de l’état dont elle n’est à vrai dire que l’organe périphérique.1

There have long been debates over the usefulness of the notion of ‘regions’ in the social sciences. Mostly these have been overridden by practical considerations, such as the categories used in academic administration, the challenges of linguistic training and the demands of the job-market that oblige social scientists to become regional specialists whether they originally intended to or not. Yet regions are notoriously difficult to define, and publications with a regional focus tend to open with painstaking discussions of boundaries without ever coming to any definitive conclusions.2 Furthermore, delimitations of regions often carry within them traces of past or present power relations and political projects, and might easily become self-fulfilling prophecies; they are therefore easier to deconstruct than to defend. One way of avoiding these problems might be to adopt the notion of borders as suggested more than half a century ago by French geographers keen to dispel threatening German ideas about ‘natural borders’: to shift our focus of investigation away from a region’s boundaries towards its core and the forces that keep it together. Thus, in 1938, Jacques Ancel claimed that every kind of community necessarily produces its own kind of boundaries, and that the study of the former would necessarily

1

Pol Trousset, “L’idée de la frontière au Sahara et les données archéologiques,” in Enjeux sahariens, ed. Pierre-Robert Baduel (Paris, 1984), p. 50. 2 For an example of these difficulties, see Dale Eickelman, The Middle East: An Anthropological Approach (Englewood, 1981).

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precede the latter: A border is a “political isobar that establishes, for a while, the balance between two pressures”.3 Decades later, similar notions were put forward by Braudel and Wallerstein, when attempting to define the boundaries of the world-economy or world-system they were aiming to describe; these were seen to be situated where the ‘pull’ of the core was about to disappear or give way to the influence of another regional centre.4 In such an approach, regions are inevitably dynamic, not static, and contain differences of attraction that hold them together. They are thus politically and economically charged and in themselves expressions of inequalities, rather than similarities; they are never only geographically or even historically determined, but are maintained by constant exchange, movement and activity; rather than as an area that could be coloured in on a map, they appear as significant spheres of action and thought. Such an approach, however, as attractive as it might seem at first, leads to severe methodological difficulties, as regions might overlap or shift over time. Furthermore, if taken seriously, it demands that an in-depth local study precedes any attempt at regional inquiry. In this contribution, I would nevertheless like to try to apply this definition of a ‘region’ to a village in Kabylia, a Berber-speaking area in north-eastern Algeria, if only to see whether such an attempt might bear any fruit and further our understanding both of the village and Kabylia, and of the local significance of ‘regions’. Kabylia, all French colonial and Kabyle contemporary sources agree, is remote, timeless, rooted, and static.5 Its population long resisted, it is claimed, both Ara-

3

Ancel, Jacques, Géographie des frontières (Paris, 1938), p. 195. Fernand Braudel, Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme, XVe–XVIIIe siècle, 3, Le temps du monde (Paris, 1979) and Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System, vol. 1 (New York, 1974). See also Fernand Braudel’s earlier work, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II (1949; trans. and repr. Glasgow, 1975), in which the Mediterranean appears as the ‘sum of its movements’. 5 See for example Adolphe Hanoteau and Aristide Letourneux, La Kabylie et les coutumes kabyles (Paris, 1872–1873) and Emile Masqueray, Formation des cités chez les populations sédentaires de l’Algérie: Kabyles du Djurdjura, Chaouïa de l’Aourâs, Beni Mezâb (1886; repr. Aix-en-Provence, 1983), and Antoine-Ernest-Hippolyte Carette, Études sur la Kabilie proprement dite (Paris, 1848) for a notable exception; and Mouloud Feraoun, Jours de Kabylie (Algiers, 1954), Mouloud Mammeri, La colline oubliée (Paris, 1957) and, more differentiated, Alain Mahé, Histoire de la Grande Kabylie XIXe–XXe siècles (Paris, 2001). For an overview of the French colonial literature, see Patricia Lorcin, Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice and Race in Colonial Algeria (London, 1995). For a thorough bibliography on Kabylia in general, see Mahé, Histoire. 4

Blida

Biskra

Batna

Ouargia

Touggourt

: Taddart

Akabli, Timbuktu, Ségou

Laghouat

Djelfa

M’Sila

El-Oued

Tabessa Ṣafāqis

Tūnis

: Kabylia

TUNISIA

Qābis

Constantine Oum el Bouaghi

Guelma

Bizerte

Map 8. Kabylia and Other Places Mentioned in the Text (Cartography: Judith Scheele)

: Places mentioned in the text

Séguiet el-Hamra

Tlemcen

Béchar

Fez, Marrakech

El Asnam

Tiaret Mascara Saïda

Mostaganem Oran

Sidi Bel Abbes

ALTAR (U.K.)

Tizi Alger Ouzou Béjaīa Jijel Skikda

Annaba

Paris, Ardennes

Tripoli

Cairo, Mecca

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bic and Islamic influence; it has always been independent, democratic, poor; its high mountains have preserved original North African or Roman ways—depending on the perspective adopted. Yet, geographically at least, Kabylia is also situated at the crossroads of several world civilisations; it has long overlooked the main inland roads from the Mediterranean to the Sahara and beyond; it has produced great Islamic scholars, scores of soldiers and, more recently, the first wave of emigration to France. Kabylia is in itself generally treated as a region, although its regional unity might at closer look be less evident; however, through recent developments of political opposition and regional homogenisation, the status of Kabylia as a region in its own right seems to be less and less doubtful. Questions of what larger region Kabylia might belong to are less easily answered, as they feed into a long series of political debates about Kabyle and Algerian identity. Algerian nationalism is strong, and jealous; Algeria’s relationships with its neighbours have long been tense, and statements of regional belonging might easily be misread as claims to hegemony or separatism. Demands for a united ‘Berber homeland’ that would include all Berber-speaking populations of North Africa, are first and foremost a political claim reacting to other hegemonic projects, and are widely understood as such. Claims that Kabylia is part of the Mediterranean might sound too close to French colonial rhetoric;6 while attempts to link it to the Middle East or, even worse, the ‘Arab world’ are resented for opposite reasons. Yet these categories cannot be rejected out of hand, as they form part and parcel of people’s lives and the ways in which they construe their own identities, ‘regional’ or not. Arguing from the inside out, this article aims to show what kind of region might have mattered to Kabyles throughout time, how and why these regions might have changed, and how they relate to the categories listed above. It thereby demonstrates that the ‘pull’ of various regions and their change over time are an integral part of lived reality that needs to be taken into account in order to fully comprehend Kabylia, both in the past and the present. Kabylia, then, constitutes a good example of the multiplicity of regions which a given place might be part of over time, and of how these

6 Braudel’s Méditerranée, published less than a decade before the Algerian war of independence broke out by a former (1923–1934) teacher in Constantine and Algiers and supporter of the Algérie française, is thus far from politically neutral.

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regions are constructed and maintained. At the same time, it shows the impact of such regional pulls on local life.

Grandfathers and Brides My doctoral research was conducted in Taddart,7 a village of roughly 1,500 inhabitants overlooking the Soummam Valley, the geographical frontier between Greater and Lesser Kabylia. It is situated three hundred kilometres east of Algiers, and sixty kilometres southwest of the important harbour town of Béjaïa. One of my initial aims was to trace the history of the village, an undertaking with which I had but little luck, for reasons that I have tried to explain elsewhere.8 However, it soon became clear to me that the history of the village, as far as I could establish it, was a history of movement. None of the families in the village pretended to be of local origin,9 all claimed to have moved there in stages, from an area that extended far beyond the valley, but whose main place-names were surprisingly recurrent throughout most family histories. These ancestors’ past itineraries were said to be dotted with material traces of their passage. Although sometimes forgotten by the younger generation, they are still alive in family names and in topographic terms that often take the names of the people who used to live there. Until today, some of these itineraries are revived through pilgrimages and marriage arrangements; several families continue to claim ownership of land they had once settled, although it might be too far away even to think about working it or ‘owning’ it in any practical way. If one were to map all these claimed places of origin, the map of the village and its surroundings would be covered in criss-crossing pathways, extending far beyond its borders. These pathways might serve as an indication of the ‘region’ in which Taddart has evolved, at least according to contemporary local historical imagination. This region

7

All names have been changed. “Generating Martyrdom: Forgetting the War in Contemporary Algeria,” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 6, 2 (2006), 180–194 and Village Matters: Politics, Knowledge and Community in Kabylia (Algeria) (Oxford, 2009). 9 This observation has also been made elsewhere in Kabylia, see Masqueray, Formation, for an early mention, and Nadia Abdelfettah-Lahri, “La ville, l’urbanité et l’autochtonie: Analyse des représentations dans les discours sur Béjaïa” (Mémoire de Magistère, University of Béjaïa, 2000) for a more recent analysis. 8

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does not correspond to present-day notions of Kabylia, but rather links the Soummam valley to the Arabic speaking areas to the East, stopping short of the city of Constantine: in other words, the area whose abundant production of cereals has long been indispensable for the economic survival of the area, and whose semi-urban civilisation clearly has left traces in the village.10 Rather than linking places that are today seen as very much alike, they created connections between areas that were inherently different, and complementary. However, even within a community as small as Taddart, different families would lay claim to different areas both of origin and of privileged interaction; and some of those who said they arrived much later to Taddart link their own family histories to origins to the West, to Greater Kabylia—but then, as village sociology has it, they are ‘newcomers’, and this peculiar origin is but one indication proving this. These historic ‘connections’ between families, villages and places were doubled up by repeated patterns of economic and matrimonial exchanges. The French colonial registers allow us to verify such claims from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards.11 Overall, frequent marriage patterns seem to confirm the general layout of the region as established through family histories. Networks of traders, markets and peddlers seem to have followed similar lines, as older villagers remember their grandfathers and fathers conducting business from M’Sila to Sétif, Arabic-speaking markets to the southeast and east respectively. The marriage pattern of local religious families (marabouts), although they tended to locate their origin to the West and outside the area that seems to be of relevance to Taddart, similarly corresponded to village connections, as did the scope of their religious and intellectual activities and their choice of educational institutions for their children. Even the family of the local bach-agha Ben Aly Chérif,12 marabout of a neighbouring village and employed first by the

10 Alan Christelow, Muslim Law Courts and the French Colonial State in Algeria (Princeton, 1985) notes the large number of minor ‘ulamâ’ active in the region of Constantine that were originally from Lesser Kabylia. 11 The Etat-civil de la commune mixte d’Akbou, douar de Chellata, 1892, held at the town hall of Chellata, and the Registre des mariages de la commune mixte d’Akbou, 1891–1963, held at the archives of the Akbou town hall; for recent changes, the Sijill al-zawâj baladiyya shallâta, 1985–2003, held at Chellata. For a full analysis of these documents, see Scheele, Village Matters. 12 Bach-agha was the highest rank in the French colonial administration given to an indigenous administrator.


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Ottomans and then by the French, based his influence on connections within the area indicated by village activity, though on a notionally much grander scale.13 With French colonial conquest, the area of village activity and alliance was gradually transformed. Movement became partly more restricted, partly easier due to increased security. Administrative boundaries started to have a real impact on people’s activities, as crossing them meant displaying the necessary paperwork that was notoriously difficult to obtain.14 New roads were constructed, often to reflect administrative divisions. Over the years, marriage patterns changed imperceptibly, and were increasingly concentrated within the valley and the commune of Akbou, the larger administrative unit. Akbou itself blossomed into a large town that started to exert a considerable attraction on villagers. More generally, the rapidly growing towns in the valley, and the relatively easy means of transport that connected them, became central to village marital alliances. Unions with Kabyles from Greater Kabylia became also more common, as did connections with Algiers; while villages to the East, formerly rather ‘close’ to Taddart, came to be neglected and seem to have become increasingly inaccessible and ‘foreign’. Today, most marriages are concluded within the village or with one of the two neighbouring towns. With the exception of occasional marriages to emigrant cousins in France or Algiers, the ‘region’ covered by networks of kinship has thus shrunk considerably. Yet the web of past and present kinship, carefully tended and maintained through mutual visits, gifts and services, remains crucial to the way the world opens up to villagers. This is especially true for women and girls, for whom visits to relatives often constitute the only opportunity to travel and to acquire direct knowledge of places and people outside their immediate neighbourhood. For the younger generations, photo-albums of relatives rather than family histories seem to describe a region that is

13 See the description given of Ben Aly Chérif ’s sphere of influence, maintained through marriage as well as political alliance, in a letter by the Administrateur de la commune mixte d’Akbou to the sous-préfet de Bougie (February 24, 1953), held at the Archives d’outre-mer (AOM) in Aix-en-Provence, unclassified folder on Akbou. 14 The code de l’indigénat, applied throughout Algeria as soon as civil administration was established from the 1870s onwards, required all non-naturalised Algerians (indigènes) to remain in their douar (district) of residence unless they had an official permit to leave it (see Charles-Robert Ageron, Les algériens musulmans et la France (1871–1919) (Paris, 1968).

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relevant to them, more or less directly ‘known’, and within which they define themselves. The fact that this area has been reduced over recent years thus means a contraction of the familiar for most villagers; at the same time, the ‘region’ that is of relevance to them, ‘known’ through television and especially internet, now also includes Algiers and parts of Paris, as inaccessible as these places might in actual fact remain.

Saints and Scholars In addition to family histories, various saintly legends establish links between Taddart and certain places beyond its boundaries.15 The local saints are said to have come from Morocco, and to have led lives of wandering and searching, until they settled down to establish a village or open a zâwiya (pl. zawâyâ, in Kabyle taεmamart, from the Arabic ‘amara, to settle).16 Much as the itineraries of the village families mentioned above are dotted with places inevitably connected to them by their family history and names, the saints’ itineraries, as they appear in local legends, are marked by the physical proof, the burhân, of their passage: a spring they caused to yield water, a village they established, a rock they displaced. Through this emphasis on the saints’ individual itineraries through ‘known’ places, and on their faraway origin, the saints appear as mediators, or literally as ‘go-betweens’ between the local and the world;17 their itineraries are long lists of ‘familiar’ places that are seen as somehow connected to the present village and to its spiritual well-being:

15 In the colonial literature the veneration of saints has come to be seen as one of the distinguishing features of North African Islam, and as a more ‘appropriate’ form of religion for sedentary agriculturalists than the more ‘abstract’ Islam of the ‘nomadic civilisations’ of the hijâz (see for example Corneille Trumelet, Les saints de l’islam: Légendes hagiologiques et croyances algériennes (Paris, 1881), Alfred Bel, La religion musulmane en Berbèrie (Paris, 1938) and Emile Dermenghem, Le culte des saints dans l’Islam maghrébin (Paris, 1954). Their faraway origin has thereby often been ignored. 16 Throughout the Maghrib, the zawâyâ fulfilled a variety of functions in rural life: generally constructed around the tomb of a local saint, they served as teaching institutes of varying quality, where the teachers of the village Qur’ânic schools would be educated, as sites of pilgrimages, institutes of charity, hostels, and meeting places for religious brotherhoods. 17 See also Houari Touati, “Essor et fonction du saint homme,” Peuples méditerranéens 52, 3 (1990), 145–154.


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[The local saint] Si Mohand ou Messaoud belongs to the axxam [family, lit. house] Ben Aly Chérif. Like them, he came from Morocco, he went through the Beni Waghlis, via Smaoun, and he came along the path above the village. He stopped at Si Moussa ou Ali and sat there for some time. He made water flow at Si Mohand ou Messaoud, and then he stayed there and founded his zâwiya.18

The saints thereby link the area to the centres of the Islamic world, such as southern Morocco, Cairo and Mecca, and, ultimately, to God and all his saints. The origin of the zawâyâ, the most visible localities in the area, is seen as the result of past movement, channelling a central force—God’s baraka—to a place that thereby becomes specific, and named. Physically, the place so founded resembles all other zawâyâ: it evokes an architectural model that can be found throughout North Africa, and that North African scholars and saints took with them on their journeys to distant places, in particular the Algerian south and the Niger bend.19 By their uniformity, by the recurrence of their names and deeds, and by their genealogical connections, these saints create regional unity and a common feeling of familiarity, significance and belonging, stretching from Morocco via Kabylia to Tunisia and beyond, and south across the Sahara. Although family histories are in structure very similar to saints’ stories, the latter thus describe a very different kind of region, reaching much further, composed of inaccessible holy places, finding its earthly centre on the Atlantic coast in southern Morocco rather than in the East, and situating its spiritual source in the realm of the saints. Nevertheless, this region also has a direct impact on the movements of contemporary villagers by inspiring and directing their pilgrimages to nearby holy places. Many of the local saints only survive in legends, pilgrimages, songs, poems, and place-names. Others, however, can be identified with regional Islamic scholars. Their zawâyâ often blossomed into Islamic teaching institutes, attracting students and teachers from throughout the Central Maghrib and beyond. They were sometimes situated in villages, sometimes next to them; at times large landowners through religious endowments, they shaped the surrounding landscape, and often gave rise to considerable settlement and agricultural enterprise;

18

This local legend corresponds to the stereotypical saint legend that can be found throughout the Central Maghrib; for a collection of these legends, see Trumelet, Les saints de l’islam and Dermenghem, Le culte des saints. 19 Cf. Nadir Marouf, Lecture de l’espace oasien (Paris, 1980).

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but they remained, at least in local perception, places essentially representative of movement and circulation, deriving their legitimacy from their constantly maintained outside connections. They functioned as hostels, put up travellers, and constituted privileged links with the world of Islam, thereby creating their own region, notionally independent of but in practice often interacting with that created by markets, kinship and mundane travel. These zawâyâ conserve traces of the circulation they resulted from and gave rise to in their collections of manuscripts. Taddart houses three hundred manuscripts, dating mainly from a period stretching from the late seventeenth to the first decades of the twentieth century. These manuscripts were bought on local markets, brought by travelling students, passed on from teachers to students, or procured by scholars on their trips abroad. Despite their various origins, they bear witness to the existence of a region constituted through scholarly contacts and within which most intellectual exchange took place. Almost half of the manuscripts came from the area centred on Béjaïa, which in the past had been an important centre of Islamic learning. This area mainly included both mountain-slopes over-looking the Soummam valley. It therefore overlapped partly with the area of village activity described above, although it appears larger, extending further north. Another fifth of the manuscripts preserved in Taddart came from the Algerian East more generally. Eighty-five percent of manuscript texts originated in the Maghrib, and the remaining fifteen percent were constituted by standard Middle Eastern Islamic texts. The rare printed documents in the collection were published in the 1950s either in Algiers or Egypt. Despite the various origins of authors and texts, the copies themselves do not show any obvious signs of different origin, indicating that they were produced in an area marked by a certain uniformity of materials and script, stretching from the Soummam valley to Constantine and Tunis. A village library ‘discovered’ recently on the other side of the valley owns an even larger collection of manuscripts, some of which have travelled for thousands of miles, but most of which equally seem to bear traces of a certain regional coherence.20 In addition to the area traced

20 See Djamil Aïssani and Djamel Eddine Mechehed, Manuscrits de Kabylie: Catalogue de la collection Ulahbib (Algiers, 2007).


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by the manuscript collection in Taddart, Moroccan centres of scholarship such as Fez and Marrakech figure prominently in the inventory. Nevertheless, here as in Taddart, Béjaïa and its larger region, connected to the wider Algerian East, appear to have been central to local perceptions of Islam and scholarship more generally. Inversely, copies of manuscripts produced by local scholars could be found throughout the Islamic world, but with a clear emphasis on the Algerian East and South, and Islamic West Africa.21 Despite the decline of the zawâyâ following the French conquest, local French colonial archives abound in reports on the movement of students and teachers, to and from Kabylia; the circulation of manuscripts, both from Morocco and increasingly also from the Middle East, remained one of their chief worries. French reports, by retracing individual scholars’ careers, confirm the importance of connections within the Algerian East.22 Many local zawâyâ were further linked among themselves through one of the various Sufi brotherhoods that were active in Kabylia at the time, and that yet again created and maintained their own ‘region’ within which they could be effective and link people and ideas across large distances. More conspicuous than other religious activities in the area, these orders were perceived as a latent threat by the French, precisely because they created regional allegiances that exceeded colonial boundaries and spheres of influence. Large colourful maps of the ‘regions’ they created are thus numerous both in French colonial archives and publications.23 Rather than clarifying the situation, these maps seem to further the reigning confusion, and at best appear to indicate a degree of actual flexibility that surpassed French colonial epistemological categories. It seems nevertheless clear that the spiritual networks created by Sufi orders, in opposition to those of the saints, were centred on the Arab lands of the East rather than on Morocco. From the 1930s onwards, French reports and village memories allow us to guess at changes in these regional networks brought about by the emergence of Reformist Islam, which reoriented them once more,

21 Judith Scheele, “Al-Waghlîsî à travers le monde,” in Actes du colloque autour ‘Abd al-Rahmân al-Waghlîsî, tenu à Béjaïa du 13 au 15 octobre 2004, eds. Djamil Aissani and Judith Scheele (Algiers, 2009). 22 See for example AOM 93/1393 and B3 246. 23 See for example the maps in Louis Rinn, Marabouts et Khouan: Etude sur l’Islam en Algérie (Algiers, 1884) and Octave Depont and Xavier Coppolani, Les confréries religieuses musulmanes (Algiers, 1897).

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this time towards the cities of the littoral.24 Yet the same French documents and oral history also allow us to guess at the permanence in religious contacts that, although nominally within the Reformist connection, relied on links prior to it.25 Throughout its history, Taddart thus appears as part of several overlapping, but never quite coextensive networks of religious and often also political transmission and allegiance, whose complexity allowed for considerable flexibility on the ground, and never ceased to puzzle French observers. However, as hinted at in the introduction to this article, regions are never static; they are influenced by a certain ‘pull’ towards its centre, a pull that through its intellectual, imaginary and practical efficacy creates and perpetuates ‘margins’. Indeed, despite the large choice of regions that was open to it, it seems that Taddart never ceased to be marginal. Scholarship acquired in Taddart clearly was not the same as scholarship acquired in Mecca or Cairo, and remained far less prestigious. Virtually all writings on Kabylia produced by local scholars represent it as an abode of wild mountain dwellers and heathens that need to be reformed; notions of the ‘un-Islamic’ Berbers clearly do not only date from the French conquest.26 And indeed, various reformers flocked to the Kabyle mountains in a never-ending stream that proved in itself their lack of success; while an equally dense flock of Kabyle scholars travelled each year to Cairo and Mecca to benefit from the enlightenment of the centres of the Islamic world, and to boast on their return of their numerous links with the most well-known scholars in the world.27 True Islamic scholarship, most local sources seem to agree, could only be achieved in one of the centres of the Islamic world; any scholar with any ambitions needed to have been there, and ideally have produced a rihla (account of his journey) to prove the

24 See for example the anonymous report L’enseignement privé réformiste et l’Association des oulémas d’Algérie held at the Diocesan Archives in Algiers; and the police reports held in the folder Bougie: Associations at the Archives du département de Constantine in Constantine. 25 Judith Scheele, “Recycling baraka: Knowledge, Politics and Religion in Contemporary Algeria,” Contemporary Studies in Society and History 49, 2 (2008), 304–328. 26 See for example al-Husayn al-Wartîlânî, Nuzhat al-ansâr fî fadl ‘ilm al-târîkh wa-l-akhbâr (Algiers, 1908) and Ibn al-Hâjj, Rihlat al-Abdarî: Al-musammat al-rihlat al-maghribiyya (Rabat, 1968). 27 For an example of this, see Jonathan Katz, Dreams, Sufism and Sainthood: The Visionary Career of Muhammad al-Zawâwî (Leiden, 1996).


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authenticity and great success of his travels.28 More or less directly, Kabyle scholars partook in the intellectual developments of the entire Islamic world, and learned to adopt its categories, even in reference to their own place of origin. Like the saints (who they often became), they derived their local legitimacy from their connection with the outside world, the relations they had established there, and their mastery of ‘universal’ categories they had brought back. Yet seen from the outside, Kabylia itself also had a certain ‘pull’ towards its own hinterland. Most students who travelled to Kabylia came from underprivileged areas in the Algerian South or beyond.29 Local libraries contain manuscripts by West African authors; however, as mentioned above, exchange seems to have been much more frequent in the other direction, and works by local ‘ulamâ, little known beyond their home region, can be found in West African libraries.30 Teachers travelled south from Kabylia to make their fortune and find recognition as representatives of Islam, or of one of the various Sufi orders based in the North; while, save some rare exceptions, knowledge travelling in the other direction was branded sorcery or magic.31 As much as Kabylia received intellectual categories and legitimacy from its close contact with the centres of the Islamic world, it passed them on to places that were even more peripheral,32 thereby establishing a

28 Sami Bargaoui, “Sainteté, savoir et autorité en Kabylie au XVIIIe siècle: La rihla de Warthîlânî,” in L’Autorité des saints, ed. Mohamed Kerrou (Paris, 1999) and see also Dominique Urvoy, “Effets pervers du hajj, d’après le cas d’al-Andalus,” in Golden Roads: Migration, Pilgrimage and Travel in Medieval and Modern Islam, ed. Ian Richard Netton (Richmond, 1993). The need to travel to acquire greater knowledge is of course not limited to Kabylia, but an integral part of Islamic scholarship, see e.g. Dale Eickelman and James Piscatori, Muslim Travellers: Pilgrimage, Migration and the Religious Imagination (London, 1990). As a whole, this tradition establishes an implicit (and flexible) hierarchy of places to travel to (‘centres’) and places to travel from (‘margins’). Kabylia and most of the Central Maghrib clearly counted mainly among the latter. 29 Students in the zawâyâ in the southern Constantinois routinely were taught basic Kabyle words, to prepare them for their further study (Fanny Colonna, personal communication). See also the names and origins of students noted by Hanoteau and Letourneux, La Kabylie, and recorded in the French archives (AOM B3 246 and 93/1393). 30 See e.g. Noureddine Ghali, Sidi Mohammed Mahibou and Louis Brenner, Inventaire de la bibliothèque ‘Umarienne de Ségou, conservée à la Bibliothèque Nationale (Paris, 1985). 31 Cf. Emile Dermenghem, “Les confréries noires en Algérie,” Revue Africaine 97 (1953), 314–367. 32 There was obviously also a direct route that linked the countries of the bend of the Niger to Cairo, Greater Syria and the hijâz. However, the North African connection

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graded network of intellectual exchange that spanned across a large part of the Islamic world.33

Migrants, Students and Politicians From the 1920s onwards, migration to the Algerian cities and to France enlarged the ‘region’ that was known, used, and economically relevant to villagers to include parts of Paris and of the French mining towns in the Ardennes. Yet again, these parts were specific: one particular street in the nineteenth arrondissement in Paris, or a couple of houses in Charleville-Mézières. In Taddart, areas of Paris and the Ardennes became part of everyday life, through family events associated with them, through work accidents and scars brought home, through letters, pensions, trinkets on the newly constructed mantelpiece, and photos. They eventually changed the village itself, as emigrants could afford to construct costly concrete villas instead of the old stone houses, and as the village baptised its back way, through which so many villagers had slipped away to go to France, the rue de Paris. Despite—or rather, because of—migration to France, from the first decades of the twentieth century onwards, the Algerian nation was to become the most important ‘imagined community’ and imagined known region for most villagers. This development arguably lasts until today, and has, as it constitutes ‘nationalism’ rather than ‘regionalism’, been studied abundantly.34 In Algeria as elsewhere, one of its mainstays was state education. The French had invested early in primary education in Kabylia, and primary schools, leading up to teacher training in Algiers, quickly created their own region to mirror that of the colonial state. After independence, this development was furthered by massive investment in national education, making it accessible to all.

seems to have been more important than is often thought, especially where less wellknown students and scholars are taken into account. 33 According to Braudel, Méditerranée (1949, translated 1975), pp. 468–469, the Algerian Tell long fulfilled a similar role of intermediary in the trade between the Western Sudan and the Mediterranean, thus forming ‘an ancient structured system’ to the overall benefit of the Mediterranean. 34 It is impossible to provide a full bibliography, but see for example Gilbert Meynier, L’Algérie révélée: La guerre de 1914–1918 et le premier quart du XXe siècle (Geneva, 1981) and Omar Carlier, Entre nation et Jihad: Histoire sociale des radicalismes algériens (Paris, 1995).


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In the decades after the war of independence (1954–1962), education was about movement, and literally opened up new paths leading to the centres of the country, if not of the ‘world’, through the concentration of higher education in the large cities, and the generous attribution of scholarships to study abroad. While studying in the state system, pupils actively developed their own regional networks, following the well-trodden paths of national administration to the national centres of decision-making.35 Yet education also mirrors the ultimate failure of national integration and the reduction of the familiar mentioned above. Today, going to university usually means only to travel as far as the regional capital, Béjaïa, or maybe Tizi-Ouzou, the capital of the neighbouring department. These restrictions of movement seem to have contributed to the popular devaluation of education as a means both of social mobility and the acquisition of knowledge quite as much as the numerical increase in students: much as observed above for religious learning, knowledge obtained ‘abroad’ carries more prestige than that acquired nearby. Diplomas from Algiers tend to be valued more highly than local ones; ‘true education’, everybody seems to agree, can only be achieved in Europe, if needs must even in Eastern Europe; and students deeply resent being ‘held back’ in Kabylia. The growing regional consciousness in Kabylia itself clearly stems partly from the reduction of most contacts and paths that are open to villagers in Kabylia itself. The same is valid for political movements: militant Berberism, a movement demanding official recognition of Berber cultural identity, sprung up when access to the national administration was perceived to be increasingly restricted to the selected few. It succeeded in creating its own, regional hierarchy, pathways, accesses and regional boundaries. Today, these boundaries, which do not entirely correspond to those that used to be associated with ‘Kabylia’ before the 1980s, but include neighbouring parts of the country whose inhabitants are equally dissatisfied with the current state of affairs, are respected as such both by Kabyles and by government officials. Kabyle demonstrators going to Algiers tend to be stopped by national security forces at these boundaries, but never within them. The alleged government policy to ‘punish’ Kabylia for its unruliness by ‘letting it rot’ is limited to the

35 Cf. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983), pp. 53–56.

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same areas. By now, although these boundaries continue to shift, their notional existence has become of central importance in local imagination and for notions of belonging and regional identity. Similarly, local accounts of political careers often seem to resemble a geographical description of a significant region within which this political commitment has taken shape, and within which it carries meaning: At the beginning of the mouvement associatif [from 1989 onwards], I was mainly active in Akbou, with associations there. We moved around a lot: that’s how I came to know the universities of Bougie, Tizi Ouzou, Algiers, Boumerdes, all the universities and educational institutes in the region. We took the car, went off, to meet people, exchange ideas. . . . When the association culturelle [in Taddart] had to send a representative to Tizi Ouzou to take a training course in Berber, everybody suggested that I should go, maybe because I already had a certain experience of outside relations. We were put up at the student halls in Tizi Ouzou. That’s where I met everybody, and where I learnt everything I know about Berber.36

FPO

More generally, Berberism is a good example of how local political commitments strive to create a new region through the development of an independent set of networks that would create access to centres that might at times be situated outside national boundaries. Berberism is a loose term for a complex of ideas centring mainly on the claim that the Berber language and Berber cultural heritage should be recognised and protected.37 Linked to this claim are demands for a more pluralist form of government, and Berberism has thus, much like Islamism, become a vehicle for the expression of a whole series of dissatisfactions with the Algerian political system. Yet, as it has long been suppressed by the government, the most visible Berberist activities have taken place in France, and especially intellectual endeavours and research into Berber matters are usually conducted at French universities. This means that the prime references and linguistic and historical resources for local representatives of the Berber movement are French, and that access to French sources and contact with French academics is crucial to local Berberism, and tends to be displayed with as much publicity as possible. Similarly, one of the fundamental claims of Berberism is the overriding unity of Berber culture throughout the Maghrib. By

36

Interview in Taddart (April 2004). For a well-known full exposition of this argument, see Salem Chaker, Berbères aujourd’hui: Berbères dans le Maghreb contemporain (Paris, 1999). 37


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claiming a certain regional affiliation for Kabylia, Berberism thus creates its own practically efficient ‘region’, focussed on France, but that also at least notionally includes other Berber-speaking areas of Algeria and neighbouring countries. The development of this region shows once more the importance and the effects of tensions that are internal to it. The fact that its intellectual centres are seen to be in Paris has locally led to the assumption that true ‘local knowledge’, such as local language, history and customs, had better be studied there. During fieldwork, villagers were reluctant to teach me the language they used, as it was not ‘proper’ Kabyle; local history could only be found in books and documents that had been ‘stolen’ from the village, and could certainly be found in Paris; local customs had been recorded long ago by French ethnographers, and yet again the books would best be bought in Paris. Mecca might have been replaced by Paris, I felt, but intellectual legitimacy was maybe even more than ever bound up with real and putative outside connections, and ideally with past movement to the current centre of the world: the village had changed its region, but it had not changed its relatively marginal position within it. This does not mean that the inhabitants of Taddart are passive consumers of ‘universal’ truth; rather, it means that they are prone to dress up local knowledge in foreign categories in order to legitimise them beyond doubt, and that the fact of being consciously part of a larger whole, whatever whole that might be, influences the way many villagers tend to think and especially talk about themselves.

The View from the South This picture changes, however, once we take into account how other people might relate to Kabylia. In addition to sending out migrants, Kabylia has also long received them. As late as the nineteenth century, reports of French soldiers who deserted to become Kabyle were legion.38 Long before then, Béjaïa was an important seaport, providing the wealth of the south, including slaves, to the desirous Mediterranean, and attracting adventurers, merchants and Christian slaves

38 For individual examples, see Carette, Etudes, and Auguste Veller, Monographie de la Commune mixte de Sidi Aïch (1888; published Paris, 2004).

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coming the other way.39 As seen above, all local family histories speak of some kind of outside origin. In addition to this, a large number of contemporary Kabyle villages, in particular in the fertile plains of the valleys, are said to be of servile origin. The establishment of these villages is generally associated with the Turks,40 but might in some cases have preceded them. Several families in the area derive their family names from their black origins; there are vivid traces of black Sufi orders, West African musical, medical and magical traditions; certain occupations are associated with blackness. Students have long travelled to Kabylia to further their studies, initially in the search for religious knowledge, since independence more often hoping for good further education. Some come from other Berber-speaking areas in Algeria to study in one of the two recently opened departments of Berber study, others from West Africa to benefit from French-speaking science courses at university. West African students become each year more numerous in the area, although their integration into the receiving society remains exceptional. For most of them, although they often stay for years, if not decades, Kabylia is perceived as a buffer zone, as a ‘Europe’ outside Schengen, rather than as an aim in itself. They claim that they initially wanted to go to France, as everybody else, but their results were not good enough to get a scholarship, and they somehow got stuck half way. This means that Kabylia and Algeria as a whole often leads to bitter deceptions, as it is but a faint reflection of France. ‘They can’t even speak proper French here’, as almost all West African students I interviewed complained, but what would you expect—they are peasants, whereas we come from large cities and are more used to foreigners. But they don’t realise, they think of themselves as French, and they don’t even know how ridiculous this is.

39 See Robert Brunschvig, La Berbérie orientale sous les Hafsides des origines à la fin du XVe siècle, 1 (Paris, 1940–1947), pp. 382–384, and the various notes on Saharan trade in the French archives, e.g. AOM 10H30 to 33, 22H13, 22H14, 22H26, 22H33, 22H38, 22H45, 22H46, 22H56 and 22H59. According to Diego de Haëdo, Topographie et histoire générale d’Alger (1612, published Paris, 1998), p. 62, more than half of the population of Algiers in the late sixteenth century was composed of Christian renegades and slaves “as there is not one nation in Christendom that has not sent its share of renegades to Algiers”; the situation in Béjaïa must have been similar. 40 Henri Aucapitaine, “Colonies noires de Kabylie,” Revue Africaine 4 (1860), 73–77.


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For others, imbued with ideas of South-South cooperation or Islamic solidarity, Algeria is seen as a destination in itself, although yet again this might lead to deceptions: I have always admired Algeria, politically, after all, they fought for their freedom—and a large part of my family live on the other side of the border, so it seemed natural to come here . . . but most Kabyles don’t realise, all they know is France, they see themselves through France’s eyes, and they look at us without interest, although after all we are all Muslims, but they don’t care.

Or, more poetically: “Kabyles are nomads, always on the move, but they face due north, and never look back . . .”41 As much as the multiple connections that link Kabylia to France and to the Middle East speak of and maintain certain power relations through fostering intellectual dependency, the South might look to Algeria, and certainly used to do so, while actually searching for the reflection of something else, of one of the current centres of the world. Many migrants thus seem to experience a double displacement; whereas Kabylia remains, as it has long been, a vital intermediary.

Conclusion: An Intellectual World-system? If we take as our working definition of a region an area that is of practical or intellectual and cultural significance to a given set of people, the ways in which this region might be defined, and thus its geographical correlates, are varied, and depend both on the historical period and the aspect of social life taken into account. The above attempts may help us to define some kind of area that, although it might not have any definite boundaries, does indicate patterns of significance and relevance to daily practices and definitions in one particular locality. If nothing else, they describe a certain way of relating to the world, and show that regions are never given, but constructed, and that they need to be maintained in order to last: seen from the inside out, regions, if anything, are subject to historic circumstance, and need to be understood as such. The above example further shows that the notion of regional coherence does not preclude the existence of internal tensions and differences; indeed, it might be one of its defining features. 41

Interview in Béjaïa (April 2006).

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Regions have centres, and centres exert a certain attraction on their margins. Regions are thus dynamic, and this dynamism might help us to delimit them. In the above examples, I have tried to show that this ‘pull-factor’ is not only economic, but might also be cultural and intellectual, while describing the implications this can have for life in the margins. Considering Kabylia from this aspect—the centres it might be attracted to and the margins it might attract from—shows it as an intermediate region that seems to derive much of its characteristics from such a position. Wallerstein’s and Braudel’s notions of worldsystems might be useful here, mainly as ways to think through farreaching connectedness and global inequality as a relational rather than an internal feature.42 Current ‘globalisation’ might displace these intermediate areas, and change their orientation and function, but cannot do without them. In the case of Kabylia, this seems to be even more striking: the centres of the world might have changed, and, as seen from Kabylia, have multiplied, but Kabylia remains in a similar position of dependent intermediary. Formerly acting as a link between West Africa and the centres of the Islamic word, it now acts as a buffer zone for the European Union, France, and all this represents on the other side of the Mediterranean. Mutatis mutandis, Kabylia remains unthinkable without the constant movement of people, goods and ideas, and the continuing pull towards one of the centres of the world, that have made it what it is.

42

Braudel, Méditerranée, p. 419 and Civilisation matérielle, pp. 11–55.

TRANSLOCAL ‘KINSHIP’ RELATIONS IN CENTRAL AFRICAN POLITICS OF THE 19TH CENTURY* Beatrix Heintze Frobenius Institute, Frankfurt

Introduction Kin-based groups are amongst the oldest informal and formal mutual protection associations known to man. Ties based on kinship provide relative security in the face of external enemies and other dangers, as well as solidarity with the weaker members of the community in the event of illness, natural disaster and in other times of crisis. If one happened to meet relatives while travelling far from home, no matter how distantly related they might be, one could count on their support, at least for the time being. Groups that were bound to each other through kinship were able to secure political, economic and other opportunities which put them at an advantage vis-à-vis groups joined by association along other lines. However, kinship may be defined in various ways. The circle of those who may be included differ from society to society, and range from narrow to very broad groups. The links between relatives, and indeed relationship systems as such are—contrary to what has been assumed for long—no perpetual law but, like all expressions of culture, subject to manifold processes of change. Relationships have not only regulated regional relations between people in a significant manner, but also played an outstanding role in ordering relationships at supraregional and political levels, and they continue to be important in some areas

* I am grateful to Katja Rieck for rendering this text from the original German. All Portuguese citations were translated into English. This paper is the quintessence of a larger work, see Beatrix Heintze, “Luéji, Quinguri, Tembo & Co.: Politik und Verwandtschaft im vorkolonialen Zentralafrika,” (manuscript 2006). I have added in parentheses the Lunda rendering of the most important Lunda names and terms occurring in the Luso-African versions of the sources (according to James Jeffrey Hoover, The Seduction of Ruwej: Reconstructing Ruund History (the Nuclear Lunda; Zaire, Angola, Zambia) (PhD thesis Yale University, Ann Arbor, 1978).

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even today. Marriage politics were particularly significant, especially in monarchies. But beyond such rather mundane strategies, the category ‘kinship’ could at the state level constitute a rather complex network of real and fictive kinship ties that could shape political life. This article focuses on the kinship networks operating at the state level in the great Lunda Commonwealth1 in Central Africa of the nineteenth century. I draw on an unusual source, namely the manuscripts and publications of Henrique Augusto Dias de Carvalho. They cover several thousand pages2 and provide extensive and detailed reports covering a four-year Portuguese expedition into this region in the mid-1880s. Carvalho’s work not only gives insight into the principles of Central African politics at the time but also demonstrates their specific applications in day-to-day political affairs. Moreover, the political climate at the time was crisis-ridden and the reports paint a gloomy picture of the Lunda Commonwealth just before the dawn of the colonial age as being eroded by Chokwe migrations and internal dynastic conflicts.

The Historical Context The extensive and later famous Lunda Commonwealth had its origins in the small kingdom of the Rund, the heartland of Lunda, and its residence Musumba3 on the Kalanyi river. Their aggressive expansive policy was closely linked to the Atlantic slave trade and began around the middle of the seventeenth century. The warriors of the Rund kings,

1 A term introduced by Jan Vansina, “Government in Kasai before the Lunda,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 31, 1 (1998), 1, fn. 1. 2 See Henrique Augusto Dias de Carvalho, O Lubuco: Algumas oberservações sobre o livro do Sr. Latrobe Bateman intitulado The First Ascent of the Kasaï (Lisbon, 1889); Ethnographia e História Tradicional dos Povos da Lunda (Lisbon, 1890); A Lunda ou os Estados do Muatiânvua, dominios da soberania de Portugal (Lisbon, 1890); Methodo pratico para fallar a lingua da Lunda contendo narrações historicas dos diversos povos (Lisbon, 1890); Descripção da Viagem à Mussumba do Muatiânvua, 4 vols. (Lisbon, 1890–1894); O Jagado de Cassange na Provincia de Angola. Memoria (Lisbon, 1898) and manuscripts in the Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino in Lisbon (hereafter AHU). 3 Mussumba (luso-african) resp. musumb (Rund) connotes every fenced camp or settlement of a mwant yav (title of the Rund and Lunda kings) or an honorary mwant yav (Carvalho, Descripção da Viagem à Mussumba do Muatiânvua, II, fn. 613). Meanwhile, this term has become the proper name of a number of residential towns of the mwant yav on the river Kalanyi. When this meaning is intended, the term will be spelt with a capital M and without italics.

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who carried the title of mwant yav in honour of their legendary first king, gradually overran the entire eastern region up to the Kwango and established their own dominions in the conquered territories. Early references to these violent events in Central Africa can be found in the voluminous history written by António de Oliveira de Cadornega in 1680–16814 and later in numerous eighteenth-century Portuguese documents.5 Amongst the most famous emerging Lunda satellite dominions, which were sometimes more and sometimes less dependent on the Rund centre of power on the River Kalanyi, were Kumbana in the Pende area, the two Kaúngula (of the River Lóvua and of the state Mataba), Putu Kasongo of the Yaka on the middle Kwango, Kapenda ka Mulemba of the Shinje, Kimbundu in the territory belonging to the Minungu in the Southwest and many others.6 Significantly the Portuguese received most of their early reports regarding the mwant yav and the Lunda Commonwealth from the Mbangala who had an important kingdom on the western side of the Kwango. They traded with the Lunda and for a long time successfully defended their trading monopoly and their key position in these relations. They therefore denied all other merchants/traders passage across the river—a very effective trade barrier, which they were able to maintain well into the nineteenth century. The Kwango thus proved to be first and foremost a dividing line to be controlled which separated the Portuguese and the Luso-Africans in the West from the Lunda in the East. After the slave trade had been officially abolished by the Portuguese government in 1836 the Angolan trade underwent a reorientation affecting the hinterlands, a trade which in the previous decades had become ever more dependent on supplies of slaves from the continent’s interior. Initially wax, ivory, but also palm fibre textiles overshadowed

4

António de Oliveira de Cadornega, História Geral das Guerras Angolanas, 3 vols., (manuscript of 1680–1681), eds. José Matias Delgado and Manuel Alves da Cunha (Lisbon, 1940–1942), 3, p. 219. 5 See for example AHU, Angola, box 45, no. 42, Letter by Governor António de Vasconcellos (February 12, 1762). 6 On the early history of the Rund-Lunda-Expansion see Jan Vansina, “Du nouveau sur la conquête lunda au Kwango,” Congo Afrique 341 (2000), 45–58 and idem, How Societies are Born: Governance in West Central Africa before 1600 (Charlottesville, 2004), pp. 209–210, 244–259, 266–267. On the interaction with the Atlantic slave trade see Joseph C. Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade 1730–1830 (London, 1988), especially the chapter “The Slaving Frontier,” pp. 140–153 which provides a useful map 5.1, p. 148.

0

14°

16°

go an Kw

Bié

Munhango 18°

JE

Quimbundo

20°

Mukenge BU K U

22°

M ATA B A

LU

Lulu a

Kambunje

24°

Mussumba

Luluaburg

Capuco

KETE

Sanburu KUBA Capungo

Map 9. Principal Long-Distance Caravan Routes in West Central Africa (1850–c. 1890), in Beatrix Heintze and Achim von Oppen, eds., Angola on the Move: Transport Routes, Communications and History, Frankfurt am Main: Lembeck, 2008, p. 146

12°

N

12°

A SA

Madrid

Malanje Kwan za

K

Dondo

Golungo Alto

Kaungula

Kumbana

Lóvia

300 km

Luanda

Anzavo

Mputo Kasongo

Chicapa

Lisbon

N

Mbanza Kongo

Kas ai

ai

10°

8°

6°

or ire Za ngo Kw e

o ng Ko Luangue

4°

ilo Kw s Ka

Luac himo

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the trade in slaves in commercial significance; copper continued to be important and later rubber joined salt and cattle as prominent goods. However, a revitalised inner African slave trade continued during this whole period. During the long reign of mwant yav Nawej a Ditend (ca. 1820/22– 1851/52) the first Luso-Africans (the so-called Ambaquistas) followed in the footsteps of the Mbangala and settled in Musumba. At the time of Nawej a Ditend’s successor they established a trading and settler colony which existed there for about 30 years. It was the heyday of Lunda trade, which reached its peak in the 1860s and lasted until the closing of the southern trade route in the year 1881.7 Yet this was also the period during which the ivory trade grew in importance, and the Chokwe were searching for better hunting grounds and trading opportunities, following the northward migrations of the elephants from the upper Kwango, upper Kasai and Lungue-Bungu which had begun in the middle of the century.8 The markets of the Luluwa, Kete and Kuba, tapped by the Luso-Africans, Portuguese, Mbangala and later also the Germans, became more and more attractive to the west coast and increasingly marginalised the old Rund centre of power on the River Kalanyi. On top of all this, internal political intrigues and power struggles in the Lunda Commonwealth, aggravated by a series of unstable alliances with the advancing Chokwe, led to its erosion and ultimately its dissolution. At the same time the European colonial powers partitioned its territories amongst themselves, drawing new borders from their drawing tables.

Fictitious Translocal Kinship Ties: Positional Succession and Perpetual Kinship In the nineteenth century the Rund, who had formed the core of the great Lunda Commonwealth, were characterised by their bilateral kinship system which caused much confusion amongst their 7 On this see Beatrix Heintze, Afrikanische Pioniere: Trägerkarawanen im westlichen Zentralafrika (ca. 1850–1890) (Frankfurt a.M., 2002) and idem, Pioneiros Africanos: Caravanas de carregadores na África Centro-Ocidental (entre 1850 e 1890), trans. Marina Santos (Lisbon/Luanda, 2004), chap. II.1 and III.1 and III.3. 8 The map in Joseph C. Miller, Cokwe Expansion 1850–1900, (Occasional Paper) 1 (Madison, 1969), p. 48 provides a clear depiction of the Chokwe’s rapid expansion in the second half of the 19th century.

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early European visitors. Paternal and maternal sides were principally equal, and collateral kin were assimilated into the nuclear family. As a result, all aunts and wives of uncles on both sides were called ‘mother’ (makw), and all paternal uncles and the husbands of all aunts on both sides were referred to as ‘father’ (tat’ukw). Cousins on both sides were considered ‘siblings’, which if they were of the same sex as ego were only distinguished by age. If, however, they were of the opposite sex there was no such distinction. The children of siblings and cousins were all classified as ‘children’. Each father and each mother of any ‘father’ or ‘mother’ was consequently a ‘grandfather’ or ‘grandmother’. The only exception in this bilateral classificatory system was the mother’s brother (mantw), which ego could not refer to as ‘father’.9 From this it is quite apparent that such a bilateral classificatory system engendered innumerable close relations. In the political context, combined with the principle of ‘positional succession’ and ‘perpetual kinship’ (see below), this created a tightly meshed network of ‘relations’ in time and space, which the Rund applied in particular to their reigning royal family and its legendary origins. It was this network which long served to effectively stabilise the expansion of their rule. The concept of ‘positional succession’ implied that a successor to a particular (political) title literally became his (deceased) predecessor. He thus took on his predecessor’s name, his wife (or wives) and children, his social roles and part of his property.10 This also meant that all the children of any mwant yav (king) were considered to be the children of the reigning one. However, the ‘immortality’ of the first title bearer only pertained to his political functions, not to his private endeavours, such as those he undertook as a businessman.11 To clarify this, Carvalho quotes the mwant yav Nawej a Ditend uttering the following words: “The Muatiânvua [mwant yav] never dies; he is always the same. What Chibinda, Noéji, Muteba did, I did; and that is what all those to come must do too.”12 Yet the full power of the ties that this concept could engender was only achieved if it was used together with its twin concept, that of ‘perpetual kinship’, which established relations between titles and not

9

Hoover, The Seduction of Ruwej, p. 85. Ibid., p. 113. On this see also Vansina, “Government in Kasai before the Lunda,” p. 19. 11 With regard to the Chokwe title kisenge, see Carvalho, Descripção da Viagem à Mussumba do Muatiânvua, 3, p. 416. 12 Carvalho, Ethnographia e História Tradicional dos Povos da Lunda, p. 540. 10


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persons. This second concept established that the successor to a political title inherited not only the personal and social identity of his predecessor (with whom he often had no genealogical ties at all), but also all the social relations of the very first title bearer. These two concepts, which are quite common throughout Central Africa, were artfully used by the Rund/Lunda in securing and consolidating their position as the pre-eminent political power in the region. Hoover therefore also characterised it as the “constitutional idiom of Lunda political thought”.13 They secured for themselves considerable room to manoeuvre in order to place in offices the most capable candidates or those which fulfilled particular requirements, while all at once reinforcing and keeping alive close ties with the central ruling dynasty. At the same time, they also promoted the Lundaisation of peripheral areas, at least as long as the centre continued to exude allure and prestige. This centre focussed on the legendary mother of the first mwant yav, Luéji (Ruwej) to whom everyone was related. Thus the first Kaúngula, whose extensive dominions extended from the Luembe to the Kwilu, was, according to one oral tradition supposed to have been a descendant of Kandala, the brother of Luéji’s (Ruwej’s) father. According to another tradition he was the descendant of one of Luéji’s aunts. Whichever of these versions one lends credence to, from that point on this kinship made all Kaúngula ‘grandfathers’ to both the reigning mwant yav and all of his predecessors.14 This first Kaúngula, ostensibly authorised by the mwant yav, is supposed to have shared his dominions with his brother and a son. Since then he was known as the Kaúngula of the River Lóvua, while his brother and all those successors (installed by the mwant yav), who were designated Kaúngula of the important state Mataba, always represented the younger brother of this first Kaúngula of the Lóvua, regardless of whether he shared such or any other kinship ties with him. Consequently every reigning Bungulu represented the son of the Kaúngula of the Lóvua, since a Bungulu was regarded to be a son of the first Kaúngula (or at least is supposed to have been).15

13 Hoover, The Seduction of Ruwej, p. 114. See also Vansina, “Government in Kasai before the Lunda,” pp. 19–21. 14 Carvalho, Descripção da Viagem à Mussumba do Muatiânvua, 2, pp. 568, 621. 15 Carvalho, Descripção da Viagem à Mussumba do Muatiânvua, 2, pp. 433, 568; 3, pp. 104, 919–923; Ethnographia e História Tradicional dos Povos da Lunda, p. 235; A Lunda ou os Estados do Muatiânvua, p. 231.

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This political hierarchy, often derived from fictitious criteria, which was further gradated according to age (also often fictive) within the prevailing kinship system, found expression in all rankings visible in daily political life, such as seating arrangements, the ordering of speaking privileges, insignia, titles of address, interjections and other forms of etiquette. It did not matter how old a given title bearer was or what the relative ages of a number of congregating title bearers actually were. The place that a title bearer occupied in this hierarchy determined his political weight in the Lunda Commonwealth and at the court of the mwant yav. Since the formation of such kinship ties is a product of historical processes which were embedded in specific political contexts, it would be mistaken to assume that such ties are ‘artefacts’ of some by-gone age. Rather, in most cases they were political constructs which, like other constellations, were subject to change and could be adapted to meet the requirements of new political situations. Parallel to these often fictitious kinship ties in time and space there existed a further direct and controlled institutional link between the local Rund/Lunda potentates, who were installed or confirmed by the mwant yav, and the political centre. All chiefs and other bearers of political titles kept personal representatives at court with full powers of authority and insignias to act as their ‘alter egos’. These spoke not only in the name of the person they represented, but also in the ‘I’ form, since at that moment they in fact were considered to be this (political) persona.16 Because political and diplomatic demands were constantly reactivated in the present, this doubling of political titles, and with that all kinship links in time and space, kept alive a consciousness of the transmitted historical interrelationships and re-infused them with relevance. These could even deliberately be made to serve a politics of remembering in the sense of a postulated collective identity (see below). Such asserted historical interrelationships further gained relevance whenever a diplomatic or other visitor arrived at any of the chieftaincies or at court as a representative of his master. These fictitious links served as the basis upon which the tiny power centre of Rund-proper, was able to successfully extend its supremacy over a vast

16

Carvalho, Ethnographia e História Tradicional dos Povos da Lunda, p. 231.


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territory encompassing various languages and cultures. This supremacy was maintained for many decades practically unchallenged. To an outsider it might seem rather paradoxical that the lack of corporate lineages amongst the Rund/Lunda would be conducive to the emergence of such a formative kinship idiom. However, precisely because of this there were no rules that dictated appointments to political offices on the basis of strict, existing kinship criteria determined by lineage.17 Instead, the bilinear kinship system, in the guise of expansive (fictitious), ideological kinship ties expressed in the idiom of positional succession and perpetual kinship, made it possible for them to award political offices on the basis of qualification and merit (abuse notwithstanding). This system also permitted the creation of new offices and titles as needed, and their attachment to the central authority. As long as the political and economic preconditions of this state remained favourable, this system provided a high degree of political flexibility, which enabled it to expand, consolidate and maintain its predominance over an extended period of time. In the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries such kinship ties were able to afford the expanding Lunda dominions with a constitutional basis that supposedly extended back into the distant past which legitimised the balance of power and prestige of the mwant yav and his Musumba on the Kalanyi vis-à-vis their weaker neighbours and passing trading caravans.

Transethnic18 Kinship Ties These same principles could be employed to retrospectively link other ethnic groups with the Rund/Lunda centre of power. However, the initiative to do so often came from these groups themselves. Particularly during the nineteenth century it was economically advantageous to establish a historical tie that would serve as the basis for becoming privileged trading partners, opening up trade routes or minimising

17 This had already been pointed out by Hoover, The Seduction of Ruwej, pp. 362, 376. See also Vansina, “Government in Kasai before the Lunda,” p. 20. 18 This term is used here in analogy with ‘translocal’ or ‘transnational’ and denotes certain phenomena normally or allegedly associated to ethnicity, claiming that ethnic ties or barriers vis-à-vis other ethnic groups are, at least temporarily or partially, dissolved, transcended or minimalised.

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conflicts by settling in the Lunda Commonwealth. Since these other groups too were familiar with the twin concepts of positional succession and perpetual kinship, they used them as convenient idioms in which to cast such relationships. It seems that other ethnic groups did in fact take advantage of these two concepts quite frequently, at least much more frequently than modern historians have hitherto been aware of. Thus, a historical discourse emerged which put forward the notion of a common ancestral relationship of the Rund/Lunda and those groups. They were only separated through the emigration of one or more ‘founding fathers’ of these other ethnic entities. This migration theme is a common topos in oral traditions, which is why it is no longer a surprise to historians that such asserted migrations are in Central Africa said to have taken place along what later became the great trade routes of the nineteenth century (see below).19 Such contrived interethnic kinship ties were not carved in stone. Whenever the political or economic winds shifted, or when other shifts occurred that affected regional political constellations, such ties could be abandoned or replaced by new ones. For this reason the oral traditions upon which they are based are no longer regarded to be historical sources to be taken literally and are no longer used in reconstructing a corresponding history of the area. Today it is clear that the creation of such traditions is an ongoing process. In a few instances it is possible to uncover the steps involved in such a process. This includes the traditions of the Mbangala and Chokwe, who are both neighbours of the Lunda. These nineteenth-century narratives relate the ancient genealogical links of first the Mbangala rulers and second the various Chokwe chiefs with the Rund royal dynasty (see below). Today we know that this kinship was asserted for two reasons. For one, both the Mbangala and the Chokwe had close contacts with the Rund/Lunda in the nineteenth century: the former as savvy traders and the latter as immigrants who became increasingly more aggressive in staking their claims. Having said that, the reports from the interior all were transmitted by those Europeans who had close contacts both

19 Vansina, “Government in Kasai before the Lunda;” for the kingdom of Kongo see John K. Thornton, “The Origins and Early History of the Kingdom of Kongo, c. 1350–1550,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 34, 1 (2001), 97; Wyatt MacGaffey, “Changing Representations in Central African History,” Journal of African History 46, 2 (2005), 200.


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with the Mbangala as well as with the Chokwe or who were more familiar with them than with any other groups. The story of the Mbangala is quite old and has left traces in countless sources of various forms and quality. Neither the early eyewitness accounts, which predate the settlement and the establishment of a Mbangala polity in the Baixa de Cassange nor the earliest records of oral traditions featured as yet any relationship of the Mbangala with Central Africa, much less with the Lunda. The first Angolan ‘Jaga’, as the Portuguese referred to them, which, as we know today, have been the Mbangala, appeared in the documents of the 1580s and 1590s. It is fairly certain that the ethnogenesis of the first Jaga/Mbangala took place in some pastoral area in the south not very far from the Atlantic coast, from where they migrated northwards. En route, they incorporated into their group inhabitants of the territories which they conquered, plundered and destroyed, particularly from the Sumbi region. Others were sold as slaves to the Portuguese.20 Later countless references in Portuguese documents, text fragments and compilations of Mbangala oral traditions provide glimpses into their eventful history, which became so significant to Angola. But it was only in the middle of the nineteenth century that ties to the Rund were established via their leader and hero, Kinguri. At that point, both peoples were already very close trading partners. Lunda slaves lived in Mbangala villages, learned and worked in commercial settlements, occasionally freed themselves and then acted as intermediaries between the two peoples and cultures.21 According to a Mbangala tradition recorded around 1850/1851, one Kinguri kia Bangela in Central Africa lived in the vicinity of the mwant yav, where his father was chief. Although he should have been his father’s successor, his older sister Manyungo prevented this, supporting the mwant yav instead. Kinguri and a number of followers therefore emigrated to the west. After a number of stopovers and the establishment of alliances with the Portuguese, his successor Kasanje finally established the Mbangala state of Kassanje in its current

20 Vansina, How Societies are Born, p. 197 and map 22; Beatrix Heintze, “The Extraordinary Journey of the Jaga through the Centuries: Critical Approaches to Precolonial Angolan Historical Sources,” History in Africa 34 (2007), 67–101. 21 On this see Heintze, “The Extraordinary Journey of the Jaga through the Centuries.”

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location.22 By then, Kinguri had been elevated to the status of central character in the Mbangala state’s foundation myth and the Mbangala roots in Sumbi territory on the Atlantic Coast and the area further south had been eliminated from the tradition. Yet around the middle of the nineteenth century there emerged more than one version of this myth, depending on which ethnic-geographic context the story was used in.23 As the trade relations between the Mbangala and the Rund/Lunda intensified, the myths of their Lunda origin became more and more linked to the Lunda dynastic tradition until Kinguri appeared in them as a brother of the dynastic founding mother of the Rund/Lunda, Luéji. In this particular version which is also told in several variants24 sibling rivalry over who would succeed to head of the Lunda state led to Kinguri’s emigration to the west and to the establishment of a state in the Baixa de Cassange in present-day Angola. When the German explorer Max Buchner travelled to the Lunda capital in 1879/80, he discovered that the story of a common Mbangala and Lunda past was widespread from both sides. This is confirmed

22 Antonio Rodrigues Neves, Memoria da expedição a Cassange commandada pelo major graduado Francisco de Salles Ferreira em 1850 (Lisbon, 1854), pp. 96–108. For details and summaries see Jan Vansina, “La fondation du royaume de Kassanje,” Aequatoria 25, 2 (1962), 48–52 and for a new interpretation idem, “It Never Happened: Kinguri’s Exodus and its Consequences,” History in Africa 25 (1998), 390–391, cf. also Heintze, “The Extraordinary Journey of the Jaga through the Centuries.” 23 See Joaquim Rodrigues Graça, “Descripção da viagem feita de Loanda com destino ás cabeceiras do rio Sena, ou aonde for mais conveniente pelo interior do continente, de que as tribus são senhores, principiada em 24 de Abril de 1843,” in Annaes do Conselho Ultramarino, Parte não official, 1 (1855), p. 110. Another version which revolves around Kinguri and which dates from the mid-nineteenth century may be found in Ladislaus Magyar, Reisen in Süd-Afrika in den Jahren 1849 bis 1857 (Pest, 1859), pp. 266–269. On this see Vansina, “It Never Happened: Kinguri’s Exodus and its Consequences,” pp. 391–392; Heintze, “The Extraordinary Journey of the Jaga through the Centuries.” 24 See Buchner in Max Buchners Reise nach Zentralafrika 1878–1882: Briefe, Berichte, Studien, ed. Beatrix Heintze (Cologne, 1999), p. 445; Paul Pogge, Im Reiche des Muata Jamvo (Berlin, 1880), pp. 224–225; Otto H. Schütt, “Bericht über die Reise von Malange zum Luba-Häuptling Mai, und zurück, Juli 1878 bis Mai 1879,” Mittheilungen der Afrikanischen Gesellschaft 1 (1878–1879), 182; 175–176; idem, Reisen im südwestlichen Becken des Congo: Nach den Tagebüchern und Aufzeichnungen des Reisenden, ed. Paul Lindenberg (Berlin, 1881), pp. 60, 79, 82; idem, “Im Reich der Bangala,” Das Ausland 54 (1881), 381; Curt von François, “Geschichtliches über die Bangala, Lunda und Kioko,” Globus 53 (1888), 273–276; Hermann Wissmann et al., Im Innern Afrikas: Die Erforschung des Kassai während der Jahre 1883, 1884 und 1885 (1888, repr. 1891, Leipzig), p. 101; Carvalho, Ethnographia e História Tradicional dos Povos da Lunda, pp. 60–85, 529.


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explicitly and repeatedly by various reports received by Henrique Dias de Carvalho between 1885 and 1887 during his great expedition to Musumba through his Mbangala, Lunda, Chokwe and mostly from his Luso-African informants (most notably his interpreter). Already upon reaching the Kwilu in 1885, he noted that the Lunda, Chokwe, Shinje and Mbangala with whom he spoke were agreed on their common ancestry who had once lived together on the other side of the Kasai.25 Later in 1886, having reached the Chiumbue, Carvalho heard from the Lunda that they and the Mbangala were descended from the same mother,26 and even the mighty Chokwe chief Kisenge spoke (1886) of the kindred peoples of Lunda, Chokwe and Mabangala (see below).27 That the Rund/Lunda adopted this version, too, or at least used it in certain political contexts, is highly unusual since loyalists who remained behind rarely have reason to remember renegade dissidents. This points to feedback through the extended commercial contacts with the Mbangala, who were not only the authors but also the trans-ethnic disseminators (directly, and through the Luso-Africans indirectly) of this persuasion regarding the existence of such kinship ties.28 Unlike the Mbangala, the Chokwe refer to a founding mother as the origin of their rulers. The mythical ‘ancestral mother’ Tembo had apparently long figured prominently in the traditions from the area that corresponded to the former Chokwe homeland between the headwaters of the Kwanza, Kwango, Kasai, Lungue-Bungu and environs. Since the mid-nineteenth century, Tembo has been associated with the origins of the Chokwe group led by Andumba a Tembo, who was considered to be the oldest and most important of all Chokwe chiefs. At the same time, however, reference to two brothers born to this ‘ancestral mother’ explains the origins of other chiefly families, such as that of the Lunda chief Kambunje.29 This incorporation of a minor Lunda chief into the Mbangalese story of origin is one of numerous

25

Carvalho, Descripção da Viagem à Mussumba do Muatiânvua, 2, pp. 339–340. Carvalho, A Lunda ou os Estados do Muatiânvua, p. 191. 27 Ibid., p. 235. 28 Cf. Heintze, “Luéji, Quinguri, Tembo & Co.” and idem, “Long-distance Caravans and Communication beyond the Kwango (c. 1850–1890),” in Angola on the Move: Transport Routes, Communications and History / Angola em Movimento: Vias de Transporte, Comunicação e História, eds. Beatrix Heintze and Achim von Oppen (Frankfurt Main, 2008), pp. 144–162. 29 Neves, Memoria da expedição a Cassange, p. 98. 26

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indicators that sharp ethnic classifications and divisions were more a result of European classificatory obsessions than of Central African realities. While ethnic differences were obviously noted and played a role particularly at times of conflict, they could also be bridged where necessary. In July 1878, one of the ‘descendants’ of the emigrated Chokwe Chief Andumba a Tembo thus told the Portuguese explorers Capello and Ivens his version of this story: Luéji, from the Rund and Lunda traditions, appears as Tembo, whose sons, like her brother Kinguri in the Mbangala versions (with or without his siblings), emigrate and become the first chiefs of the more important of the present-day ethnic groups residing in the area, namely the Chokwe, Songo and Mbangala.30 Another tradition is closely associated with Kisenge, the most powerful Chokwe chief between the Kwango and the Kasai at the time of Henrique Dias de Carvalho. His dominions stretched between the Chicapa and Luembe Rivers.31 The fact that by this time the Chokwe had already been quite close to the Rund/Lunda elites for decades and the fact that they were dependent on each other in trade, most certainly explains the emergence of myths that link their ‘ancestral mother’ with the house of the mwant yav, which had so long been dominant and continued to be both acclaimed and feared. All Carvalho’s informants agreed that Kambamba, or Kambamba Mussopo uá Nama (which was her full name), was Kisenge’s mother. She herself was regarded a close older relative of the legendary Rund ‘ancestral mother’, Luéji luá Konti, most often as her ‘aunt’. According to tradition, she moved away after Kinguri’s falling out, accompanied by a group of Chokwe from Luéji’s court or from that of the first mwant yav. However, the real founders of the various Chokwe states were actually her son Kisenge and his brothers, or other relatives who had accompanied her when she left.32

30 Hermenegildo Capello and Roberto Ivens, De Benguella ás terras de Iácca, 2 vols. (Lisbon, 1881), 1, pp. 173–174, cf. also pp. 143–144. 31 Carvalho, Descripção da Viagem à Mussumba do Muatiânvua, 3, pp. 473, 517; A Lunda ou os Estados do Muatiânvua, pp. 200, 370. Cf. Heintze, “Luéji, Quinguri, Tembo & Co.” 32 See Carvalho, Descripção da Viagem à Mussumba do Muatiânvua, 3, pp. 441– 442, 469; 482, 778, 928; ibid., 2, pp. 502, 764; ibid., 4, p. 12; Ethnographia e História Tradicional dos Povos da Lunda, pp. 87, 90–91; A Lunda ou os Estados do Muatiânvua, p. 240; cf. Heintze, “Luéji, Quinguri, Tembo & Co.”


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What is so unusual about Carvalho’s statements on these matters is that the underlying fragments of traditions were told to him by several Lunda as well as several Chokwe informants (in small variants) and that this tradition, as we shall see below, continued to play a significant role in contemporary politics. Moreover during his day there continued to exist a Chokwe chieftaincy which was governed by a female chief, Kambamba. She resided between the Luembe and Kasai Rivers and by virtue of her being the first Kisenge’s mother claimed for her son the Kisenge title, in opposition to the reigning Kingurika.33 Even into the second half of the twentieth century a female chief with this title who lived at the court of the mwant yav was responsible for the care of Chokwe guests.34

Transethnic Kinship Ties as Arguments in Central African Politics Outside of special ceremonial occasions, such as the instalment of a new mwant yav,35 historical ‘memory’ was refreshed and oral traditions disseminated through the ubiquitous practice of public recitation. Visitors, such as caravan leaders, emissaries and messengers, were not permitted to simply storm in and get to the point regarding the reason for their visit. Instead, at their first public audience they began their performance with a long, sweeping historical account. In this way information and various historical narratives were disseminated and discussed over a large area.36 A shared past, however distant, carried considerable political weight in the present. Firstly, it permitted one to share in the prestige of renowned states. Secondly such asserted kinship ties could be useful during periods of intensified commercial contact (such as those between the Mbangala and the Lunda), as well as in times of violent conflict (such as that between the Chokwe and the Lunda). While the assertion of such ties could not prevent clashes, it did serve to facilitate efforts at rapprochement and provided a basis for re-establishing relations.

33 34 35

Carvalho, Descripção da Viagem à Mussumba do Muatiânvua, 4, p. 12. Hoover, The Seduction of Ruwej, p. 303. Carvalho, Ethnographia e História Tradicional dos Povos da Lunda, pp. 352–

354. 36 Ibid., p. 390. See also Descripção da Viagem à Mussumba do Muatiânvua, 2, pp. 580, 766–767; ibid., 4, pp. 55, 81, 564.

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Thus it was particularly useful to the Lunda in the 1880s to emphasise the shared genealogical origins of their rulers with the Chokwe, who were at this time threatening or perceived as threatening Musumba and a number of Lunda chieftaincies.37 The appeal to an ancient genealogical connection with the guests thus became a strategy for conflict resolution. As the caravan network became more developed frequent repetition of such traditions at public audiences in the centres of power disseminated certain versions of kinship links and history, which thus became known over vast areas, ultimately becoming common knowledge. The extent to which such ideas had already found their way into the general consciousness is apparent when one examines the countless stereotypical references which Carvalho noted in the course of exchanges with Mbangala, Lunda and Chokwe interlocutors, which he either led or participated in. Although Carvalho himself used such references quite emphatically in his responses, attempts at mediation and addresses, further boosting their popularity, it would be incorrect to see him as the originator and propagator of such notions of kinship, even though reports of their existence are to be traced back almost exclusively to him. Even a small selection38 from the corresponding traditions of more or less explicit references to the ancestral kinship linking the three ethnic groups upon which we have focussed here shows the extent to which these references were part of a collective identity and shared culture of remembering, as well as how these were brought into play on very mundane but also politically very critical occasions. As the Lunda would never cease to emphasise—whether in public audiences, or when receiving Chokwe emissaries, during emergency meetings to settle violent conflicts between Lunda and Chokwe, but also in conversations amongst themselves as well as with Carvalho— Chokwe and Lunda were kin and they should behave as such. After all, their leaders all descended from the house of the mwant yav. Moreover, the Lunda had not violently driven out the Chokwe but rather the latter had left Lunda of their own free will and had committed

37 For example see instances in Carvalho, A Lunda ou os Estados do Muatiânvua, p. 123; Descripção da Viagem à Mussumba do Muatiânvua, 2, p. 723; cf. also Capello and Ivens, De Benguella ás terras de Iácca, 1, p. 173; Wissmann et al., Im Innern Afrikas, p. 101. 38 Details in Heintze, “Luéji, Quinguri, Tembo & Co.”


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no crime in their homeland. Did they really want to attack their kin? Should they not instead live together in peace as all good kinsmen do? The Kaúngula of the Lóvua, for example, declined to go to war against the Chokwe Mushiku, because he regarded him to be kith and kin. The Mbangala under Kinguri too had left their Lunda kinsmen of their own accord and had subordinated themselves to the protection of Mwene Putu (King of Portugal/the Portuguese). But their founding father Kinguri was worth no more than his ‘sister’ Luéji, the mythical ancestral mother of the Lunda, and thus they would respectfully ask the Mwene Putu to please also send to the Lunda military and other assistance, just as he had done for the state Kasanje of the Mbangala. The designated mwant yav Ianvo also pointed to the existing ancestral kinship ties between Lunda and Mbangala to justify his having taken a Mbangala into his royal household. He referred to Kinguri as his “brother” and called the most powerful Chokwe ruler at the time, Kisenge, his “nephew and brother” and his “friend and family”.39 The Chokwe, for their part, at the time emphasised repeatedly that the violent conflicts between the kindred peoples of Lunda, Chokwe and Mbangala should finally stop, since the Lunda in particular were kith and kin. Since their forefathers were sons of Kabamba, a kinswoman of Luéji of Konti, they should not be treated badly, the way they had been treated by the ‘children’ (subjects) of the mwant yav. After all they were all ‘children’ of the Lunda. In their dispatches and proceedings, the Chokwe rulers, Kisenge and Mukanjanga, referred to the designated mwant yav Ianvo as “kith and kin”. When a dispute arose between a Lunda and a Chokwe chief, which threatened to escalate, one of the Chokwe elders asked the Lunda adversary whether he really intended to kill his “kith and kin”, our mwanangana (Chief), upon which tempers calmed.40

39 Ibid.; e.g. Carvalho, Descripção da Viagem à Mussumba do Muatiânvua, 2, pp. 502, 625, 664, 723, 764, 767; ibid., 3, p. 134; A Lunda ou os Estados do Muatiânvua, pp. 123, 168, 234, 778, 921–922; AHU, room 12, batch 1092, Letter from Carvalho to Ministro e Secretario d’Estado dos Negocios de Marinha e Ultramar, no. 278 (Feburary 6, 1886), f. [4–5]; Carvalho to the same, ibid., no. 736 (June 19, 1886), f. [28]. 40 Details in Heintze, “Luéji, Quinguri, Tembo & Co.;” see Carvalho, Descripção da Viagem à Mussumba do Muatiânvua, 3, pp. 134, 159, 279–280, 523–524, 585, 778; A Lunda ou os Estados do Muatiânvua, pp. 180, 235, 240; AHU, room 12, batch 1092, Letter from Carvalho to Ministro e Secretario d’Estado dos Negocios de Marinha e Ultramar, no. 736 (June 19, 1886, f. 11; Letter from Carvalho to Ministro e Secretario d’Estado dos Negocios de Marinha e Ultramar, no. 737 (June 27, 1886), f. 8; Letter from Carvalho to the same (January18, 1887), f. 6–7.

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The elderly Chokwe chief Kiésse, who was highly regarded for his abilities as an adviser and for his war magic alike, was also particularly well-versed in the traditions of his people. According to his version of the tradition, the Mbangala Kinguri iá Konta left Lunda territory first, because he did not want to subordinate himself to the reigning mwant yav Ilunga, who was his sister Luéji’s lover. After that the Chokwe chiefs Ndumba, Kanyika, Mbumba, Kisenge, Kiniama and others followed. Kinguri placed himself under the protection of the Portuguese and it was under this benevolent protection that his descendants became the rulers of Kasanje. Later the Chokwe asked mwant yav Nawej a Ditend permission to settle once again in his dominions, pointing out that they were all his children.41 Their once having left his land to follow Kinguri was after all no crime, which would give him reason to deny them the right to return to the land of their forefathers. The tradition continued with Nawej a Ditend then having received them well and sending envoys to other Chokwe chiefs in order to settle the family feud which went back to the times of their forefathers and for which they themselves could not be blamed. After all, Chokwe and Lunda were both the children of the mwant yav. For example, Kisenge—during Carvalho’s time the most powerful Chokwe chief between the Chicapa and Kasai Rivers—had been a relative by virtue of his descent from Kabamba (Kambamba Mussopo uá Nama), one of Luéji a Konta’s aunts, from which all mwant yav descended.42 This tradition led Chief Kiésse to conclude: The elders and I are like Mwene Putu convinced that we are all children of the mwant yav and that these lands belong to his dominions. We did not come here bearing arms; our fathers left their land to seek adventure; they were not driven out for any crime, and we are now returning, but do not deny that they [the areas in which we are now settling] belong to the mwant yav.43

The Mbangala in turn ostensibly remembered44 their founding father Kinguri who emigrated from Lunda and appealed to the resulting 41 Here and in what follows the term ‘filhos’ (children) encompasses both meanings: direct descendants and subjects. 42 AHU, room 12, batch 1092, Letter from Carvalho to Ministro e Secretario d’Estado dos Negocios de Marinha e Ultramar, no. 736 (June 19, 1886), f. 19–23. 43 AHU, room 12, batch 1092, Letter from Carvalho to Ministro e Secretario d’Estado dos Negocios de Marinha e Ultramar, no. 736 (June 19, 1886), f. 27. 44 On the fictitious nature of these traditions see Vansina, “It Never Happened”, How Societies are Born and Heintze, “Luéji, Quinguri, Tembo & Co.”


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kinship ties with the Lunda in order to settle on-going disputes. The dominions of their ‘kinsman’, the designated mwant yav Ianvo, they dubbed the “State of Luéji”, “sister45 to our Kinguri”. They complained that the Lunda, their kin, had treated them badly and that Ianvo, who even had sisters (married to Mbangala) on the Kwango, had permitted acts of robbery to be perpetrated against them. The assistance promised the Lunda by the Mwene Putu would most certainly benefit the Mbangala too, since they needed commercial ties with their Lunda brothers.46 The degree to which the history shared by Lunda and Chokwe influenced every-day political affairs at the time of Carvalho’s expedition is evident from the visit paid in April 1886 to the designated mwant yav on the Chiumbue by the representative of the female Chokwe chief Kambamba Mussopo á Nama. She “represented in the state the mother of the first Kisenge”.47 Kambamba demanded that Ianvo, referred to as xa Madiamba, stop by her residence on his way to Musumba on the Kalanyi, where he was to be installed with full honours as the new mwant yav. She disapproved that “her kinsman xa Madiamba” would depart from tradition by travelling via Mataba before going to Musumba. “He should recall that she ranked as first amongst his Chokwe kin, since she represented the mother of the first Kisenge.”48 Fictitious kinship ties at the state level were reinforced in oral traditions, which were repeatedly instrumentalised in everyday political contexts for particular ends. This was achieved either through elaborate recitations or in stereotypical references or figures of speech. They created an expansive, translocal and transethnic network of ‘kin’ who all were situated in a shared history through which a certain sense of togetherness, in some cases even a sense of collective identity, was created. This could defuse conflict situations at least for a short while. Yet in addition to that, such symbolic politics were coupled with real politics that aimed to achieve the same objectives by creating real

45 Carvalho writes irmão, brother, but this was certainly a slip of the pen and should have been irmã, sister. 46 Carvalho, Descripção da Viagem à Mussumba do Muatiânvua, 4, pp. 24, 593–594. Details in Heintze, “Luéji, Quinguri, Tembo & Co.” 47 Carvalho, Descripção da Viagem à Mussumba do Muatiânvua, 3, p. 469. 48 Ibid., p. 482.

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kinship ties at the level of government. It is this politics of marriage that we will now briefly sketch in the final section of this article.

Transethnic Marital Ties as Strategies in Central African Realpolitik Marriage politics has always played an important role in Central Africa, particularly for elites. Thus the daughters of the mwant yav were supposed to marry high-ranking chiefs, who would thus be tied more closely to him and his policies.49 Because the number of foreign contacts increased dramatically in the course of the nineteenth century, there seems to have been an increase in the number of interethnic marriages as well. Thus two of the designated mwant yav Ianvo’s sisters were married to Mbangala on the west bank of the Kwango. On the basis of this kinship tie, Ianvo later asserted that the Mbangala were obligated to support him in his campaign against the Chokwe.50 In this manner an additional network of loyalties and dependencies was created. The institutionalised form of creating interethnic kinship ties, which is documented for the Rund, Lunda and Chokwe, was referred to as tombo (ntombw) and was characterised by Carvalho as a special form of paying tribute. It was deployed in the nineteenth century primarily to make peace or create alliances between the Chokwe and the Lunda. Lunda chiefs as a rule gave in marriage one or more close female kinswomen (such as a sister, daughter or niece) to Chokwe chiefs.51 In the course of their northward migrations, which began in the midnineteenth century, more and more Chokwe settled in the vicinity of Lunda villages, which led to numerous conflicts and often ended with the Lunda paying a fine to the aggressive Chokwe. And since the Chokwe were out to acquire women more than anything else,52 a tombo relationship was able to defuse the situation.

49 See for example Carvalho, Ethnographia e História Tradicional dos Povos da Lunda, pp. 488, 492. 50 Carvalho, Descripção da Viagem à Mussumba do Muatiânvua, 2, p. 511; ibid., 4, p. 571; O Jagado de Cassange na Provincia de Angola, p. 303. On this and for more details see Heintze, “Luéji, Quinguri, Tembo & Co.” 51 Carvalho, Descripção da Viagem à Mussumba do Muatiânvua, 2, p. 327 fn. 2. 52 Carvalho first heard of the squabbles between the neighbouring Lunda and Chokwe when he reached the Kwilu. When he asked the Lunda the reason for the strife, he was told, “they [the Chokwe] need women”. AHU, room 12, batch 1092,


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To give close kin to a potentate makes him your brother. That means they may no longer declare war on each other and any demands made on members of the two peoples will be settled through arbitration.53

A number of cases of such tombo alliances during Carvalho’s Lunda expedition indicate how cohesive they were. On the one hand, they affected the relationship to the Chokwe, which began to shift against Lunda’s favour. On the other hand, the Lunda also found the Chokwe quite useful as allies in their own intra-Lunda intrigues and power struggles. The women who had been given by the Lunda as tombo were held by the Chokwe in high regard, and even in cases in which these women were not the principle wife they were treated as such. They were never permitted to belong to another man regardless of the situation, even if they had been found guilty of a crime. In the latter case they were simply returned to the Lunda, but had to be replaced by another kinswoman.54 From the Lunda perspective the initiative to form and the advantages derived from such alliances rested entirely with them. Particularly detailed explanations regarding the motives, which underlay such gestures of subservience, were provided by Chibango, a Luba chief who was residing not far from the Chiumbue. Carvalho had expressed to him his astonishment that such a powerful ruler as Kaúngula of Mataba would deign to pay such a tribute to a Chokwe chief, in this case Muíokoto. But Chibango saw only advantages for Kaúngula, since this made Muíokoto an ally and the Chokwe who entered his dominions to do business did so as good friends, making no mischief amongst his people, nor pillaging their fields.55 The desire to avoid violent conflict was the primary motive for the creation of tombo alliances, especially along the much travelled and important trade route from Kwango to Lubuku, where during Carvalho’s expedition more

Letter from Carvalho to Ministro e Secretario d’Estado dos Negocios de Marinha e Ultramar, no. 736 (June 19, 1886), f. 5. 53 Carvalho, Ethnographia e História Tradicional dos Povos da Lunda, p. 566. 54 Carvalho, Ethnographia e História Tradicional dos Povos da Lunda, pp. 486–487; Descripção da Viagem à Mussumba do Muatiânvua, 2, p. 327 fn. 2; ibid., 3, pp. 266– 268; 378, 804; ibid., 4, p. 565; Henrique Augusto Dias de Carvalho (texts) and Manuel Sertorio de Almeida Aguiar (photographs), “Album de Fotografias da Expedição Portuguesa ao Muatianvua 1884/88,” n.d. [1890], Arquivo do Ministério dos Negocios Estrangeiros, Lisbon, Secretaria de Estado, 3° P., A. 7, M. 108, text regarding image 20d (here the institution is referred to as sembo). 55 Carvalho, Descripção da Viagem à Mussumba do Muatiânvua, 3, pp. 266–267.

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and more Chokwe settled.56 But such a strategy was used too in order to win dependable allies in intra-kin power struggles, such as those between Bungulu and his brother Mutashi.57 Lastly, I would like to mention one final strategy for creating kinship ties which exerted great political influence, particularly in the nineteenth century. During this time innumerable Luso-Africans married close kinswomen of those Central African chiefs amongst whom they settled. Along with the Mbangala, these Luso-Africans, referred to as Ambaquistas, were the most highly regarded experts on Central African caravan trade between the Portuguese on the coast and in the Angolan hinterland and African chiefs in the interior.58 They oriented themselves ‘upwards’ towards the Portuguese and regarded themselves to be both Portuguese and white, whereby whiteness referred not so much to a particular appearance but rather to specific cultural characteristics. Light skin colour was to be found amongst them only rarely. “I am black, but my heart is that of a white man”59 is how one individual characterised himself. Their mother tongue was most often Kimbundu, a Bantu language of present-day north western Angola, but they were proud to also speak Portuguese and many of them could both read and write. They were baptised and held themselves to be staunch Christians. As outward signs of their high status these LusoAfricans wore shoes (which was a particular privilege) and European clothing. Amongst them were to be found countless specialised craftsmen, such as tailors, cobblers and carpenters. They, however, gained quite a reputation for being savvy merchants, who pushed ever further into the African interior.60 Their routes took them via the Kwango to

56

Carvalho, Descripção da Viagem à Mussumba do Muatiânvua, 4, p. 565. Carvalho, Descripção da Viagem à Mussumba do Muatiânvua, 3, pp. 378–379. 58 For an extended discussion see Heintze, Afrikanische Pioniere and Pioneiros Africanos. 59 The porter Xavier Domingos Paschoal 1887 in a letter to Henrique Dias de Carvalho. Carvalho, Descripção da Viagem à Mussumba do Muatiânvua, 4, p. 723. 60 On the Ambaquistas see Miller, Way of Death, chap. 8; Dias, “Angola,” pp. 363– 364; idem, “Changing Patterns of Power in the Luanda Hinterland: The Impact of Trade and Colonisation on the Mbundu ca. 1845–1920,” Paideuma 32 (1986), 291– 295, 298, 303; but especially Jill Dias, “Estereótipos e realidades sociais: Quem eram os ‘Ambaquistas’?” in Construindo o Passado Angolano: As Fontes e a sua Interpretação, Actas do II Seminário Internacional sobre a História de Angola (Lisboa, 2000), pp. 597–623, Heintze, Afrikanische Pioniere and Pioneiros Africanos, chap. I.3 and III.1; Buchner in Max Buchners Reise nach Zentralafrika 1878–1882, ed. Heintze, pp. 177–178. 57


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the East into Lunda territory and to the Luba, also to the Southeast along the Zambezi to the Lui and the Kololo, and to the northeast to the Luluwa and all the way to the Kuba. The Ambaquistas were quite often also the first to test a new route, even before their Portuguese employers or the European explorers who followed them opened them ‘officially’. And many of these Ambaquistas settled for years or decades in African chieftaincies.61 Their hosts, whom they served as secretaries, held them in high regard for their ‘Portuguese’ culture. They married their daughters, granddaughters or nieces and henceforward partook in their power as kinsmen and important advisers and acted as modernisers in manifold ways. They were active precursors to subsequent globalisation.62 Besides their many other talents, Ambaquistas became sought-after partners, particularly for their commercial know-how and their contacts with the Western commercial centres in Portuguese Angola.63 The desire of many chiefs in the interior to have Luso-Africans settle amongst them was mostly due to commercial interests and to the resulting boost to their own prestige. But the role played by these so-called Ambaquistas in the African chieftaincies of the continent’s interior was much more far-reaching. They enjoyed a high position of trust, which they were able to use as teachers and cultural ‘interpreters’.64 They helped clear up misunderstandings, and, because of their interethnic skills, were able to make themselves useful to both sides.

61 See Beatrix Heintze, “Between Two Worlds: The Bezerras, a Luso-African Family in Nineteenth-Century Western Central Africa,” in Creole Societies in the Portuguese Colonial Empire, eds. Philip J. Havik and Malyn Newitt (Bristol, 2007), pp. 127–153. 62 On this see Beatrix Heintze, “A lusofonia no interior da África Central na era précolonial: Um contributo para a sua história e compreensão na actualidade,” Cadernos de Estudos Africanos 6/7 (July 2004/June 2005), 179–207. 63 See for example Heintze, Afrikanische Pioniere and Pioneiros Africanos, chap. II.5; see also II.7, III.3; Capello and Ivens, De Benguella ás terras de Iácca, 2, p. 39; Carvalho, Methodo pratico para fallar a lingua da Lunda contendo narrações historicas dos diversos povos, pp. 19–20. 64 See Beatrix Heintze, “Luso-afrikanische Dolmetscher und kulturelle Vermittler in Angola im 19. Jahrhundert,” in Sprachgrenzen, Sprachkontakte und kulturelle Vermittler in der Geschichte der europäisch überseeischen Beziehungen: Beiträge zur europäischen Überseegeschichte, eds. Mark Häberlein and Alexander Keese, Stuttgart (2010, in print).

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Kinship ties are the oldest basis for group solidarity, being the antecedents to economic, reproductive and defensive associations. Particularly in the more distant past they provided members with opportunities and options which they would not have enjoyed as individuals, although for this they had to submit to the stringent rules of the community. These rules, therefore, were emphatically exclusive, a phenomenon one can still observe today amongst the European nobility, even in those houses where they have been stripped of many of their privileges and all their political power. In nineteenth-century Central Africa, however, things were quite different. Here, the integrating function of ‘kinship’, both vertical and horizontal (i.e. in both time and space), predominated thanks to flexibly defined real kinship systems and the fictitious kinship ties that served to complement them. The intensification of such linkages in the nineteenth century has much to do with the history of this region, which is very complex, unravelling as it did at the interstices of transatlantic global markets and ideologies on the one hand and ‘traditional’ societies with ‘patrimonial structures’ on the other. The so-called ‘traditional’ structures of the African interior, which have so often served as a counterpoint to ‘modernity’ were certainly not static, but rather had been in constant flux since time immemorial. These structures were not simply superseded by ‘modernity’, but rather were transformed in subtle and manifold ways. The Africans involved were by no means victims of such processes but rather actively shaped them in innovative ways. Historians have with good reason focussed primarily on the importance of long-distance trade with its rapidly changing imports and exports. They have highlighted this as the most important dynamic factor in nineteenth-century Central African history.65 The network 65 See for example the following works, the richness of which is not limited to just this one aspect: Ingeborg Schönberg-Lotholz, “Die Karawanenreisen der Tjiaka um 1900,” in Estudos Etnográficos 1 (Memórias e Trabalhos do Instituto de Investigação Científica de Angola 2) (1960), 109–128; Miller, Cokwe Expansion 1850–1900 and Way of Death; Jean-Luc Vellut, “Notes sur le Lunda et la frontière luso-africaine (1700–1900),” Etudes d’Histoire africaine 3 (1972), 61–166; Achim von Oppen, Terms of Trade and Terms of Trust: The History and Contexts of Pre-Colonial Market Production around the Upper Zambezi and Kasai (Münster, 1993); Isabel de Castro Henriques, Commerce et changements en Angola au XIXe siècle: Imbangala et Tshokwe face à la modernité, 2 vols. (Paris, 1995); Maria Emília Madeira Santos, Nos Caminhos


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of merchant caravans grew in density and were joined by European expeditions,66 the harbingers of colonialism. This also led to a greater concentration of news and intelligence and to the creation of new communicative spaces.67 It was in this context of historical change that the kinship concepts discussed here were developed and transformed. Their emancipation from existing local embedment and transformation into expansive, translocal and even transethnic ideas and institutions are the result of interactions dating back to at least the seventeenth century caused by territorial mobility provoked by trade, other types of exchange, conquest and migration. These real and fictitious kinship ties could serve as potential counterweights especially at the translocal level. They worked in response to powerful processes of economic and political dissociation and exclusion such as the assertion of commercial monopolies, demands for tribute and political supremacy in conquered areas. This constituted an integrating force but could also defuse critical situations. ‘Positional succession’ and ‘perpetual kinship’ opened up avenues for upward mobility which under normal circumstances would have been impossible. This also created opportunities to partake in the distant centre’s power, even in conquered areas inhabited by peoples of a different cultural and linguistic imprint. Members of other ethnic groups could, by reformulating their myths of origin, be adopted as ancestral ‘kinsmen’. Such concepts did not remain abstract, but rather shaped the politics and rhetoric of nineteenth century everyday life. Real kinship ties under the influence of more frequent and more extensive external contacts fortified translocal fictitious notions of kinship in time and space. These interlocking

de África. Serventia e Posse. Angola Século XIX (Lisbon, 1998); Heintze, Afrikanische Pioniere and Pioneiros Africanos. 66 See for example, Ilídio do Amaral, “Progressos do conhecimento geográfico da África em finais do século XIX,” in História e Desenvolvimento da Ciência em Portugal, 2 (Lisbon, 1986), pp. 1141–1171; Maria Emília Madeira Santos, “Capelo e Ivens, um fecho europeu para uma tradição nacional,” Série Separatas 184 (Lisbon, 1987); idem, Viagens de exploração terrestre dos portugueses em África (1978; repr. Lisbon, 1988); Beatrix Heintze, Ethnographische Aneignungen: Deutsche Forschungsreisende in Angola (Frankfurt a.M., 1999, 2nd rev. edition 2007), Max Buchners Reise nach Zentralafrika 1878–1882 and “Colonial Ambitions as Blind Passengers: The Case of German Explorers in West-Central Africa (1873–86),” in A África e a Instalação do Sistema Colonial (c. 1885–c. 1930), 3, Reunião Internacional de História de África— Actas, ed. Maria Emília Madeira Santos (Lisbon, 2000), pp. 19–30. 67 See Heintze, Afrikanische Pioniere, Pioneiros Africanos, chap. III.5 and “Longdistance Caravans and Communication beyond the Kwango (c. 1850–1890).”

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Central African kinship links of varying reach were thus, like other translocal phenomena, subject to constant processes of change in the context of a “dialectic of flux and constitution, of transfer and exclusion”.68

68

Ulrike Freitag and Achim von Oppen, “Translokalität als ein Zugang zur Geschichte globaler Verflechtungen,” H-Soz-u-Kult (June 10, 2005), p. (16) and passim [http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/forum/type=artikel&id=632 (accessed June 29, 2009)].

PART THREE

LOCALITY AND BEYOND

AUTOCHTHONY: LOCAL OR GLOBAL?1 Peter Geschiere University of Amsterdam

The aim of this chapter is to explore the recent upsurge of the notion of ‘autochthony’ as a virulent political slogan in different parts of Africa. Its forms may differ but it always calls for excluding strangers (‘allogènes’ or ‘allochthons’), whoever they may be. It is worthwhile to place these African examples in a wider, comparative perspective. Indeed they fit in with a much broader (one could say a truly ‘global’) obsession with belonging that seems to be the flip-side of intensified processes of globalisation also in the richer parts of the present-day world. The contrast with the parallel notion of ‘indigenous’—also undergoing a recent renaissance, but following a striking different trajectory—can help to outline certain ambiguities in this volatile quest for belonging and for limiting the ranks of those who can claim to be ‘real’ citizens. The terms ‘autochthony’ and ‘indigenous’ go back to classical Greece and have similar implications. ‘Autochthony’ refers to ‘self ’ and ‘soil’. ‘Indigenous’ means literally ‘born inside’, with the connotation in classical Greek of being born ‘inside the house’. Thus, both notions inspire similar discourses on the need to safeguard the ‘ancestral lands’ against ‘strangers’ who ‘soil’ this patrimony; they uphold first-comers’ rights to special protection against later immigrants. Nonetheless these two terms followed quite different trajectories and they impact differently on present-day issues of belonging. Over the last decades, the notion of ‘indigenous peoples’ acquired a new lease of life with truly global dimensions. This is especially so since the founding of the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations (1982) representing groups from all six continents. The spread of the notion

1

This text contains a few sections—partly re-written—of a text I published with Bambi Ceuppens in Annual Review of Anthropology 34 (2005), 385–409, under the title “Autochthony: Local or Global? Struggle over Citizenship and Belonging in Africa and Europe.” The earlier version also contains a section written by Bambi Ceuppens on “Allochthons between Ethnic and Civic Citizenship in Flanders.” See also Peter Geschiere, Perils of Belonging: Autochtony, Citizenship and Exclusion in Africa and Europe (Chicago, 2009).

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of ‘autochthony’ remained more limited. During the 1990s it became a burning issue in many parts of Africa, inspiring violent efforts to exclude ‘strangers’, especially in Francophone areas, but with a spillover into Anglophone countries. Roughly during the same years it became a key notion in debates on multiculturalism and immigration problems in several parts of Europe, notably Flemish Belgium and the Netherlands. The spread of the notion in Western contexts is of particular interest. While most Westerners think of ‘indigenous peoples’ as ‘others’ who live in far-out regions and whose cultures can only ‘survive’ if they receive special protection, the epithet of ‘autochthon’ is claimed by important groups in the West itself. This term thus highlights that the obsession with belonging and the exclusion of strangers have become major issues in everyday politics throughout the world, in the North as much as in the South. The new dynamics of autochthony discourse on a global scale can therefore serve as a strategic entry point for understanding the enigmatic intertwinement of globalisation with intensified struggles over belonging and exclusion. The New World Order, announced by President Bush, Sr. and others at the end of the Cold War, seems to be less marked by freely circulating cosmopolitans than by explosions of communal violence and fierce attempts towards exclusion. Appadurai already signalled some years ago that globalisation and the undermining of the nation-state inspire a vigorous “production of locality.”2 Meyer and Geschiere characterized globalisation as “a dialectic of flow and closure.”3 In a seminal contribution based on research in Indonesia on the politics of “indigenous peoples,” Tanja Murray Li evokes a “global conjuncture” of widely different trends that all converge towards a growing concern with belonging.4 Neo-liberal economics inspiring new development policies of ‘by-passing the state’ and ‘decentralization’; political liberalization turning questions like ‘who can vote where?’ into burning issues; the global concern with ecological degradation; the strong interest in the West in ‘disappearing

2 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimension of Globalization (Minneapolis, 1996). 3 See the title and the introduction of Birgit Meyer and Peter Geschiere, eds., Globalization and Identity: Dialectics of Flow and Closure (Oxford, 1999). 4 Tania Murray Li, “Articulating Indigenous Identity in Indonesia: Resource Politics and the Tribal Slot,” Comp. Stud. Soc. Hist. 42 (2000), 149–79.

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cultures’; all these trends seem to work towards a defence of local roots. It is also clear that this conjuncture creates great uncertainty and violent doubts. Belonging promises safety, but in practice it raises fierce disagreements over who ‘really’ belongs—over authenticity and falsehood. Two points stand out with some urgency from the literature discussed below. First of all, notions like ‘autochthony’, or ‘indigenous’ appear to defend a return to the local, but in practice are more about access to the global. This point is made most explicitly for Africa by Achille Mbembe and Abdoumaliq Simone.5 It may seem logical to equate ‘autochthony’ with a celebration of the local and of ‘closure’ against global ‘flows’. Yet, in practice it is often directly linked to processes of globalisation. Simone is right to insist that “ . . . the fight is not so much over the terms of territorial encompassment or closure, but rather over maintaining a sense of ‘open-endedness’.”6 What is at stake is often less a closer definition of the local than a struggle over excluding others from access to the new circuits of riches and power. A second point is the surprising elasticity of autochthony discourses, allowing for constant shifts and re-definitions, but also making this discourse a somewhat empty one. It is striking that similar discourses, inspiring almost identical slogans, can have great mobilizing power in highly different contexts, from present-day Africa to Europe. Studies that place the notion in a longer historical perspective7 show how easily autochthony discourses can switch from one ‘Other’ to the next one, without losing their credibility. This may explain their great resilience in the face of modern changes, easily adapting to the constant re-drawing of borders that seem to be inherent to processes of globalisation. The flip-side is a certain fuzziness. In a given situation it may

5 Achille Mbembe, “Ways of Seeing: Beyond the New Nativism—Introduction,” African Studies Review 44, 2 (2001), 7; Simone AbdouMaliq, “On the Worlding of African Cities,” African Studies Review 44, 2 (2001), 25. 6 Ibid. 7 Karel Arnaut, Performing Displacements and Rephrasing Attachments: Ethnographic Explorations of Space, Mobility in Art, Ritual, Media and Politics (Ph.D. thesis, Ghent Univ., 2004); Peter Geschiere, Francis Nyamnjoh, “Capitalism and Autochthony: The Seesaw of Mobility and Belonging,” Public Culture 12, 2 (2000), 423–425; Jean-François Bayart and Peter Geschiere, eds., ‘J’étais là avant: Problématiques de l’autochtonie,” Critique internationale 10 (2001), 126–195; Antoine Socpa, Démocratisation et autochtonie au Cameroun: Variations régionales divergentes (Münster, 2003). Peter Geschiere, The Perils of Belonging: Autochthony, Citizenship and Exclusion in Africa and Europe (2009, Chicago).

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appear to be self-evident who can claim autochthony. Yet, any attempt to define the autochthonous community in more concrete terms gives rise to fierce disagreements and nagging suspicions of ‘faking’. Indeed, autochthony discourse is of a segmentary nature: belonging tends to be constantly re-defined at ever closer range. It is an identity with no particular name and no specified history, only expressing the claim to have come first, which can constantly be contested. Precisely this emptiness can give it highly violent implications. Below, I will briefly discuss the genealogy of ‘autochthony’ in Africa, notably its role in the imposition of French colonial rule, a crucial link to its present-day upsurge on the continent. Next I discuss its new dynamics in post-colonial Africa in the 1990s, in the context of what can be termed the new politics of belonging, using Cameroon, Ivory Coast and the ‘Great Lakes Region’ in Central Africa as specific examples.

Colonial Roots: Autochthony and French Rule in the Sudan Like endogenès, the term autochtonos had quite positive implications in classical Greek. The Athenians justified their claim to superiority over all other Greeks by emphasizing that only they were truly ‘autochthons’ of their area. To them, moreover, their autochthony explained their natural propensity for democracy.8 Yet Nicole Loraux also shows that this defence of rootedness was paradoxically balanced by a celebration of a “fundamental alterity” in the myths, highlighting the role of strangers as founders of the society. We will come back to both aspects. The term did not become current in English. The Oxford Dictionary does mention it, as “son of the soil” but gives only historical quotes on this meaning; interestingly, more recent quotes refer to its use in geology and botany (as in ‘autochthonous’ rock formations or plants). Jean and John Comaroff pick up this implication in an article on a popular panic created by a huge fire on the Cape Peninsula.9 The fire destroyed South Africa’s cherished heritage of fynbos (indeed, unique

8

Nicole Loraux, Né de la terre: Mythe et politique à Athènes (Paris, 1996). Jean Comaroff, John L. Comaroff, “Naturing the Nation: Aliens, Apocalypse and the Postcolonial State,” J. Southern African Stud. 27, 3 (2001), 627–651. 9


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in the world). In the panic that ensued people started to associate this loss of an ‘autochthonous’ heritage with growing concerns about the post-Apartheid invasion of ‘aliens’ from other parts of Africa, which equally seemed to threaten the autochthons. The Comaroffs see this surprising convergence as a possible explanation for the haunting power of the autochthony discourse in present-day contexts. They emphasize its “naturalizing” capacity—as a “naturalizing allegory of collective being-in-the-world”—that makes it “. . . the most ‘authentic’, the most essential of all modes of connection”.10 In the French understanding of the term, however, which is now prevalent in Francophone Africa, autochtones are people, rather than plants or rocks. It was introduced in Africa in the French Sudan by French military, researchers and administrators. This was already in use at the time of the colonial conquest (end of the nineteenth century), since it was meant to play a vital role in categorizing the new subjects in order to make the administration of the vast, newly conquered areas possible. For instance, for Maurice Delafosse, administrator cum ethnographer, and a towering figure in the imposition of French rule in West Africa, autochthony was a first criterion in his influential book Haut-Sénégal-Niger (1912). He used the notion as a basic categorization within the dazzling variety of indigènes: some indigènes were autochthons, whereas others were definitely not.11 The background to the emphasis on this distinction was the politique des races, a fixed principle for setting up a colonial administration during the early decades of French rule.12 Whereas the British with their Indirect Rule were preoccupied with finding ‘real’ chiefs, French policy was (at least initially) to by-pass chiefs (who might be troublesome) and instead form homogeneous cantons, populated by the same race; hence the need to separate ruling immigrant groups from true autochtones. Practice was different: the French also soon began to involve local chiefs in the administration of the vast territories they had conquered.13 It is characteristic, therefore, that Delafosse, despite his search for autochtones in line with the politique des races, was clearly 10

Ibid., pp. 648–649. Maurice Delafosse, Haut-Sénégal-Niger (1912; repr., 1972); Arnaut, Performing Displacements, p. 207. 12 See Jean Suret-Canale, Afrique noire occidentale et centrale II: L’Ere coloniale 1900–1945 (Paris, 1964), p. 103. 13 See Michael Crowder, “Indirect Rule: French and British Style,” Africa 33, 4 (1964), 293–306; Suret-Canale, Afrique noire; Jaques Lombard, Autorités traditionnelles et 11

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much more interested in mobile groups who had created larger political units. For instance, in his book on Haut-Sénégal-Niger the Peul get nearly 40 pages—clearly the author is deeply interested in their peregrinations throughout West Africa and their reputation as empire builders—while most ‘autochthonous’ groups only get a brief mention.14 Striking also is Delafosse’s somewhat condescending language for these autochthonous groups, whom he describes, for instance, as malheureux.15 This paradox of looking for autochthons as an anchor for the administration, but at the same time treating them as some sort of humble group became more pronounced as the autochthon/non-autochthon distinction became canonized under French rule. In many societies in the Senegal-Niger area described by Delafosse, local patterns of organization were indeed dominated by a complementary opposition between ‘people of the land’ and ‘ruling’ groups who claimed to have come in from elsewhere. Thus, ‘the chief of the land’ formed (and still forms) a kind of ritual counterpoint to the chief of the ruling dynasty. To the French the term ‘autochthony’ proved to be an obvious one to describe this opposition. A good example is the vast literature on the Mossi (the largest group in present-day Burkina Faso). For generations of ethnologists this opposition between what they termed autochtones and “rulers” became the central issue inspiring highly sophisticated, structuralist studies.16 In this context the notion of autochthony again acquired somewhat condescending overtones. Luning, for instance, indicates that in the prevailing discourse of the Mossi Maana, the tengabiise (now translated as autochthons) were characterized as some sort of “pre-social” terrestrial beings, who had only became classified as a

pouvoirs européens en Afrique noire: Le déclin d’une aristocratie sous le régime colonial (Paris, 1967). 14 Cf. Jean-Louis Triaud, “‘Haut-Sénégal-Niger’, un modèle positiviste? De la coutume à l’histoire: Maurice Delafosse et l’invention de l’histoire africaine,” in Maurice Delafosse—Entre orientalisme et ethnographie: Itinéraire d’un africaniste (1870–1926), eds. Jean-Loup Amselle and Emmanuelle Sibeud (Paris, 1998), pp. 210–233. 15 Cf. Triaud, p. 230. 16 Michel Izard, Gens du pouvoir, gens de la terre: Les institutions politiques de l’ancien royaume du Yatenga (Bassin de la Volta blanche) (Cambridge, 1985); Sabine Luning, Het Binnenhalen van de Oogst: Ritueel en Samenleving in Maane, Burkina Faso (Ph.D thesis, University of Leiden, 1997); Dominique Zahan, “Pour une histoire des Mossi du Yatenga,” L’Homme 1, 2 (1961 ), 5–22; cf. also Marc-Eric Gruénais, “Du bon usage de l’autochtonie,” Cahiers ORSTOM—Série sciences humaines 21, 1 (1985), 19–24.


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human society since the coming of the naam, their foreign rulers.17 She also notes that in practice naam power was in all sorts of ways limited by the tengabiise. Still, the naam, as foreign rulers, were formally on top in the prestige scale, decidedly above the ‘autochthons’.18 This stands in striking contrast with how the opposition autochthon— stranger came to be seen in later phases of post-colonial rule.

Autochthony in the Post-colony In many parts of francophone Africa the autochthony notion, introduced by the French, was appropriated by the local populations, becoming an important principle for categorizing people. Yet after independence (for most countries around 1960) its role seemed to decline, at least formally. During the first decades after independence in Cameroon, for instance, it was not done to talk about autochthons or allogènes, at least not in the open. ‘We are all citizens of Cameroon’ would be the inevitable, and the politically correct answer. Yet, this changed dramatically in the 1990’s after the end of the Cold War and the demise (at least formally) of one-party authoritarianism on the African continent. Under political liberalization, the seemingly matter-of-fact categorizations of colonial administrators according to the autochthons/non-autochthons divide turned out to be highly explosive. Recently the Ivory Coast made headlines because of the fierce hatred behind the violence with which self-styled autochtones tried to push out immigrants. But similar outbursts are reported from elsewhere. One factor behind this was clearly the practical effect of the wave of democratization that overran the continent. Democratization as such was certainly welcomed. But several authors19 highlight

17

Luning, Het Binnenhalen van de Oogst, p. 11. There is an intriguing similarity between forms of ‘diarchy’ between land-chief and ruler (usually coming from elsewhere) described by anthropologists for SE Asia; for an overview article see Reimar Schefold, “Vision of the Wilderness on Siberut in a Comparative Southeast Asian Perspective,” in Tribal Communities in the Malay World, eds. Geoffrey Benjamin and Cynthia Chou (Singapore, 2001), pp. 422–437; see also Patricia Spyer, The Memory of Trade: Circulation, Autochthony and the Past in the Aru Islands (Eastern Indonesia) (PhD thesis, University of Chicago, 1992) and idem, The Memory of Trade: Modernity’s Entanglements on an Eastern Indonesian Island (Durham, 2000). 19 Arnaut, Performing Displacements; Geschiere and Nyamnjoh, “Capitalism and Autochtony”; Socpa, Démocratisation et autochtonie. 18

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that the re-introduction of multi-partyism inevitably turned questions like “who can vote where?” and, more importantly “who can stand as a candidate where?”—that is, questions of where one belongs— into red-hot issues.20 Especially in more densely settled areas and in bigger cities, the locals’ fear of being outvoted by more numerous ‘strangers’—often citizens of the same nation-state—ran so high that the defence of autochthony seemed to take prevalence over national citizenship. A striking complication was that in many countries regimes in power encourage such strife over belonging: the old slogans of nation-building and reinforcement of national citizenship give away rapidly to a support for localist movements with the clear aim of trying to divide the opposition. A more hidden factor was an equally dramatic switch in the policies of the development establishment during the 1980s: from a decidedly statist approach to development (emphasizing ‘nation-building’ as a prerequisite for realizing progress) to an emphasis on decentralization, by-passing the state and reaching out to ‘civil society’ and NGOs. Several authors emphasize that this, again, almost inevitably triggered fierce debates about belonging, that is, over who could or could not participate in a ‘project-new-style’.21 Yet, most importantly, nearly all authors warn that upsurges of autochthony during the 1990s are not simply triggered by political manipulations from above, but equally carried by strong feelings from below. Some authors discuss the proliferation of funeral rituals, turning the burial ‘at home’ (that is, in the village of origin) into a key moment in the contest over belonging.22 Others point to land23 or

20 This was certainly not limited to Francophone Africa. A notorious case was the ousting in Zambia of former President Kenneth Kaunda from political competition by his successor Frederick Chiluba on the ground of Kaunda’s descent of foreigners. 21 Jean-Pierre Chauveau, “Question foncière et construction nationale en Côte d’Ivoire,” Politique africaine 78 (2000), 94–126; Peter Geschiere, “Ecology, Belonging and Xenophobia: The 1994 Forest Law in Cameroon and the Issue of ‘Community’,” in Rights and the Politics of Recognition in Africa, eds. Harri Englund and Francis Nyamnjoh (London, 2004), pp. 237–261; Stephen Jackson, War Making: Uncertainty, Improvisation and Involution in the Kivu Provinces, DR Congo, 1997–2002 (Ph.D thesis, Princeton University, 2003). 22 Peter Geschiere and Joseph Gugler, eds., “The Politics of Primary Patriotism,” Africa 68, 3 (1998), 309–319; Célestin Monga, “Cercueils, orgies et sublimation: Le coût d’une mauvaise gestion de la mort,” Afrique 2000 21 (1995), 63–72; Claudine Vidal, Sociologie des Passions: Rwanda, Côte d’Ivoire (Paris, 1991). 23 On Ghana/Burkina Faso see Carola Lentz, “‘Premiers arrivés’ et ‘nouveaux venus’: Discours sur l’autochtonie dans la savane ouest-africaine,” in Histoire du peu-


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ritual associations24 as crucial issues in popular movements to defend autochthony. General studies of the autochthony explosion in post-colonial Africa are still scarce. Therefore we will elaborate the themes outlined above for three specific regional contexts: Southern Cameroon, Southern Ivory Coast and the ‘Great Lakes Region.’ Cameroon: Autochthony versus National Citizenship The upsurge of autochthony as a virulent issue in Cameroon during the 1990s must be understood in relation to the determined, sometimes even desperate, struggle of President Paul Biya, the leader of the former single political party, to remain in power. Probably under direct pressure of François Mitterrand, the then President of France, Biya permitted only towards the end of 1990 freedom of association. This immediately brought a proliferation of opposition parties. However, the regime’s stubborn refusal to meet the popular demand for a National Conference inspired the opposition to launch the “Operation Ghost Town,” blocking public life in the major cities for more than a year. Biya refused to give in and after 1992 the operation petered out. The crucial presidential elections of 1992 became a scandal since it was quite clear that Biya obtained his narrow victory over his main rival, John Fru Ndi, (38% against 35%) due to massive rigging. However, in following years Biya held out against all pressure, his party won all subsequent elections and the recent presidential election (October 2004) brought a landslide victory (more than 70%) over his main rival (still Fru Ndi, who now obtained only 17%). Biya’s capacity for political survival is, indeed, impressive, all the more so since this took place in the midst of a deep economic crisis. The regime is generally counted among the most worrying examples of the “criminalization” of the State.25 Indeed, under Biya Cameroon rapidly rose to the first position on the list of the world’s most corrupt countries. Biya’s personal charisma is almost nil and he has become increasingly invisible to the

plement et relations interethniques au Burkina Faso, eds. Richard Kuba, Carola Lentz and Claude Nurukyor Somda, (Paris, 2003), pp. 113–134. 24 On Duala see Ralph A. Austen, “Tradition, Invention and History: The Case of the Ngondo (Cameroon),” Cahiers d’etudes africaines 32, 126 (1992), 285–309. 25 Cf. Jean-François Bayart, Stephen Ellis and Béatrice Hibou, The Criminalization of the State in Africa (Oxford, 1999).

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population, spending much of his time abroad and limiting his public appearances to a minimum. This begs the question of how he and his team succeeded nonetheless in completely outmanoeuvring the opposition, which seemed to be in such a promising position in the early 1990s. For the authors quoted below an obvious answer is the regime’s success in playing the autochthony card. Indeed, Cameroon offers a prime example of the effectiveness autochthony slogans can acquire in national politics. Geschiere and Nyamnjoh show how the regime used the growing fear among ‘autochthons’ in the Southwest Province and Douala city, the country’s economic core areas, that they would be outvoted under the new, more democratic constellation by more numerous immigrants from the highlands of the Northwest and West Province.26 After the 1996 municipal elections, the government actively supported largescale and quite violent demonstrations by ‘autochthons’ in Douala to protest against the fact that in four of the six communes of the city Bamileke had been elected as Mayor on an opposition ticket. The demonstrators’ slogans were all too clear: the came-no-goes (the evocative Pidgin term for immigrants) should go home and vote where they really belonged. The government defended its support for this viewpoint with reference to the new Constitution (1996) which emphasized the need to protect the rights of “minorities” c.q. “indigènes.” There is a telling contrast here with the earlier Constitution of 1972, at the high tide of nation-building, which emphasized the right of any Cameroonian to settle anywhere in the country. Nyamnjoh and Rowlands show that the regime’s support for new-fangled elite associations created another arena for struggles over belonging and autochthony.27 Again, there was a striking reversal of former policies here. Under one-party rule any form of association outside the party was severely discouraged. But after the onset of democratization, the regime even obliged regional elites (mostly civil servants and therefore in the pay of the government) to constitute their own associations. These associations often had ostentatious cultural aims, but in practice there was an underlying obligation to go home and campaign for the President’s party. Such regional associations offered, therefore, a welcome channel 26 Geschiere and Nyamnjoh, “Capitalism and Autochtony”; Jean-François Bayart, Peter Geschiere, and Francis Nymanjoh, “Autochtonie, démocratie et citoyenneté en Afrique,”Critique Internationale 10 (2001), 177–195. 27 Francis Nyamnjoh and Michael Rowlands, “Elite Associations and the Politics of Belonging in Cameroon,” Africa 68, 3 (1998), 320–337.


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to mobilize votes and to neutralize the effects of multi-partyism. This was all the more so since they also served to exclude elites who were not ‘really’ autochthonous to the area and thus blocked the political participation of allogènes who mostly supported the opposition parties.28 Konings discusses how effective the regime has been in dividing the Anglophone opposition which in the early 1990s still seemed to form a solid front.29 They achieved this through a tactical mix of support to elite associations and minority groups, coupled with a general emphasis on belonging. In subsequent years the Southwest’s autochthons (Anglophones)—fearing, like the (Francophone) Douala, to be overwhelmed by come-no-go immigrants—became the regime’s staunchest supporters.30 All this excitement triggered a fierce debate among academics and other intellectuals over the rights of autochtones versus allogènes. The Cameroonian review La Nouvelle Expression offered a seminal overview of various visions on this burning topic in its May 1996 issue. While several contributors (e.g. Ngijol Ngijol, Bertrand Toko and Philip Bissek) warned against the dangers of the political use of discourses on autochthony, the contribution by Roger Nlep was to attain a central position in the debates in Cameroon. With his ‘theory’ of le village electoral, Nlep takes a different view, arguing that “integration” is the central issue in Cameroonian politics, and people can only be fully integrated in the place where they live if there is not un autre chez soi (another home). Therefore, if a person runs for office in Douala and still defends the interests of his village elsewhere, this must be considered as “political malversation.” The relation to the regime’s manipulation of voters’ lists, telling people to go ‘home’ and vote there is quite clear.31

28 See Geschiere and Nyamjoh, “Capitalism and Autochtony” and Piet Konings, “Mobility and Exclusion: Conflicts between Autochtons and Allochthons during Political Liberalization in Cameroon,” in Mobile Africa: Changing Patterns of Movement in Africa and Beyond, eds. Mirjam de Bruijn, Rijk van Dijk and Dick Foeken (Leiden, 2001), pp. 169–194 on the “Assocation of the Elites of the Tenth Province”, an imagined province (Cameroon has only nine provinces), proclaimed by elites who feel excluded from belonging anywhere else. 29 Konings, “Mobility and Exclusion.” 30 See also Piet Konings and Francis B. Nyamnjoh, Negotiating an Anglophone Identity: A Study of the Politics of Recognition and Representation in Cameroon (Leiden, 2003). 31 For an overview of more extreme voices (for instance on the supposed ‘ethnofascism’ of Bamileke), see Geschiere and Nyamnjoh, “Capitalism and Autochtony.”

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However, other aspects of belonging, less directly linked to the vicissitudes of national politics, also emerged in these debates. A crucial statement, as seminal as it is succinct, came from Samuel Eboua, an éminence grise of Cameroonian politics, in an interview in the review Impact Tribu-Une: Every Cameroonian is an allogène anywhere else in the country . . . apart from where his ancestors lived and . . . where his mortal remains will be buried. Everybody knows that only under exceptional circumstances will a Cameroonian be buried . . . elsewhere.32

Such statements emphasize how strongly the Cameroonian version of autochthony opposes the very idea of a national citizenship and the principle that every Cameroonian “. . . has the right to settle in any place . . .,” celebrated by the earlier Constitution of the time of nationbuilding. Geschiere and Nyamnjoh highlight the growing emphasis, in the context of autochthony politics, on the place of funeral as the ultimate test of belonging.33 Protagonists of autochthony repeat time and again that as long as immigrants, even if they are Cameroonian citizens, still want to be buried back home in the village, it is clear that this is their home, where they should return to vote.34 Similar arguments play a central role in the confrontations between autochthons and allogènes studied by Antoine Socpa in two very different parts of the country: the capital Yaoundé and the Extrême Nord Province where the first explosion of violence erupted after democratization.35 In both areas autochthony has a long history. In Yaoundé it were mainly the issue of land and the supposed tricks with which Bamileke immigrants succeeded in appropriating plots of land from the Beti autochthons. This created animosity between the groups ever since the French made the town the capital of the colony (1921). But it was the elections-new-style that made these tensions acute. Socpa shows that when Bamileke succeeded in buying a plot for building they continued to address the former owner as their ‘landlord’ (bailleur) while former owners talked about their ‘tenants’ (locataires) even though they had sold the land.36 Significantly, this implies in the latter’s view

32

Interview with Samuel Eboua in Trbu-Une 5 (1995), 14. Geschiere and Nyamnjoh, “Capitalism and Autochtony.” 34 See also Geschiere, “Funerals and Belonging” and Monga, “Cercueils, orgies et sublimation” on the proliferation of ‘neo-traditional’ funeral rituals in this context. 35 Socpa, Démocratisation et autochtonie. 36 Ibid., p. 117 ff. 33


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that these ‘tenants’ should behave as good ‘guests’ and not vote for the opposition—that is not try and rule in their ‘landlord’s house.’ Socpa also highlights the elusive nature of the notion despite all the emphasis it receives. In the competition for political posts, autochthons take it for granted that they should rule in their own area, but some are apparently more ‘autochthonous’ than others.37 After Biya’s party and his Beti won the 1996 municipal elections in Yaoundé, furious fights broke out between different local clans who claimed the Mayor position on the grounds that they were the ‘real’ autochthons. Precisely in the bastion of autochthony that Yaoundé remains in the Cameroonian context, the discourse shows its ‘segmentary’ character, subject as it is to a constant tendency to redefine the ‘real’ autochthon at ever closer range. Socpa’s parallel study of the bloody collisions in the North between Kotoko and Arab Choa highlight another aspect of the malleability of the autochthony discourse.38 In sharp contrast to anywhere else in the country, the Biya regime is here clearly siding with the immigrants (the Arab Choa) against the Kotoko who claim autochthony. The background to this surprising volte-face is clearly the Biya regime’s determination to divide the northern bloc on which the power of Ahidjo, Biya’s predecessor, was built and in which the Kotoko sultans played a pivotal role. The consequence of Biya’s shift to the Arab Choa was an explosion of banditism. This is the area where les coupeurs des routes constantly threaten the highways.39 A series of bloody confrontations between Kotoko and their former subjects also resulted. Socpa shows in detail how easily the government’s arguments for determined support to autochthony movements in the South can be reversed in order to justify support for allogènes in the North. In a recent article I discussed the vicissitudes of autochthony in, again, a very different part of the country: the sparsely populated forest area of the Southeast.40 This study highlights the impact of the new style of development politics emphasizing decentralization and “by-passing the state.” With the dramatic fall of world-market prices for Cameroon’s main cash-crops (cacao, coffee and cotton), and the threatening depletion of its oil reserves, timber has become a crucial 37

Ibid., p. 208 ff. Ibid., chapter 6, 7 and 8. 39 See Janet Roitman, Fiscal Disobedience: An Anthropology of Economic Regulation in Central Africa (Princeton, 2004). 40 Peter Geschiere, “Ecology, Belonging and Xenophobia.” 38

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export product. Thus the Southeast, long seen as the most backward part of the country, became a region of central interest because of its rich forest resources. However, there was vehement opposition from global ecological movements, strongly supported by the World Bank in this area, against the further plundering of this ‘lung of the world.’ The result was the new forest law of 1994, which the Cameroonian government only accepted under heavy pressure from the Bank and the IMF. Typically for the new approach to development, the law emphasizes the role of local ‘communities’—unfortunately not further defined—as central stakeholders in the exploitation of the forest, advocating moreover far-reaching financial decentralization. Thus, municipalities of a few thousand inhabitants were to receive almost half of the taxes on logging in their areas. This no doubt well-meant insistence on redistribution and protecting the ‘community’ immediately triggered fierce fights over belonging in this sparsely populated area. Local communities here are notoriously diffuse, constantly splitting up according to malleable oppositions between lineage branches. In practice, the village committees that are supposed to manage the new ‘community forests’ are constantly divided over accusations that some people do not ‘really’ belong. Even kin can be unmasked as allogènes who rather belong in another village and therefore should join the new development project there. Clearly the segmentary tenor of the autochthony discourse is never-ending, hence its violent implications. Even within the intimacy of these close-knit villages that seem lost in vast tracts of forest it has become possible to unmask one’s neighbor or relative as ‘really’ a stranger. Ivory Coast: Autochthony and the Difficult Birth of a ‘New’ Nation The trajectory of the autochthony notion in the Ivory Coast, during the same troubled period of democratization is markedly different, notably in its relation to the nation. In Cameroon, autochthony seems to be some sort of rival for citizenship, denying the formal equality of all citizens and defending special forms of access to the state. In the Ivory Coast, in contrast, it refers to efforts to redefine or even ‘save’ the nation. In this country, the concept of autochthony, again introduced by French colonials, was quickly appropriated by local spokesmen. One of the first signs of a new local élan was the foundation, already in 1934, of an association that baptized itself Association de défense des


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intérêts des autochtones de Côte d’Ivoire.41 In those days, Senegalese and Dahomean clerks occupying the lower ranks in the colonial administration were the main target for Ivorian autochthony. However, soon other ‘strangers’ were to replace them in the self-definition of autochthons. Since the 1920s, cocoa production in the southern part of the colony attracted ever greater numbers of immigrants from the North who first came as labourers, but soon managed to create their own farms. Especially after Independence (1960) this immigration became one of the mainstays in the miracle ivoirien, the spectacular flowering of the country’s economy. Both Dozon and Arnaut mention the role of President Houphouët-Boigny’s pan-African ideas in his conscious encouragement of immigrants to push the “frontier” of cocoa production ever further in the country’s southern parts.42 Local communities were encouraged to grant land to enterprising immigrants. Chauveau shows that the autochthons’ main chance to continue to profit from their original rights was to hang on to their role as tuteurs, which allowed them to ask for regular ‘gifts.’43 Over time, with the value of land rising, this ‘tutorship’ became a “permanent and conflict-ridden negotiation.”Immigrants came mainly from both the northern parts of the country and neighbouring countries (Mali and especially Burkina Faso). But Dozon emphasizes that southerners hardly distinguish between Ivorian citizens and others among these northerners.44 Commonly called ‘Dyula,’ whether Ivorians or non-Ivorians, they all shared similar characteristics—many are Muslims—and this created an idea of le grand Nord from which all these people came down. However, towards the end of the 1980s Houpouët-Boigny’s miracle seemed to stagnate: the scarcity of land led to increasing tensions; worldmarket prices for cocoa collapsed; and because of the crisis, the return of young urbanites to the village increased rural tensions. This gave rise to a réactivation de l’idéologie de l’autochtonie.45 After the 1990 elections, the southern opposition parties openly accused Houphouët-Boigny

41 See Karel, Performing Displacements, p. 208; Jean-Pierre Dozon, “La Côte d’Ivoire au péril de l’ivoirité: Génèse d’un coup d’Etat,” Afrique contemporaine 193 (2000), 16. 42 Dozon, “La Côte d’Ivoire au péril de l’ivoirité” and idem, “La Côte d’Ivoire entre démocratie, nationalisme et ethnonationalisme,” Politique africaine 78 (2000), 45–63; Arnaut, Performing Displacements. 43 Chauveau, “Question foncière,” p. 107. 44 Dozon, “La Côte d’Ivoire entre démocratie, nationalisme et ethnonationalisme.” 45 Chauveau, “Question foncière,” p. 114.

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that he owed his re-election to the votes of ‘strangers’ and even that he himself was some sort of ‘allochthon’.46 The developments after his death in 1993 and especially since 2000 seem to reinforce the fears of several authors of a consolidation of a southern bloc of autochthons versus the North.47 It is important to signal that this broad trajectory, which in retrospect appears almost inevitable, involved all sorts of curves and still contains other potentials. Chauveau highlights, for instance, that the definition of the autochtone keeps shifting together with the moving frontier of the cocoa zone.48 Production began in the Southeast of the country and expanded from there gradually to the Southwest and the West. In earlier phases, Baule (in the center of the southern part of the country) were the main migrants. They moved first into the Southeast when cocoa-production took off there. Later on, cacao entered their own region, but subsequently they expanded, following the cacao frontier, into the western and southwestern parts. Thus in the 1960s the claim to autochthony was mainly forwarded by groups in the southwest and west (Bete, Dida) against Baule ‘immigrants’. Now, terms like allogène or immigrant are nearly synonymous with Northerner. But Chauveau warns that Baule are very conscious of the fact that ‘real’ autochthons may at any time redirect their grievances against them.49 Since Houphouët-Boigny the Baule may have been highly represented in the national centres of power and they may have been in the forefront of defending the autochthony of the southerners against northern immigrants, yet they are increasingly reminded by the ‘true’ locals, especially in the Southeast, that they are also immigrants and could therefore be marked as ‘fake’ autochthons. After 1993, the defence of autochthony was couched in more ideological terms when Houpouët-Boigny’s successor, Henry Konan Bedié launched the notion of ivoirité. He introduced this idea to oust one of his main rivals for the Presidency, Alassane Ouattara, from the electoral competition, on the grounds that both the latter’s parents came from Burkina Faso. Dozon and Arnaut show in rich detail that this

46 Arnaut, Performing Displacements, p. 216; Dozon, “La Côte d’Ivoire au péril de l’ivoirité,” p. 16. 47 Chauveau, “Question foncière”; Dozon, “La Côte d’Ivoire entre démocratie, nationalisme et ethnonationalisme”; Bruno Losch, “La Côte d’Ivoire en quête d’un nouveau projet national,” Politique africaine 78 (2000), 5–26. 48 Chauveau, “Question foncière.” 49 Ibid., p. 121.


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was part of a broader ideological offensive, aiming to justify the need to distinguish Ivoiriens de souche (trunk) from others.50 Dozon speaks of an aéropage of intellectuals and writers around Bedié, brought together in Curdiphe.51 Politique Africaine published part of the Acts of a colloquium of this institute in which, for instance, professor Niangoran-Bouah (the country’s first anthropologist, as director of the patrimoine culturel of the Ministry of Culture) proposes a “regrouping” of “the ancestors of Ivorians, or Ivorians de souche.”52 Thus, he first sums up “the autochthons with a mythical origin” and then les autochtones sans origine mythique. He insists—and this is clearly very important to him—that all these groups were already settled in the country on March 10, 1893 when “. . . Ivory Coast was born.”53 In such enumerations ivoirité seems to coincide with the notion of a Southern autochthony. But Dozon warns that, again, there are sub-texts hidden in Bédié’s celebration of ivoiriens de souche.54 At a deeper level it highlights the special vocation of the Baule (the group to which both Bédié and Houphouët-Boigny belonged) as some sort of super-autochthons. As part of the broader Akan group (which also includes, for instance, the neighbouring Ashanti in Ghana), Baule see themselves as blessed with state-forming talents which distinguish them from other Southern groups (like the ‘more segmentary’ Bete). Thus, the idea of Ivoiriens de souche implies a double exclusion: on the one hand of northern immigrants; on the other hand, also of other southerners, supposedly less capable because of their cultural heritage to lead the nation. Arnaut highlights that the discourse shifts not only per region but also over time. In 1999 Bédié was pushed aside by a military coup under general Guéï. In 2000, Laurent Gbagbo, another Southern politician (but a Bete from the Southwest) won the elections, from which Ouattara, the candidate of the North, was excluded. But in September

50 Dozen, “La Côte d’Ivoire au péril de l’ivoirité” and idem, “La Côte d’Ivoire entre démocratie, nationalisme et ethnonationalisme”; Arnaut, Performing Displacements, ch. 3. 51 Cellule universitaire de recherche et de diffusion des idées et actions du président Konan Bédié. 52 Curdiphe, “L’Ivoirité, ou l’esprit du nouveau contract social du Président H.K. Bédié,” Politique Africaine 78 (2000), 65–69. 53 Ibid., p. 66. See Arnaut, Performing Displacements, ch. 3 and 4, for a discussion of similar texts. 54 Dozen, “La Côte d’Ivoire au péril de l’ivoirité” and idem “La Côte d’Ivoire entre démocratie, nationalisme et ethnonationalisme.”

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2002, a military insurgency in the North effectively split up the country between North and South, “the kind of geographical framework within which the discourse of autochthony flourishes so well in Côte d’Ivoire”.55 Under Gbagbo the idea of ivoirité acquired a new lease of life, but Arnaut signals new aspects: the ivoirité of Gbagbo has a more global outlook, and it sets up the “frontier” in Bete land (rather than any Baule element) as a symbol of the nation, but then a new, emerging nation of “real” Ivorians.56 Arnaut concludes: “Autochthony is . . . . also a powerful discourse for a regional minority to reinvent itself as a ‘national’ majority . . .”57 In Ivory Coast, autochthony may remain more closely linked to the nation, albeit in purified form. But it shows similar segmentary tendencies as elsewhere. Who the ‘real’ autochthon is remains an object of deep controversies, just as ‘the Other’ takes on constantly new guises. The ‘Great Lakes Region’ and other African Settings Another hotbed of autochthony is the ‘Great Lakes Region’, notably Rwanda-Burundi and the adjacent parts of Congo (North and South Kivu). Stephen Jackson’s recent thesis (2003) on “War-Making” in Goma, the capital of North Kivu is based on research since the late 1990s when RDC ‘rebels’, backed by Rwandan and Ugandan troops conquered this part of Congo. He speaks of “. . . a breakneck chase to exert control over fluctuating identity categories . . .”58 His second chapter on “Making History and Migratory Identities” evokes, indeed, a dazzling vortex of identities with constantly changing names and historical claims. However, a recurring dividing line in all this is apparently the opposition between ‘autochthons’ and ‘allochthons’; and a fixed pole in defining the latter are the much resented ‘Banyarwanda’—‘Rwandophones’ who are constantly suspected of plotting to deliver the region to neighboring Rwanda. Yet, even this more or less fixed beacon has its ambiguities: it can refer to recent Hutu refugees (who fled to Congo after the 1994 genocide of Tutsi in Rwanda and the subsequent takeover by Kagame and his Tutsi army); but it can also refer to their arch-opponents, the enigmatic Banyamulenge, 55 56 57 58

Arnaut, Performing Displacements, p. 240. Ibid., pp. 242, 252. Ibid., p. 254. Jackson, War Making, p. 247.


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whom autochthons often call ‘Congolese Tutsi’. Jackson’s study highlights both the surprising resilience of the idea of a Congolese nation among the “autochthons” of this far-out part of the country and the fierce debates over history in this context: where do these Banyamulenge come from? When did they settle in Congo? How can they claim to belong here as well? Like Jackson, Jean-Claude Williame highlights, as an important factor behind all these uncertainties, Mobutu’s volatile manipulations of national citizenship promised the Banyamulenge to recognize their Congolese citizenship when he needed their support; he then denied it when he rather betted upon the support of other groups.59 Liisa Malkki’s references to “autochtonisation” as a central trait in the construction of a group-history among Hutu refugees from Burundi similarly highlight the narrow link—albeit with a somewhat different tenor—between autochthony claims and the struggle over national citizenship.60 The Hutu historical claim for autochthony is essential to their hope of being liberated one day from the domination by Tutsi with their false pretence of superiority. However, Malkki also shows that such claims to being autochthonous have their flip side: Hutu have to share their autochthony with Twa (‘Pygmies’). This indicates how easily this notion can be associated with ‘primitive’, as still being in a first stage of development. There is a return here to the connotations the notion acquired in the western Sudan, the first area where the term was introduced to the continent by French civil servants: the almost “pre-human” autochthons were only socialized by incoming foreign rulers. Malkki is certainly right to emphasize that for the Hutu refugees, as well, “. . . autochthony can be a double-edged sword.”61 Various authors highlight the centrality of preoccupations with autochthony in recent political developments for other parts of Africa. Carola Lentz emphasizes the long history of these tensions, going back to pre-colonial times, in Burkina Faso and neighbouring parts of Ghana.62 But she also notes that ‘autochthony’ became a powerful

59 Jean-Claude Willame, Banyarwanda et Banyamulenge: Violences ethniques et gestion de l’identitaire au Kivu (Paris, 1997). 60 Liisa Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago, 1996), pp. 63ff. 61 Ibid., p. 63. 62 Lentz, “‘Premiers arrivés’ et ‘nouveaux venus’.”

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political slogan especially in the 1990s—in the competition for posts, but even more in struggles over access to land. The language of autochthony also seems to penetrate into Anglophone parts of the continent, not only in the Anglophone part of Cameroon (see above), but also in parts of North Ghana that border on Burkina and Togo.63 But even where the notions as such are not current, similar discourses prove to be highly mobilizing. The Comaroffs are certainly right to compare the threatening upsurge of xenophobia in South Africa against the makwere-kwere (African immigrants from across the Limpopo) to the autochthony obsession elsewhere on the continent.64 Especially their analysis of the “zombification” of these makwere-kwere—the tendency to de-personalize immigrants—is highly relevant for the autochthony examples discussed above.65 Catherine Boone’s challenging comparison of developments in Senegal, Ivory Coast and Ghana shows how easily similar discourses, again centering on the access to land, crosscut the border between Anglophone and Francophone Africa.66 Achim von Oppen’s recent Habilitationsschrift on Bounding Villages in Zambia similarly highlights the paradox of exclusionist discourses on locality and belonging that manage at the same time to remain open-ended and tuned in to globalisation.67 In general it might be useful to emphasize that this upsurge of autochthony in Africa is cause for surprise. Historians and anthropologists used to characterize African societies as oriented towards “wealth-in-people” in contrast to conceptions of “wealth-in-things” prevailing elsewhere.68 Africa would be characterized by its open forms of organization with special arrangements for including people into local groups. This would encompass elements such as very broad

63 See Martijn Wienia, The Stranger Owns the Land but the Land is for Us: The Politics of a Religious Landscape in Nanun, N. Ghana (Leiden, 2003). 64 Comaroff and Comaroff, “Naturing the Nation.” 65 Cf. on Ghanaian immigrants in Botswana also Rijk van Dijk, “Localisation, Ghanaian Pentecostalism and the Stranger’s Beauty in Botswana,” Africa 73, 4 (2003), 560–583. 66 Catherine Boone, Political Topographies of the African State: Territorial Authority and Institutional Choice (Cambridge, 2003). 67 Achim von Oppen, Bounding Villages: The Enclosure of Locality in Central Africa, 1890s to 1990s (Habilitation, Humboldt University of Berlin) 2003. 68 See Joseph C. Miller, ‘Way of Death’: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade 1730–1893 (Madison, 1988); Jane Guyer, “Wealth in People and Self-realisation in Equatorial Africa,” Man n.s. 28, 2 (1993), 243–265 and idem, Marginal Gains: Monetary Transactions in Atlantic Africa (Chicago, 2004).


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kinship terminology, adoption, forms of clientelism. The current emphasis on autochthony and local belonging seems, therefore, to be a quite dramatic turn towards closure and exclusion. However, the above analysis shows that such apparent closure may deceive in view of the extreme malleability of autochthony discourse. It is doubtful whether one can simply characterize it as a ‘retraditionalisation’ and a return to the village. Its exclusionary tenor is rather about limiting the access to the state and new global circuits.69 Autochthony can present itself as a rival to national citizenship, but it can also pretend to reinforce the nation (by ‘purifying’ it). Despite its appeal to local belonging as a selfevident criterion, its segmentary tenor creates nagging uncertainties: one always risks to be unmasked as ‘not really’ autochthonous. Indeed, its emptiness, the elusiveness of who is ‘really’ an autochthon, gives it a dizzy quality. African examples of recent autochthony movements suggest that the quest for belonging is a never-ending one, promising safety, yet raising basic insecurities.70 From all the variations discussed above, autochthony emerges as a never-ending mirror-game (but certainly not an innocent one). Its apparent ‘naturalness’ hides a constant flux of re-defining one’s belonging that seems to slip away as constantly. Striking are its highly different implications for the nation-state. In Cameroon it presents itself as an alternative to the very idea of national citizenship. In Ivory Coast in contrast, it defines itself as the nation, albeit in a renovated, purified form. In Europe it is caught between ‘civic’ and ‘ethnic’ definitions of citizenship, while its target is rather the welfare state; that might be undermined more by the global economy than by the influx of immigrants. For the Athenians, long ago, it implied a kind of inborn

69 Cf. Mbembe’s and Simone’s emphasis, quoted above, on the open-endedness of these discourses. 70 For reasons of space we can not address here the relation with alternative notions of belonging that seems to feed on people’s perception that the continent is in crisis. Notably a comparison with the upsurge of Pentecostalism would be of interest since it clearly offers a different sense of belonging from autochthony. Most authors (cf. Birgit Meyer, Translating the Devil: Religion and Modernity among the Ewe in Ghana (Edinburgh, 1999)) signal Pentecostalists’ deep distrust of ‘the village’ and ‘the family’ equated with the Devil; instead they belong to a (global?) community of ‘born-agains.’ However, for Malawi, Harri Englund (“Cosmopolitanism and the Devil in Malawi,” Ethnos 69, 3 (2004), 293–316.) emphasizes the close links urban Pentecostalists retain with their village of origin. Apparently in the relation between autochthony and Pentecostalism, as seemingly opposite discourses on belonging, varying contradictions and articulations are possible.

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propensity towards democracy. However, in modern Europe it rather seems to express a deep disappointment about what democracy has become. Yet the above also does suggest some general trends. A crucial one is highlighted by the classical glorification of autochthony in early Athens, in the challenging interpretation of Nicole Loraux.71 She evokes the paradoxical instability of a discourse that celebrates stability. Autochthony may invoke staying-in-place as some sort of norm. But for historians—and certainly not only for academic ones—movement is rather the norm: any history starts with a migration. Even the Athenian families that were so proud of their autochthony had myths about origins from elsewhere. And even the Beti, who have now become the arch-autochthons of Cameroon, express their unity by a myth of an only partially successful crossing of the majestic Sanaga river on the back of a huge python. Autochthony needs movement as a counterpoint to define itself. It is precisely this basic instability that makes it quite a dangerous discourse. It seems to offer a safe, even ‘natural’ belonging. But it is haunted by a basic insecurity: the worries about its own authenticity, the need to prove itself by unmasking ‘fake’ autochthons, and hence internal division and violence. This paradox between a promise of primordial security and a practice of basic insecurity seems to be of all times and places, whenever autochthony or similar notions (‘people from the land’) become current. Yet it is clear that the force of such notions and their emotional appeal can differ greatly. An obvious question remains: Why was it especially in the 1990’s that such discourses of belonging and exclusion became suddenly so strong and began to dominate politics—not only in many parts of Africa but also elsewhere in the world? It is clear that there is a link with intensified processes of globalisation. Yet it is clear also that this link can take very different forms. For Africa democratisation and the new style of development policies were mentioned above as specific factors in this context. In Europe the growing concern about migrants, who supposedly refuse ‘cultural integration,’ seems to play a big role. Clearly we need to follow much more closely the different historical trajectories in the articulation of globalisation and the preoccupation with belonging that always has exclusion as its flip side.

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Loraux, Né de la terre, pp. 95–100.

HERITAGE AND THE MAKING OF (TRANS-)LOCAL IDENTITIES: A CASE STUDY FROM THE CURONIAN SPIT (LITHUANIA) Anja Peleikis Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg, Germany

Introduction In the context of globalisation debates, the examination of local spaces has also received new meanings. While ‘locality’ has been generally understood as a social space defined by direct face-to-face relations, by physical proximity and a form of everyday routine in the ‘here and now’, this equation has been called into question more and more. Locality in the sense of physical proximity is no longer the only model based on which local community is conceived. Empirical case studies have shown that social groups are also constituted beyond local, regional and national borders, a result of the reduction of geographic distances owing to new global information and transport technologies.1 Locality is imagined less and less as a static unit with clearly defined borders to the outside or as a ‘container’ in which local life manifests itself, but as an object of social practice and construction. Thus, it has become necessary to give up fixed and stable conceptualisations of ‘locality’ and follow more dynamic and flexible concepts. Appadurai has suggested asking how locality is in fact produced by different social actors at different points in time.2 He states that locality is always context-generative as well as context-driven.3 Context-generative images of locality are formed by local actors themselves, who in rituals, rites of passage, by way of festivals and shared work for example, generate their understanding of local identities

1 See for example Anja Peleikis, Lebanese in Motion: Gender and the Making of a Translocal Village (Bielefeld, 2003); Peggy Levitt, The Transnational Villagers (Berkeley, 2001). 2 Arjun Appadurai, “The Production of Locality,” in Counterworks: Managing the Diversity of Knowledge, ed. Richard Fardon (London, 1995), p. 213. 3 Appadurai, “The Production of Locality,” p. 211.

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‘from below’.4 At the same time, local actors are also context-driven by forces ‘from above’, for instance by powerful national or global actors. By now it has become obvious, however, that a dichotomising contrasting of constructions of locality as ‘from below’ or ‘from above’ appears ambivalent. In many cases of constructions of locality originating ‘from below’ it can be observed how local actors take up global conceptions and ideas in order to integrate them, localise them and make them into components of essentialist definitions of local culture and identity. Thus, it has become a commonplace to say that global processes are expressed in the local, and local ways of life, on the other hand, may spread globally. Producing locality has actually become in many places a constant struggle where different social actors mobilise and combine different local and global resources creatively and strategically to stabilise their influence or obtain new power resources.5 Mobilising diverse interpretations and representations of the local past and heritage has actually become one important resource and instrument in negotiating local identities in times of globalisation.6 While until only a few decades ago the word ‘heritage’ was commonly used to describe an inheritance that an individual received in the will of a deceased ancestor or bequeathed when dead to descendants, the range of meanings attached to this formerly legal term has recently undergone an expansion to include almost any sort of intergenerational exchange or relationship.7 Following Graham et al. I will use the term ‘heritage’ to denote the contemporary use of the past.8 Hence, people are at the focus of this definition. They are the creators of heritage, and not merely passive receivers or transmitters of it. People create representations and objects of heritage as they require it and manage it for a range of contemporary purposes.9 Two of these purposes will be delineated in more detail in the following, namely how creating heritage can serve economic interests in the context of tourism and how the making of heritage serves identification processes at the local and national scale. 4

Ibid. Arjun Appadurai, “Sovereignty Without Territoriality: Notes for a Postnational Geography,” in The Geography of Identity, ed. Patricia Yaeger (Ann Arbor, 1996), pp. 40–58. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science (Berkeley, 1997). 6 Brian Graham, G.J. Ashworth and J.E. Tunbridge, A Geography of Heritage: Power, Culture and Economy (London, 2000). 7 Graham et al., A Geography of Heritage, p. 1. 8 Ibid., p. 2. 9 Ibid. 5

heritage and the making of (trans-)local identities

Map 10. The Curonian Lagoon Region and the Position of Nida (Cartography: Jutta Turner, Max Planck-Institute, Halle/Germany)

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Taking the ethnographic example of the Curonian Spit in present-day Lithuania which has been characterised by changing national affiliation, forced migration and a total population exchange in the course of the twentieth century, it is my interest to understand the process of making local heritage and by this producing (trans-)local identities at different points in history given the tremendous ruptures in the region under study. How do people create their translocal identities after having been forced to leave their localities and live elsewhere? And how does a new population create local heritage and by this a new local identity at a place whose history and past is rather unknown to them? How do national narratives, ideologies and politics influence the making of local heritage and identity?

The Making of Curonian Heritage and Identity (1900–1945) The area under study, the northern part of the Curonian Spit10 which belongs to the region of Lithuania Minor,11 has been characterised by an inconsistent national affiliation in the course of the twentieth century and the resulting change of population. For many centuries it was part of East Prussia12 and since 1871 the German Reich. The harsh living conditions on the narrow sandy peninsula between the Curonian Lagoon and the Baltic Sea marked the lives of the local fishermen and women. Historically they had been of diverse ethnic background, e.g. German, Lithuanian and Curonian, but over the centuries they developed a specific local identity as ‘the people from the dunes’,13 with their distinct local habits, practices and Curonian language.14 With the

10 Presently, the 100 km-long, narrow peninsula is divided between the Lithuanian state and Kaliningrad Oblast (Russia). In this paper I focus exclusively on the Lithuanian part of the Spit. 11 Depending on the historical and political contexts, this region was also called ‘Prussian Lithuania’ or Memelgebiet (Memel territory) and Memelland. 12 On the history of East Prussia see for example Andreas Kossert, Ostpreußen: Geschichte und Mythos (München, 2005). 13 See Nijolė Strakauskaitė, The Curonian Spit: The Old European Postal Road (Vilnius, 2004). 14 Curonian is an old Indo-Germanic Baltic language, closely related to Latvian. See Richard Pietsch, Deutsch-kurisches Wörterbuch (Lüneburg, 1991); Paul Kwauka and Richard Pietsch, Kurisches Wörterbuch (Berlin, 1977); Christliebe El-Mogharbel, Nehrungskurisch: Dokumentation einer moribunden Sprache (Frankfurt a.M., 1993). During the fifteenth century Curonians from the Latvian region of Courland migrated to the Curonian Spit, where they were later Christianised and Germanised and also


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formation of the German Reich and the introduction of ‘Germanisation politics’, national identification became stronger and more and more important. German education, administration as well as tourism to the Curonian Spit fostered German national identification also on the side of the local population.15 Tourism to the Curonian Spit developed at the end of the nineteenth century, when German travellers and artists first ‘discovered’ the beauty of the landscape and established the Niddener artists’ colony.16 In fact, from the beginning of the twentieth century up until the end of World War II, Nidden was an important meeting point for German painters, writers, scientists, journalists and filmmakers as well as for a German public seeking relaxation and tranquillity. All of them were attracted by the Spits landscape of mighty sand dunes, the Curonian Lagoon, dense pine forests and long, large bathing beaches on the Baltic Sea. Famous German painters, like Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Max Pechstein17 presented images of the Curonian population in their art, writers such as Thomas Mann18 described them in literature, and photographers produced photos and postcards depicting the ‘traditional world’ of the local Curonian population. This was often done in a manner reinforcing Western ideas of a romantic and exotic native ‘other’. Fascinated by shifting light conditions, rich colours and atmosphere, the painters endlessly depicted the impressive landscape. The old, reed-covered wooden fishermen’s houses, with their brownish-blue colour, the vivid flower gardens, and above all the Curonian fishing boats (German: Kurenkähne) with the picturesque Kurenwimpel (weathervanes) on the mast of every boat were favourite motifs, as were fishermen and women themselves. Initiated through the painters mixed with Germans and Lithuanians who came to the Spit. See Evalds Mugurevics, “Ethnic Processes in Baltic Inhabited Territories and the Emergence of the Latvian Nation in the 6th to the 16th Century,” Humanities and Social Sciences Latvia 3 (1997), 75–92. Marija Gimbutas, The Balts (London, 1963). 15 Kossert, Ostpreußen, pp. 177–182. 16 Maja Ehlermann-Mollenhauer, ed., Ernst Mollenhauer: Ein Expressionist aus Ostpreußen (Heidelberg, 1992); Jörn Barfood, Nidden: Künstlerkolonie auf der Kurischen Nehrung (Fischerhude, 2005). On tourism on the Curonian Spit see Anja Peleikis, “Reisen in die Vergangenheit: Deutsche Heimattouristen auf der Kurischen Nehrung,” Voyage. Jahrbuch für Reise- & Tourismusforschung 8 (2009), 85–97. 17 See Max Pechstein, Erinnerungen, ed. Leopold Reidemeister (Stuttgart, 1993 [1960]). 18 See for example the writings of Thomas Mann on the Curonian Spit; Thomans Mann, Über mich selbst: Autobiographische Schriften (Frankfurt a.M., 1994 [1983]). Mann visited Nidden for the first time in 1929. In 1930 his summer house was built, in which he spent three summers with his family. Today the house is the most visited museum in Lithuania.

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and photographers new images and external presentations of the fisher locality appeared. The local inhabitants were not passive recipients of these influences but became agents in marketing ‘their tradition’ and ‘cultural heritage’ to the tourists. As the tourists were fascinated by the colourful Kurenwimpel on the fishing boats—originally introduced by the fishery inspectors so as to be able to recognise the boats—the local inhabitants started to carve small copies to sell them as souvenirs. A painter who came to live in Nidden, Ernst Mollenhauer, became active in the 1920s and initiated the Niddener Trachtenverein (Niddener association of traditional costumes) whose task was to preserve popular Curonian culture. The association was also active in the founding and organisation of the Nehrungsmuseum (Spit Museum).19 In this context processes of commodification and heritagisation of local culture were initiated. It can be argued that the local population took up external interpretations of their past, localised them and in this process redefined their own local identities of that time.20 This example also indicates that the making of local identities is closely embedded into the wider societal and national contexts at any given time. This becomes even more obvious when focusing on the developments influencing the region under study after World War I. In 1919 the Curonian Spit was divided and the northern Spit which belonged to the Memelgebiet (Memel territory) was cut from the rest of East Prussia and came under a League of Nations Mandate. Shortly thereafter, in 1923, Lithuania annexed the Memel territory, which received an autonomous status in the newly created Lithuanian state.21 Still, the inhabitants of the northern Spit further identified with Germany and German nationalist ideology rapidly spread during those years. In 1939, following the Hitler-Stalin Pact, the Nazis reappropriated the Memel territory and incorporated it into Nazi Germany. I argue that with the rise of nationalist identification, local ethnic identities became redefined. While on the one hand ‘being Curonian’ became a synonym for backwardness and out-dated traditions, at the same time ethnic and local identities became nationalised. While the

19

Jörn Barfood, Nidden, p. 42. Anja Peleikis, “Tourism and the Making of Cultural Heritage: The Case of Nida/ Curonian Spit, Lithuania,” in Defining Region: Baltic Area Studies from Sociocultural Anthropology and Interdisciplinary Perspectives, eds. Rimantas Sliužinskas and Vytis Čiubrinskas (Klaipeda, 2006), pp. 101–114. 21 Before 1919 most of Lithuania was part of the Tsarist Russian Empire. 20


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traditional Curonian costume, for example, was worn by girls and women during Sundays and special events before, during the 1930s it became more and more a tourist commodity. The girls went out in these costumes, so that the tourists could photograph them. The dress became a tourist commodity while at the same time it became a symbol of nationalist German folklore.

The Making of Translocal Curonian Heritage (1945–1990) The end of the Second World War brought a brutal end to local life on the Curonian Spit when most of the inhabitants fled the area in fear of the Red Army, joining millions of others fleeing Central and Eastern Europe. Most of them went to West and East Germany, where they had to cope with their experiences of displacement, the loss of their home localities, poverty and overall insecurity in an environment that tended to be hostile towards the newcomers from the East. For the refugees, East Prussia, the Curonian Spit and the village disappeared behind the Iron Curtain and only lived on in their memories and imaginations. However, despite the fact that it was impossible for the refugees to return to their locality during the Cold War, the local memory was continually relived, reimagined and shared with other former inhabitants over the years. People maintained contact with local kin and neighbours despite the fact that they were living in very different places in West and East Germany. They met in the course of family gatherings, in Heimatvertriebenen (expellees) organisations, Memelland groups and Nidden gatherings. They developed a translocal village network of former inhabitants in which they renegotiated and remade their local identity in absentia from the actual place of reference. In this context the locality of origin developed more and more into a distant, unattainable and idealised home locality, an emotional landscape and projection site that met their needs to feel at home and rooted. The importance and activities of this translocal network has changed over time. Over the years ‘the Niddener’ like the other refugees from the East became more and more integrated into post-war German societies and developed new local identities in their new homes. Still, when in 1990 the former inhabitants were allowed to re-visit their place of origin for the first time in 45 years, many took upon themselves a journey ‘home’, carrying their memories and place-images to the present-day locality.

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But not only Germans who originated from the Curonian Spit have started to travel to Eastern Europe. Many Germans interested in German cultural heritage in the East have carried out such trips. Some of these people had visited Nida as children before the Second World War, when Nidden was a well-known tourist spot. Others had also heard about the rich, unspoilt landscape of the Spit and kept these images in their minds over the years. In this way, images of the uniqueness and beauty of the Curonian Spit as an expression of Germany’s cultural heritage in the East had survived fifty years of Soviet closure in the collective German memory.

The Making of Local Identities during the Period of Soviet Sovereignty (1945–1990) After World War II Nidden became Nida, a village of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic, which imposed a new socialist legal and political order upon the place and its new population. At the beginning of 1945 there were hardly any people left in the villages of the Curonian Spit. However, some of the former local Curonian-German inhabitants did not manage to flee or they returned to their villages after the war.22 Since they still had their Lithuanian documents from the interwar period and spoke Curonian, they were considered Lithuanians and thus allowed to stay. Although the local Curonian-Germans never identified themselves as Lithuanians, they mobilised their former Lithuanian citizenship as a survival strategy to counter Soviet persecution. They were forced to hide their past local and national identities, which they could only express privately and in the context of religion. Church and family life constituted a small niche in which traces of the past local order could be experienced despite a repressive and all-encompassing Soviet state. In the late 1950s most of these remaining German-Curonians received the right to emigrate to West and East Germany. Only a few people were not allowed to emigrate or decided to remain because they had in the meantime developed familial

22

On the post-war situation in former East Prussia see Ruth Kibelka, Ostpreußens Schicksalsjahre, 1944–1948 (Berlin, 2000) and Eckhard Matthes, ed., Als Russe in Ostpreußen: Sowjetische Umsiedler über ihren Neubeginn in Königsberg/Kaliningrad nach 1945 (Ostfildern vor Stuttgart, 1999).


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relationships with Lithuanians or Russians. These people officially became Lithuanians and Soviet citizens. From the early 1950s onwards, people from all over the Soviet Union, but predominantly from various regions in Lithuania were settled on the Curonian Spit by order of the Soviet state. Fishermen were especially asked to move there as the interest was to increase fish production.23 Given the poverty and limited income possibilities in many regions of Lithuania, people were attracted to the Spit where they found accommodation in the empty houses of the former population and jobs in the fishing kolkhoz. Over the course of time the ‘new’ population appropriated the village, ‘Lithuanianised’ it, and in this process produced narratives on the Lithuanian-Curonian heritage of the place. I argue that this was a major vehicle in the process of making new local identities for the newcomers. All of them had originated from very different regions in Lithuania and in Russia. Place and landscape were unfamiliar for them and slowly they adapted to life in the foreign environment of ‘sand and water’. Narratives of the ancient Curonians with their impressive Curonian fishing boats who also managed to survive in these severe circumstances, helped to identify with the past, construct a link to the present and contributed to the making of a new local identity as Nidiškės (the people of Nida). These narratives on the local Curonian-Lithuanian past became especially important in the context of Soviet tourism that developed in the 1960s. Nida once again became a popular holiday resort—now for chosen Soviet citizens. While new narratives and presentations of the Curonian-Lithuanian past developed, the legacy of the Curonian-German past on the Spit became politically ignored, persecuted and unmade. However, the most visible reminder of the German-Curonian heritage was to be found in local architecture: fishermen’s houses, the local cemetery, the church, hotels and Thomas Mann’s summer house told the story of a vibrant pre-World War II tourist and artist village. Despite Soviet plans to completely demolish the old buildings and construct a Soviet holiday resort, local architects and parts of the new local population fought to preserve Nida’s old monuments. They succeeded, and many of the old houses were saved from destruction. In this process, Nida’s

23 Arunė Arbušauskaitė, “Sociological Analysis of Family Cards of Neringa Residents in 1956,” in Everyday Life in the Baltic States, ed. Meilute Taljunaite (Vilnius, 1997), p. 186.

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architecture and local heritage was appropriated by the new Lithuanian inhabitants. These narratives on the place’s heritage was presented to the ‘new’ tourists coming from all over the Soviet Union, from diverse Soviet Republics, from as far away as Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan, from Georgia or Armenia as well as from Leningrad and Moscow. They travelled to the Curonian Spit and helped to construct Nida as the ‘pearl’ and the ‘most beautiful village’ of the Soviet Union. Thus, officially Nida stood out as an exemplary Soviet tourist destination with a distinct Lithuanian heritage of Curonian fishermen as people of the Soviet ‘working masses’. Thus, these heritage sites and monuments became the visual manifestations of an official, public interpretation of the past—detached from the historical and political context in which they were built. Thus, monuments and heritage sites can be considered as vehicles for nation building, for constructing a new identity, and presenting this to the outside. In this process the tourist as ‘Other’ looks in and helps define the local and national Self.24 Despite the Soviet state’s ideology and attempts to create a ‘monolithic community’ that had overcome ‘the national question’ by eliminating all social and most cultural differences between the nations within the Soviet Union,25 there was some room left for ‘national cultural forms’.26 These were local languages and folk culture, which in Soviet ideology were defined as the culture and lore of the ‘working masses’.27 Generally speaking, representations of traditional folk culture were divided into those considered ‘progressive’—that is, those that expressed a consciousness of hard work and of exploitation and struggle against the exploiter—and those considered ‘repressive’—usually those associated with religion.28 Given this context, the local work culture of Curonian fishermen and women was presented in the local Nida history museum established in the Protestant church between the end of the 1960s and the end of the 1980s. The material artefacts were presented without any reference to the political context in which they

24 Sabine Marschall, “Post-apartheid Monuments and Cultural Tourism in South Africa,” in Tourism and Postcolonialism, eds. Michael Hall and Hazel Tucker (London, 2004), p. 97. 25 On the formation of Soviet national identities see Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca, 2005). 26 Vytis Čiubrinskas, “Identity and the Revival of Tradition in Lithuania: An Insider’s View,” Folk 42 (2000), 27. 27 Čiubrinskas, “Identity,” 27. 28 Ibid.


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had developed but as an expression of the hardworking Soviet ‘working masses’. This example makes clear how local heritage can be used for local as well as for national interests. Next to this official, state-authorised and legalised version of the Spit’s past, other narratives of the place’s ‘Curonian-Lithuanian’ past developed during Soviet times. This process has to be understood in the context of a growing Lithuanian nationalism that developed in opposition to Sovietisation processes. Starting in the 1970s, local history clubs and folklore ensembles sprang up all over Lithuania and there emerged a growing interest in pre-Soviet ethnic traditions. It became popular to trace the magic, ritual, myth and symbols of the ancient Lithuanians.29 Learning to understand and maintain one’s national and ethnic heritage contributed to the remaking of Lithuanian nationalist identities and the drive for independence in the late 1980s. In this context, people became interested in the history, pagan rituals and symbols of the ancient Curonians, who like the Prussians and Lithuanians were a Baltic ethnic group living in the area of present-day Lithuania, Kaliningrad Oblast and Latvia.30 With this renewed interest in the pagan Lithuanian past, the local Curonian past became a focus of interest as well, and it was mobilised in this context for Lithuanian national interests against the official Soviet narrative. While the Soviet state proposed an official and legalised version of the Lithuanian past, segments of the Lithuanian population began to question and resist this Soviet narrative. They considered the Lithuanian people the legitimate ‘owners’ of Lithuania’s Curonian past. In focussing on local heritage production in Soviet times, I have demonstrated that the local history of Curonian people was Lithuanianised and depicted in a Soviet mode of presentation. At the same time the making of Lithuanian heritage served as an important means of articulating Lithuanian national identity and, by this, resisting the all-encompassing Soviet state and ideology. The narrative of Lithuanian-Curonian heritage, which was produced in the Soviet political

29 Ibid., 19–40; Vytis Čiubrinskas, “Sovietmečio iššūkiai Lietuvos etnologijai: Disciplina, ideologija ir patriotizmas,” Lietuvos Etnologija: socialinės antropologijos ir etnologijos studijos 1 (2001), 99–117. 30 Evalds Mugurevics, “Ethnic Processes in Baltic Inhabited Territories and the Emergence of the Latvian Nation in the 6th to the 16th Century,” Humanities and Social Sciences Latvia 3 (1997), 75–92. The Curonians were described as an influential and prosperous ethnic group engaged in pirating and trading across the Baltic Sea, first mentioned in the ninth century.

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and legal context, continued to be an important narrative in post-Soviet times. In fact interpretations of local heritage became nationalised and now contribute to the making of nationalist identities in independent Lithuania and to attracting international tourists.

Local Heritage in Independent Lithuania (1990–Today) The mobilisation of the past for nation-building processes has been extensively documented and analysed.31 Focussing on nation-building processes in the post-Soviet space after 1989, it has been shown that there was a pervasive preoccupation with the recovery of histories and memories repressed under the Soviet regime.32 Social actors also draw on the distant (e.g. pre-Soviet) past to provide inspiration for breaking with the immediate past.33 When Lithuania regained independence in 1991, heritage politics and practices became an important and official means of nation-building. In this context, readings of the past contributed to the legitimation of the nation’s claim to its territory. Presenting the local history of the ancient Curonians of Lithuanian descent inscribes Lithuanian territorial claims in the present-day region of Lithuania Minor including the northern part of the Curonian Spit, which once belonged to the Prussian State, the German Reich, independent Lithuania, Nazi Germany and later to the Soviet Socialist Lithuanian Republic. At the same time, the Lithuanian government asserts that as the national sovereign, it is the authority that creates and dictates the use of heritage within its borders. This also applies to movable and immovable cultural heritage, and in this context to all of the heritage that was once created by non-Lithuanians and ethnic or religious minorities whose artefacts can be found on the territory of present-day Lithuania. 31 Eric Hobsbawn and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, Eng., 1983). 32 Graham Smith, ed., The Nationalities Question in the Post-Soviet States (London, 1996); Graham Smith, Vivien Law, Andrew Wilson, Annette Bohr and Edward Allworth, Nation-building in the Post-Soviet Borderlands: The Politics of National Identities (Cambridge, Eng. 1998); Chris Hann, “Postsocialist Nationalism: Rediscovering the Past in South East Poland,” Slavic Review 57 (1998), 840–863; Chris Hann, “The Cartography of Copyright Cultures versus Proliferation of Public Properties,” in Properties of Culture: Culture as Property, ed. Erich Kasten (Berlin, 2004), p. 292. 33 Caroline Humphrey, “The Moral Authority of the Past in Post-socialist Mongolia,” Religion, State and Society 20 (1992), 375–389.


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In this respect the Lithuanian state behaves according to international conventions, which support the tendency to retain cultural patrimony by declaring cultural property found within a nation’s territory as part of that state’s cultural heritage.34 Lithuania joined UNESCO in 1991 and accepted the International Convention concerning the World Cultural and Natural Heritage and the Convention of European Culture. Furthermore, it received the opportunity to propose Lithuanian cultural objects and natural sites for the UNESCO World Heritage List. In 2000 the whole Curonian Spit, as a trans-border region belonging to Russia (Kaliningrad Oblast) and Lithuania, was accepted on the UNESCO World Heritage List as an outstanding example of a landscape of sand dunes under constant threat by natural forces.35 In this way Nida’s local heritage was officially globalised and made into ‘World Heritage’. Despite this process of globalising local heritage, it simultaneously contributed to nationalising local heritage. Shakley has stated that all World Heritage Sites are also national flag carriers, universally recognised symbols of national identity.36 In the same vein, I suggest that although the aims of UNESCO are to preserve global heritage, the Curonian Spit as a World Heritage Site represents a powerful evocative symbol of Lithuanian national identity. In fact, with the Curonian Spit’s emergence as an accepted World Heritage Site, the Lithuanian state demonstrates that it is the legitimate owner of the Spit’s cultural heritage. At the same time, Lithuanian tourist officials and politicians hope that this award will increase the interest of international tourists in visiting the country. Lithuania’s unspoiled nature as well as its cultural heritage is presented as its greatest tourist attraction. In tourist leaflets, brochures and guidebooks, this cultural heritage, including the Curonian Spit’s fishermen’s artefacts and architecture like the Nida church and the cemetery, as well as age-old traditions and folklore, is praised and marketed appropriately.

34 UNESCO, “Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property,” United Nations Treaty Series 823 (1970), 238. 35 UNESCO World Heritage—Curonian Spit, http://whc.unesco.org/pg.cfm?cid= 31&id_site=994 (accessed June 12, 2009). 36 Myra Shackley, ed., Visitor Management: Case Studies from World Heritage Sites (London, 1998).

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Indeed, as Reinhard Johler has stated, ‘cultural heritage’ has become an important niche in the European tourist economy,37 and Lithuania has definitely sought out the ‘heritage industry’ for its economic development. Since independence, national and local political efforts have concentrated on the implementation of a new touristic infrastructure on the Curonian Spit so as to meet Western European standards. Much attention was given to a redefined cultural infrastructure, new museums opened and cultural festivals take place during the summer months. Narratives of the age-old Curonian fishing population and its specific and outstanding cultural heritage are mobilised as important cultural capital in the process of marketing the Curonian Spit. The typical Curonian boats (Ger.: Kurenkahn) are re-mobilised as the most important symbol of Curonian heritage. While the former GermanCuronian population used them in fishery, these boats have disappeared from the lagoon since they left and the fishery was motorised. Only recently were a few of the boats rebuilt and used for tourist trips on the lagoon. Commodities that were popular tourist souvenirs during German sovereignty, like the Kurenwimpel (weather-vanes), are once again being sold as profitable tourist items.38 It is striking that these present-day Kurenwimpel carved by Lithuanian carpenters have acquired new Lithuanianised interpretations. Saleswomen working in small tourist boutiques in Nida, for example, explain the meaning of these ‘Curonian-Lithuanian’ objects to curious tourists: “You know, our ancestors, the Curonians, were pagans and they believed in the sun and moon; that’s why these symbols are presented on the weather-vanes.” In the redefined Lithuanian tourist market, artefacts, which once used to represent the German-Curonian heritage, are now being used and reinterpreted flexibly. Thus, tourist items from pre-war times are remobilised and combined with heritage interpretations from Soviet and post-Soviet times, and in this way are made into typical present-day Lithuanian tourist souvenirs. In this way, traces from various periods of the past are mobilised for the present-day making and commodification of Curonian heritage. These examples demon-

37 Reinhard Johler, “Europe, Identity Politics and the Production of Cultural Heritage,” Lietuvos Etnologija, Lithuanian Ethnology. Studies in Social Anthropology and Ethnology 2 (2002), 10. 38 Anja Peleikis, “Tourism and the Making of Cultural Heritage: The Case of Nida/ Curonian Spit, Lithuania,” in Defining Region: Baltic Area Studies from Sociocultural Anthropology and Interdisciplinary Perspectives, eds. Rimantas Sliužinskas and Vytis Čiubrinskas (Klaipėda 2006), pp. 101–114.


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strate that heritage in independent Lithuania has become an important resource of economic capital used by local and national actors in attracting tourists. The question appears as to how do the former German inhabitants who have returned as ‘roots-tourists’ since 1990 to the Curonian Spit as well as German heritage tourists encounter these Lithuanian narratives of their local heritage? And how do the Lithuanian tourist representatives manage heritage dissonance? With the following ethnographic example I will demonstrate how multiple versions and interpretations of the Curonian heritage co-exist in the present. While in many places the question ‘whose heritage?’ can lead to fierce contestation and struggles, my case reveals that divergent heritage interpretations can also co-exist. They contribute to the (re-)making of diverse (trans-)local identities and are multi-sold and multi-consumed by different groups of tourists.

Multiple Heritage Productions During my fieldwork in Nida I repeatedly accompanied tour guides. Once I followed a Lithuanian guide showing a group of German tourists around the so-called ‘Nida ethnographic cemetery’. They were passing through the new cemetery gate, which carries a sign in German and Lithuanian reading: “I am the resurrection and the life.” (Ich bin die Auferstehung und das Leben.) The guide, Aušra Rimantienė,39 a woman in her 40s, provided explanations of the Spit’s old Curonian population and explained: The Curonians were an archaic Baltic tribe with very exotic habits and a very special tradition, very unique for Lithuania. Many of the crosses are Lithuanian krikštai. Krikštai can be shaped like a horse’s head, birds or plants and are placed at the foot of the grave. The Curonians believed that if the dead want to get up they can hold on to the krikštai to pull themselves up.

She also explained that this is a historic cemetery and no longer in use: This cemetery is taken care of by the ‘National Department of Cultural Heritage protection’, which does its best to protect these wooden traces of Lithuania’s past.

39

All personal names have been changed in this text.

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While the guide was passing on her colourful information on the lives of the pre-Christian Curonians, just next to the tourist group an elderly woman was on her knees, cleaning a grave and planting some flowers on it. When I later came to talk to this woman, she was very upset about the explanations of the Lithuanian guide: Look at this, here is the grave of my grandparents. I was born in Nidden and my parents and grandparents were born in Nidden as well. Have a look, there are crosses with German inscriptions all over. This was our local cemetery. We were good Protestants, we buried our dead in a Christian way and we were Germans. Why do the Lithuanians only stress the archaic Curonian past and do not mention us, the former inhabitants?

This example depicts various fractures and different narratives of the local past. While the tour guide presents the cemetery as an ethnographic historical cemetery of the ancient Curonians of Lithuanian nationality, the old German woman who was born in Nidden remembers her Protestant family members who were buried in this local cemetery before World War II. The woman, 80-year-old Anna Pietsch, returned to Nida for the first time—in 45 years—in 1990, and since then has returned nearly every year. Despite extensive destruction, some of the pre-war graves have survived the Soviet period,40 so that Anna Pietsch was able to find the grave of her family. She then started to restore it. She commissioned a new cross, set it up, planted flowers and redid the edging of the grave. Since Lithuania’s independence, the face of Nida’s cemetery has changed considerably. Every year new crosses are put up and new flowers are planted by the former inhabitants. They do not ask for permission but practise what they believe is their right and their moral duty. They used to belong to the local families of Nidden and in their understanding, therefore, have ‘roots’ in the village, as demonstrated by the graves of their ancestors. This ancestral genealogy as well as their former citizenship legitimise, in their view, their claims to the present-day cemetery. Some of the former inhabitants express their wish to be buried in ‘their’ cemetery when they die, to rest close to their ancestors and in their Heimaterde (homeland soil). 40 On the post-war destruction of cemeteries in Lithuania Minor see Martynas Purvinas, “Die Vernichtung der Friedhöfe im Memelland nach 1944: Die politischen, ideologischen, sozialen, psychologischen und andere Gründe dieses Sakrilegiums,” Annaberger Annalen 8 (2000), http://jahrbuch.annaberg.de/jahrbuch/2000/ Annaberg%20Nr.8%20Kap4.pdf (accessed June 24, 2009).


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I suggest that in revisiting the cemetery and caring for the graves they create an opportunity to symbolically reconnect to their ancestors and to their own local past. The cemetery and the church are in fact the strongest symbols of their local pre-World War II history and lives as well as the break and rupture they experienced in the context of war and displacement. With every visit Anna Pietsch walks across the cemetery—often together with a local friend from her school-days in Nidden. As not all the graves are reconstructed, they walk by and try to remember who was buried where. By recalling the names of the former Niddener it seems as if they symbolically try to bridge the gap of 60 years of absence. The local people who died before and ‘stayed behind’ and those who left appear closely linked in their present-day narrative. Thus, their practices in the Nida cemetery are a way of working through their own personal history. Meeting other former inhabitants in Nida has offered them the possibility to remake their translocal identities in the context of new political changes and travel possibilities. In contrast to Anna Pietsch, who stands for many former inhabitants, the Lithuanian tourist guide Aušra Rimantienė actually speaks of a very different past of the local cemetery. She describes the graveyard as a place of pagan, pre-Christian Curonians, who used exotic grave markers, referring to an ancient Baltic culture. In her descriptions, the Curonians were a Lithuanian tribe living side by side with many other ethnic groups in Lithuania. Furthermore, the cemetery appears as an ethnographic relic from a long distant past and not as a place with a ‘living memory’, where people mourn their relatives and ancestors. Aušra Rimantienė is not originally from Nida and has gathered her knowledge from information leaflets she received during her training as a tourist guide. Thus, she represents the official national narrative of the local past and heritage which is presented to tourists in Nida originating from all over the world. This narrative reveals much of the official version presented and spread during Soviet-times when the German past of the place was ignored and untold. However, as most of the Western tourists on the Curonian Spit are Germans who are particularly interested in Germany’s cultural heritage in the region, tourist officials have started to consider the demands of well-off German tourists who partially question the ageold Lithuanianness of the place and search for traces of the German past. Thus, there have been some initial attempts to integrate interpretations of the German history of the place into some tourist information. Another example is the case of a hotel owner, whose hotel

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was built in the place of another hotel where the famous Nidden artist colony was based before World War II. She asked the German granddaughter of the former German hotel owner to produce a small exhibition on the artist colony and the life-history of her family. Since then the exhibition as part of the hotel has attracted many—above all German visitors—and the present-day hotel owner has profited from the positive resonance. This example also makes evident the close connection between heritage representations and economic interests. Probably the temporal distance from Soviet times, the process of redefining Lithuanian national identities in the context of Europeanisation as well as the rising interest of Lithuanian historians in the East Prussian past may lead to new reinterpretations of the local heritage as well.

Concluding Remarks This case study has revealed the multiple, contesting and changing production of local heritage and identities in the Curonian Spit over time. Since the early days of tourism, heritage has been effectively mobilised as a powerful economic and cultural resource in attracting tourists as well as producing local and national identities. While the Curonian heritage was depicted in national-socialist terms during the Nazi regime, it was represented through the lens of socialist ideology during Soviet times. Towards the end of the Soviet regime, Lithuanian nationalist interpretation of Curonian heritage found its expression and continued into Lithuanian sovereignty. Moreover, the designation of Curonian heritage as a World Heritage Site under the international legal regime of UNESCO has—somehow paradoxically—supported the Lithuanian national interests and attracted more international tourists towards the Spit. During these different periods the respective local population has appropriated and localised external influences in their attempts to define local identities which has produced at any time specific inextricable interdependencies of local, national and global elements in the making of localised heritage and identity. The case of the former German inhabitants has shown that—over many years of absence—people have continued to rework their translocal identities and narratives of local heritage which are contested by local heritage narratives of the present-day Lithuanian population.


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However, while conflicts over the interpretation of heritage are often vehement and linked to questions of violent and powerful struggles over ownership, the presented case rather reveals that contradicting heritage narratives and claims may also co-exist. Given our case this has to be understood against the background of socio-political as well as economic interests. As the heritage practices of the former inhabitants attract German tourists in search of a German-Prussian past, local and national Lithuanian representatives accept the practices of the former inhabitants. On the other hand, the former inhabitants generally do not question Lithuania’s presentday sovereignty and the consequences of the “Two Plus Four Agreements”,41 in which Germany renounced all territorial claims east of the Oder-Neisse line. They do not come back to recapture their property but to re-visit their past and to symbolically re-link to it. Present-day local Lithuanians who themselves had experienced flight, migration and relocation to a new and unknown place generally understand and accept these heritage practices. Probably the heritage practices of the former inhabitants may also influence the contemporary local population who may pick up elements and integrate them into their present-day versions of the local past. Hence, the production of heritage appears to be mobile, highly flexible and malleable. It can be interpreted in many ways for numerous purposes, sequentially or simultaneously. The same building, the same location can thus in many cases fulfil the identification needs of different people or different scales. Different claims may be reconciled once the problems are recognised and mutual claims respected.*

41 The “Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany”, also called “Two Plus Four Agreements”, is the final peace treaty negotiated between the Federal Republic of Germany, the German Democratic Republic, and the Four Occupation Powers. It was signed in Moscow in September 1990. In this treaty Germany finally accepted the territorial losses imposed on it after 1945.

* Between 2002 and 2007, I carried out 16 months of anthropological fieldwork in the village of Nida (Ger. Nidden), on the Curonian Spit, Lithuania. During this period I also visited former German inhabitants in their homes in Germany. The Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle/Saale, Germany, funded this project within the framework of its research group ‘Legal Pluralism’. I thank Ulrike Freitag and Achim von Oppen for their thoughtful comments on an earlier version of this article.

SHIFTING GLOBALITIES—CHANGING HEADGEAR: THE INDIAN MUSLIMS BETWEEN TURBAN, HAT AND FEZ Margrit Pernau Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin

The Mughals were the last in a succession of Muslim dynasties ruling over a large part of India. The first emperor, Babur, invaded India at the end of the fifteenth century. His empire was consolidated under his grandson Akbar and nominally lasted until the British exiled the last ruler to Rangoon after the failed rising of 1857. Ruled by a Muslim dynasty, one might assume that the Mughal empire would form part of what John Voll called “Islam as a World System”, a world system which had its basis in the common religion, its centre in Arabia and the Arab language and culture as a common frame of reference.1 This constitutes an important challenge to our assumptions of globality in at least two respects. On the one hand, it opens up the possibility that globality might not uniquely be brought about by economics and, more concretely, the expansion of a capitalist world order, but permits us to take into consideration other factors shaping interaction and entanglement between localities. On the other hand, it questions the idea of a unique and homogeneous globality. Instead it becomes possible to think about plural and interacting globalities, of zones of intensive communication, but also of zones of non-communication, of fault-lines and of ruptures. However, posting Islam as the basis from which a world-system evolves is a highly problematic assumption, as it presupposes religion to be the central unifying force which links Muslims from different regions. Moreover, the focus on Islam as the bonding influence leads to its homogenisation—the Islamic globality, no less than the religion, would thus of necessity be Arabo-centric. The present contribution aims at challenging these assumptions. My hypothesis would be that there was not one pre-modern Islamic world

1 John Obert Voll, “Islam as a Special World System,” Journal of World History 5, 2 (1994), 213–226.

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system, but at least two (the Ottoman Empire oscillating between an orientation to either of them and the creation of a centre of its own) which partly overlapped: an Arabic one, centred on the sea trade of the Indian Ocean, stretching from the Arabian Peninsula to the East African coast in the west and to the Indian Coromandel coast, Malaysia and Indonesia in the east. The second, land-based one would encompass Central Asia, Persia and India; here the lingua franca, both linguistically and culturally would be Persian.2 Arabic was of course known to a good number of religiously learned men in India, but before the second half of the eighteenth century, even their knowledge was largely mediated by interpreters belonging to the Persianate and Central Asian world, Sufis as well as scholars. Religion certainly was important to create a feeling of belonging, for some Muslims more and for others less and for some even not at all, but so were language, norms of social interaction and even knowledge of the same poems. While this hypothesis asks for serious research on Sufi networks and scholarly traditions, on trade routes, migration patterns, and on the creation of genealogies,3 my paper will proceed on a much lighter vein, following the changes in Indo-Muslim headgear. Though not as serious as following back lines of commentators on classical texts, I hope the topic nevertheless not to be trivial. The choice of headgear—whether imposed by the state, a ruling group or following fashion and individual taste—both creates and expresses an identity, at the personal as well as at the collective level.4 Wearing or not wearing a turban, tying it in a certain way or dropping it for a cap, a hat or a fez,

2 See the article by Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Dreaming an Indo-Persian Empire in South Asia, 1740–1800,” in Explorations in Connected History: Mughals and Franks, ed. idem (Delhi, 2005), pp. 173–210, a fascinating counterfactual musing, posing the question, what would have happened if Nadir Shah had not only invaded North India in 1739 (which he did) but stayed on (which he didn’t, but which he might have done). This in turn serves as a starting point to challenge the teleological assumption that history of necessity evolved towards the creation of a nation encompassing the whole of South Asia and only South Asia. Instead, the cultural and economic links between India and its northern neighbours are drawn out, which might well have led to the formation of a very different polity, encompassing North India (but not the south), Persia, Afghanistan and the southern fringes of Central Asia. 3 First steps in this direction have been taken in Pierre Chuvin, ed., Inde—Asie Centrale: Routes du commerce et des idées (Tashkent, 1996). On trade relations see Jos Gommans, The Rise of the Indo-Afghan Empire (Leiden, 1995). 4 Cornelia Bohn, Clothing as Medium of Communication, available on: www.unilu .ch/documente/docus_rf/clothing_as_medium_of_communication.pdf (accessed February 22, 2007).

the indian muslims between turban, hat and fez

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is a reliable indicator of the community a person or a group claims to belong to. This community may be the Islamic umma, but it may also be regionally, ethnically, linguistically or socially defined. Focusing on the Indian Muslims, this paper aims to show the translocal movement of headgears and thereby to identify shifts in the boundaries of the global systems as well as in their cultural centres. The first part looks at the early Mughal turban and tries to situate it in its Persian and Central Asian context; it then proceeds to consider the localisation of this global model in the turban of the emperor Akbar, which became the model for the Mughal elite, both Muslims and Hindus, for more than two centuries. The second part follows the loss of political and cultural hegemony of the Mughal Empire in the eighteenth century through the emergence of local traditions in headgear, which served to identify ethnical factions and rising provincial powers. The third part looks at the advent of the British colonial power, bringing with it a different sartorial history and reference system. It shows how the British proceeded from adaptation by wearing turbans themselves, to the highly exclusionary symbol of the sun helmet. The fourth and last part follows the search for an Islamic identity on the part of the Indian Muslims under and after colonial rule, leading first to spreading an unostentatious and plain turban, then to the adoption of the Ottoman fez. Some concluding remarks point to the development of a new global Islamic fashion, based on a literal interpretation of the hadith, the traditions of the Prophet considered normative. This interpretation nowadays is diffused widely through the internet.

Localising the Persianate Turban Babur, the prince, who was to become the first Mughal emperor of India, was the fifth in descent from Timur. It was as a Central Asian ruler that he saw himself and that he was perceived by others. In spite of the fact that his conquests led him to the south—first to Kabul and then across the passes of the Hindukush to North India—it was the recovery of Samarqand which remained his life’s aim and the focal point of his mental map.5 The Chaghatai-Turk identity that this first generation of the Mughal elite cultivated was profoundly impregnated

5

Richard C. Foltz, Mughal India and Central Asia (Karachi, 1998).

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by Persian court culture, an influence which became even more deeply entrenched in the next generation, when Babur’s son Humayun suffered a series of defeat against the Afghan rulers of North India and had to take refuge at the Isfahan court of Shah Tahmasp. Unfortunately, contemporary Central Asian miniature portraits seem to be rare. An illustration of the diwan of Hafiz, originating from Herat in the early sixteenth century shows the men wearing the bulb-like Persian turbans, wrapped around a cap which ended in a stiff sheath, and, as a sign of distinction, ornamented with a feather.6 This is the turban Babur, Humayun and their entourage continued wearing in India. In an environment perceived as foreign, it marked their belonging to the Central Asian and Persianate cultural universe.7 Religion certainly did play a role—they were very well aware of being Muslims and thus distinct from their new Hindu subjects. However, their main opponents in India were not the Hindus, but those Muslim dynasties, mainly of Afghan origin, already settled in the country. From the early Mughal paintings onward the iconography depicting the first two emperors with this turban remained constant.8 A miniature held by the National Museum at Delhi shows the crossing of a river, painting a vivid portrayal of Babur and his entourage. The entire upper half of the picture is taken up by the boat of the emperor, showing him sitting cross-legged under a richly decorated canopy, accompanied by his son and high dignitaries. The lower half shows the efforts of the army fighting against the waves and a particularly vicious looking crocodile. Although the painting dates from the late sixteenth century, long after the sartorial style of the Mughal rulers had changed, most of the men are still depicted with the bulb-like Central Asian turban, either in white or in subdued colours, while Babur, his son and

6 The prince entertained on a terrace, from a manuscript of a diwan by Hafiz, dated 1523, Herat, http://www.asia.si.edu/collections, © Smithonian Institution. 7 Unfortunately, I have so far not been able to trace written sources for the early times, which would permit us to take into consideration the meaning the actors themselves accorded to their different headgear. While a quick skimming of the memoirs of the first Mughal rulers did not reveal any references to turbans, malfuzat, collections of the sayings of Sufi saints and fatwa collections might prove more useful. This however calls for the work of a specialist in medieval Indian history. 8 Babur crossing River Son. A folio from the Babur-nama, dated 1598. Daljeet, Mughal and Deccani Paintings from the Collection of the National Museum (Delhi, 1999), p. 38.


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one of the high nobles are distinguished by the traditional turban with the stiff sheath and the ornamental feather. The Mughals always remained aware of their Central Asian origins, which bestowed them distinction in a social system in which the essential difference was held to be between those Muslims (the ashraf ) who immigrated from the Islamic heartlands—Central Asia, Afghanistan, Persia and to a very much lesser extent and rarely directly, but rather through Persia or Central Asia, Arabia—and those who converted locally (the ajlaf ).9 Miniatures depicting the genealogy of the dynasty, as in the painting of 1658, which shows the dynastic line from Timur to Aurangzeb, therefore take great care to visualise this status.10 The Mughal empire almost until its demise formed part of a Central Asian global world system, drawing a permanent flow of immigrants—soldiers, artists, scholars, saints and poets. Their influence is shown in the architecture and layout of a city like Delhi as much as in monuments like the Taj Mahal at Agra. It can be traced in the genealogies of the major Sufi orders as well as in the status Persian held as the language of the court and courtly society, but also of poetry and scholarship far into the colonial period. Having learned his art from a teacher born and bred in Persia was one of the claims to excellence brought forth by the poet Mirza Ghalib in the nineteenth century. However, the Mughal dynasty simultaneously struck deep roots in India. Akbar, the third emperor, to this day is known for his efforts to bring forth a cohesive elite composed of Hindus, notably the rulers of the Rajput states, as well as Muslims, who were united by reference to a common Indo-Persian culture. In place of the close ties his family traditionally had cultivated with the Naqshbandi Sufis, he favoured the Chishtis, who had opened up to the encounter with Hindu saints and

9 Imtiaz Ahmad, “The Ashraf-Ajlaf Dichotomy in Muslim Social Structure in India,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 3 (1966), 268–278. For the transformation of these categories see also Margrit Pernau, “Transkulturelle Geschichte und das Problem der universalen Begriffe,” in Area Studies und die Welt: Weltregionen und neue Globalgeschichte, ed. Birgit Schäbler (Wien, 2007), pp. 117–150. 10 A Dynastic Line from Timur to Aurangzeb, composition ca. 1685, Nour Foundation no. 874, in Sheila Canby, Humayun’s Garden Party: Princes of the House of Timur and Early Mughal Painting (Bombay, 1994), pp. 88–89. The painting shows Timur (Sahib-e Qiran) in the middle, Babur is the third to his left, Humayun the third to his right. While they are depicted with the Central Asian turban, the painter seems well aware of the change in fashion occurring over the centuries, as their descendants are correctly shown with the turban of their own time.

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were held in veneration by both Hindus and Muslims. He patronised Indian artists, musicians, painters and artisans and his tomb remains a powerful symbol of the bringing together of the Central Asian concept of the garden tomb, Persianate architecture and Hindu craftsmanship. These developments are reflected in the headgear. Under Akbar, the large Central Asian turban became much smaller and moved towards the back of the head. Its folds were held together by a strap, which by its elaborate ornamentation became an indicator of the social rank of the individual. A miniature from the Akbarnama, dated 1604, shows Akbar hearing a petition. While the petitioner by his beard and turban seems to be a Persian, Akbar and his entourage wear their turbans in the new style, which no longer permits a differentiation according to ethnic or religious criteria within the elite.11 The origins of this turban still remain to be researched more in detail. However, contemporary Rajasthani miniatures seem to indicate that Akbar might have been influenced by the sartorial style of his Rajput allies—possibly the Mughal turban could be traced back to the traditional headgear of the rulers of Jaipur and Jodhpur.12 Within a few years, this turban became dominant as the courtly headgear not only at Akbar’s court and throughout Rajasthan, but also far into the south of the subcontinent, in the Deccan.13 Although some changes occurred in the following centuries—initiated by the ruler and taken up by the nobility—notably in the breadth of the strap and in the size and shape of the rear folds, the cultural hegemony of the Mughal court held sway until well into the eighteenth century.14 If the symbolism of the headgear tells us anything at all, the elites of the Mughal Empire did not see themselves primarily as part of a world defined by Islam and centred in Arabia, but of a translocal and transimperial universe, based on the reference to Persianate culture, albeit in 11 Akbar hears a petition, from an Akbarnama, ca. 1604, http://www.asia.si.edu/ collections, © Smithonian Institution. 12 Miniatures at the National Museum in Delhi. An expert on Rajasthani history and painting, before and during the Mughal period might certainly provide further elucidation on this point. 13 Daljeet, Mughal and Deccani Paintings from the Collection of the National Museum. 14 Hermann Goetz, “Kostüm und Mode an den indischen Fürstenhöfen in der Großmogul-Zeit (16.–19. Jahrhundert): Ein Beitrag zur Chronologie und Kulturgeschichte der Indischen Miniatur-Malerei,” Jahrbuch der asiatischen Kunst 1 (1924), 67–101.


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a strongly localised version. It has to be left to further research to spell out in how far this sense of belonging mirrored a system of interaction and whether it linked up with communication patterns of knowledge, directions of migration and trade routes. Although the Mughal elite was numerically dominated by Muslims, it was held together not by religion, but by a culture potentially open to other faiths. Notably the Mughlai turban was certainly not seen as a Muslim symbol—we even come across miniatures depicting Lord Krishna wearing it.15

Diversification and Individualisation The Mughal Empire reached its greatest extent with the conquest and incorporation of the Deccan by Aurangzeb, Akbar’s great-grandson (1618–1707). His religious policy is to this day the subject of intensive historiographical debate and it is still not possible to properly distinguish between the historical Aurangzeb and his image as an orthodox and fanatical Muslim, bent on subjugating the Hindus. Be it as a result of a reversal of the policy aiming at the creation of a composite elite or as a result of the economic overstretching of the empire, the fissures which had developed during his reign led to a rapid disintegration after his death, facilitated by a number of rapidly changing and weak rulers.16 What is interesting in respect to our topic is that the factions at court and the revived or newly created principalities (notably the kingdom of Awadh, the state of Hyderabad, the confederation of the Marathas and the Rajput states), almost immediately began to challenge the Mughal cultural hegemony of the courtly turban. It would be a most rewarding task to compare the detailed portraits of the assemblies of the nobility at the imperial court, which pay careful attention to the attire of the nobles and usually include the names of the individuals, in order to develop a typology of the headgears. As far as can be assumed at the moment, the tendency to demarcate ethnic and regional identity by different ways of tying the turban, in most cases however without completely relinquishing the Mughal pattern, seems to have started in the 15

National Museum, Delhi, ed., Miniature Paintings of Rajasthan (Delhi, n.d.). For an introduction into the different interpretations brought forth as explanations for the decline of the Mughal Empire, see John F. Richards, The Mughal Empire (Cambridge, 1993). 16

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eighteenth century already. This made it possible to distinguish a noble from Jodhpur from one hailing from Jaipur or Udaipur by his turban— not to speak of the Maratha turban or of Hyderabad and Awadh, which altogether gave up the turban in favour of a cap- or hat-like headwear. This development reached its height in nineteenth century British policy towards the so-called Indian states, those 500-odd principalities which were not incorporated into the system of direct rule, but governed by indigenous rulers, linked to the British empire by a subsidiary alliance based on treaties and controlled by a British Resident. In an effort to re-traditionalise these principalities and to demarcate their separate identity, the British paid much attention to upholding (or aiding in the invention of ) distinct headgears. The official painting of the darbar on the occasion of the coronation of the British Emperor of India in 1911 is a wonderful suggestion of this creation of oriental magnificence and diversity. It underlined the difference between the oriental rulers and the political culture of the West, but also their distinctiveness from one another, which denied the idea of a unified Indian nation.17 While this movement led to a diversification according to regional, ethnic and at times religious criteria, a second movement occurred simultaneously at the centre. Here, the cultural hegemony of the Mughal turban since the eighteenth century gave way to individualisation even at the very centre. A miniature showing Shah Akbar II (r. 1807–1837) in court reveals an extraordinary diversity of headgear. While the ruler himself still held to a smallish version of the traditional turban, almost disappearing behind the broad and jewelled strap, even his sons standing next to him in front of the throne have taken to wearing a cap, though decorated with the traditional jewelled strap.18 Bahadur Shah, his eldest son, continued wearing this cap after his accession. Notwithstanding the cultural rivalry between Delhi and Lakhnau, this seems to have been the same cap, panels of four, sometimes five identical parts sewn together (symbolising the panchia, the five members of the Prophet Muhammad’s family), made fashionable by the Nawabs of

17 See Charles Allen, and Sharada Dwivedi, Lives of the Indian Princes (London, 1984), frontispiece. 18 Court of Akbar II, ca. 1825, www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00routesdata/ 1700_1799/latermughals/akbar2nd/darbar.jpg (accessed April 22, 2008).


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Awadh.19 Perhaps the Shi’a inclinations of the Mughal ruler may have determined this decision. While most of the nobles still donned some kind of a turban at court and for formal occasions, for everyday wear a formless cap became the usual headgear, either similar to the one worn by Bahadur Shah, or, especially in the heat, a small and thin cap made of muslin. The Central Asian world still held its place on the mental map of the Indian Muslim elite.20 Even under British rule the boundaries were never really closed, neither to trade nor to the wandering of scholars and religious leaders. At least until the middle of the nineteenth century, and at least in North India and in Hyderabad, Persian remained the language of the elite, even after the British abolished its use as official language in 1835 and cut into its patronage. Nevertheless, compared to former centuries, these contacts were greatly reduced. Central Asia, but also the Indo-Persian culture of the Mughals were becoming objects of nostalgia, distant memories of a mythic past, but less and less of a lived reality—the fact that the poet Mirza Ghalib was so proud of his Persian teacher also shows how rare immigrants of the first generation had become in nineteenth century Delhi. Two new global systems vied for the allegiance of the Indian Muslims, the colonial world, and a new form of Arabo-centric Islam. Both brought with them new headgears.

Turban, Top Hat and Sun Helmet Recent research on European fashion in Europe has focused on the transition between the French Revolution and the 1830s.21 During this time, the clothing style of the nobility, its frocks made of costly and colourful material, its short trousers and silk stockings, were replaced as an ideal by the sober dressing of the middle classes, finding its expression in their grey or black frocks and long trousers. To this corresponded the replacing of the tricorne by the top hat. 19

Abdul Halim Sharar, Lucknow: The Last Phase of an Oriental Culture, trans. and ed. E.S. Harcourt and Fakhir Hussain (Delhi, 1994). 20 For the relative importance given to news from the different world regions see Margrit Pernau, “The Delhi Urdu Akhbar: Between Persian Akhbarat and English Newspapers,” Annual of Urdu Studies 18 (2003), 1–27. 21 Sabina Brändli, ‘Der herrlich biedere Mann’: Vom Siegeszug des bürgerlichen Herrenanzuges im 19. Jahrhundert (Zürich, 1998).

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Though permitting for some local variations, these sartorial symbols quickly transcended national boundaries—the top hat marked the line which divided the new middle class male from the nobility as well as from the subaltern classes, from women, whose passion for finery contrasted with male sobriety and from the Orientals, whose colourful dressing showed their lack both of civilisation and of real manliness. These changes took time to reach India. Longer than in Europe, colonial officers still subscribed to the life style of the nobility, not least in their dressing. A red frock, a waistcoat of brocade, silken stockings, wig and tricorne marked them out as Europeans and nobles at the same time.22 However, these early colonial officers were but ambivalent propagators of the new, Western globality. Without relinquishing their claim to power, they at least partially adapted to Mughal courtly culture, speaking and writing Persian fluently to the extent of participating at poetical gatherings, and adapting to the life-style and the dress-code of the local nobility. At least for informal occasions, the British preferred the loose garments made of light fabric, which their Indian counterparts wore and which were so much more comfortable than the tight coats made for a colder climate. The hubble-bubble and the turban completed their outfit as local nobles.23 The evangelical movement, which reached North India in the 1830s, not only reminded the British of their Christian identity, and thus re-enforced the cultural boundary between them and the Indians, but also became one of the most important agencies for middle class values. On a miniature of 1825, which shows Akbar Shah II on his throne, the British resident for the first time appears in a black frock and white collar, thus clearly demarcated both from the ruler and from

22 See the portrait of William Fullerton, ca. 1760–63, in Barbara Schmitz, ed., After the Great Mughals: Painting in Delhi and the Regional Courts in the 18th and 19th Centuries (Mumbai, 2002), p. 39. 23 Wombwell, ca. 1760, in Schmitz, ed., After the Great Mughals, p. 53. For the culture of this generation of colonial officers see William Dalrymple, The White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in 18th Century India (London, 2002). However, the cultural adaption, which Dalrymple so colourfully depicts, did not take place in a power-free vacuum, but formed part of the early colonial effort to rule the subcontinent at minimal costs, therefore preferring a system of indirect rule based on alliances to formal annexation and administration.


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the courtiers.24 Very soon afterwards the Napoleonic hat was to be replaced by the top hat, which remained part of the official colonial dress code until the end of the empire25—the British rulers of India had effectively become part of the new global order. Unlike the Central Asian and the Indo-Persian translocal cultures, the British globality was highly ambivalent with regard to its own universality and the inclusion or exclusion of the elites it had subjugated. Colonial officers certainly interpreted the top hat as a sign of their own cultural superiority with regard to the turban wearing Orientals. “Dressing for dinner in the bush”,26 keeping to the rigorous British dress code under all situations and never giving in to the temptation of wearing more comfortable clothes prevented all adaptation to regional circumstances and thus a localisation of the global standards and the evolution of a common frame of reference between ruler and ruled. Colonial officers were expected, and after the 1830s did keep to their own side of the boundary which separated them from their indigenous subjects. In the name of the civilising mission Indians were asked to take over the new values—manliness, sobriety and cleanliness—symbolised in the top hat. At the same time, however, those who followed the call and dressed like Englishmen, crossing and challenging the boundary, which divided coloniser and colonised, were despised for their ridiculous attempts at aping the British and depreciated as a denationalised minority, representing no one but themselves. ‘Modernity’ and ‘civility’ were the etiquettes for a new global order to which access was very unequal. The triumph of the sun helmet since the 1870s therefore refers to new medical insights on the danger of sun strokes only at a first glance. Far more important was its symbolic value, both as a demarcation of the danger the Orient held for Europeans, and as a much more effective visualisation of the boundary separating the British and the Indians than the top hat had ever been.27

24 Akbar Shah II receiving the British Resident, Charles Metcalfe, in: Mildred Archer, Company Paintings: Indian Paintings of the British Period, (Victoria and Albert Museum, Indian Art Series) (London, 1992), p. 162. 25 The Delhi Sketchbook, vol. 1 (1850). 26 Helen Callaway, “Dressing for Dinner in the Bush: Rituals of Self-definition and British Imperial Authority,” in Dress and Gender: Making and Meaning in Cultural Contexts, eds. Ruth Barnes and Joanne B. Eicher (New York, 1991), pp. 232–248. 27 Francis A. de Caro and Rosan A. Jordan, “Topi: Personal Narratives, Ritual and the Sun Helmet as a Symbol,” Western Folklore (1984), 232–248.

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margrit pernau In Search for an Islamic Identity

Above it has been shown how the Central Asian/Persianate turban lost its position as courtly headgear at the time of the Mughal emperor Akbar. Actual portraits of religious scholars and Sufi saints are very rare, the ban on images naturally holding more importance for them then for the worldly elite. However, the emperor or one of the princes visiting a saint or otherwise, Sufi sheikhs or scholars coming to court, were traditional motifs often reproduced.28 While ascetics, both Hindus and Muslims, are often shown either without headgear or wearing a simple cap, scholars and Sufis of the established orders held on to the Central Asian/Persianate turban, even after it went out of fashion at the court. No less than the beard, a large turban, usually in white or in muted colours, wrapped in regular folds, was the insignia of the orthodox in the Mughal Empire, marking their ongoing integration into an Islamic world system. Though processes of localisation of spiritual and worldly knowledge certainly did take place—and the encounters between Sufis and Hindu saints were by no means limited to the Chishti order—they never reached the same level of integration as the courtly culture. But it is of central importance that this Islamic world system, the integration into which formed an important part of the identity of the scholars, was not the Arabo-centric one, but had its focus on Persia and Central Asia. From the middle of the eighteenth century, religion’s place within the social system, but also the fundamental principles of interpretation of the canonical texts, underwent a sea change, in India no less than in much of the Islamic world. Contrary to the widely held opinion that it was in pre-modern times that religion had its greatest influence, slowly giving way to secularisation, it was now that Islamic piety became important to the everyday life of an increasing number of individuals. Moreover, this piety increasingly was no longer based on rituals hallowed by tradition, but on a literal reading of the canonical texts. The history of the theological arguments, of the ascent of the manqulat, favouring the exegesis of canonical texts over the exertion of the reasoning faculty, and of the renewal of the hadith scholarship

28 Jahangir preferring a Sufi Sheikh to Kings (detail), 1615–1618, www.asia.si.edu/ collections, © Smithonian Institution; A visit to the ascetic, Indian Painting, Mughal School, 17th century, no. 7170, Musée national des Arts Asiatiques—Guimet, Paris.


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is well known and need not be repeated here.29 In India these changes are associated with the school of Shah Wali Ullah and the Naqshbandi mujaddidiyya. What is important for our argument is what this tells us about the transformation of the Islamic world system. Two developments deserve special mention: First, while the scholars, at least the elite among them, had certainly known Arabic and had been able to read and teach the classical texts and commentaries, the language of polite society, the language constituting the cultural reference system and binding a heterogeneous elite together and linking it with the cultural centres across the borders had been Persian. From the second half of the eighteenth century onward and even more pronouncedly in the nineteenth century, Persian lost this place—to the local Urdu as a language of everyday communication and of literature, to English as the new language to gain access to power and jobs, and to Arabic as the sacred language, the symbol of Islamic identity and the new medium of communication among Muslims from all regions of the world. The more Persian became associated with a decadent and effeminised nobility, lost in the recitation of poetry, lax in the performance of their religious duties and unable to lead the community of believers, the more Arabic stood for manly piety and the belonging to the worldwide umma.30 Second, the increasing emphasis which was placed on the veneration of the Prophet Muhammad led to the attempt to follow his example, as described in the hadith, in the minutest details of everyday life. Wearing a turban now no longer was a way of referring back to a Central Asian homeland and holding on to the community of those who claimed the same buzurg, the same spiritual and genealogical forefathers, but resulted from a conscious decision to cover one’s head in the way hallowed by the Prophet. As the scholarly and the courtly turban had already grown apart since the sixteenth century, this change in symbolism could take place without much of a corresponding change

29 See introduction of Barbara Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 1860–1900 (Princeton, 1982); Saiyid Athar Abas Rizvi, Shah Wali Ullah and His Time (Canberra, 1980); idem, Shah Abd al-Aziz: Puritanism, Sectarian, Polemics and Jihad (Canberra, 1982); Jamal Malik, Islamische Gelehrtenkultur in Nordindien: Entwicklungsgeschichte und Tendenzen am Beispiel von Lucknow (Leiden, 1997). 30 Marc Gaborieau, “Late Persian, Early Urdu: The Case of ‘Wahhabi’ Literature (1919–1857),” in Confluences of Culture: French Contributions to Indo-Persian, ed. Françoise Delvoye (Delhi, 1994), pp. 170–195.

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in the outward appearance. The turban of the scholars now at the same time consciously distinguished them from the Persianised nobility and marked them as sober members of the new middle class and as pious Muslims. Based on a tradition quoted by the medieval hadith scholar as-Sakhawi (1427–97) in his al-Maqasid al-hasana, it was the turban which now was held to constitute the dividing line between Muslims and unbelievers31 and the supreme visualisation of the Islamic identity. This symbolism worked out very well in most of the Muslim countries and also in India, as far as the division between the Muslims and the colonial power was concerned: the turban and the hat became the symbols demarcating the boundary between ruler and ruled. The ongoing struggle on this boundary is exquisitely played out in the novel Ibn ul Waqt, by the most famous Urdu novelist of the late nineteenth century, Nazir Ahmad.32 Like the author, the protagonist is an alumnus of the Delhi College, an institution hailed as the meeting ground between Oriental and Western knowledge. While he is drawn to British culture at an early age already, his family background and economic independence for some years prevent his becoming a moral slave to the colonial rulers, attempting at aping them. During the revolt of 1857 he saves the life of a wounded Englishman, Noble Sahib, nomen est omen. Soon a close friendship links both the men and Noble Sahib convinces Ibn ul Waqt that he is called to reform the Muslim community, a reform which in British eyes has of necessity to go hand in hand with its Anglicisation. Taken in by the arguments of his new friend and in spite of the warnings of his family and Muslim friends, Ibn ul Waqt gives up his house in the old city, moves to the cantonment and attempts to take up friendly intercourse with the British community. He invites them to dinner and, most importantly, he adapts to their manner of dressing: “This was like a baptism, not into Christianity, but into Anglicism.”33 The Imam warns him that although this sartorial style is not forbidden by Islam, he nevertheless should keep in mind that “one who makes his resemblance with a particular community becomes one of them.”34 Ibn ul Waqt is confident that he

31 Fazlur Rahman Azmi, Turban, Kurta, Topee: In the Light of the Sunnah and Practice of the Sahaba and Tabieen (Delhi, 2003). 32 Nazir Ahmad, Ibn ul Waqt, trans. Muhammad Zakir (as: The Son of the Moment) (Hyderabad, 2002). 33 Ahmad, Ibn al Waqt, p. 35. 34 Ibid., p. 63.


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will be able to keep apart religion and lifestyle, but the British clothes prevent him from being regular in his call to prayer: they are not cut in a way to permit a thorough ablution before the namaz and their tightness makes it awkward to bow and kneel properly. Therefore, Ibn ul Waqt prays less and less and finally turns to an enlightened theism. This leads to the Muslims of Delhi no longer considering him as one of them, but rather as the founder of a new sect. The integration into the British community, on the other hand, is hardly less problematic. Only the personal influence of Noble Sahib had so far prevented criticism. Once he returned to England, those British gained ascendancy, who resented the crossing of the sartorial boundaries by a native: “[Ibn ul Waqt] wants to become an English Sahib. Maybe he does not think so, but we take it to be impertinence.”35 As always in the highly didactic novels of Nazir Ahmad, a happy end follows: Ibn ul Waqt returns where he belongs and forthwith, once again, wears the turban. While the turban thus was highly successful in demarcating the Muslims from their Christian colonial masters, it could not perform as a visual distinction between the Muslims and the Hindus, who also wore turbans. Though the turbans of the Rajputs or the Marathas were quite different from the scholarly Muslim turban, this was an ethnic, rather than a religious difference. Muslims, Hindus, and even native Christians with a similar social and regional background could not be told apart by their headgear.36 It is here that the entangled history of the turban joins the equally entangled history of the fez. The origin of the fez cannot be established with certainty. The name would seem to indicate that this headgear had first been worn in the Maghreb. This would tally with the story that it had been brought to Istanbul from the western Mediterranean by the Ottoman fleet in the early decades of the nineteenth century.37 However, similar caps had also traditionally been worn by the Greek,

35

Ibid., p. 185. Compare the pictures of Maulawi Muhammad Zaka Ullah (Sunni Muslim), in C.F. Andrews, Zaka Ullah of Delhi, ed. and intro. Mushirul Hasan and Margrit Pernau (Delhi, 2003), and Master Ramchandra (Kayastha Hindu, converted to Christianity) in Ewin Jacob, A Memoir of Professor Yesudas Ramchandra of Delhi (Kanpur, 1902). 37 Donald Quataert, “Clothing Laws, State and Society in the Ottoman Empire, 1720–1829,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 29 (1997), 403–425, reference to 412. 36

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Albanian and Bosnian peasants.38 As part of the move to eradicate the importance of ethnic and religious differences and loyalties within the Ottoman Bureaucracy, the fez was made the obligatory headgear for all officers in 1829. Only the ulama were henceforth allowed to wear their traditional turbans. While the turban now carried exclusivist Islamic connotations, the fez was a symbol, which was perceived as both inclusive and religiously neutral.39 This however changed, once the Ottoman sultan began to emphasise his position as the universal Caliph, claiming allegiance from all of the world’s Muslims and becoming the rallying point for many of them. In the eyes of the European powers and most of the non-Arab Sunni Muslims, Ottoman, and Muslim identities were increasingly seen as coinciding. As an Ottoman symbol, the fez, too, became Islamised and transformed into the appropriate headgear for all Muslims. This held true for large parts of the British and French colonial armies, where the fez became part of the Muslims’ uniform. Its real triumph, however, came with the spreading of the Pan-Islamic movement. In India the fez fulfilled the Muslims’ need for a type of headgear which distinguished them from both the Hindus and the British, while being at the same time close enough to the Western hat not to offend the colonizers’ tastes and susceptibilities. It permitted them to imagine themselves as participating in the global modernity, epitomised by their British rulers (and adopted and adapted through the Ottoman reforms).40 At the same time it visualised their belonging to the worldwide community of believers, to an Islamic world-system, which, though no longer Central Asian and Persian, still was not unequivocally Arab, but centred in Istanbul. As such it was adopted first by Saiyid Ahmad Khan and the Aligarh movement in the 1870s. He held that the future of the Indian Muslim community lay in a close collaboration with the British colonial power, which would permit it to catch up with modern scientific and

38 Gabriella Schubert, Kleidung als Zeichen: Kopfbedeckungen im Donau-BalkanRaum (Wiesbaden, 1993). For a slightly later period see also the excellent work of Mary Neuburger, The Orient Within: Muslim Minorities and the Negotiation of Nationhood in Modern Bulgaria (Ithaca, 2004). 39 Quataert, “Clothing Laws.” 40 Selçuk Esenbel, “The Anguish of Civilized Behavior: The Use of Western Cultural Forms in the Everyday Lives of the Meiji Japanese and the Ottoman Turks during the Nineteenth Century,” Japan Review 5 (1994), 145–185.


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cultural developments and thus strengthen its position as a minority in the Indian subcontinent.41 In India, the fez experienced its widest diffusion during the time of the Khilafat movement, which brought the Muslims into a coalition with Mahatma Gandhi at the end of the First World War and merged the struggle against the British colonial power at home with the fight for the revision of the treaty of Sevres and the restoration of the Arab lands to the Turkish Sultan and Caliph. This commitment for the Caliph as the imagined symbol of the worldwide Islamic community was certainly important for the Indian Muslims. However, this importance accorded to the Caliph as a symbol was not matched by too great a knowledge or even interest in the actual developments taking place in the Ottoman Empire. The Khilafatists, in their very great majority, were as blissfully aware of conflicts between the rulers in Istanbul and Arab nationalists, as they were completely taken by surprise by the Kemalist drive towards secularism and laicism. The importance of the Caliph was primarily, if not exclusively, symbolic. He provided a rallying point, with which all the different schools, groups and regions of Indian Muslims could identify and under the banner of which they would enter the anti-colonial struggle. More than a Pan-Islamic symbol, for the Indian Muslims he was a PanIndian one,42 the local once again in the same move referring to the global, and deeply transforming it. Unequivocal as the Ottoman symbols seemed to the Indian Muslims— the Caliph no less than the fez—in reality they were highly contested: by the Arabs, who rejected them as signs of the Turkish dominations and not less by the Kemalist Turks themselves, who fought to distance themselves from the Ottoman past. Though the Indian Khilafat movement lingered on longer than the Caliphate and the fez even survived until the eve of independence, the Pan-Islamic community with a centre at Istanbul, which they had stood for, had ceased to exist.43

41 David Lelyveld, Aligarh’s First Generation: Muslim Solidarity in British India (Delhi, 1996 [1978]). 42 Gail Minault, The Khilafat Movement: Religious Symbolism and Political Mobilization in India (Delhi, 1982). 43 Hamza Alavi, “Ironies of History: Contradictions of the Khilafat Movement,” in Islam, Community and the Nation: Muslim Identities in South Asia and Beyond, ed. Mushirul Hasan (Delhi, 1998), pp. 25–56.

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margrit pernau Conclusion

Though the fez is no longer worn in India today, it has remained the iconographic symbol identifying the Indian Muslims.44 But what do they wear on their heads? What is the headgear—if any—which distinguishes them from their neighbours and marks their Islamic identity? And to which communities does it refer them? At least in urban settings, the use of any kind of head covering has drastically gone down, for Muslims no less than for Hindus. Except for the consciously pious, Muslims wear a cap, usually white and crocheted, only when reading the Koran, praying or entering a mosque or shrine.45 While lower classes may wrap a shawl round their head, a proper and elaborate turban (in different shapes) would point to a Sikh, a Rajasthani or to some Hindu religious leader, but only in few regions, as for instance in Kashmir, to a Muslim. At the same time books, pamphlets and above all the internet increase their efforts to model pious Muslim behaviour on the traditions of the Prophet. Collections of hadith are easily available, especially focusing on the headgear of the Prophet, on the length of his turban, on its colour, on whether to keep a cap under the turban and how to wrap it, so that its loose ends come to hang between the shoulders, as the Prophet himself favoured.46 This might point to attempts to create a new Islamic world system, whose members’ outlook, everyday life, dress and headgear would be purged of all localisations and conform to a global and uniform Islamic standard, based on the model of the Prophet and highly Arabo-centric. As long as our research on Muslim cultures and societies focuses on theological and normative texts, evidences abound for the existence of an Islamic world-system, held together by the primary importance of religion.

44 Shahid Amin, “Representing the Musulman: Then and Now, Now and Then,” in Subaltern Studies XII. Muslims, Dalits and the Fabrication of History, eds. Shail Mayaram, M.S.S. Pandian, and Ajay Skaria (Delhi, 2005), pp. 1–36. 45 I have so far not been able to trace the origin of this crocheted cap. While a cap in a similar shape was already popular in nineteenth century Delhi, it was at that time sewn of muslin. 46 Azmi, Turban, Kurta, Topee (several versions of which are on the internet); Shaikh Muhammad Hisham Kabbani, Questions on Islamic Dress and Head-dress for Men, http://sunnah.org/fiqh/islamic_dress.htm; http://shariahboard.com/fatwa/ Miscellaneous/i.html (accessed April 22, 2008).


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Social practices, however, may well point in quite a different direction. The rising importance accorded to correct headgear and the attempts to mark people as Muslims by the way they dress, thus constituting a visualising global identity for all Muslims, is reflected only to a very limited extent in their daily attire (Friday prayers being, of course, a case apart). If the sartorial code of the 140 million Indian Muslims counts for anything, if the identity markers they wear (or don’t wear) on their head tell us something about their sense of belonging, their wish to form part of an exclusively or even primarily Islamic globality, at the moment is not very strong—at least not strong enough to override competing identities.

RECLAIMING THE AFRICAN CITY: THE WORLD AND THE TOWNSHIP Terence Ranger Oxford

Introduction The twenty-first century has been hailed as the century of the Southern African city. Southern African cities are bursting through their colonial bonds; stimulated as well as distorted by neo-liberal globalisation. They are not only bigger than colonial cities; it is said in the dominant literature, but qualitatively different. Colonial cities were the receptacles of regional labour flows. Contemporary cities are the receptacles of global ones. The African populations of colonial cities could never stabilise nor create local urban identities. But contemporary African cities are creating multiple urban cultures. By contrast to their regional predecessors they are simultaneously essentially global and intensely local. It is the argument of this chapter, however, that the novelty of contemporary African cities is being over-stated. The regional model of the colonial city was always an intellectual construct rather than a reflection of reality. I shall argue that colonial cities, too, were both global and local and that the methods and questions of the new urban scholarship, if applied to them, would prove immensely fertile.

The Propositions of the Recent Literature on African Cities One of the many collective studies now under way on the African city is the Nordic Research Programme on ‘Cities, Governance and Civil Society in Africa’. A chapter in its first volume is suggestively entitled “Between Ghetto and Globe”. Abdou Maliq Simone writes: The globalisation of economic transactions, on the other hand, creates new urban arrangements, which compels cities to consider their prospects, complementary to those of urban entities in other countries, rather than securing their development within national space. Erstwhile

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terence ranger connections between physical [ . . . ] and social allegiances are less rooted in specific localities than spread across multiple territories, sectors and nations.1

Simone concentrates on the ever-widening networks of informal and criminal activity within Africa itself and their connections with the global economy. He shows, for instance, how the Sufi brotherhoods in Dakar use “extensive networks to control much of the mercantile sector of the Sahel and more recently, the highly lucrative trade in consumables and electronics from Asia.”2 He describes how the inner city of Johannesburg has “become a staging area for individuals from Francophone countries, Ethiopia, Somalia, Nigeria, Ghana and Kenya.”3 He brings his two national case studies together by remarking that “Soninke traders originally based in Dakar . . . [whom] I interviewed over ten years ago in Bangkok had built up substantial contacts in the port of Cape Town.”4 Simone concludes: If cities are increasingly characterised by parallel realities, Johannesburg harbours chasms in-between them, which, in turn, are being shaped as conduits that in small but significant ways contribute to a re-spatialisation of intra-continental contact . . . [ . . . ] to form an integrated urban system [of Johannesburg] but an almost built-in ability to ‘recognise’ where the city is located within a global urban system and within Africa itself. Johannesburg as an urban system seems to act like an ‘immigrant’ in its ‘own’ continent.5

A different way of conceptualising South African cities in a global world is suggested by Robert Thornton in his “step towards a theory of the social edge.”6 Thornton suggests that South Africa is really not so much a nation as it is the hinterland of three city-states: South Africa is a country stretched as thin as a sheet over three points of power and wealth. [They amount to city states, not just cities. They

1 Abdou Maliq Simone, “Between Ghetto and Globe: Remaking Urban Life in Africa,” in Associational Life in African Cites: Popular Response to the Urban Crisis, eds. Arne Tostensen, Inge Tvedten and Mariken Vaa (Uppsala, 2001), p. 46. 2 Simone, “Between Ghetto and Globe,” p. 52. 3 Ibid., p. 56. 4 Ibid., pp. 58–59. 5 Ibid., pp. 60–61. 6 Robert Thornton, “The Potentials of Boundaries in South Africa: Steps towards a Theory of the Social Edge,” in Postcolonial Identities in Africa, eds. Richard Werbner and Terence Ranger (London, 1996), pp. 136–161.

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are Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town] . . . the three main cities are all that matter, they mark the space around them and dominate their hinterlands, which look to them with desire and anticipation, loathing and disdain.7

The three city states look outwards—Cape Town and Durban to the Indian and Atlantic oceans, Johannesburg to the networks of all of continental Africa. The rest of South Africa looks to the cities.8 Kalipeni and Zeleza’s 1999 collection, Sacred Space and Public Quarrels, also sees African urban growth in the context of globalisation, but now as a constraining rather than a stimulating factor. Zeleza’s own chapter is entitled “The Spatial Economy of Structural Adjustment in African Cities”.9 This deals with what Zeleza calls “the ambitions of global capital to restructure the African material, symbolic and imaginary landscapes, through structural adjustment.”10 One result of structural adjustment, Zeleza says, was a demonisation of African cities, caricatured by their global rivals as “unproductive rent-seeking urban coalitions of corrupt elites and shiftless workers, who thrived on the exploitation of the rural peasantry.”11 Advocates of modernising, industrial development in Africa had to contend with global ideologies which pretended to privilege the immiserated rural areas. The result was large-scale urban unemployment, the criminalisation of the city, the expansion of urban agriculture,—“a ruralization of urban space.”12 Zeleza remarks that everywhere there was “destruction and recreation of urban social space and time by structural adjustment,” and instances Nairobi whose “colour, texture and vibrancy has changed noticeably since the late 1980s.”13 Structural adjustment, says Zeleza, first checked the growth of African cities and then ensured that that it would re-commence on a distorted and violent basis. The contemporary African city is the site of violence and riot. Yet at the same time as they emphasise the perverse stimulus of globalisation, these studies—and many more—lay as much emphasis

7

Thornton, “The Potentials of Boundaries in South Africa,” p. 154. Ibid. 9 Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, “The Spatial Economy of Structural Adjustment in African Cities,” in Sacred Spaces and Pubic Quarrels: African Cultural and Economic Landscapes, eds. Paul Tiyambe Zeleza and Ezekiel Kalipeni (Trenton, 1999), pp. 43–71. 10 Zeleza, “The Spatial Economy,” p. 44. 11 Ibid., p. 46. 12 Ibid., p. 54. 13 Ibid., p. 55. 8

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on the ‘local’ as they do on the global. Simone’s chapter, after all, is entitled “Between Ghetto and Globe” and having documented the sort of informal, criminalised activities that Zeleza’s analysis would suggest, it ends by emphasising the African city’s “enormous resilience and determination to use the symbolic, material and social resources at its disposal [ . . . ].”14 The question of where Africa’s cities are going, he suggests, “could be addressed by assessing [ . . . ] where African urban residents are going [ . . . ] Urban poverty is indeed growing worse [but] urban residents are not standing still. There is something going on [ . . . ] efforts are being made [ . . . ] to create interesting cities.”15 Zeleza argues that long regarded by the poor as a transit area, as a place that was not quite ‘home’, even for the middle class elites, the beleaguered structurally adjusted city increasingly came to be seen as ‘home’, a place that was worth struggling for. And so they sought to reinvent it, to reshape its spaces, signs, and symbols, to make it work for them.16

So current research projects focus on the ‘local’. Preben Kaarshom ends his paper on peri-urban space in South Africa and how to re-integrate it dynamically with old urban centres with these words: “For [our] research to make sense it seems necessary first to know more about local perceptions of what are steps forward and steps backward.”17 The Nordic project concentrates on African urban associational life—some of it international, some of it national, but most of it local. As in so much other discourse on globalisation, then. The focus of the new studies of African cities is simultaneously concerned with the international and the local. Both, of course, can be studied in the same post-modern, post-colonial perspective. Bodil Folke Frederisken, writing on “popular culture in the south” in Livelihood, Identity and Instability, emphasises a “de-centring” which has replaced older ideas of imperial cultural hegemony and has “meant the return of actors—

14

Simone, “Between Ghetto and Globe,” p. 60. Ibid., p. 61. 16 Zeleza, “The Spatial Economy,” p. 62. 17 Kaarsholm, “Instability, Migration and Violence: Notes on a South African PeriUrban Situation,” in Livelihood, Identity and Instability, eds. Bodil Folke Frederiksen and Fiona Wilson (Copenhagen, 1997), p. 57. 15


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those groups of people who carry and articulate the non-privileged discourses.”18

The Perspective of an Urban Social Historian Urban Africanist discourse has moved, then, from an older literature on African cities which saw them regionally to one which sees them both globally and locally. The older historical sociology of African cities was both too broad and not broad enough in its perspectives. It focussed on African regions of migration rather than international connections. But it assumed that the oscillations of regional migration were incompatible with the creation of local African urban identities. Its discourse was that of de and re-tribalisation rather than of the emergence of African urban communities. Here I should declare my interest. I am not a student of the contemporary African city, still less a prophet of the shape of cities to come. I am in fact working at the moment on a social history of one particular African city—Bulawayo in south-western Zimbabwe—and mainly on its first, and for a long time, its only African location, Makokoba. My book will stop in 1960 when Bulawayo was not yet a large city and when Makokoba was still a small location; when colonial influx controls, so far from being relaxed, were being intensified and rigorously enforced. That does not seem to have much to do with the new patterns of rapid urban growth; the new networks of continental and inter-continental interaction; the new emphases on struggles for an urban home. To make matters worse, I am a micro-historian. I believe with William Blake that all truth lies in minute particulars. My own inclination is to deal with what a recent Zimbabwean writer, Wonder Guchu, calls Sketches of High Density Life, carrying you into “a landscape where rumour, reality and urban myth converge”.19 My own book is to be entitled Bulawayo Burning, a title deliberately chosen to evoke 18 Bodil Folke Frederiksen, “Popular Culture in the South: Production and Reception,” in Livelihood, Identity and Instability, p. 171. 19 http://newwritinginternational.com/2006/05/15/sketches-of-high-density-life/ (accessed June 11, 2009), describing Wonder Guchu, Sketches of High-Density Life (Harare, 2003). Guchu’s tales are set in Zimbabwe’s other main city, Harare, which, in his depiction, has attracted many newcomers and thus formed a mystifying and confusing mix of languages and traditions.

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Butterfly Burning, the brilliant novel of Makokoba life in 1946 by the late lamented Yvonne Vera.20 In this book I shall aspire to take advantage of some of the freedoms of the novelist—to hold up the story and to freeze scenes; to develop individual characters; to present counter and even contradictory narratives.21 Yet I rejoice in the new urban perspectives, not despite the fact that I am a social historian of colonial towns but because of it. I can perhaps explain this best with reference to the book edited by Richard Werbner and myself, Postcolonial Identities in Africa.22 The book has a divided personality with its two editors firing at each other over the heads of the surprised contributors. In his Introduction, “Multiple Identities, Plural Arenas”, Werbner rejoices in the rich combination of every meaning of post-colonial.23 In my postscript I warn against a too rigid distinction between colonial and post-colonial. The contrast is misleading. Colonialism was much less coherent, simple and lucid than such dualism suggests. Colonial Africa was much more like postcolonial Africa than scholars have hitherto imagined. The dynamics of colonial society have continued to shape post-colonial society.24 This argument certainly applies to urban history. The new perspectives of African urban studies are the best way not only of looking at the contemporary and future realities but also of looking at the past realities of African cities. Newly published studies of urban Africa lay a great deal of emphasis on recent change. In fact they make too much

20

Yvonne Vera, Butterfly Buring (New York, 1998). The blurb says that the novel “captures the intense bitter-sweet flavour of township life: its joys and sorrows, its freedoms and restrictions, it ebullience and disenchantments”; its heroine seeks to “fly” but “the closely woven fabric of township life, where everyone knows everyone else, has a mesh too tight and too intricate to allow her to escape.” 21 So far I have published four examples of this Bulawayo work, “Dignifying Death: The Politics of Burial in Bulawayo, 1893–1960,” Journal of Religion in Africa 34, 1 (2004), 110–144; “The Meaning of Urban Violence: The Case of Bulawayo, 1929 to 1960,” Journal of Social and Cultural History 3, 2 (2006), 193–228; “City versus State in Zimbabwe: Colonial Antecedents to the Current Crisis,” Journal of Eastern African Studies 1, 2 (2007), 161–192; “Myth and Legend in Urban Oral Memory: Bulawayo, 1930–60,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 44, 1 (2008), 77–88. 22 Richard Werbner and Terrence Ranger, eds., Postcolonial Identities in Africa (London, 1996). 23 Richard Werbner, “Introduction: Multiple Identities, Plural Arenas,” in Postcolonial Identities in Africa, eds. Richard Werbner and Terence Ranger (London, 1996), pp. 1–25. 24 Terence Ranger, “Postscript: Colonial and Post-colonial Identities,” in Postcolonial Identities in Africa, eds. Richard Werbner and Terence Ranger (London, 1996), pp. 271–281.


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of recent change. South Africa was just as much a thinly stretched out country over the three great urban power points a hundred years ago as it is today—in fact it was even more so. Zeleza’s contrast between African perceptions of the colonial city as a “transit zone” and of the contemporary city as a place in which to create homes seems to me to be at best over-stated and at worst misleading.25 In Bulawayo, at least, Africans have been trying to create homes and to make an urban community for at least a hundred years. To do so they sometimes drew on international resources and sometimes on local. But both the internationality and the localism have been obscured by the hegemony of the regional paradigm.

Applying the New Perspectives to Urban History There was always a combination of globalism and of localism in the consciousness of some of the citizens in Bulawayo—but they were the white citizens. The white residents of Bulawayo, and of all other Central African towns, knew very well that that their incipient cities depended upon international networks of trade. Bulawayo may have been sited where it was—on barren veldt, with inadequate water supplies—because of the symbolic value of being built next to the ruins of King Lobengula’s capital. But it could only subsist as a rail-head; linked to the gold-mines and ports of the south and the copper-mines of the north. Its original white inhabitants—and for decades the great majority of its white residents—were immigrants, coming from all over southern Africa, from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, a handful from the United States, and later very many from Europe. The jingoistic mayor of the rival Rhodesian city of Salisbury, Charles Olley, alleged in the late 1940s that it was rare to hear English spoken by whites on the streets of Bulawayo! Bulawayo whites were acutely aware of that great globalised reality, the Empire, from which came other immigrants in the shape of Indian labourers, market gardeners, eating-house keepers and merchants. Empire Day was their main annual celebration. Their young men participated in what were justly called two ‘World Wars’ in defence of the Empire and white society was held together by ex-service associations. Bulawayans might delight

25

Zeleza, “Spatial Economy,” p. 62.

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in the surprise of visitors at finding a city in the bush, but they were proud of being an outpost of global urban civilisation, securely established on the frontiers of the wild. At the same time as this internationalism, however, there arose an intense white localism in Bulawayo. Bulawayo was sturdy, shrewd, business-like by contrast to the effete bureaucrats and pseudo intellectuals of Salisbury. This self-image was partly derived from the commercial dominance of lowland Scots in Bulawayo, partly derived from a lingering sense of pioneering adventure. Bulawayo belonged to southern Africa, to the Empire and to the world. But it was very much its own self. All this changed when whites looked at the blacks who lived in and around the town. Africans, whites thought, had no part in international networks—and Rhodesians thought it positively dangerous when some African soldiers fought in the Middle East and Burma in the Second World War. A few educated Africans clung to the Imperial ideal of equal rights for all civilised men but they found that in this respect they were the only ‘imperialists’ in Rhodesia. By white definition Africans came to town not as immigrants but as foreigners to urban culture, whether they had travelled from the rural Matabeleland in which Bulawayo was set, or from Northern Rhodesia, Nyasaland and Mozambique. Africans were defined as regional men (with a few anomalous women). If Africans could not be international, still less could they be local. Whites felt passionately that blacks could not be citizens of Bulawayo; an African lacked the skills to make a home in the town. At least until the 1950s the Bulawayo Municipality took the view that it had no need to build houses in which married men could live with their families. The ideal worker was a short-term migrant, reliably returning to his ‘real’ world in the tribalised countryside.26 As Wambui Mwangi puts it in a recent paper on mid-colonial Kenya, the communitarian African admired by many whites was “inevitably rural. Any African existing in an urbanised context, or otherwise separated from his ‘natural’ tribal collective, was not only abnormal but irreparably damaged”.27

26

For these white municipal attitudes see Ranger, “City versus State,” pp. 178–182. Wambui Mwangi, “The Colonial State and its Anti-Subjects: Blood Money and Bodily Value in Inter-War Colonial Kenya,” Paper presented at the African Studies Association & Canadian Association of African Studies, 47th / 37th Annual Meetings, New Orleans, November 12, 2004. She quotes a colonial ‘expert,’ Hugh Wyndham, 27


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By such colonial definition no African in a city could possibly become ‘local’ let alone ‘global’. Hence to apply the new insights of African urban history to the colonial city—and to Bulawayo in particular—is to do a belated racial justice.28 It is see the black citizens of colonial towns as the white citizens saw themselves—simultaneously global and local people.29 But how is this to be done. How, first, are we to see black residents in colonial southern African cities as ‘global’?

International Resources for Local Identities Long before colonialism, African cities had been at a beginning or at an end or at a junction of flows of international trade, religion and ideas. North African cities, of course, had always been part of a Mediterranean culture; East African coastal cities had been part of an Indian Ocean culture; West African cities of the western Sahel had been part of a trans-Saharan culture; West African coastal cities became part of an Atlantic culture. In all of them international people and ideas interacted with indigenous people and ideas to produce local urban identities.30 Historians have produced much sophisticated work on these

writing in 1925 about urban Africans: “he may end as a highly trained mechanic, dancing in evening clothes [ . . . ] But his mental and spiritual being is all the time in its primitive state. He becomes an individual drifting about without any real anchorage in the society.” Hugh Wyndham, “The Colour Problem in Africa,” International Affairs 4, 4 (1925), 176. 28 Since I wrote this sentence an exploration of the same issues for the early history of Salisbury has been published, Tsuneo Yoshikuni’s African Urban Experiences in Colonial Zimbabwe: A Social History of Harare before 1925 (Harare, 2007). For the emergence of an African urban community see especially p. 56. 29 A good deal of recent work has adopted this problematic. James Brennan, Andrew Burton and Yusuf Lawi, eds., Dar es Salaam: Histories from an Emerging Metropolis (Dar es Salaam, 2007) declares that its approach is “representative od contemporary trends in urban Africa, notably those associated with ‘globalisation’ and the indigenous response.” It offers “detailed accounts of social, political and cultural efforts made by people to create pathways of urban belonging” and focusses on “the interplay between regional and cosmopolitan musical trends on the one hand and quite local traditions on the other”, pp. 2, 3, 7–8. 30 I have myself worked on these processes in East African coastal cities and my book, Dance and Society in Eastern Africa (London, 1975), is an account of how they continued into the colonial era. A splendid development and elaboration of that book is offered by the essays edited by Sala Frank Gunderson and Gregory Barz in Mashindano! Competitive Music Performance in East Africa (Dar es Salaam, 2000). See also Alex Perullo, “Here’s a Little Something Local: An Early History of Hip-Hop

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pre-colonial cities and how they managed to retain their global/local dynamics under colonialism.31 Most of this work has been in reaction against “the over-mighty influence of Southern African anthropology” and its problematic of de-tribalisation.32 As a result we now face a different problem—West, North and East African cities have come to seem quite different from southern African ones. The danger is that the history of southern African towns will be left mired in the problematics of dysfunctional modernity and colonial spatial oppression, at least until the emergence of the ‘new’ conditions laid out in the recent work on African cities. Yet the black populations of colonial southern African cities had their own international cultural resources, quite apart from the fact that many of them came to work for international capitalist enterprise. I have myself proclaimed that I can understand the social history of colonial Bulawayo best in the comparative context of North, West and Eastern African city studies.33 South African urban history is moving in the same direction.34 Belinda Bozzoli in her marvellous recent book intensively studies the micro-politics and spatial symbolism of Alexandra township, a virtually enclosed and bounded entity literally surrounded by Johannesburg. She wonderfully evokes the evolution of successive local Alexandra cultures and the generational and gender struggles within them. In her account of the Alexandra rebellion of 1986 she is able

in Dar es Salaam, 1984–1997,” in Dar es Salaam: Histories from an Emerging Metropolis, eds. James Brennan, Andrew Burton and Yusuf Lawi (Dar es Salaam, 2007), pp. 250–272. 31 Two splendid examples for Ghana are Sandra Greene, Sacred Sites and the Colonial Encounter (Bloomington, 2002); Tom McCaskie, Asante Identities (Edinburgh, 2000). A recent general history of African cities is Bill Freund, The African City: A History (Cambridge, Mass., 2007). For a useful collection of essays on the ancient, medieval and modern history of African cities, see David Anderson and Richard Rathbone, eds., Africa’s Urban Past (Oxford, 2000). 32 Ibid., p. 10. Anderson and Rathbone sum up the impact of southern African urban studies: “history had little place in towns because towns had little history.” 33 Terrence Ranger, “Book Review: Africa’s Urban Past,” African Affairs 99, 396 (2000), 467–469. My article on the social history of burials in Bulawayo—“Dignifying Death,” Journal of Religion in Africa 34, 1 (2004), 110–144—is explicitly inspired by John Parker’s chapter in the Anderson and Rathbone collection, “The Cultural Politics of Death and Burial in Early Colonial Accra,” pp. 205–221. 34 Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall, eds., Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis (Durham, 2004). Their own chapter in the book, “Writing the World from an African Metropolis,” pp. 347– 372, is “an exercise in writing the worldliness—or the being-inthe-world—of contemporary African life forms,” p. 347.


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to map out in detail the radical reshaping of township space, symbol and ritual. She insists that any study of Alexandra must be particular, its history understood as different from that of any other South African township and quite different (she insists) from that of any other southern African town.35 But despite all these splendid Blakean “minute particulars”—“nothing entered the township without being given local meaning”,36 she writes—Bozzoli also shows Alexandra as an organising centre, recruiting area and clearing house of international crime, linking regions as far apart as the Cape, Angola and Kenya.37 This sounds very much like an antecedent of the great informal trading network which Simone describes for contemporary Johannesburg. And Bozzoli’s list of the names of Alexandra’s youth gangs in the 1950s reads like a roll call of contemporary global consciousness—the Young Americans, the Berlins, the Black Koreans, the Mau-Maus, each with its own zone of domination inside Alexandra.38 The other great global imports into Alexandra were liberal, radical and revolutionary ideologies. White liberals, communists, trade unionists, doctors and intellectuals were “active in township life, protest and politics on the ground”—but here too none of these ideologies entered Alexandra ”without being given local meaning.”39 Most of what Bozzoli writes about Alexandra is true about the Bulawayo townships. In Bulawayo also the naming of African gangs and clubs showed an acute global awareness. The Bulawayo African football team in the 1950s was called the Red Army; its rival from Salisbury was known as the Yellow Peril. To this day the most popular black football team in Zimbabwe bears the Soviet name of Dynamos. The 35 Belinda Bozzoli, Theatres of Struggle and the End of Apartheid (Edinburgh, 2004). 36 Bozzoli, Theatres of Struggle, p. 27. 37 Ibid., p. 28. Bozzoli is here drawing on a local journalist, writing in Libertas (August 1942), quoted in Clive Glaser, Bostotsi: The Youth Gangs of Soweto, 1935–76 (Portsmouth, 2000). The Libertas article describes how there radiated from Alexandria “roads and paths, some marked on the map and some not, carrying the agents, spoils and instruments of crime.” The most effective account of early criminal networks, stretching between the South African townships and eastern Europe is Charles van Onselen, “Randlords and rotgut, 1886–1903,” in Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Witwatersrand, 1886–1914, 1, New Babylon, ed. idem (Harlow, 1982). In this case the controllers of the international informal liquor trading networks were white; the consumers largely black miners and township residents. 38 Bozzoli, Theatres of Struggle, p. 28. 39 Ibid., p. 32.

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competitive dance associations in the cities of the East African coast in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries named themselves after imperial naval powers and did homage to that great imperial symbol, the kilt. In the same way southern urban African associations organised their own competitive sociality around the facts of imperial global power struggles. Of course this pretence assumed all too much reality during the liberation war of the 1960s and 1970s when Joshua Nkomo’s guerrilla forces were armed and trained by the Soviet Union while Robert Mugabe’s were armed and trained by China. The famous photograph of Nkomo, that quintessential Bulawayo man, dressed in a Soviet marshall’s uniform is both comic and deadly. Clothing has always been, indeed, one of the crucial dimensions of township globalisation. Nkomo’s Soviet photograph is one in a series of portraits of him wearing a whole variety of costumes, expressing a whole variety of international and local identities—the Saville Row suit topped off by the cultural nationalist fur hat. There had been for decades significant interactions of photography and fashion in black Bulawayo—the young male dandies of the late 1920s, strutting the townships streets in their black suits and white gloves, exclaiming “O, style Bulawayo!, O style Bulawayo!”; the savage attacks on their ‘ridiculous’ garments by white missionaries and other whites; the gender revolution which meant that by the 1950s it was black township women, hitherto shoe-less and un-photographed but now with some disposable income, who became the pea-cocking beauties.40 Historians have shown some unease in writing about township dress and fashion. The most spectacular example of globalised clothing have been the sapeurs of Brazzaville. The anthropologist Jonathan Friedman has written about these extraordinary young men in his “Narcissism, roots and postmodernity: the constitution of selfhood in the global crisis”,41 though once again what he is describing is certainly not a

40 Terence Ranger, “Pictures Must Prevail: Sex and the Social History of African Photography in Bulawayo, 1930–1960,” Kronos (special issue Visual History) 27 (2001), 261–266; see also Terence Ranger, “Colonialism, Consciousness and the Camera,” Past and Present 171 (May 2001), 203–215. 41 Jonathan Friedman, “Narcissism, Roots and Postmodernity: The Constitution of Selfhood in the Global Xrisis,” in Modernity and Identity, eds. Scott Lash and Jonathan Friedman (Oxford, 1992), pp. 331–366.


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post-colonial phenomenon and has its roots deep in the leisure culture of colonial Brazzaville.42 A helpful summary of Friedman by Joanne Finkelstein runs: In the African Congo . . . there developed a cult around European luxury goods and, in particular, haute couture. At the time, the capital of the Congo, Brazzaville, was a French colonial outpost . . . European clothes, particularly those of haute couturiers, Yves Saint Laurent, Versace, Uomo, were also in demand, but they were not being merchandised through stores. They were the currency of a subculture of young, mostly unemployed men known as sapeurs, who valued elegant dress above all else. The traffic in fashion took place in the ‘clubs des jeunes premiers’. . . despite being poor [ . . . ], the young Congolese devoted themselves to dressing well, in the labels of Parisian haute couturiers. . . . In the lives of these young, unemployed men, a pilgrimage to Paris, to the source of all things civilised and luxurious, was a necessity. And the final achievement was the status of parisien or elder.43

This is undeniably bringing the township to the world and the world to the township. But Finkelstein betrays uneasiness at what seems senseless mimicry. The irreconcilability of a desire for French luxuries with the dismal economic future of the sapeur suggests such a degree of irrationality that the practice seemed almost magical, not unlike a cargo cult.44

In Bulawayo too the young men who rejoiced in the city’s ‘style’ were often those with the lowest wages—sometimes four men shared a suit and wore it on one weekend a month. But in assessing the rationality of this practice we should take into account the conclusion reached by Luise White in her recent brilliant essay about “Masculinity and Migrancy” in eastern Africa: Whose history do we write when we write history about clothes and canes?. . . Historical research is at its most intimate [in its most minute particulars, I would say], its most attentive to the complexity of people moving through the cycles of their complicated lives, when it can look at everyday practices not as a generalization, but in terms of the canes and jackets and tennis rackets that ordinary men used to offend their fathers and colonial officials [and to impress young women, I would add] in a

42

For which see Phyllis Martin, Leisure and Society in Colonial Brazzaville (Cambridge, Mass., 2002). 43 Joanne Finkelstein, “Chic Theory,” Australian Humanities Review 5 (1997), 1. 44 Ibid.

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terence ranger single fashionable gesture . . . The history of canes and jackets and tennis rackets does make scholarship irrelevant to several agenda laid down for African history in the last 30 years [but] Africans’ own description of their own lives provides historians with tools to reconstruct social relations as they were lived and struggled over.45

In the Bulawayo townships, indeed, what old men and women want to talk about most is clothes—the women remembering the moment when they “were seen, really seen”.46 Listening to them does reconstruct lived and contested social relations. And it enables us to see the sense of these aspirations and memories. Sometimes the desire for high fashion led on to global economic activity. A review in Africa Today describes Congolese immigrant traders in Paris, “engaged in clandestine trans-national exchanges of goods and services”; many of the traders, says the review, are known as sapeurs, a term which illuminates “the trader’s world view.”47 And seen simply as clothes, Finkelstein tells us, “although the sapeur was black, unemployed, and a discarded colonial relic, he was existentially equal to his European master if he dressed in the same style.”48 But I think this underestimates the effect of township high style. In Bulawayo, certainly, by the 1950s some black women were dressed much more fashionably than white women. White Rhodesians were famously caught in a time warp which reproduced the styles of prewar England; young black women were experiencing what Yvonne Vera calls “a kind of independence” by dressing internationally.49 “The body is fashionable”, writes Vera about township photographs of young black women in the 1950s.

45

Luise White, “Work, Clothes and Talk in Eastern Africa,” in African Historians and African Voices, ed. Atieno Odhiambo (Basel, 2001), p. 74. 46 Terence Ranger, “Myth and Legend in Urban Oral Memory,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing (special issue African City Textualities) 44, 1 (2008), 77–88. 47 Karen A. Porter, “Review of Congo-Paris: Transnational Trader on the Margins of the Law,” African Affairs 50, 1 (2003), 133–136. The review remarks that originally the term sapeur sprang from French slang, meaning ‘threads’, but that in Brazzaville it was turned into an acronym for Société des Ambianceurs et Personnes Elégantes. 48 Finkelstein, “Chic Theory,” p. 1. 49 Yvonne Vera, “Introduction” to the catalogue of the 1999 Thatha Camera exhibition of township photographs in the National Gallery of Bulawayo of which she was Director.


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It is a thing in itself, an entity presented as complete, as separate from the traditional concept of kinship [ . . . ] It is a freed climate. This is Bulawayo. This is the city. This is me. The photograph confirms this identity.50

To the photograph must be added the film. Hollywood films made a much greater impact on the black residents of Bulawayo than they did on the white. They transformed township musical performances for example. The synchronised singing and dancing of black American quartets produced many southern African imitators—in South Africa the famous Manhattan brothers; in Rhodesia the City Quads and the Black Evening Follies. And here one can make another point. It is far from the truth that a desire for fashion and an emulation of American styles was an aspiration only of “black, unemployed and discarded colonial relics.”51 In Bulawayo it was the mission-educated youth elite who copied black American choirs and synchronised singing. It was the progressive Bantu Mirror which hailed a performance by the Follies—with its perfect co-ordination and smart evening dress—as proving that ‘the race is rising’. In the 1950s it was even permissible for respectable girls to sing with these groups, earning themselves such accolades as ‘the Judy Garland of Bulawayo’.52 The flow of musical influence into South Africa, both from black and white North America and over more than a hundred years has been described in splendid studies with titles very appropriate to this article—In Township Tonight! or Music, Modernity and the Global Imagination.53 The black urban jive culture of Bulawayo in the 1950s was in fact an early aspect of what Patrick Neate, in his remarkable study of our

50 The same point is made in the book of the exhibition of Seydou Keita’s late colonial portrait photographs from the city of Mali, Michelle Lamuniere’s You Look Beautiful Like That (New Haven, 2001). In Mali, however, unlike in Bulawayo, women developed modern forms of ‘traditional’ dress while men aimed at Western elegance. 51 Joanne Finkelstein, “Chic Theory.” 52 For the making of black middle class culture see Michael West, The Rise of an African Middle Class: Colonial Zimbabwe, 1898–1965 (Bloomington, 2002). For Zimbabwean consumer culture see Timothy Burke, Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women (London, 1996). 53 David Coplan, In Township Tonight! South Africa’s Black City Music and Theatre (Johannesburg, 1985); Veit Erlmann, Music, Modernity and the Global Imagination: South Africa and the West (Oxford, 1999). See also Gwen Ansell, Soweto Blues: Jazz, Popular Music and Politics in South Africa (New York, 2004). A study of the history of Zimbabwean township music is Joyce Jenje Makwenda, Zimbabwe Township Music (Harare, 2005).

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contemporary “Hip-hop Planet”,54 calls “glocalisation—the adaptation of worldwide products to indigenous needs.”55 What Neate’s publishers say about Hip-hop could just as well have been said about jive as it affected the cities of colonial Africa: The [American] born music and culture has woven itself into the local urban cultures of the distant corners of the globe in different, consistently surprising, and provocative ways. What is cliche in one city is revolutionary in another, and completely meaningless in yet another.56

Thus the township culture of many different groups—criminal gangs, the unemployed, the low-waged, aspirant young women, the striving middle class—drew upon global rather than regional influences. And this was true, too, of the last international influence I want to discuss—religion. Christian mission in the townships got off to a slow start. Missionaries preferred the ‘real’ African societies of the ‘tribal’, rural areas, where their denomination might establish a monopoly. (Though it is worth remarking how global missionary societies were in Rhodesia— German, American, Swedish, Northern and Southern Irish, Welsh, Scottish). Once the Christian churches got to Bulawayo’s tiny Makokoba Location, however, it became an intensely competitive market place, where once again costumes and music as well as theologies were on display: The Bulawayo African Township inhabitants had the opportunity of listening to religious teaching of all dogmas during the Easter holidays [wrote the Bantu Mirror on 22 April 1944], as many of the local churches conducted services in the streets. Various kinds of religious uniforms, badges and ribbons, according to the various religious faiths were worn; these seemed to attract the curiosity of onlookers more than the preaching and teaching [ . . . ] The climax of this religious activity came on Sunday morning—Resurrection Sunday—when blissful sleepers were welcomed by the strains of select religious tunes by worshippers parading the streets.57

54 Jonathan Friedman, “Narcissism, Roots and Postmodernity: The Constitution of Selfhood in the Global Xrisis,” in Modernity and Identity, eds. Scott Lash and Jonathan Friedman (Oxford, 1992), pp. 331–366. 55 For an account of Yvonne Vera’s treatment of popular music in Bulawayo see Meg Samuelson, “Yvonne Vera’s Bulawayo: Modernity, (Im)mobility, Music and Memory,” Research in African Literatures 38, 2 (2007), 22–35. 56 Summary produced by Blackwell’s Book Services, http://www.princeton.lib.nj.us/ catelists/200505/Non-Fiction_-_Adult_Collection/169.html (accessed July 10, 2009). 57 Bantu Mirror (Bulawayo) (April 22, 1944).


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And as the number of townships around Bulawayo and the size of its African population grew from the 1950s onwards, religious activity grew to keep pace. William Phiri, who has been writing a series of reminscences of eMalokishini, the townships, in the Bulawayo Chronicle, produced on 26 April 2005 a memoir on black urban religion, still focussing on music, costume and performance: Growing up in eMalokishini, we were exposed to different kinds of religious beliefs [ . . . ] Among the Christian churches, the Salvation Army was very popular with children. We used to love their smart uniforms, blood red flag, their processions and the bugle band. Men who used to play itolopito (the trumpet) always drew a lot of attention from the kids. So as the ‘Christian Soldiers Marched’ around eMalokishini we would join in their procession . . . from Magwegwe to their Mpopoma church . . . Then there were the Methodist and Dutch Reformed Church members whose processions were characterised with lots of dancing and spiced with sharp tunes from animal horns. As for Catholics and Anglicans, they were very popular with their Palm Sunday marches . . . Even more eye-catching were the long processions when Catholics from all over the diocese converged at St Patrick’s, Makokoba, celebrating Corpus Christi . . . altar servers, white and black priests and nuns in their colourful regalia and the scent of incense.58

And there were night-time Pentecostal services, with fascinating confessions blared through megaphones, which you ‘could not ignore even in your house’. It is clear that Bulawayo township Christianity lived up to Belinda Bozzoli’s insistence that everything that entered Alexandra from outside was absorbed into local culture. But it is also clear that Makokoba and the other townships were being offered the whole range of global Christianities—the popular Catholicism and the slum Protestantism of the European nineteenth century; the ecstatic legacies of American revivalism; the cooler rituals of Anglicanism. William Phiri emphasises that “the influence of religion in our upbringing remains with us for the rest of our lives” and that even shebeen habiting men who “may be willing to compromise on what brand to drink” never abandon the signs of their faith imported from the outside world. Jehovah’s Witnesses never celebrate Christmas; those brought up in the Seventh Day never join ikhabhiza on Friday evenings. Their party time starts on Saturday after 6pm [ . . . ] Catholic-raised avoid eating meat on

58

William Phiri, Bulawayo Chronicle (April 26, 2005).

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terence ranger Good Fridays and SDAs would buy all the meat for everyone but stick to ama-salads.59

Of course in addition to these global signs and symbols the churches offered many things essential to the emerging township culture— schools and moral teachings in particular. But in the context of this chapter, it is most interesting to note the importance of religious costumes. The differently uniformed women of the Methodist, Anglican and Roman Catholic churches made a contrasting self-assertion to that of the fashion conscious beauties of the 1950s. Their uniforms signalled the aspiration to be what Marja Hinfelaar in her recent book calls “Respectable and Responsible Women”—key participants in building homes in the townships.60

Local Resources for the Construction of Urban Identity Even in discussing the global elements in African urban culture I have offered quite enough minute particulars. As I turn to African urban local identities, I will satisfy myself by making one or two points and then by examining the key topic of recent urban studies—associational life. The first point is merely to repeat my assertion that some Africans were striving to create local communal identities in Bulawayo from the end of the nineteenth century. Some of them were surviving members of the overthrown Ndebele royal family setting themselves up as house-holders in the Location; others were educated black migrants from Bechuanaland and South Africa, who later came to describe themselves as the ‘pioneers’ of Makokoba; others were landladies of various ethnicities who built houses and were patrons to their tenants; yet others were workers who had migrated from all over Central Africa. I have been emphasising the global and the local at the expense of the regional, but the regional was nevertheless very important. I have described the township galaxy of global Christian denominations. But there was also a world of ‘traditional’ regional denominations. One of our septuagenarian informants, Mrs Bhelamina Ndlovu, told us:

59

William Phiri, Bulawayo Chronicle (April 26, 2005). Marja Hinfelaar, Respectable and Responsible Women: Methodist and Roman Catholic Women’s Organisations in Harare, Zimbabwe, 1919–1985 (Utrecht, 2004). 60


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You know this Township, small as it may appear, is a vast place. It has many people of different ethnicities, of different cultures and beliefs, and it is very possible for one to stay in Makokoba for many years without knowing that something like funeral ceremonies are being held.61

My own article about “The Politics of Burial in Bulawayo” attempts to describe how township Africans drew on various global Christian traditions, various ‘local’ rural Ndebele traditions, and various regional ethnic traditions to create a broadly common local urban funeral culture.62 The same was true of all other aspects of ‘Bulawayo style’—dress, music, sport, sociality As far as the townships were concerned ‘local’ did not described an inherited tradition of urban life, nor did it describe continuous Ndebele traditions. It meant something continuously created and contested. Bulawayo urban style was self-consciously modern—“city life was fascinating” said an informant, “because to us most things were just new. That feeling of being part of a new city life was great.”63 Something of the complexity of the choices being made, and of the vast global, regional and traditional repertoire from which they were being drawn, can be seen from the material available on Bulawayo African voluntary societies in the 1950s.64 The 2001 Nordic research project volume is entitled Associational Life in African Cities: Popular Responses to the Urban Crisis. The assumption is that the existence of numerous and over-lapping voluntary associations betokens an urban ‘civil society’, the possibility of which had previously been denied. Perversely, the wealth of associations in mid twentieth century Bulawayo and other southern African cities has been taken as evidence of the persistence of regional ethnic identities rather than of the emergence of local urban society or the proclamation of global solidarities.

61 Interview between Busani Mpofu and Mrs Bhelamina Ndovu, Makokoba (July 24, 2000). 62 Ranger, “Politics of Burial in Bulawayo.” Most of the figures who have appeared in this chapter participated in the process—Ndebele aristocrats, southern ‘pioneers’, landladies, uniformed Christian women. 63 Interview between Busani Mpofu and L.M. Ndelela, Makokoba (January 2000). See more generally Jennifer Robinson, Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development (London, 2006). 64 Tsuneo Yoshikuni, African Urban Experiences in Colonial Zimbabwe (Zimbabwe, 2007) has fascinating material on Salisbury voluntary associations in the 1920s. Yoshikuni sees these as evidence for a migrant worker class consciousness.

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In the Housing Department of the Bulawayo Municipal offices are held a series of files containing applications for registration sent to Hugh Ashton, Director of Municipal Native Administration, by African voluntary societies in the 1950s.65 Many of them concerned that staple of associational life in southern African townships—the burial society—and many of these were certainly regional in character. Even with these, however, a fascinating process of defining fraternity is apparent—there is a hierarchy running from the Achewa North Rhodesia East Province Helping Society and the North Western Rhodesia Luka Movement to the Northern Rhodesian Association Club and from that and other territorial associations (including the Belgian Congolese Joint National Society) to the African Unity Burial Society. The right to represent all Northern Rhodesians was contested between the Northern Rhodesia Chiefs Unity Association and the Northern Rhodesian African National Congress. The former stood for a confederation of ‘tribal’ identities. The latter introduced into Bulawayo some radical international ideologies—Kenneth Kaunda in a letter of 31 December 1956 cites a socialist friend for teaching him that the means of production should not be the property of any privileged person or class but should be owned and controlled by the whole community [ . . . ] A nation whose workers are dependent upon a small fraction of non-producers for access to the instruments of wealth production is a nation of slaves and tyrants.66

A similar hierarchy of burial and territorial societies existed for Nyasaland and indeed for Southern Rhodesia itself. But in addition there were a multitude of other cross-cutting associations. Some represented occupations—the Fruit and Vegetable Hawkers Association; the African Traders Association; the Bulawayo African Carpenters Association; the Matabeleland African Vegetable Growers Association. Most of these also acted as burial societies; the Vegetable Growers Association demanded from its members “Education, Patriotism, Vegetable Experience”. Then there were powerful trade unions like the Rhode-

65 These were rescued from the old Municipal Native Administration archive by J.S. Ncube who permitted me to see them—the reference is S.O.8. Similar files exist for the 1960s and probably for the 1970s but since my projected book on Bulawayo takes its history only up to 1960 I did not note these. They will be a rich resource for future urban social historians. 66 Letter of Kenneth Kaunda (December 31, 1956), see general file on associations S.O.8. Vol. 1, T Box 100, Bulawayo Municipality.


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sia Railways African Employees Association, which regularly supplied Ashton with invaluable records of its proceedings. There was even a Southern Rhodesia Unemployed Association, led by men who had been repatriated from South Africa and who had applied for multiple clerical jobs in Bulawayo without success. And then there were associations representing global culture. There was, for instance, the African Jiving Society, whose aim was “to advance a high standard of jiving among the African people in Southern Rhodesia”; “gangs of law-breaking Africans are punished by sending them to the Police. The Society shall encourage every member to come the dance smartly dressed and if possible competitors should look respectable.” It also helped with “funeral business” and sickness. The De Tourist Brothers aimed “to keep Catholic boys away from busy streets during holidays [and] to entertain anyone who wants to be entertained”. The Smart Gents Dancing Competition Club wanted “to encourage Africans in the better way of dressing” and “to foster spirit of Love and Pride in Modern Dressing”. It, too, helped with sickness and burial.67 In short the voluntary associations of Bulawayo in the 1950s embodied a much wider variety of notions of communality than the ethnic or tribal. Sick and dying residents of the townships could be helped not only by rural kin but by those who shared their occupations and recreations and global religions—the uniformed church women’s organisations dominated the funeral services of their members. Many people belonged to more than one burial society. There was a black urban civil society.

Conclusion Of course I am not arguing that all of these associations came together naturally or spontaneously to create a single urban community. Many different ‘styles Bulawayo’ could be constructed out of them and the other cultural resources available in the townships. Indeed there was fierce contestation over what the dominant character of township culture should be and over who should dominate it. In a recent paper on “The Meaning of Urban Violence” I have argued against interpretations which seek to explain it solely in terms of anti-colonial protest, of

67

See general file on associations S.O.8. Vol. 1, T Box 100, Bulawayo Municipality.

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tribal rivalry or of political economy. Taking the two great violent outbursts in Bulawayo—in 1929 and in 1960—I have argued that they were essentially about who should control urban culture. In 1929 there was a generational struggle. Smart young men in their black suits, fighting in their boxing gloves and riding their bicycles, had overplayed their mastery of global symbols and were repaid for their boasting. They were beaten up and their suits and bicycles piled up and burned. In 1960 there was a class struggle, between the impoverished have-nots and the too opulent haves, which ended with every African owned shop in the townships being burned down. The fires of the culture wars justify the title of my own book, Bulawayo Burning.68 On September 25, 2004 the Guardian published an essay by the South African novelist Achmet Dangor. As a young man Dangor himself wrote poems and stories set in the city, in the dusty township, trying to find beauty in dimly lit streets and the hard echo of asphalt.

But the rest of the young writers wrote about “the savannah, the idyllic peaceful village”. For them the city was transiently evil, a gigantic asphalt salt mine into which Africans had been thrust after imperial Europe had wrenched them from their rural innocence.

Today Dangor has: Observed with some relief how other African writers have taken to the streets, as it were. Yvonne Vera beautifully evokes Bulawayo [ . . . ] African writers are starting to reclaim the African city from the colonialists who by their association with it had poisoned it as a centre of culture.69

Among these African (and Africanist) writers are social and cultural historians who are also reclaiming the African city by bringing together the world and the township.70 The twenty-first century may be the century of the African city. But to understand that city’s relation to the world we need to ask both global and local questions about the towns of the twentieth century from which it is emerging.

68 Terence Ranger, “The Meaning of Urban Violence in Africa: Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia, 1890–1960,” Cultural and Social History 3, 2 (2006), 193–228; idem, Bulawayo Burning (Harare, 2010). 69 Achmet Dangor, “Another Country,” The Guardian (September 25, 2004). 70 Outstanding among these is Joyce Nyairo. She gave the Audrey Richards lecture to the United Kingdom African Studies Association in 2005 on Kenyan urban discourse. She and James Ogude have edited Urban Legends, Colonial Myths: Popular Culture and Literature in East Africa (Trenton, 2007).

PART FOUR

ALTERNATE GLOBALITIES

‘ALTERNATE’ GLOBALITIES? ON THE CULTURES AND FORMATS OF TRANSNATIONAL MUSLIM NETWORKS FROM SOUTH ASIA Dietrich Reetz ZMO, Berlin

This chapter explores the concepts and approaches of transnational Muslim groups from South Asia pursuing their own religious, cultural and political agendas from salvation to emancipation and development. While the rationale of their activities is largely group-specific and often ideology-driven, they apply a variety of public and political means and tools to achieve their objectives, sometimes seeking to replace western domination with their own hegemony. For many western observers, their activities remain suspicious and even threatening. It is felt that the West may have to work with these movements rather than against them if a painful long-term collision course is to be avoided. In order to succeed, however, it will be necessary to closely study the competing religious, cultural and political compulsions they face. While it is common place to argue that globalisation studies cannot be reduced to the subject of finance and the economy alone, nor to the impact of the West, we know very little as of yet about the influence of non-western forms of globalisation, how non-economic global processes function, how they interact with the economic processes and what drives them. This paper seeks to contribute to the understanding of Muslim global networks and how they are adapting to the current processes of globalisation creating separate visions of the world and ‘alternate globalities.’ It will focus on those emanating from South Asia, a region which on the back of an expansive South Asian diaspora has generated a rising number of translocal and transnational Muslim networks. It is intended to point out new trends and developments worthy of further study. A discussion of categories and the conceptual arguments will be followed by a review of the historical antecedents. The main focus will be on the new features and formats of this networking, how it is evolving and in what direction it is going. It is thus hoped that the paper contributes to mapping the directions of internal and external expansion of these networks.

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dietrich reetz Framing the Question

Muslim global networking is being discussed here for its contribution to globalisation. It symbolises a direction towards religious awareness and embeddedness, a sector representing Muslim actors and institutions and an outcome creating new structures and establishing new formats, channels and procedures. When we link Muslim global activism to the emergence of ‘alternate globalities’ we refer to the assumption that there is a main direction of globalisation to which other processes constitute some form of ‘alternative’. This assumption is based on the perceived or real domination of globalisation by western economic and financial interests. Many Muslim agents and networks position themselves consciously as an imagined alternative, opposition or antidote against this direction of globalisation. At the same time Muslim actors who cross borders and regions in the pursuit of religious networking also follow economic compulsions and interests. On various levels they are also part of globalisation as driven by financial and economic interests, even though from a weaker or disadvantaged position. Their disadvantages are often exacerbated by a colonial and dependent past within the world economic and political order. If we want to study non-economic forms of globalisation with their historical antecedents as a process in stages the categories of time and space become important parameters. In a more general sense globalisation can be perceived either as a compression of time and space proceeding gradually or in leaps over a longer period of time.1 This would represent a macro perspective looking at global networking and activism ‘from above’. Such a perspective will have to be complemented with a perspective ‘from below’ where we can see globalisation as an extension of networks and values in space and time, or what Giddens calls time-space distanciation.2 It is against this background that Muslim networking constitutes a real or perceived alternative to economic globalisation as it largely seems to follow a non-economic rationale of religious and cultural interaction, at least as far as intention and main thrust are concerned.

1 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford, 1990). 2 Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge, 1990), p. 64.

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Using the term ‘globality’ is meant to highlight the results of global networking, the emergence of global conditions, structures, interaction and patterns of behaviour that exist because of their translocal and transnational reach. Global interaction has been dominated by structures and patterns resulting from both western-dominated and economy-centred activity.3 In this sense Muslim global networking creates ‘alternate’ globalities insofar as it positions itself against processes and conditions that have been dominated by the West and are centred on economy and finance. However this positioning can be only relative. It partly reflects reality and partly the ideology of Muslim actors constructing a unitary understanding of the West and of economic activity. In reality, Muslim global networking is also partly and significantly rooted in the West and becomes part of a highly diverse western agenda in terms of globalisation. It is also inherently related to economic and financial flows, interests and institutions. These reflect trading networks, roots of migration, career paths and the need to finance the religious institutions constituting the backbone of Muslim global networking. But again, even as part of the West and any economic agenda, Muslim agents would be largely underrepresented, underprivileged and could therefore still be considered as ‘alternate’ agents. The term ‘alternate’ globalities could therefore be used to describe the perspective and intention of Muslim agents and agencies in global networking, to model their contribution and impact in a globalisation process that is hierarchical and uneven in terms of areas, impacts, participants and outcomes. When we talk about Muslim networks here, we are referring to repeated and relatively stable interaction and interrelation of social units such as agents, institutions, organisations, but also values, texts and concepts as mediated by Muslim activists.4 Translocal will be understood as pointing to an exchange or movement of these units, activity patterns or symbols across real or imagined boundaries, whereas transnational will emphasise the importance of crossing the

3

Martin Shaw, Theory of the Global State: Globality as Unfinished Revolution (Oxford, 2000). 4 Cf. Roman Loimeier, Die islamische Welt als Netzwerk: Möglichkeiten und Grenzen des Netzwerkansatzes im islamischen Kontext (Würzburg, 2000).

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borders of nation states in the process.5 In this sense most globalising Muslim networks have to be seen as both translocal and transnational at the same time. The difference between the two terms is in pointing to different directions and in the qualities of the interaction. Translocality transcends the limitations and boundaries of the local, but is not necessarily transnational, whereas all transnational interaction is probably also translocal. In comparison, the translocal will also include sociological, religious and cultural qualities and will be a reminder of its other side, the local, as well, whereas transnational more points to the political dimension and importance of crossing the borders of nation states creating a separate grit of references. The recent phase of globalisation has encouraged Muslim groups and sects to go out into the world and expand in new ways that go much beyond the traditional bounds and networks in which they organised historically. While references will be drawn from various ‘Muslim’ regions, the focus will be on Islamic groups from South Asia.6 They are a good example of this trend as almost all sects and interpretations which developed there during the last 150 years or so have nowadays established branches and networks in other parts of the world. In this they not only follow the routes of migration of Indian Muslims within the former colonial British Empire and beyond. They have also established a presence where Indian or Pakistani migrants had not settled in larger numbers such as Indonesia or North and West Africa. At the same time, South Asian Islam is not the only regional centre that has radiated such influence. Religious groups from Saudi Arabia, from Iran and Turkey, Sufi orders from North Africa and the Middle East, have followed suit. They are currently operating translocal and transregional networks of significant expanse. They show that globalisation has not led to the homogenisation of Islam and of Muslim networks, as feared by secular and Islamist critics alike. While to the undiscerning observer from outside, the presence of Muslim actors and Islamic discourse in the public sphere has grown tremendously, it is a picture far from being uniform or homogeneous. 5 For the concept of translocality as a research perspective, see Ulrike Freitag and Achim von Oppen,“Translokalität als ein Zugang zur Geschichte globaler Verflechtungen,” H-Soz-u-Kult (June 10, 2005), http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/forum/id= 632&type=artikel&sort=datum&order=down&search=translokalit%C3%A4 (accessed July 2006, 18), and introduction to this volume. 6 Cf. Dietrich Reetz, Islam in the Public Sphere: Religious Groups in India 1900– 1947 (Delhi, 2006).


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Antecedents The current phase of transnational Muslim activism is undoubtedly building on a historical legacy. Transnational networks of Muslim activists have long existed throughout the Muslim world. They are particularly well-known for Sufi scholars and their disciples.7 Graduates of established religious schools, madrasas and dar al-‘ulums, have stayed in contact with their alma mater and with each other. Also politically motivated global Islamic activity has existed before the current phase of ‘Islamism’. It had been the focus of international attention around the turn of the twentieth century in the shape of ‘Pan-Islamism’. Colonial powers felt that Muslim activists challenged their rule as they allegedly owed no allegiance to their country or the reigning sovereign, as they suggested, but to Mecca. The well-known British administrator William Hunter pointedly asked towards the end of the nineteenth century: “Our Indian Mussalmans: are they bound in conscience to rebel against the Queen?”8 It was during the early nineteenth century that modern Islamic mobilisation in South Asia split along sectarian lines. In quick succession a number of schools of thought and sectarian groupings emerged which started out as distinctly local phenomena. Their doctrinal ambitions soon shaped them into translocal forces. They wanted to prove that they represented the only ‘true’ Islam, seeking to ‘re-convert’ other Muslims to their causes all over British-India and beyond. The reformist Deobandi and Tablighi networks (Hanafi Sunni) were centred on the Islamic Seminary in Deoband, North India, which was founded in 1866 by Muhammad Qasim Nanaotawi (1832–79) and Rashid Ahmad Gangohi (1829–1905), two conservative scholars. The school advocated a purist, scripturalist and revivalist Islam, invoking the Qur’an and Sunna. Many Islamic schools in South Asia follow its teaching.9 The Tablighi movement was created in north India in 1926 by Muhammad Ilyas (1885–1944) inspired by Deobandi teachings. Originally it was formed to oppose the re-conversion efforts of 7 Miriam Cooke and Bruce B. Lawrence, eds., Muslim Networks from Medieval Scholars to Modern Feminist (Delhi, 2005); Martin van Bruinessen and Julia Day Howell, Sufism and the “Modern” in Islam (London, 2007). 8 W.W. Hunter, Our Indian Mussalmans: Are They Bound in Conscience to Rebel Against the Queen? (London, 1871). 9 Barbara Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 1860–1900 (Princeton, 1982); Reetz, Islam in the Public Sphere, p. 64f.

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reformist Hindu preachers from the Arya Samaj (Society of the Nobles, 1875). The latter was seeking to return Muslim tribes, mainly from the Mewat region around Delhi, to the fold of Hinduism to which their ancestors had belonged. The missionary approach of the Tabligh Jama‘at (TJ)10 dispatching groups of lay preachers to other Muslim communities turned out to be highly successful. The TJ grew into a mainstream mass movement in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.11 The Sufi-oriented traditionalist Barelwi School of thought goes back to the religious scholar and writer Maulana Ahmad Raza Khan Barewli (1856–1921) and first appeared at the end of the 19th century in Bareilly, North India, close to Deoband.12 He defended Sufi-related practices of Pir- and shrine worship heavily attacked by Deobandi purists.13 The Ahl-i Hadith (AH, People of the Tradition) scholars and schools represent a minority purist Sunni sect rejecting all law schools but privileging the Prophetic traditions (hadith). It formed under the leadership of Siddiq Hasan Khan (1832–90) and Maulana Nazir Husain (1805–1902) in North India in Bhopal, the Punjab and the United Provinces around 1864.14 The AH network is polarised between a scholarly and a more radical, militant wing.15 The minority sect of the Ahmadiyya founded by Ghulam Ahmad Mirza (1839–1908) in 1889 also emerged in Punjab province. Most mainstream Muslim groups regard it as heretic. It is particularly the claims of its founder and his successors to some degree of Prophethood that have enraged radical Sunni Muslim activists. Since the 1920s Ahmadis were persecuted for their beliefs by Sunni radicals accusing

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Urdu: Missionary Movement. Muhammad Khalid Masud, Travellers in Faith: Studies of the Tablighi Jama‘at as a Transnational Islamic Movement for Faith Renewal (Leiden, 2000); Reetz, Islam in the Public Sphere, p. 75f. 12 Usha Sanyal, Devotional Islam and Politics in British India: Ahmed Riza Khan Barelvi and his Movement, 1870–1920 (Delhi, 1996). 13 Reetz, Islam in the Public Sphere, p. 64f. 14 Martin Riexinger, Sanaullah Amritsari (1868–1948) und die Ahl-i-Hadis im Punjab unter britischer Herrschaft (Würzburg, 2004); idem, “How Favourable is Puritan Islam to Modernity? A Study of the Ahl-i Hadīṣ in Late Nineteenth/Early Twentieth Century South Asia,” in Colonialism, Modernity, and Religious Identities: Religious Reform Movements in South Asia, ed. Gwilym Beckerlegge (New Delhi, 2008), pp. 147–165. 15 Dietrich Reetz, “Kenntnisreich und unerbittlich: Der sunnitische Radikalismus der Ahl-i Hadith in Südasien”, in Sendungsbewußtsein oder Eigennutz: Zu Motivation und Selbstverständnis islamischer Mobilisierung, ed. idem (Berlin, 2001), pp. 79–106. 11


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them of committing apostasy by subscribing to the Prophetic claims of their leaders. In 1924 an Islamic court in Kabul had sentenced one Ahmadi activist, Ni’matullah, to death for holding fast to key Ahmadi beliefs.16 The Jama‘at-i Islami (JI, Islamic Party) created in British India in 1941 and the legacy of its founder Abu’l Ala Maududi (1903–79) are at the core of a rather modernist network of affiliated groups and institutions. From the beginning, the JI being a ‘cadre party’ and religious organisation, staged claims to political and ideological hegemony in society.17 Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817–1898) established a rationalist and modernist interpretation of Islam which was based on the dictum that God could not have given reason to man without wanting him to use it.18 His emphasis was on providing Muslims with modern western education in a religious environment where they would not be alienated from their cultural and religious traditions. For this purpose he established the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College in Aligarh in 1875, which was converted into a full-fledged university in 1920. While his writings caused much controversy and created conflict with the religious scholars of the time, his thinking deeply influenced the discourse and institution-building among Muslims of South Asia. This applied as much to the inception of the Pakistan movement as to modern Muslim educational institutions.19 Ubaidullah Sindhi (1872–1944), a left-wing Deobandi scholar, was considered a political radical in his time because of his staunch anticolonialist and pro-socialist views for which he used classical theological arguments. His political discourse combined with a critical reading of the Islamic sources turned him into an icon of progressive Muslim thinkers of the Southasian subcontinent ever since. Along with religious scholars from Deoband and other schools, he was arrested in 1916 and interned in Malta until 1920 for participating in a plot to

16 Yohanan Friedmann, Prophecy Continuous: Aspects of Aḥ madi Religious Thought and its Medieval Background (Berkeley, 1989), p. 28; Simon Ross Valentine, Islam and the Ahmadiyya Jama‘at: History, Belief, Practice (New York, 2008). 17 Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr, Mawdudi and the Making of Islamic Revivalism (New York, 1996). 18 Cf. Aziz Ahmad and Gustav von Grunebaum, eds., Muslim Self-statement in India and Pakistan 1857–1968 (Wiesbaden, 1970), pp. 25–48. 19 David Lelyveld, Aligarh’s First Generation: Muslim Solidarity in British India (Delhi, 1996 [1978]).

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overthrow colonial rule and to set up a nationalist Indian government in exile in Kabul.20 Since then these traditions and schools of thought have globalised themselves. The high global impact of groups from South Asia is largely explained by the flow of South Asian migrants, first within the British colonial empire, and later within the Commonwealth and the globalising economy.21 Where British colonialism claimed that the sun never set down over the British Empire, today it is the Indian Ministry for Overseas Indians, proudly rephrasing the slogan that the sun never sets down on the Indian diaspora.22 In 2005 alone it is calculated that the five major South Asian countries sent over 1.5 million migrant workers abroad legally. In 2000, there were 24 million South Asians abroad, a figure that does not include the historic and the illegal migration.23 Indian Muslim groups shared in these dynamics which were strongly pushed by Gujarati trading castes, the Memons, Suratis, Khatris and others. Thomas Blom Hansen shows in his study of South African Muslims of South Asian origin how Gujarati origins are being reflected by Muslim activists. They undertake reformist efforts of Arabisation with the slogan “We are Arabs from Gujarat”.24 Historically, the Deobandis, Tablighis and the Ahmadis were the first to start globalising themselves towards the end of colonial rule. The seventies and eighties saw another phase of expansion on the back of the Islamisation policies of the Zia-ul-Haq administration in Pakistan, and new massive flows of labour migration from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India, to the Gulf States, but also to Western Europe and North America. These developments helped the political Islamists of the Jama’at-i Islami, groups such as the Ahl-i Hadith, the Barelwis

20 K.H. Ansari, “Pan-Islam and the Making of the Early Indian Muslim Socialist,” Modern Asian Studies 20, 3 (1986), 509–537; Reetz, Islam in the Public Sphere. 21 Crispin Bates, ed., Community, Empire, and Migration: South Asians in Diaspora (New York, 2001). 22 The Chairman of the High Level Committee on the Indian Diaspora, Dr. L.M. Singhvi, at a media briefing on 1 November 2002: “I have often said that the Sun never sets on the Indian diaspora from Fiji to Canada around the world.” At http://www .meaindia.nic.in/mediainteraction/2002/11/01m01.htm (accessed 17 June 2008). 23 “South Asia: A Special Report,” Migration News 14 (October 2008), 4. http:// migration.ucdavis.edu/mn/more.php?id=3446_0_3_0 (accessed November 11, 2008) 24 Hansen, Thomas Blom, “‘We are Arabs from Gujarat!’ The Purification of Muslim Identity in Contemporary South Africa,” RAU Sociology Seminar Series (Edinburgh, February 14, 2003), http://www.ukzn.ac.za/CCS/default.asp?3,28,10,900 (accessed June 24, 2009).


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and the Pakistani Shias expand their transnational activities, first on a regional scale. Partly as an outflow of the civil war in Afghanistan, the proliferation of an internationalist Islamist ideology in relation to conflicts in the Middle East, the first Gulf War, the conflicts in Kashmir and Chechnya, the nineties formed yet another phase of expansion of these groups to intense levels of global networking.

Doctrinal Differentiation This process of expansion in South Asia and beyond was marked by a growing differentiation. It followed both doctrinal and cultural markers. From the perspective of Islamic doctrine and practice these groups positioned themselves in the ‘Islamic field’25 in different ways. More general markers to such positioning are claims by these groups to some form of reformism, ‘traditionalism’ or modernism. Many scholars point to the relative nature of such classification.26 However it is believed that it could still serve as an indication of a general orientation of these groups within the Islamic field. These claims more often speak about the intentions than about the realities. We would use these terms here less as analytical categories from ‘outside’ rather than as reflections of emphasis in Islamic doctrine and practice from ‘inside’ with a preference for ‘reformation’ (islah), ‘adherence’ (taqlid) or ‘independent reasoning’ (ijtihad). At the same time Muslim groups combined these orientations and developed sub-types of these concepts and practices. In the process of growth and global expansion we have seen gliding shifts of paradigm which require further exploration. Within this configuration, the Deobandis, Ahl-i Hadith and Jama’at-i Islami broadly follow the doctrinal orientation of the reformists, championing islah as a way to return to the perceived or real original meaning of the teachings and practice of Islam. The term is used here with

25 The term ‘Islamic field’ is used here with reference to Bourdieu’s theory of the field of cultural production as a system of “objective relations” between agents or institutions and as the “site of struggles” over power to consecrate values and beliefs. Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (New York, 1993), p. 78. 26 Cf. Benjamin F. Soares and René Otayek, Islam and Muslim Politics in Africa (New York, 2007); Roman Loimeier, “Patterns and Peculiarities of Islamic Reform in Africa,” Journal of Religion in Africa 33, 3 (2003), 237–262; Reinhard Schulze, Islamischer Internationalismus im 20. Jahrhundert: Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der Islamischen Weltliga (Leiden, 1990).

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reference to the movement of islah as associated with the Egyptians Muhammad Abduh (1849–1905) and, with a more conservative orientation, the Syrian Rashid Rida (1865–1935) making a strong impact on Asia and Africa outside of Arabia.27 In various ways they sought to intervene in Muslim society to bring it into conformity with their understanding of Islamic precepts. Inspired by the piety and practices of the first three generations of Islam, the al-salaf, the reformist trend of the Salafiyya branched off from the islah movement and took on a life of its own.28 From the point of view of Islamic doctrine the revivalists have been critical towards the law schools rejecting blind adherence (taqlid) to them, although they still favoured some form of conformity. Instead many revivalists looked favourably at ‘independent reasoning’ (ijtihad) to apply the Qur’an and the Sunna to new and current circumstances, mostly in a more literal reading. The Deobandi school of thought considered itself thoroughly reformist, i.e. oriented towards islah, although it still followed taqlid with regard to its own concept. It never shared the ‘anti-Sufi’ turn of many modern reformist movements as it advocated a balance between the law (shari’a) and the path (tariqa), between reformism (islah) and mysticism (tasawwuf ). The Deobandis accepted those forms of Sufism which they saw as compatible with the shari’a. A number of Deobandi scholars even saw tasawwuf as indispensable for bringing out the right character of students and followers.29 Such orientation is also reflected in the creed of Deoband30 emphasising the unity of shari’a and tariqa, or in other words, reformism and spiritual mysticism. This double orientation is also visible in the promi-

27 Malcolm H. Kerr, Islamic Reform: The Political and Legal Theories of Muḥ ammad ‘Abduh and Rashīd Riḍā (Berkeley, 1966); A. Merad, Hamid Algar, N. Berkes and Aziz Ahmad, “Iṣlāḥ,“ in Encyclopaedia of Islam 2, 4 (Leiden, 1990), pp. 141–171. 28 For a discussion of the many shades of the Salafiyya movement, cf. P. Shinar and Werner Ende, “Salafiyya,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam 2, 8 (Leiden, 1995), pp. 900–909; Werner Ende, Udo Steinbach and Renate Laut, Der Islam in der Gegenwart (München, 2005); Fritz Steppat and Thomas Scheffler, Islam als Partner: Islamkundliche Aufsätze 1944–1996, (Beiruter Texte und Studien) 78 (Würzburg, 2001). 29 My interviews with leading Deobandi scholars at Deoband (December 2001). 30 The school adopted a formal document describing the ‘Tack’ of the Deoband school, highlighting the importance of (1) the law (shari’a), (2) the path (tariqa), (3) the custom of the Prophet (sunna), (4) the Hanafi legal tradition, (5) the dialectics of the classical Hanafi scholar al-Maturidi, (6) the ‘defence’ against ‘false’ beliefs, such as polytheism, and (7) the preference for the thought of the founders of the school, Muhammad Qasim Nanaotawi (1832–79) and Rashid Ahmad Gangohi (1829–1905), Reetz, Islam in the Public Sphere, pp. 316–318.


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nence of Deobandi scholars known for their reformist writings and also for their extensive networks of Sufi disciples. The scholars Ashraf ‘Ali Thanawi (1863–1943) and Muhammad Zakariyya (1898–1982) are good cases in point. Thanawi’s and Zakariyya’s books are featured in various Deobandi seminars the world over. On the current website of the Deoband School, among the six books presented on the Englishlanguage interface, three are authored by Thanawi: “Rights in Islam”, “Masail of Hairs”, “Nikkah (Marriage) in Islam”.31 Thanawi’s writings are a source of reference for the Deoband-influenced Association of Religious Scholars of South Africa (Jam‘iatul ‘Ulama).32 Zakariyya penned the hadith selection commonly used by the Tablighi Jama‘at, the Fazail-e Amal. It is recommended by various Deobandi institutions around the world.33 The spiritual importance of these two scholars is amply demonstrated by Mufti Ebrahim Salejee who founded and heads the Deobandi School in Durban, South Africa. On his website, he lists his spiritual connection (silsila) with both Thanawi and Zakariyya.34 The Ahl-i Hadith are more rigid in their rejection of Sufi practices. They also reject the law schools and go back to the Prophetic traditions. The Ahl-i Hadith believed they had direct access to the divine insight of the Prophet through the Prophetic traditions (hadith). This allowed them to circumvent the law schools. They argued that Muhammad received the Prophetic traditions as part of the revelation (Qur’an 53:3, 4). For this reason they enjoined Muslims to follow all the Prophetic traditions.35 They did not extend their reverence of the Prophet to saints and their shrines, regarding this as aberrant. Today they highlight the principle of tawhid (Unity of God), shared

31 http://darululoom-deoband.com/english/books/index.htm (accessed November 4, 2008). 32 A site-related search on Google reveals 18 such references: http://www.google.com/s earch?hl=de&q=thanwi+site%3Ajamiat.co.za&btnG=Suche&lr= (accessed November 4, 2008). 33 See the Deobandi Darul ‘Ulum in Holcombe, UK, on the website of which it appears in numerous references: http://www.inter-islam.org/Biographies/biohazrtshyk.htm, http://www.inter-islam.org/Actions/ir105.html (accessed November 11, 2008). See also the Islamic bookshop trading in reformist literature at http://darulishaat.co.uk and http://www.iqra.org (accessed November 11, 2008). 34 http://alhaadi.org.za//index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=257&Ite mid=33 (accessed November 4, 2008). 35 Cf. Muḥammad Ibrāhīm Mīr Siyālkot ̣ī, Tarīkh-e ahl-i ḥ adīth (Urdu: History of the ‘People of the Traditions’) (Sargodha, 1953), pp. 168ff.

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with other Salafi groups. Other forms of devotion are regarded as shirk (polytheism) that should be actively countered.36 The Jama‘at-i Islami combines doctrinal orthodoxy that is not far removed from Deoband with an emphasis on the importance of political power and the state for the formation of an Islamic society. Maududi consciously shaped this group as a religious organisation and a political party.37 The party is eager to answer the modern challenges of politics by taking an active anti-western stand on issues of globalisation, anti-terror policies or the ‘hegemony’ of the United States. It embraces not only modern party politics, but also modern means of communication, catering to its middle class social basis. The Barelwis could be considered to follow a ‘traditionalist’ line. As ‘traditionalist’ we will regard the diverse forms of interpretation and practice based on adherence (taqlid) to legal opinion and established custom as they have been inherited in the historical process. This legacy was embodied in local rituals, saint and shrine worship, and was transmitted through local mosques and Quranic schools. Anthropologists sometimes called it ‘lived’ or ‘living’ Islam.38 The Barelwis defend the traditions of lived Islam which they find under attack from purists of the Deobandi and Ahl-i Hadith school. They consider their approach as legitimate, i.e. being rightly guided by the Qur’an and the Sunnah, the tradition of the Prophet and his companions. Their customs include the veneration of Saints and shrines. They believe in their power of intercession as followers plead with God through their donations to have their wishes granted. They show special love and affection for the Prophet, and this is seen by their critics as detracting from the monism of Islam. Although they are attacked by the Deobandis for their alleged lack of ritual and doctrinal purity, most of their doctrinal and legal views are close to Deobandi orthodoxy.

36 See the declaration of their beliefs on their British website where principle no. one of their aims and objectives reads: “To spread the belief in Tawheed (the oneness of God) is the main purpose of the coming of the Prophets. It was their mission to wipe out Shirk (belief in other gods) from the lives of the people.” http://www.mjah .org/AboutMJAH/AimsandObjectives/tabid/60/Default.aspx (accessed November 11, 2008). 37 Nasr, Mawdudi. 38 Imtiaz Ahmad and Helmut Reifeld, eds., Lived Islam in South Asia: Adaptation, Accommodation and Conflict (Delhi, 2004); Magnus Marsden, Living Islam: Muslim Religious Experience in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier (Cambridge, 2005).


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The Ahmadiyya is seen by most Sunni and Shia Muslims as heterodox because of the claims of its founder and subsequent leaders to some degree of (minor) prophethood. It also renounced violent jihad in contrast to classical Islam which argues for both peaceful and violent jihad. Beyond that the Ahmadis combine doctrinal conservatism with social modernity and political loyalism. The Jama‘at-i Islami and the followers of the Aligarh school of thought would be considered here representing different shades of modernism. This would be based on the understanding to call those scholars and trends modernist, which see no inherent contradiction between the confirmation of the faith and the pursuit of rational, scientific thought. They would share the method of ‘independent reasoning’ (ijtihad) with the revivalists. But their reading of the Qur’an and the Sunna was less literal and more allegorical and metaphorical. They applied this method to a ‘rationalist’ reading of the Qur’an, striving to bring it into consonance with modern scientific and technological thought. In consequence, many accepted the political and economic requirements of modern industrial and capitalist societies. This process of diversification has helped to intensify competition between them in a global ‘market’ of Islamic institutions and concepts. At the same time it has led to some form of ideological convergence. Every contestant is anxious to present his vision of Islam as the only ‘true’ Islam, as their very own reformist agenda. We see the concept of reformation, or islah, acquiring new meanings and connotations. In a more general sense for the Islamic networks the task of reformation, or islah, becomes synonymous with expansion of their global institutions. It is also equated with development efforts in favour of Muslim communities which perceive themselves as being at ‘the receiving end’ of globalisation in Muslim minority societies and globally in relation to western domination. While such classification was based on their major doctrinal beliefs (‘aqida) the groups also showed cross influences of other orientations in the Islamic field. Reformist groups tackle modern topics and retain traditionalist influences. Modern groups develop reformist pretensions. Traditionalist scholars modernise themselves. The double trend of diversification and convergence becomes more obvious if we look at the formation of ‘religio-cultural milieus.’

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In cultural terms, these groups grew into extended networks developing features of sects and clans. Some of them tended to become partly endogamous where followers would prefer to intermarry. Over time the groupings expanded into religio-cultural milieus. A ‘milieu’ is understood here as a religio-cultural life-world which expresses itself in preferences for a cluster of religious networks and affiliations sharing a common cultural, and sometimes regional-geographic profile of origin and orientation. Such an understanding of the ‘milieu’ would connect with research in philosophical and social anthropology where a milieu would present a “world arranged and structured according to the predispositions of the actor.”39 In a globalising world translocal actors would carry these predilections with them forming what would be for Max Scheler a ‘milieu-structure’.40 In globalisation, it helps travellers, migrants and their descendents “to make themselves at home in various places in the world.”41 From the perspective of our research, it is felt that such preferences are not only subjective attitudes, but take on features of social structures and networks, spawning institutions accompanied by a distinct internal social and organisational culture. For the groups discussed here they would create competing religiocultural milieus that formed separate segments of the ‘Islamic field’. The milieus would adhere to the religious tradition and the cultural aspects associated with its implementation. In this process they would further differentiate reproducing the social and doctrinal differentiation of the Islamic field within each milieu where we would find reformist, orthodox-traditionalist and modernist elements side-by-side. The following listing includes samples of such diversification within the translocal milieus of the South Asian Islamic groups:

39 Martin Albrow, John Eade, Jörg Dürrschmidt and Neil Washbourne, “The Impact of Globalization on Sociological Concepts: Community, Culture and Milieu,” in Living the Global City: Globalization as a Local Process, ed. John Eade (London, 1997), p. 30. 40 Albrow et al., “Impact of Globalization“; Max Scheler and Maria Scheler, Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik (Bern, 1966), pp. 148–172. 41 Albrow et al., “Impact of Globalization,“ p. 31.


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Deobandis The Deobandi milieu nowadays encompasses madrasas, political groups, ideological organisations, (secular) school associations, social or cultural groups. The affinities between those institutional networks are maintained by Deobandi theologians. They concurrently get involved in different forms of activism responding to broad-ranged needs. They seek to serve local Muslim communities, build roads for the social and economic advancement of their followers and answer the missionary quest of spreading the ‘true’ Islam in Deobandi interpretation. Deobandi madrasas and mosques have established a global presence following in the footsteps of South Asian migrant communities. They are prominently represented in Britain, Portugal, Spain, South Africa and South East Asia. In several places they have started attracting followers of non-South Asian descent, such as local Malay- and Bhasaspeakers in Malaysia and Indonesia, Muslims of Malay and North African descent in South Africa, East African Indians and Black African Muslims in Portugal, and Maghribean Muslims in Spain. Most students attending Deobandi madrasas follow a regular six- to eight-year religious degree course giving them the qualification of an ‘alim (religious scholar). Others attend courses to become a Quranic memoriser (hafiz) or reciter (qari). Some of the more prominent and successful madrasas outside South Asia include the following: Darul ‘Ulum Dewsbury, UK Darul ‘Ulum Holcombe, Bury, UK Jami’atu’l Imam Muhammad Zakaria, Bradford, UK (for girls) Darul ‘Ulum Zakariyya, Lenasia, South Africa Darul ‘Ulum Azadville, South Africa Darul ‘Ulum Sri Petaling (Tablighi Markaz), Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia Darul ‘Ulum al-Madania, Buffalo, NY, USA Darul ‘Ulum al Islamia de Portugal, Palmela (1994).42

Deobandi political and religious pressure groups include the parties of religious scholars, the Jam‘iat-ul ‘Ulama, which have formed in Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, South Africa and Canada. Ideological bodies

42

Abdool Karim Vakil, “Do Outro ao Diverso: Islão e Muçulmanos em Portugal: História, discursos, Identidades,” Revista Lusófona de Ciência das Religiões 3, 5/6 (2004), 283–312, http://cienciareligioes.ulusofona.pt/arquivo_religioes/religioes5_6/ pdf/283–312Vakil.pdf (accessed October 4, 2008), p. 306.

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of Deobandi orientation can be found in the Khatm-e Nabuwwat councils and departments seeking to uphold the principle of Muhammad being the ‘Seal of the Prophets.’ They are chasing ‘deviant’ beliefs and groups seen as challenging this principle. Among those groups, the Ahmadiyya are their prime target as their founder and leaders supposedly claim some Prophetic faculties. Deobandi scholars also participate in the organisation and running of public and private Muslim schools teaching the secular curriculum for primary and secondary education, combined with religious instruction. Such schools have successfully been operating since the 1980s in Pakistan, India, Britain and South Africa. It is the Association of Muslim Schools in South Africa that is particularly active in this field. For a long time it was run by a Deobandi ‘alim, Mufti Zubair Bayat.43 The South African schools accept a modernist perspective on society. They view their service to the community as a means to provide Muslims with modern education in a religious environment. Any ideological pretensions about the ‘Islamisation’ of educational contents have been relegated to the background. Deobandi thinking also reaches out into the production of modern teaching material on Islam. The Iqra Foundation Mumbai produces high quality non-sectarian teaching and reading material on Islamic subjects for general Muslim schools, but also for adult education. It forms part of an Islamic educational trust in Mumbai (India) and Chicago (USA) extending its influence across the Muslim world. Its material is used for Islam classes in public and private secular schools in countries such as India, South Africa, Britain, and the US. Its Mumbai director Ms Usma Naheed is related to a Deobandi ‘alim and mediates Deobandi concepts.44 43 For a lecture on the Islamic Awareness Day 2003 in Tooting, UK (September 28, 2003), Bayat was introduced thus: “Mufti Zubair Ismail Bayat is presently the director of DIRECT (Darul-Ihsan Research and Education Centre). He is a former chairman of the Association of Muslim Schools in Kwa Zulu Natal, South Africa. He is a graduate of Darul-Uloom, Deoband and has a Masters in Islam Studies from Rand Afrikaans University. For six years he taught Advanced Islamic Studies at Madrasah Arabiyyah Islamiyyah, Azadville, South Africa. In 1994 he established Zakariyya Muslim School, where he is currently serving as an advisor and patron to the school. Since the early 90s he has been actively involved in Islamic Dawah, having delivered a series of lectures on a variety of Islamic topics in several countries. He also serves as editor of the Al-Jamiat newspaper. He is an active young scholar to whom many students of Islam turn for help and guidance.” http://www.ummah.net/forum/showthread.php?t=23542 (accessed November 4, 2008). 44 Cf. www.iqrafoundation.com for the US branch and its publishing house http:// www.iqra.org (accessed November 4, 2008).


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Today the missionary movement of the Tablighi Jama‘at is believed to be the largest translocal and transnational Muslim organisation. It is known for its association with Deobandi scholars around the world. It operates through Deobandi schools and mosques, although not exclusively. Religious scholars have a varying degree of influence in its activity. Its doctrinal orientation is reformist-Deobandi, but it keeps alive a certain Sufi legacy. That influence is embodied in ritual prayers invoking God’s name (zikr), in prayers of supplication (du’a) and in an emphasis on character and intention (niyyat)—practices and concepts common in Sufi Islam.45 Its outward appearance is marked by a preference for local Muslim dress, often the long white trousers and shirt common in North India. But the local Muslim dress from the Maghrib or West Africa, for instance, is also accepted in those regions. In Europe and North America or Australia western dress is not uncommon either. Barelwis The Barelwis also extended their religious community to the South Asian diaspora. The teachings of the founder, Raza Ahmad Khan, his shrine and the madrasa in Bareilly related to his family have become the centre of a worldwide network of Islamic schools, shrines and organisations often competing with Deobandi institutions. Their milieu has expanded enormously and grown exceptionally diverse. Their main influence is felt in South Africa, Great Britain and North America. They have formed institutions the world over, such as:46 World Islamic Mission, Wembley (UK)47 British Muslim Council, Derby (UK)48 Madrassa Ahle Sunny Jamat, Laranjeiro; Darul Ulum Kadria-Ashrafia, Odivelas (Portugal)49

45 Cf. Dietrich Reetz, “Sufi Spirituality Fires Reformist Zeal: The Tablighi Jamaa‘t in Today’s India and Pakistan,” Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religions 135 (2006), 33–52. 46 Some of these links are owed to Martin Riexinger, South Asian Islam: Worldwide Movements and Organisations Centered in South Asia, Collection of Internet links, n.d., http://wwwuser.gwdg.de/~mriexin/sasislam.html (accessed November 11, 2008); http://wwwuser.gwdg.de/~mriexin/sasislam.html (accessed November 4, 2008). 47 http://www.wimuk.com (accessed November 11, 2008). 48 http://www.wimuk.com (accessed November 11, 2008). 49 Vakil, “Do Outro ao Diverso,” p. 306 (accessed November 11, 2008).

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dietrich reetz Masjid Abdul Aleem Siddique (Singapore)50 Imam Mustafa Raza Research Centre, Durban (South Africa)51

Most of their institutions are directly associated with Pakistan-based organisations. In the diaspora, they rarely transcend the limits of ethnic followers of South Asian descent, mostly from Pakistan. Similar to the Deobandi madrasas, their teaching is associated with the orthodox curriculum of the dars-e nizami. Ritual distinctions from the Deobandis are largely focused on special prayers in praise of the Prophet (nat, salami) and on the commemoration of the Prophet’s birthday (milad-un-nabi). Also the concept of intercession (tawassul) is a bone of contention as Barelwi followers believe in the power of saints and shrines to mediate God’s influence, a belief, strongly attacked by the Deobandis. Beside orthodox, scholar-based mosques and madrasas the Barelwis are running supplementary networks with a nuanced understanding of Islamic doctrine and practice. Recently the pietist network of the Barelwi missionary organisation of the Da‘wat-i Islami has become very prominent. Founded in 1980 by Muhammad Ilyas ul-Qadri,52 it was conceived as a counterweight to the Deobandi group Tablighi Jama’at. However, unlike the latter, it is mainly limited to migrants of South Asian origins and their descendents. The DI runs mosques and Quranic schools for children. Its style is conservative and pietist. While it follows the ritual spiritualism of the Barelwis with outbursts of emotions of joy and sorrow in their community meetings (ijtima), it also emphasises orthodox reformism in the tradition of islah. This emphasis on correct Islamic practice gives their activity a reformist ideological thrust turning them into some kind of ‘Deobandi’ force within the Barelwi camp. The group strictly emphasises traditional clothing in the style of North Indian Muslims (shalwar-qamis) combined with a trademark green turban.

50

http://aleemsiddique.org.sg/ (accessed November 11, 2008). http://www.noori.org/ (accessed November 11, 2008). 52 See, http://www.dawateislami.net. Cf. Thomas Gugler, “Parrots of Paradise, Symbols of the Super-Muslim: Sunnah, Sunnaization and Self-Fashioning in the Islamic Missionary Movements Tablighi-i Jama‘at, Da‘wat-e Islami and Sunni Da‘wat-e Islami,” Paper presented at the 20th European Conference of Modern South Asian Studies, Manchester University, July 9, 2008. See, http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/ savifadok/volltexte/2008/142/ (accessed November 11, 2008). 51


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Parallel to the DI, the comparatively modern network of the Minhaj-ul-Qur’an (MQ),53 founded in 1980 by Dr. Muhammad Tahirul-Qadri (b. 1951), has spread among diaspora Muslims of Pakistani descent. It grew out of an educational movement started in Lahore, Pakistan, where its schools teach secular courses of the secondary and tertiary level combined with religious instruction. In other countries they run cultural-cum-religious centres where migrants of Pakistani descent can also pray and retain the contact with their cultural and religious tradition back in Pakistan. The group acts as a migrant support network, but so does the DI in many places. The MQ channels resources collected from membership fees of its global branches into its missionary and educational activity. The movement is operating in more than 80 countries around the world. In 1989 Qadri also established a political party, the Pakistan Awami Tahrik (PAT),54 pursuing an “Islamic path of moderation, development, friendliness and peace.”55 Its distinct development orientation clearly gives it a modernist direction. The South Asian Barelwi tradition also gave birth to the international network of Islamic Propagation Centres founded by Ahmed Hoosen Deedat (1918–2005). As a child he migrated with his family from Gujarat in India to South Africa and established the Islamic Propagation Centre International (IPCI) in Durban. Religious centres following his teachings are running in many Islamic and western countries.56 Their emphasis is on comparative religious discourse highlighting the superiority of the Qur’an as compared to the Bible. Their pamphlets teach ‘correct’ Islamic practice (prayer, dress, fasting, and education) in a modern setting. Doctrinally the centres operate across the conventional lines of orientation. They combine propagation (da‘wa) with reformation efforts (islah) and the observance of tradition (taqlid). For this reason they are sometimes counted with the modernist da‘wa of the JI variety or even the Salafi type. But the family network behind the organisation based in South Africa (Durban) is related to the Barelwi section of the South Asian diaspora. 53 The group’s website, http://www.minhaj.org/, calls itself proudly “Minhaj-ulQur’an International.” 54 http://www.pat.com.pk/ (accessed November 11, 2008). 55 Pakistan Awami Tehreek, Putting People First: [Election] Manifesto 2002 (Lahore, September 2, 2009), p. 6, http://pat.com.pk/campaign/20020902_pat_manifesto.pdf (accessed October, 26, 2008). 56 http://www.ahmed-deedat.co.za (accessed October 26, 2008).

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Ahl-i Hadith The milieu of the modern Ahl-i Hadith is known for its strong orientation towards Saudi Arabia and its affiliation with Salafi networks. The AH movement established its overseas branches since the seventies. Outside South Asia it is active in the Gulf region and on the Arabian Peninsula as well as in Britain, North America and South Africa. It is strongly tied to Muslim communities of South Asian descent. Its main headquarters overseas is in Britain in Birmingham where the movement established the Green Lane Masjid as its headquarters. It is registered as Markazi Jamiat Ahl-e-Hadith, UK (Central Party of the People of the Tradition)57 which indicates the close connection with its Pakistani counterpart of the same name. In Britain it is running a network of over 40 affiliated mosques, community centres and basic Islamic schools. From this headquarters it publishes a modern English-language journal The Straight Path propagating its Salafi ideology. In Saudi Arabia it has recently established a highly ideological mission (da‘wa) centre stoking the flames of intersectarian dissent, the Jeddah Dawah Centre (JDC).58 It runs a separate TV channel on the video website YouTube.com—Noor TV9.59 Ahl-i Hadith scholars and graduates of their madrasas are also involved in setting up private (secular) Muslim schools in South Africa, Britain and the Gulf. Ahmadiyya Due to the enormous pressure from its opponents, but also because of its ambitious programmes of expansion and conversion, the Ahmadis developed into a sect and closed community early on. They took on features of a diversified religio-cultural milieu complete with religious schools, ‘secular’ schools, separate organisations and institutions for men, women, youth and children, professional organisations, health facilities and training institutions for da‘wa preaching:60

57 58 59 60

http://www.ahlehadith.co.uk (accessed October 26, 2008). http://www.jdci.org (accessed October 26, 2008). http://www.youtube.com/user/NoorTV9 (accessed November 4, 2009). Cf. its official website: http://www.alislam.org (accessed October 26, 2008).


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Sadr Anjuman-i Ahmadiyya (1906) Atfal-ul-Ahmadiyya (boys 6–14 y.) Khuddam-ul-Ahmadiyya (boys/men 15–40 y.) Ansar-i Allah (1911, men, preaching and community service) Lajna Ama’ Allah (women) (Anjuman) Tahrik-i Jadid (1934, foreign mission) Taleemul Islam College, Jamia-Nusrat College, in Chenab Nagar (Pakistan) Waqf-e Jadid (1957, community service) Waqf-e Nau (1987, volunteers) Muslim Television Ahmadiyya Ahmadiyya Muslim Students Associations

Fleeing from sectarian attacks and government persecution in Pakistan where they had moved after partition of the subcontinent in 1947, the Ahmadis shifted their headquarters to Britain. The head of the community (khalifa) took permanent residence in Britain in 1984. Since then they established their centre in the English county of Surrey.61 They have now established a worldwide presence with strongholds outside South Asia in South East Asia, West and East Africa, Western Europe and North America. As a result of longstanding opposition from Sunni radicals, a constitutional amendment declared the Ahmadis non-Muslims in Pakistan in 1974. The Ahmadis sometimes face violent repression in Pakistan, but have proven enormously resilient, particularly relying on their strong global missionary activities. For Ahmadis calling themselves Muslim has been made a criminal offence under Zia’s Islamist dictatorship through amendments of the Penal Code in 1982–86.62 In spite of strong political and religious pressures they still manage to uphold a traditional presence among the middle classes and in the administration, including the security forces.63

61 Simon Ross Valentine, Islam and the Ahmadiyya jama‘at: History, Belief, Practice (New York, 2008), p. 77. 62 Pakistan Penal Code (Amendment) Ordinance, I of 1982; Anti-Islamic Activities of Qadiani Group, Lahori Group and Ahmadis (Prohibition and Punishment) Ordinance, XX of 1984; Criminal Law (amendment) Act, 111 of 1986; amending paragraphs 295 and 298 on offences relating to religion. Cf. Pakistan Penal Code, at http://www.punjabpolice.gov.pk/user_files/File/pakistan_penal_code_xlv_of_1860.pdf (accessed August 15, 2008). 63 Simon Ross Valentine, Islam and the Ahmadiyya jama’at.

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The Ahmadi network has been partly replicated by a split-off branch named after the city of Lahore, the Lahoris.64 Its leaders have less insisted on the Prophetic qualities of Ahmadi founders. They have been more amenable to compromise with mainstream Sunni positions. But their following is considerably less numerous. Still they form part of the larger Ahmadi milieu. Due to the high degree of institutional diversification there has been a functional differentiation of emphasis in doctrine and practice. While the training institutes for preachers would be more ideological, the professional organisations, health facilities and general Muslim schools would represent a more secularised face of the Ahmadi milieu. Jama‘at-i Islami The JI has also turned into a religio-cultural milieu, the separate elements of which have started globalising. This is particularly evident in Pakistan, but also visible in India and Bangladesh. The organisation is running separate institutions for international religious and political training, for women and for students. It even runs its own housing society in Lahore where it created a separate middle class JI settlement complete with schools, hospital and security forces.65 The JI is an important political player in Pakistan and Bangladesh, while remaining a cultural and religious organisation in India. Their cultural style is modern and technical; their political approach is issuebased and power-oriented. The objective is to establish political and cultural hegemony, to form the government and rule the country in much the same way as the BJP did in India, which has greatly inspired them. The JI runs foreign branches and student groups under different names developing into a globalising JI network of transnational political Islam. The network of its overseas institutions is most developed in Britain and North America, although the JI has developed a presence throughout the Pakistani diaspora.

64

Cf. its official website: http://www.muslim.org (accessed October 26, 2008). Cf. Farish Noor, “The Uncertain Fate of Southeast Asian Students in the Madrasas of Pakistan,” in The Madrasa in Asia: Political Activism and Transnational Linkages, eds. Farish A. Noor, Yoginder Sikand and Martin van Bruinessen (Amsterdam, 2008), pp. 141–162. 65


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The JI’s UK branches play a key role through the UK Islamic Mission in London66 and the Islamic Foundation in Leicester.67 These branches have become centres in their own right not only for the JI’s influence in Europe, but they have also turned into a switchboard for reinforcing their impact in South Asia. The JI also developed close links with the system of the International Islamic Universities. These universities, offering both religious and secular education, were established since 1980 as part of the movement of the ‘Islamisation of knowledge.’68 They are closely connected with the Institutes of Islamic Thought which emerged together with them. Despite its relatively close association with the JI ideology, the International Islamic University Islamabad (IIUI) is a transnational actor of Islam on its own. It teaches a whole range of secular courses (business and management administration, law, social science, engineering, applied sciences) combined with Islamic studies courses and extensive religious instruction.69 Its pan-Islamic agenda is promoted by the affiliated academies of Islamic Law (shari’a)70 and Mission (da‘wa).71 On one level, it is part of a multinational network of religious modernism, linking up to International Universities in Malaysia, Sudan or South Africa. Here it pursues a transnational concept of Islamic education and propagation that expands on its own religio-ideological rationale. On another level, the Islamabad University is a very Pakistan-centered organisation fully autonomous in its international activities (seminars, workshops, conferences, international students). It is nowadays almost totally financed by Pakistan’s government acting more as a national educational institution than as an international agency. In the field of transnational Islam, the IIUI’s agenda is driven both by the state and by Jama‘at-i Islami thinking—a legacy of the Zia-ul-Haq era.

66

http://www.ukim.org (accessed October 26, 2008). http://www.islamic-foundation.org.uk (accessed October 26, 2008). 68 Cf. Leif Stenberg, The Islamization of Science: Four Muslim Positions Developing an Islamic Modernity, (Lund Studies in History of Religions) 6 (Lund, 1996), pp. 153–219. 69 Cf. the university’s website at http://www.iiu.edu.pk (accessed October 26, 2008). 70 http://my.iiu.edu.pk/Academies/Shariah/tabid/326/Default.aspx (accessed October 26, 2008). 71 http://my.iiu.edu.pk/Academies/Dawah/tabid/318/Default.aspx (accessed October 26, 2008). 67

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Aligarh thinking Even though the thinking of Sayyid Ahmad Khan and the activities of Aligarh graduates proved highly influential for institution-building within the Muslim body politics of South Asia, groups and institutions sharing this thinking have not yet been able to form a uniform and compact religio-cultural milieu. Yet the concept of a rationalist and modernist reading of the Qur’an has inspired thinkers and brought into existence a number of schools, publishing houses and think tanks gradually expanding from Pakistan and India to other parts of the Muslim world. Ghulam Ahmad Parwez (1903–86) was a critical thinker and activist who shared the critical attitude of Sayyid Ahmad Khan towards the hadith literature. Like Khan, he recognised only those which were not in contradiction with the Qur’an, while those discussing miracles and jinns would be interpreted in allegorical terms. In 1938 he started publishing his monthly Tolu-e-Islam where he propagated his interpretation of the Qur’an. He published a large number of books on Quranic studies. His views were popularised through religious study centres called Bazm-e-Tolu-e-Islam. Those have now gradually expanded to Muslim communities around the world and can be found in Canada, Denmark, India, Kuwait, Norway, South Africa, the UK and the US.72 Javed Ahmad Ghamidi (b. 1951) is an Islamic scholar, exegete and educationist from Pakistan who gained popularity during the reign of the former President Musharraf for his position of ‘enlightened moderation’ on the nature of Muslim activism. He inspired Musharraf in his own position to fight Islamic militancy. He frequently appeared on television where he took questions from the audience on Islam and Quranic studies.73 Ghamidi split away from the JI after he had originally worked closely with Maulana Maududi.74 He founded the Al-Mawrid Institute of Islamic Sciences in Lahore. He is teaching an online course on Islam at http://www.studying-islam.org. Through his TV appearances and his online teaching he reaches a broad audience across the Muslim world with connection to the South Asian diaspora.

72 73 74

http://www.tolueislam.org/bazms_worldwide.htm (accessed October 26, 2008). http://www.al-mawrid.org/pages/tv_schedule.php (accessed October 26, 2008). http://www.ghamidi.net/ (accessed November 4, 2009).


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His emphasis on the historical contextualisation of Muhammad’s revelation puts him in the line of a rationalist interpretation of the Qur’an.75 Maulana Wahiduddin Khan (b. 1925) is a religious scholar from India and editor of the influential Urdu journal al-Risala serving as the platform of his rapidly expanding network of Muslim study circles. He is another important former member of the JI and critic of Maududi’s conservatism. Facing the Muslim-Hindu Conflict in India he developed an interpretation of Islam aimed at living the religion, conducting peaceful dialogue and finding the place of Islam in the modern world. New study circles of his thought have now emerged outside South Asia in the Middle East.76 His views are being propagated through books, websites and video messages.77 The journal issued by his movement, al-Risala, has formed the core of an international organisation, the Al Risala Forum International which was formed in the US.78 These scholars are using their very personal approaches to Quranic exegesis as a means to a critical and rational reconciliation of the Prophetic revelation with the modern world. Their personal ministries are expanding globally, only partially based on institutions, while more relying on modern media, including publications, books, television and the internet. Progressive Muslims For Muslim thinkers and activists broadly belonging to the Southasian diaspora the thinking following the anti-colonial tradition of Obaidullah Sindhi led them to join a discourse and camp that nowadays has acquired the label of ‘progressive Islam’. This concept seeks to discuss social change and emancipation politics in classical Quranic terms.

75 Asif Iftikhar, Jihad and the Establishment of Islamic Global Order: A Comparative Study of the Interpretative Approaches and Worldviews of Abu al-A‘la Mawdudi and Javed Ahmad Ghamidi (Master thesis, Montreal, 2005). 76 Irfan A. Omar, “Self-Reform or Missionary Work? The Al-Risala Movement’s ‘Moral Revolution’ of the 21st Century,” Paper presented at 19th European Conference of Modern South Asian Studies, Leiden, 2006; www.milligazette.com/Archives/ 01032002/0103200280.htm (accessed November 10, 2008). 77 www.goodwordbooks.com (accessed November 10, 2008). 78 www.alrisala.org (accessed November 10, 2008).

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However, it remains heavily contested.79 Tiesler calls this a political ‘ticket’ project formed on the lines of electoral politics. As it remains rooted in identity politics, its pragmatism will ultimately confirm stereotypes of difference, rather than do away with them, she believes.80 The composition of this milieu is rather diverse. It is composed of activists holding up their credentials of religious training along with a political agenda, often in the sector of non-governmental organisations—NGOs. They are engaged in social and educational activities, in local development work. The most prominent South Asian example of this tradition would be the Centre for the Study of Society and Secularism (CSSS), Mumbai (India).81 The CSSS has been working since May 1993. The executive director of the centre is Asghar Ali Engineer. The major aims are to spread the spirit of secularism,82 communal harmony and social peace, to study problems relating to Communalism and Secularism, to organise inter-faith and ethnic dialogue, but also to promote justice. The centre organises lectures and discussions. It publishes books and research materials. Engineer is known for his erudition in religious traditions, although his authority is strongly contested, if only on the grounds of his connection with the Bohra Ismaili community. In the wider Islamic field these religio-cultural milieus related to South Asian descent have to position themselves towards other Muslim activists and institutions. This is a two-fold process of cooperation in managing their global presence and of competition for the commitment of fellow Muslims and the attention of non-Muslims. Both cooperation and competition are acted out in and between larger alliances of transregional Muslim networks.

79 Omid Safi, Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender and Pluralism (Oxford, 2003); Farid Esack, Qur’an, Liberation & Pluralism: An Islamic Perspective of Interreligious Solidarity against Oppression (Oxford, 1997); idem, On Being a Muslim: Finding a Religious Path in the World Today (Oxford, 1999); Manfred Sing, Progressiver Islam in Theorie und Praxis: Die interne Kritik am hegemonialen islamischen Diskurs durch den “roten Scheich” ‘Abdāllah al-‘Alāyilī (1914–1996) (Würzburg, 2007). 80 Nina Clara Tiesler, Muslime in Europa: Religion und Identitätspolitiken unter veränderten gesellschaftlichen Verhältnissen, (Politik & Kultur) 8 (Münster, 2006), p. 140. 81 http://www.csss-isla.com (accessed November 10, 2008). 82 Secularism in India is not understood to be directed against religion and religiosity, but at the separation of religion and state mainly, promoting equal rights for all faiths and beliefs.


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Ideological Alliances In the process where Muslim networks and milieus globalise themselves they build alliances with networks from other regions, cultural backgrounds and interpretations. Here we would call such alliances ideological with a shared perspective and agenda based on common doctrinal grounds and their application to global conditions. Ideology here refers to a world view evolving from religious concepts and practices that extends beyond transcendental concerns to this-worldly objectives; that explains and maps the world with the aim of expanding presence and control in political and social categories. We are using it as an analytical approach with a connotation in political science and sociology. A growing number of Muslim actors also engage with the term. Their position is not uniform here. Some would see Islamic ideology as a positive value and argue that such an approach is inherent in Islam with a stipulated unity of religion (din) and world (duniya). Others would deemphasise it, concentrating on worship (‘ibadat) and faith (iman). Among the South Asia-based Muslim networks the first position is exemplarily taken by the Jama‘at-i Islami, the second by the Tablighi Jama‘at. The policy of Islamisation as it was pursued in Pakistan was actively shaped by the JI. It brought into existence a Council of Islamic Ideology meant to oversee the compatibility of laws and regulations with Islamic injunctions. The JI pro-actively considers itself an ideological party (nazriyati). In one of its policy papers at its website it argues in favour of an Islamic revolution: “When the people rise in accord with an Islamic ideology and leadership, sure, no one will come in front of such a movement.”83 The Tablighis, as they emphasise worship and faith, would like to suggest that they have no ideological or political concerns. But they also develop a world view of expanding faith and religious compliance mapping the globe from which they derive practical policies of planning and implementation. This in our view would also see them develop a holistic ideological approach. But this interpretation of ideology has to be differentiated from the conventional negative interpretation of western political analysts. For western policy makers there is a tendency to demand a ‘non-ideological’ approach on behalf of their opponents whereas most of them also act within ideological paradigms. In fact, developing a

83

http://www.jamaat.org/crisis/revolution.html (accessed November 8, 2008).

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world view, or ideology, for actors in the public sphere is a common and probably unavoidable feature of public activism. It is with this utilitarian connotation that we look at the building of ideological alliances by Muslim global networks, and also by the religio-cultural milieus of Muslims of South Asian descent. Even though doctrinal markers often gain a prime importance for shaping the ideology of a group or network, we can observe a gliding shift of paradigm within such alliances. This also holds true for South Asian groups when they look for partners in global Muslim networking. The Deobandi-type of reformism, for instance, is seen as a partner by orthodox ‘ulama in South East Asia from the Nahdlatul ‘Ulama (NU). Established in 1926 in response to Muslim Brotherhood reformism, the NU claims a membership of 35 million at least. Socially it remained with the ‘traditionalists’ and was led by the local religious scholars (kyia). As compared to South Asia, doctrinally and politically the NU was probably closer to the Deobandi school, whereas culturally more akin to the Barelwi milieu. The original madrasas of the pondok-type have been gradually phased out, upgraded or expanded to include regular curricula. Several of them also took to the teaching of worldly school subjects. But as with South Asia, here too we have an ‘organised’ sector of the traditionalist approach, the institutions of the NU, and an ‘unorganised’ sector consisting of unaffiliated local schools and scholars, who however broadly identify with the NU system even if they are not formally affiliated. The Deobandis also cooperate with orthodox religious scholars from Afghanistan and Central Asia, even though their orientation is often more ‘Salafi’. Issues of cooperation for the Deobandis also involve the question of the Islamic legal tradition. While in the past their adherence to the Hanafi code has sometimes limited their outreach, recent developments show that they become increasingly flexible, ready to cater to other law schools within their own institutions and outside as well. In India, some Deobandi Muftis also specialise on the Shafi legal tradition to answer inquiries from the small Shafi minority in India, but also from international students. The same applies to South East Asia, where Deobandi graduates have implemented Shafi law in the Deobandi madrasa they established at the Tablighi centre in Kuala Lumpur.84 In South Africa, the Deobandi-dominated Council of Religious

84

My field research, Kuala Lumpur (September 2005).


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Scholars (jam‘iatul ‘ulama) has also started offering legal advice on the Maliki and Shafi schools of Islamic law for Muslims of Malay descent and black African Muslim migrants.85 Through the World Islamic Mission the Barelwis run their own international ministry.86 The Barelwis also cooperate with similar Sufirelated networks. The nature of such alliances becomes clear from the list of links at the website of the Rochdale-based British Sufi Muslim Council.87 It lists among others the Islamic Supreme Council of America,88 the As Sunnah Foundation of America,89 the Crescent Network in the UK,90 the Minhaj-ul-Qur’an mentioned above, and the British Internet portal deenislam.co.uk.91 Barelwi groups also share references to Barelwi theologians and concepts with Sufi orders and Sufi-oriented websites operating independently with a vast network of international disciples and followers. One example is the Naqshbandiyya Owaisiah which emerged in Pakistan in the seventies.92 Another example is the Sufi-oriented Internet portal World of Tasawwuf featuring the biographies of the two sons of the Barelwi founder, Hamid Raza Khan and Mustafa Raza Khan, both renowned scholars and activists in their own right.93 The global cooperation of the Jama‘at-i Islami is embodied in international students attending courses at its headquarters in Lahore. This activism also shows in the JI’s strong connections with the International Islamic Universities and the JI’s interest in international Islamic educational networking in general. The International Islamic University Malaysia is a preferred partner here.94 It was founded in 1983. The affiliated International Institute of Islamic Thought (ISTAC) has been a major proponent of the ‘Islamisation of Knowledge’ project.95 The shift of paradigm that can be observed here is in the decidedly more 85

My field research, Johannesburg (February 2005). http://www.wimnet.org/ (accessed November 11, 2008). It lists representation in Japan, Singapore, Pakistan, India, Dubai, Kenya, South Africa, Mauritius, Germany, the Netherlands, France, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Ireland, Canada, USA, Trinidad, Guyana, Suriname and the UK. 87 http://www.sufimuslimcouncil.org/links.php (accessed November 11, 2008). 88 http://www.islamicsupremecouncil.org/ (accessed November 11, 2008). 89 http://www.sunnah.org/ (accessed November 11, 2008). 90 http://www.crescentnetwork.co.uk/ (accessed November 11, 2008). 91 http://www.deenislam.co.uk/ (accessed November 11, 2008). 92 http://www.naqshbandiaowaisiah.com/ (accessed November 11, 2008). 93 http://www.spiritualfoundation.net/sufisshaykhs6.htm#111011443 (accessed November 11, 2008). 94 http://www.iiu.edu.my/ (accessed November 11, 2008). 95 http://www.iiu.edu.my/istac/ (accessed November 11, 2008). 86

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this-worldly orientation and sophistication of the Malaysian institutions which are embedded in the Malaysian context of strong economic development and educational achievements. Internationally, ‘progressive’ Muslims closely cooperate with secularised and liberal Muslim thinkers. They do not disregard religion but would like to separate it from public and state activities which they feel are not only oppressive but would also corrupt the transcendental character of religion. They regard their position as an emancipatory project where religious beliefs are mainly a private matter, not necessarily less intense than in the other groups, a fact often deliberately misconstrued by their Islamist critics. These individuals are much less organised and only now start forming organisational backbones through NGOs which also link up internationally. Their networking primarily operates on the level of social and democratic activism.96 Prominent examples for the work of such groups can be found in Indonesia, Malaysia, and South Africa:97 – The International Centre for Islam and Pluralism (ICIP), Jakarta (Indonesia)98 The centre was established in Jakarta in July 2003. It is led by Syafi’i Anwar. The goal of ICIP is to build a network of Islamic Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) and progressive-moderate Muslim activists and intellectuals in South-East Asia and beyond. – International Movement for a Just World (JUST), Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia)99 This NGO was founded in 1992 by Chandra Muzaffar aiming at creating a ‘spiritual and intellectual society’ which will seek, in a modest way, to develop global awareness of the injustices within the existing system with the aim of evolving an alternative international order which will enhance human dignity and social justice.

96 Cf. Abdulkader Tayob, “Modern Islamic Intellectual History in Comparative Perspective,” ISIM Review 17, 40 (2006), 63ff. 97 For a listing of websites, authors and organizations discussing or promoting liberal themes in relation to Islam, cf. the website compiled by Charles Kurzman, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (http://www.unc.edu/~kurzman/LiberalIslamLinks.htm) (accessed November 11, 2008). 98 http://www.icipglobal.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=28&I temid=70 (accessed November 11, 2008). 99 http://www.just-international.org/ (accessed November 11, 2008).


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– Positive Muslims South Africa, being the first NGO taking care of HIV-positive Muslims100 It was founded in June 2000 and is led by Farid Esack. It is committed to raise awareness about Aids and offers support to Muslims living with HIV/AIDS. Working with a small staff and a lot of voluntary work the group tries to address all communities, linking all the relevant structures both in government and in civil society, particularly religious leaders. Some authors interpret camp parameters more broadly. Charles Kurzman would include in the liberal camp also Islamic institutions dedicated to the promotion of religious values as long as they include in their agenda ‘liberal themes’ such as the furtherance of democracy and individual rights. In his interpretation this group would also include Muslim intellectuals such as Abdolkarim Soroush and Ali Shariati.101

Formats and Channels The emergence of religio-cultural milieus has highlighted the variety of forms in which translocal Muslim networks globalise and interact. In the process of adaptation they have developed new formats and channels of networking that are an important aspect of the quality dimension of translocal and transnational networking. Formats of interaction appear to be crucial ‘nodal points’ that make the network function in its inter-relational capacity. To qualify them as formats for this purpose they should mediate or facilitate the mutual connections and impact of various social units forming the network. In other words they are ways of connecting. For further research on Muslim translocal and transnational networks these formats could be a promising unit of analysis, as they can be described from an anthropological perspective, by their sociological parameters, with their historical antecedents or political impact. While certain movements have shown a preference for some well-known formats of local interaction, these movements should also be surveyed for formats of translocal and transnational interaction. Such connection

100 101

http://www.positivemuslims.org.za/ (accessed November 11, 2008). Charles Kurzman, Liberal Islam: A Sourcebook (New York, 1998).

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is easier to see in movements such as the Tablighi Jama‘at. Despite their extensive local work the Tablighis developed a strong translocal and even transnational thrust of their work. But also activities such as the annual celebrations of the (mythical) birthday of saints at their shrines (‘urs) in the Sufi-related traditions of the Barelwis bear strong translocal and sometimes transnational aspects. Followers arrive from far-away places in a pilgrimage to the place binding them together in worship of a particular saint. And they carry this connection back to their home places where they interact with other devotees. For the networks related to South Asia, the most common formats would include: – Religious schools and universities (madrasas, darul-‘ulums) These play an important role particularly for the groups driven by theologians (‘ulama), the Deobandis, the Barelwis, and the Ahl-i Hadith. The format appeared very robust and belied speculations about a crisis of religious orthodoxy in teaching as it expanded to ever new regions of the globe. It now shows signs of crossing the borders of the South Asian diaspora attracting Muslims from different backgrounds, such as some Deoband seminaries in Portugal, the UK or in South Africa. – ‘Secular’ Muslim schools and universities combining the state curriculum with religious instruction As Muslim communities grow into the wider middle class and public education is increasingly seen to fail their aspirations, confessional private schools for Muslims have gained increasing importance. They are seen as tools to enable followers of a particular doctrine or interpretation of Islam to pass on the values of this tradition to the next generation while enabling it to master social and economic challenges of modern life. The parents electing to send their children to these schools want them to be pious and advanced. As such most religiocultural networks have recently chosen to get involved in the opening of schools teaching regular state curricula in a religious environment. The example of the Association of Muslim Schools in the UK shows the convergence of different interpretations and milieus in this format.102 The format of the ‘secular’ Muslim school represents a global growth industry in the private educational market. Many new schools

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http://www.ams-uk.org/ (accessed November 11, 2008).


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can hardly satisfy the demands and have long waiting lists of parents anxious to enrol their children. – Social networks and institutions devoted to the advancement of women, youth/students, and children Such institutions are developed to strengthen the community aspect of the work. They underline the readiness and ability to offer specific programmes to all of its sections, and not only to the male activists, as historically has been more often the case. The format reflects the expansion of the social base of Islamic movements. Growing women’s participation in global Muslim networks carries strong emancipatory aspects in mostly conservative colours. It reflects the strengthening of agency on behalf of pious Muslim women. As yet it is too early to judge the social and political consequences of this movement. – Missionary grass-roots movements Besides the Tablighis and the Da‘wat-i Islami of South Asian provenance this format is adopted by new groups such as the East African street preachers.103 It seems ideal to mobilise mainly young followers. But also established movements such as the Ahmadiyya have long adopted this format which caters to their perceived need of offensive propagation of their doctrine. The format helps bringing about mutual influences. The TJ activism served as a model for the DI to build a Barelwi-oriented preaching movement. The Ahmadis are reported to have influenced African movements such as the street preachers.104 – Institutionalised centres of religious propagation (da‘wa) and instruction This rather urban format has been adopted by the modernising groups among which the Jama‘at-i Islami, the Minhaj-ul-Qur’an or the Deedat centres are important. The modernist environment and clientele seem to shape the character of this format across dividing doctrinal and cultural lines.

103 Chanfi Ahmed, “The Wahubiri wa Kislamu (Preachers of Islam) in East Africa,” Africa Today 54, 4 (2008), 3–18. 104 Ahmed, “The Wahubiri wa Kislamu.”

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– Public meetings and conferences for the purpose of reformation (islah) or education, particularly of young followers (tarbiyat) Religious scholars and activists have recently multiplied their efforts to organise public events featuring religious themes. They are somewhat modelled along the programme of the congregation (ijtima) that is so successful within the Tablighi Jama‘at. And they have taken on specific forms. A very successful format is the tarbiyati conference or meeting for students designed to remind Muslim students of modern, secular subjects at universities and colleges of their Islamic duties and enhance their religious knowledge. – Personalised ministries of individual scholars A growing number of religious scholars run their personal ministries. They are based on their personal charisma, network of disciples and activism. This applies to Sufi-oriented scholars such as Hakeem Muhammad Akhtar from Karachi who can count on followers not only in his own city but in faraway regions such as India, the UAE, South Africa, and the UK.105 But modernist and liberal thinkers like Ghamidi or Wahiduddin Khan also rely on this format. – Media ministries driven primarily by electronic media, such as audio and video sermons on CDs, cassettes, or the Internet The expansion of global communication facilitates preachers who give preference to the dissemination of their sermons and other religious texts through websites, CDs or cassettes. This is either intentional as a ‘marketing’ strategy or unintentional, driven by curiosity and a growing fan-base. The latter is the case for Tariq Jameel, a Deobandi scholar, running his own Madrasa in Faisalabad, and a leading functionary of the Tablighi Jama‘at. His speeches can be downloaded from the Internet at http://www.maulanatariqjameel.net. They are available on CD and cassettes, recently also at the social networking video sites Youtube.com and video.google.com. Tablighi followers (and their critics) run their own video channels there, for instance at http://www.you tube.com/user/munimmiah786 (as of November 2009). This YouTube

105 Cf. the websites featuring the Sufi hospice run by Akhtar: http://www.voiceofkhan qah.com/ (accessed November 11, 2008), www.khanqah.org; and a blog of his followers: http://www.khanqahakhteria.blogspot.com/ (accessed November 11, 2008).


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user takes this channel as a chance to promote his own website offering information and literature on Islam.106 There are some forms of interaction which may more aptly be described as ‘channels’. Such can be written, oral, electronic or even visual communication weaving the ‘threads’ between the ‘nodal points’ of the network. While unknown to outsiders, a closer inquiry may in fact reveal that units of the network coordinate through—for instance—personal communication between various travelling scholars or preachers. This seems to be the case for the networking mode among Deobandi madrasas. In other cases we have learnt through inquiries that formal written communications provides crucial input into the network as with letters in the case of the Tablighi Jama’at, where this was hardly suspected before as the movement is otherwise focusing on oral communication.107 Globalisation has contributed to diversifying the formats and channels of interaction within these networks. Historical formats such as networks of scholars, graduates, or the universal use of certain legal rulings, or key texts have been complimented with media activities, journals, internet sites, and wallpapers, with audio and video material. New channels popular with Muslim network activists are no doubt mobile phones and laptops with internet connections, internet cafes, specialised internet portals and email traffic in general. Their cultural specificity in servicing various Muslim networks has still to be studied and brought out. Such studies can feed into a more nuanced understanding of the internal culture of translocal Muslim networks as mediating between various locations while creating new virtual spaces, cultures and concepts travelling within the network with a certain degree of flexibility and yet stability.

Evolution and Change In the process of going global, groups and networks underwent evolution and change that keeps altering the ‘alternate’ globalities. It is important to realise that these camps—or groups of networks have

106

http://www.findthetruth.uni.cc (accessed November 11, 2008; defunct in November 2009). 107 Dietrich Reetz, “Keeping Busy on the Path of Allah: The Self-organisation (intizam) of the Tablighi Jama‘at,” Oriente Moderno 23, 1 (2004), 295–305.

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undergone a significant evolution in the course of recent globalisation. I would date back a marked intensification of these forms of advanced networking to the late seventies, early eighties. They were part of the Islamic response to the perceived failure of the western-type ideologies of nationalism and socialism in connection with the conflict between Israel and Palestine. The Islamic response was also symbolised in the ‘Islamic revolution’ in Iran (1979). Since then the diversity of the channels and formats for networking has grown tremendously. While in the seventies the transfer of religious knowledge, of Islamic education and of radical Islamic politics appeared to be on the upsurge, development issues became more prevalent themes of institution-building and networking since the late eighties. Political issues of religious, legal and social rights and the expansion of democracy seemed to become a growing factor in Muslim countries and among Muslim minority populations since the late nineties. Besides a multiplication of agents, institutions, and bonds, some trends across the diverse milieus of Muslim networking became apparent which I would like to discuss here. The global and translocal expansion seems to be driven by a variety of motives and developments. Some authors have tried to explain the mobilisation of religious movements in the paradigm of the market. Notably the model of ‘religious economies’ has argued that religious pluralism promotes religious participation.108 The capital- and marketdriven modern phase of globalisation on the surface seems to be ideal to test the truth of this model. But this theory is based on the assumption that actors are generally free to choose which religious model to follow. Translocal Muslim networks have not generally corroborated this approach. A transfer between the various networks delineated before seems to be obstructed by various limitations. As many of these networks are conditioned by cultural and regional interpretations of Islam, loyalty within these groups is generally strong. Sectarian interpretations create distinct cultural and regio-geographic milieus between which it is difficult to switch. They are marked by allegiance to certain doctrines, clan and family structures, but also to particular leaders and places of origin, languages or dialects. The networks from 108

Cf. Roger Finke, Avery M. Guest and Rodney Stark, “Mobilizing Local Religious Markets: Religious Pluralism in the Empire State, 1855 to 1865,” American Sociological Review 61 (1996), 203–218; James D. Montgomery, “A Formalization and Test of the Religious Economies Model,” American Sociological Review 68 (2003), 782–809.


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South Asia (Deobandi, Barelwi, Ahl-i Hadith, Ahmadiyya), but also Turkey (Gülen) are obvious examples of such fixation on the cultural parameters of the network. At the same time, these networks in their global expansion adopt similar modes of operation where they act in clear competition with each other. In particular, they copy each other in the modes of operation, in their media activities, on the internet, in setting up religious instruction in both modern and traditional formats, in their ways of distributing religious literature, in operating local branches, community centres etc. However, if they cannot hope to win over many adherents from other milieus, and if their members are not fully free to choose where to go, what can they hope to gain from such competition? Their competition seems, first of all, to focus on establishing the superiority of their particular interpretation of Islam, its doctrines and practices, showing that they represent the only ‘true’ Islam. But they also appear to be in competition with non-religious and nonMuslim activist groups. They hope to show that they are the more effective and correct form of mobilisation—with a clear reference to the desired emancipation of actors mainly from the global ‘South’ as opposed to the global ‘North’ with all its connotations of development, political domination and post-colonialism. Their competition appears more directed at shoring up support among their potential adherents and followers of their own milieu aiming also at secularised Muslims from a shared cultural background. In this they follow political parties which also establish their sociological identities by creating separate cultural and social milieus. During elections they equally aim at shoring up support amongst their own followers which is usually seen as a key to success over rival groups. But while political parties gain access to power and control over resources through the political process, the expectations of Muslim networks are more ambivalent. On one level they want to use these resources to establish their superiority in terms of the ‘true’ Islam. It is the search for the transcendental truth and missionary goals in which they compete. This would be a situation radically different from a ‘religious market’ as seen from the ‘end-user’ of ‘religious’ products. But on another level behind the transcendental motives, there seems to be competition for the emancipation and promotion of those separate cultural milieus which are represented by these networks. Their expansion promises greater social prestige, a larger share in local resources, greater mobility of its members and therefore

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greater promise of worldly success for the current and particularly for the future generations. Global connections and branches are nowadays paraded as markers of a more successful and adaptable form of self-organisation. Establishing themselves globally with ‘foreign’ branches seems to be part of a competition by which they rival with other Muslim groups. Barelwis want to demonstrate to the Deobandis that they are as good in establishing an international presence or even better than their ‘rivals’. The superiority of their brand of Islam is measured in terms of the extent of media operations and the mastery of the internet. New formats of activism are being copied amongst each other and from non-Muslim forms of self-organisation. After the Ahmadiyya community introduced some form of internet-based community television broadcasts, other groups followed suit. The modern religio-educational network of Barelwi institutions belonging to the group Minhaj-ul-Qur’an has established something similar through its multimedia department in connection with its website.109 Religious television has been much on the upsurge among international groups of Turkish affiliation, as can be seen on TV channels available in Berlin. The Gülen movement also has its own television station, Samanyolu. It also has its own daily newspaper, Zaman.110 Their distribution of audio and video tapes is a well-established feature of the media activities of most Muslim networks. Even the conservative missionary movement of the Tablighi Jama’at, despite its fear of global media activities, allows the distribution of audio tapes organised by followers. With tacit approval of its leaders the speeches of the annual congregations are popularised through the tapes. The orthodox Islamic seminaries of the Deobandi and Barelwi variety in South Asia where hardly any English is spoken have developed a propensity for publishing their own regular journals made easy through computer type setting. They are increasingly made available on the internet also.111

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http://www.minhaj.org/ (accessed November 4, 2009). Bulent Aras and Omer Caha, “Fethullah Gulen and his Liberal ‘Turkish Islam’ Movement,” Middle East Review of International Affairs 4, 4 (2000). 111 See, for example, the monthly of the higher Islamic college, Darul-Ulum Deoband, coming out in Urdu since 1941 and reproduced on the website of the school at http://www.darululoom-deoband.com/urdu/magazine/index.php (accessed November 11, 2008). 110


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While the media revolution in Islamic circles and the concomitant diffusion of religious authority has been discussed by Eickelman and others extensively, it should be noted here how much these characteristics become a measure of success or failure, of the superiority of Islamic tenets in the process of global competition.112 This makes the process of the diffusion of religious knowledge more technical, potentially more uniform and ‘modernist’, although not less ideological. The heightened competition of these global Muslim networks along with the media revolution also seems to have a profound impact on the formats of interaction, and through these, on the profile of these movements. In this way doctrinal orientations and interpretations are gradually changing. This can be clearly seen in the example of Sufioriented movements. Nowadays groups with a Sufi background have come to copy many of the formats of reformist and modernist Muslim groups. Traditionally, Sufi activism was known for its very private, oral and ritual forms focused on particular teachers and institutions. Today, Sufi-oriented groups are circulating religious tracts in large and growing numbers. They have established regional offices and institutes where ‘modern’ Islamic education can be obtained which is also offered in formats of regular academic courses officially recognised by the government, and partly combined with secular education. It increases their ideological catchment area, but it also heightens the danger of watering down their ideological profile which is tied to a sectarian interpretation of Islam. Again, a typical example is the modern educational movement of the Minhaj-ul-Qur’an mentioned above. But here also the Deedat centres have to be mentioned which are organising their international activities from Durban. Deedat hailed from Surat (India) and followed the Sufi-oriented Barelwi tradition, although with a very broad modernist outlook. The Islamic Propagation Centre International in Durban113 distributes large amounts of religious literature, audio and video tapes. It is linked to the network

112 Dale Eickelman and Jon W. Anderson, eds., New Media in the Muslim World: The Emerging Public Sphere (Bloomington, 1999). 113 http://www.ahmed-deedat.co.za (accessed November 11, 2008).

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of the Islamic Research Foundation run by Zakir Naik,114 who achieved enormous popularity as a television preacher on Q-TV,115 a channel run by the UAE-based private television consortium ARY, broadcasting to South and West Asia as well as to the Middle East, the UK and the US.116 The modus of operation of these two networks is very difficult to reconcile with the traditional format of Sufi practices. Their ideology and the format of their activities is at times reformist in its emphasis on scripturalism and reformation (islah), as it is modernist in its deliberate service to a Muslim middles class aspiring to achieve social and economic success.

Conclusion We have seen translocal and transnational Muslim networks adapt to changing circumstances of globalisation at an amazing pace. Their main characteristics have been expansion to ever new regions, fields and formats, and vibrant activism across the board. Their expansion has not necessarily led to a homogenisation of Islam. Diversity has increased in the sense that even remote and small translocal networks with few resources have been able to expand beyond their regions of origin, acting often globally among migrants, followers and converts. Yet the introduction of new formats and channels of interaction typical of the global and media age, but sometimes also specific to certain Islamic movements, has modified the cultural and religious texture of their activism and messages. Particularly, folk and Sufi-oriented movements, but also scripturalist groups of Islamic reformation (islah), have grown into new and modern formats. They provide religious education and knowledge which increasingly seek to link up with or compliment modern secular institutions. Their modernist and/or technological evolution gradually makes their structures and formats more similar, which is bound to have an effect on their transcendental quality. There seems to be a strong tendency for them to grow more 114

http://islamicresearchfoundation.com (accessed November 11, 2008). Its website http://www.qtvonline.com/ is not filled with content yet (accessed November 4, 2009). 116 http://www.arydigital.tv (accessed November 11, 2008). 115


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ideological, but also more development-oriented. At the same time, movements relying on the devotional and spiritual appeal of religious practice, which include conventional shrines and Sufi movements as much as the missionary groups of the Tablighi Jama’at, still ride high on the popularity scale of Muslim youth worldwide regarding them as new countercultures of modernity. Through this process, a broader field of heterogeneous networks is emerging. As many of them follow a broadly defined ‘reformist’ agenda to champion their own vision of Islam, they also share ‘modernist’ orientation. Its participants gradually become stake holders of development and politics in society. This is even true where they sometimes act from a very selective or local perspective, or limit themselves to an oppositional stand on public policies. Such may be one of the consequences of cross-border Muslim networking bringing the compulsions of today’s world closer to home, to the grass roots level of activism. But the study of these trends is only beginning. It requires a much more specific understanding of internal modes of operation as well as the emerging translocal and transnational culture of Muslim networking that facilitates much of the overlapping activities and concepts. These groups increasingly produce a ‘travelling’ organisational culture specific to these camps and different milieus that is no longer bound by one location of origin only. It is no longer solely determined by its new place of adaptation either. It is a culture that inhabits the ‘in-between’ spaces identified by Homi Bhabha with a more abstract and yet equally effective nature of impact.117 To understand the future directions of Muslim networking these emerging translocal and transnational organisational cultures will have to be studied more closely and in detail. This should be done without prejudice and with an open mind. If indeed these groups could turn into stake holders of development and politics, they are more a potential for cooperation rather than a source of conflict in the process of globalisation. This does not mean that they will not follow their own agenda of propagating religious tradition, practice and knowledge. But the ways they are doing it, through their evolving milieus, new formats and channels, increasingly modify and shape their agendas. The emergence of ‘alternate globalities’ in the vision of these groups implies their close interaction with mainstream globalisation from which they cannot separate and

117

Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London, 1994).

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by which these globalities are driven. Globalisation thus produces its own alternatives and diversification where uniformity was feared. In this context the emergence of particular milieus and formats gives substance to the allusion of ‘alternate globalities’. Inhabiting the global in-between places is no longer imagined only. It is no longer an experiment. It takes concrete shapes. Undertaking further study of the dynamics of these milieus and formats in a context of diversification and convergence will reveal more insight into such non-economic forms of globalisation which are emanating from the global South while striking firm roots in the global North.

GLOBALISATION IN THE MAKING: TRANSLOCAL GENDERED SPACES IN MUSLIM SOCIETIES Gudrun Lachenmann Universität Bielefeld

Introduction The study of processes of globalisation and localisation in a sense of empirically grounded globalisation theories requires new approaches in research design and methodology. This contribution will concentrate on how international concepts of gender are negotiated in social spaces constituted through local and translocal networking by women in the field of development, thereby shaping translocal flows and landscapes in line with notions first developed by Appadurai1 and others. The intention is twofold, to contribute to translocal methodologies as well as to a comparative perspective across ‘Muslim’ societies. This is achieved through a study of empirical interactions, exchanges by women’s movements, and of everyday life as phenomena of translocality and glocalisation; in this case in three countries which stand for rather contrasting cases, Sudan, Senegal and Malaysia, but which allow analysis on both the subnational and transnational level. The article begins with the elaboration of a methodology based on the concept of translocality and the constitution of social spaces which integrates sociology of knowledge, grounded theory, in addition to notions of agency and negotiation of meaning, notably at the interfaces of knowledge systems. Thereby the most recent approaches in global ethnography are developed further. It then shows how women’s movements build special forms of translocal knowledge and capacity by integrating and translating concepts found in other locations or in global gender debates. This created one of the translocal spaces which allow the negotiation of gender constructs and relations. Notable examples of this, discussed in the following sections, are the evolution of translocal

1 Arjun Appadurai, “Grassroots Globalization and the Res Imagination,” Public Culture: Soc. For Transnational Cultural Studies 12, 1 (2000), 1–19.

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discourses from ‘vulnerability’ to ‘rights’, as well as the diversity of discourses on Islam by developing authority of knowledge. Finally, the importance of global networks between women activists will be acknowledged. The field of gender has so far been hugely neglected in systematic studies and theoretical debates on these issues. The multifaceted nature of globalisation processes becomes particularly evident with regard to how different Muslim societies construct gender and gender order and how women develop their own views on gender, feminism and Islamism and negotiate them with society and state. One aspect is the localisation of global concepts through key actors. Another is the very production of global concepts through the exchange of cosmopolitan epistemic communities and platforms of gender activists and development experts who come from very diverse backgrounds. Thus, the production of knowledge and its flows follow very complex relations which involve networking, transnational migration, and— indeed—development work. This has led to a breakdown of the older (clear) divides into ‘North’ or ‘South’, ‘East’ or ‘West’, even if there still exist clear hegemonic structures in the shaping of international ‘consensus’. Interestingly, however, while debates about gender are often framed in the context of international debates about (human, Islamic etc.) rights or ‘gender and development’, female agency in the translocal negotiations on these issues is hardly recognised in scholarship. The complex comparative approach is thus significant for locating debates on development and civil rights, which are global and international, in local contexts. A particularly interesting feature is the overlap of two globalising trends: on the one hand, women of various religious and ethnic backgrounds come together at international platforms such as UN conferences including NGO fora on the basis of gender-specific concerns.2 On the other hand, the globalising trend of Islamisation and Islamic

2 Gudrun Lachenmann, “Weltfrauenkonferenz und Forum der Nichtregierungsorganisationen in Peking: Internationale Frauenbewegungen als Vorreiterinnen einer globalen Zivilgesellschaft?” WP 251 (1996), www.uni-bielefeld.de/(de)/agsozanth/ publications/workingpaper (accessed May 22, 2009); idem, “Frauenbewegungen als gesellschaftliche Kraft des Wandels: Beispiele aus Afrika,” in Lokal bewegen—global verhandeln: Internationale Politik und Geschlecht, ed. Uta Ruppert (Frankfurt, 1998), pp. 208–233.

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notions of the public sphere and common good bring together Muslim women and women’s organisations from very different regions, claiming a ‘modernity’ (or ‘modernities’),3 or sometimes even ‘postmodernity’,4 which challenges mono-linear and culturalist notions of Western modernity.5 The following discussion draws mainly on results from the research project “Negotiating Development in Translocal Gendered Spaces in Muslim Societies”.6 This project compared and contrasted case studies from very different societies, namely Sudan, Senegal and Malaysia. At the same time it showed certain typologies of networking and the generation of discourses which cross-cut the different country-studies at institutional and intermediary level. The project also embraced the study of the forms of interaction between Islamism, state and women’s groups in different contexts. For example, one field of investigation was the way in which global frames of reference, such as women’s

3 Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, “Multiple Modernities in the Age of Globalization,” in Grenzenlose Gesellschaft?, eds. Claudia Honegger, Stefan Hradil and Franz Traxxler (Opladen, 1999), pp. 37–50; Shalini Randeria, “Entangled Histories of Uneven Modernities: Civil Society, Caste Solidarities and Legal Pluralism in Post-colonial India,” in Unraveling Ties: From Social Cohesion to New Practices of Connectedness, eds. Yehuda Elkana et al. (Frankfurt, 2002), pp. 285–311. 4 Jane L. Parpart and Marianne H. Marchand, “Exploding the Canon: An Introduction/Conclusion,” in Feminism/Postmodernism/Development, eds. Marianne H. Marchand and Jane L. Parpart (London, 1999), pp. 1–22. 5 Armando Salvatore, “The Problem of the Ingraining of Civilization Traditions into Social Governance,” in Muslim Traditions and Modern Techniques of Power, ed. idem, Yearbook for the Sociology of Islam 3 (Muenster, 2001), pp. 9–42; Georg Stauth, “Islam and Modernity: The Long Shadow of Max Weber,” in Islam: A Motor or Challenge of Modernity, ed. idem, Yearbook of the Sociology of Islam 1 (Muenster, 1998). 6 This was financed by the Volkswagen Foundation, directed by the author and Dr. Petra Dannecker who had been doing fieldwork earlier in Malaysia. Dr. Salma Nageeb did fieldwork in Sudan, Dr. Nadine Sieveking in Senegal, and Anna Spiegel M.A. in Malaysia (6 months each); Salma Nageeb, “Empirical Findings from Sudan: Development Issues and Actors, Negotiating Development in Trans-local Gendered Spaces: Preliminary Results,” Paper presented at the workshop “Negotiating Development: Trans-local Gendered Spaces in Muslim Societies”, Bielefeld, October 13– 15, 2005, www.uni-bielefeld.de/(de)/agsozanth/publications/workingpaper (accessed May 22, 2009); Salma Nageeb, Nadine Sieveking and Anna Spiegel, “Negotiating Development: Trans-local Gendered Spaces in Muslim Societies,” WP 355 (2005), www.uni-bielefeld.de/tdrc/(de)/agsozanth/publications/workingpaper (accessed May 22, 2009) (Report on Workshop, October 13–15, 2005, Univ. of Bielefeld, SDRC); see also Gudrun Lachenmann and Petra Dannecker, eds., Negotiating Development in Muslim Societies: Gendered Spaces and Translocal Connections (Lanham, 2008).

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rights, were taken up locally, and how this ‘localisation’ in turn travelled back to the global sphere.7 Overall, it was remarkable how diverse the situations were in the different case studies, with regard to social and state structures, to the economic situations, the role of Islam in society and international constellations of conflict. Thus, certain issues such as sexualised violence or children born out of wedlock were addressed in Malaysia, but not at all in Sudan. We were able to create certain ideal types regarding the national Islamisation processes, while at the same time tried to avoid sweeping generalisations, or a comparison of ‘Islam’ versus ‘the West’.8 Given the decidedly Islamist orientation of the Sudanese government, religion emerged as the major force against and/or with which women tried to negotiate room for manoeuvre in the context of comparisons and contrasts between global and local interpretations of the religion. At the same time, development concerned most women’s groups, regardless of their positioning within the religious debates. In the context of conflict and attempts to resolve it by the international and donor community, women have managed to expand their social spaces, in line with a general growth of civil society and a restructuring of the public sphere.9 The national context of Malaysia, by contrast, is dominated by struggles over political ethnicity and a national Islam which is, moreover, linked to a debate on Asian values as expressing strong self-reliance in economic development. Feminist organisations and networks have tried to enter the debate on situated interpretations of Islam as to women’s rights and they thus seriously challenge hegemonic religious authorities and the state as well as Islamic practices. At the same time they seem to obtain their main legitimacy through their important transnational presence and reputation in networking. The feminist

7 Lachenmann and Dannecker, eds., Negotiating Development in Muslim Societies; Gudrun Lachenmann: “Researching Translocal Gendered Spaces: Methodological Challenges,” in ibid., pp. 13–36. 8 Gudrun Lachenmann, “Introduction: Methodology and Comparison—Embedding the Research Project,” Paper presented at the workshop “Negotiating Development: Trans-local Gendered Spaces in Muslim Societies”, Bielefeld, October 13–15, 2005, www.uni-bielefeld.de/tdrc/(de)/agsozanth/publications/workingpaper (accessed May 22, 2009), p. 10. 9 Salma A. Nageeb, New Spaces and Old Frontiers: Women, Social Space and Islamization in Sudan (Lanham, Maryland, 2004); idem, “Empirical Findings from Sudan.”


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Islamic exchange is one important field, but at least as important is the participation in regional and global debates about globally defined rights (see CEDAW) from which they draw their power for national activism.10 Finally, Senegal is an example of a secular state in favour of liberal global concepts such as New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD), which is reflected in modernist development programmes that are oriented towards the elimination of poverty, as well as encouraging democracy and decentralisation. However, Islam is omnipresent through a structure of Islamic brotherhoods which are closely entwined with the political elite, as well as some newly Islamising forces which have begun to compete on a national level with state legitimacy. This diminishes the possibility to negotiate development concepts pertinent to gender questions in the public sphere. An example is the very controversial tendencies regarding the reform of the family law, partly in the sense of ‘back to Sharia law’, but mostly regarding practical issues such as parental vs. paternal custody etc. As in many African countries, othering processes take place by women and women’s movements and organisations through embracing ‘African culture’ and ‘African feminism’, sometimes as against ‘Islamic feminism’ and/or against ‘the West’. The same occurs by the society and Islamic authorities accusing women of ‘Western feminism’.11 10 Anna Spiegel, “Women’s Organisations and their Agendas: Empirical Findings from Malaysia, Women’s Movement and Trans-local Networking in Malaysia,” Paper presented at the workshop “Negotiating Development: Trans-local Gendered Spaces in Muslim Societies”, Bielefeld, October 13–15, 2005, www.uni-bielefeld.de/tdrc/projects; idem, “Women’s Organisations and Social Transformation in Malaysia: Between Social Work and Legal Reforms,” in Negotiating Development in Muslim Societies, eds. Lachenmann and Dannecker, pp. 67–92; idem, “Negotiating Women’s Rights in a Translocal Space: Women’s Organisations and Networking in Malaysia,” in ibid., pp. 171–193; idem, Striving for Social Change in Translocal Spaces: Female Activism in Islamising Malaysia (Unpubl. Doct. Dissertation, Fac. of Sociology, Bielefeld University, 2008). 11 Gudrun Lachenmann, “Civil Society and Social Movements in Africa: The Case of the Peasant Movement in Senegal,” The European Journal of Development Research 5, 2 (1993), 68–100; idem, “Decentralisation and Civil Society: Negotiating Local Development in West Africa,” WP 358 (2006), www.uni-bielefeld.de/tdrc(de)/ agsozanth/publications/workingpaper (accessed May 22, 2009); Nadine Sieveking, “Negotiating Development in Senegal: Women Organisations, Issues and Strategies,” Paper presented at the workshop “Negotiating Development: Trans-local Gendered Spaces in Muslim Societies”, Bielefeld, October 13–15, 2005, www.uni-bielefeld.de/tdrc/ (de)/agsozanth/publications/workingpaper (accessed May 22, 2009); idem, “Women’s Organisations Creating Social Space in Senegal,” in Negotiating Development in Muslim Societies, eds. Lachenmann and Dannecker, pp. 37–66; idem, “Negotiating

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gudrun lachenmann Conceptualising Translocality in Globalisation: Methodological Considerations

The methodology used in the project discussed here was based on the analysis of social spaces and their translocal constitution.12 In all three case studies, the approach of the state was to place discourses on gender in the context of traditional debates about the status of women, the policies of women (instead of gender) in development and the notion of female vulnerability. This ignored both negotiation processes within the societies as well as transnational networks and international contexts (e.g. the debate about the Convention on all forms of Discrimination against Women CEDAW) in which such concepts are shaped.13 The investigation showed not just the presence of female actors on these levels, but also that women were among the very early transnational actors. Different voices have highlighted the necessity of a fundamental methodological reconsideration of approaches within a process of globalising social science.14 Elements in this debate are the increasing interest in strengthening qualitative methodology15 in what could be called transcultural (comparative) social research.16 Our analysis refers to concepts and phenomena considered to be constitutive of globalisation, such as social movements, networks, civil society, thereby avoiding dualisms of blocks, cultures etc. Globalisation is studied through its constitutional elements of interlinking and connectedness, flows17 Women’s Rights from Multiple Perspectives: The Campaign for the Reform of the Family Law in Senegal,” in ibid., pp. 145–170. 12 Gudrun Lachenmann, “Weibliche Räume in muslimischen Gesellschaften Westafrikas,” Peripherie 24, 95 (2004), 322–340. 13 Vivienne Taylor, Marketisation of Governance: Critical Feminist Perspectives from the South. DAWN Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (Cape Town, 2000); Maxine Molyneux and Shahra Razavi, “Beijing plus Ten: An Ambivalent Record on Gender Justice,” Development and Change 36, 6 (2005), 983–1010. 14 Martin Albrow, and Elizabeth King, eds., Globalization, Knowledge and Society: Readings from International Sociology (London, 1990). 15 Gudrun Lachenmann, “Intervention, Interaktion und Partizipation: Zu einigen Methodenfragen der empirischen Entwicklungsforschung,” in Entwicklung: Theorie— Empirie—Strategie—Institution, ed. Manfred Schulz (Muenster, 1997), pp. 99–114; Georg Elwert, Feldforschung: Orientierungswissen und kreuzperspektivische Analyse (Berlin, 2003). 16 Georg Stauth, “Globalisierung, Modernität, nicht-westliche Zivilisationen,” in Kleine Staaten in großer Gesellschaft, eds. Josef Langer and Wolfgang Pöllauer (Eisenstadt, 1995), pp. 89–107. 17 Appadurai, “Grassroots Globalization and the Res Imagination.”


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and translocal social spaces. At the same time, the making of globalisation can be considered from below, hence the discussions on glocalisation and localisation.18 The perspective—or even paradigm—of translocality19 could be used here to refer to the interactive “(social) construction of reality”.20 In order to study globalisation processes further, it is certainly fruitful to use hermeneutics in order to incorporate knowledge from nonWestern societies. The sociology of knowledge has laid the necessary and still relevant methodological foundations rather early. Schuetz and Luckmann’s conceptualisation of the “structures of the life-world”21 is a very good basis from which to study translocality, as it can refer to worlds of different reach. Of particular importance in the research on transcultural global phenomena have been ideas regarding communicative genres, construction of the other, new forms of sociability as well as attempts to understand different possible interpretations of meaning, i.e. by authors of a ‘new’ sociology of knowledge and hermeneutics,22 although the danger of cultural relativism is not always recognised. “Grounded theory”23 has helped to develop key categories and working (hypo)theses within the framework of (repetitive) interpretation of empirical data. This process

18 Roland Robertson, “Glocalization: Time-Space and Homogeneity-Heterogeneity,” in Global Modernities, eds. Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash and Robert Robertson (London, 1995), pp. 25–44; Ulf Hannerz, “Transnational Research,” in Handbook of Methods in Cultural Anthropology, ed. H. Russel Bernard (Walnut Creek, 2000), pp. 235–256. 19 Ulrike Freitag and Achim von Oppen, “Translokalität als ein Zugang zur Geschichte globaler Verflechtungen,” H-Soz-u-Kult (June 10, 2005), http://hsozkult .geschichte.hu-berlin.de/forum/type=artikel&id=632 (accessed June 29, 2009). 20 Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Garden City N.Y., 1966). 21 Alfred Schuetz and Thomas Luckmann, The Structures of the Life-World (Evanston Ill., 1973). 22 Clifford Geertz, Dichte Beschreibung: Beiträge zum Verstehen kultureller Systeme (Frankfurt, 1983); Uwe Flick, Ernst von Kardoff and Ines Steinke, eds., A Companion to Qualitative Research (London, 2004); Ronald Hitzler and Anne Honer, eds., Sozialwissenschaftliche Hermeneutik (Opladen, 1997); Hubert Knoblauch, ed., Kommunikative Lebenswelten: Zur Ethnographie einer geschwätzigen Gesellschaft (Konstanz, 1996); Thomas Luckmann, “Zum hermeneutischen Problem der Handlungswissenschaften,” in Text und Applikation, eds. M. Fuhrmann et al. (München, 1991), pp. 513–523; Hans-Georg Soeffner, “Social Scientific Hermeneutics,” in A Companion to Qualitative Research, eds. Flick, Kardoff and Steinke. 23 Anselm Strauss, Qualitative Analysis for Social Scientists (Cambridge, 1987); idem and Juliet Corbin, Basics of Qualitative Research: Techniques and Procedures for Developing Grounded Theory (Thousand Oaks, 1998).

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of confronting theory with empirical findings also helps us to understand ‘different meanings’ and the situatedness of actions and discourses, both issues of relevance to the constructivist approach. The phenomenological approach of interpretative sociology and sociology of knowledge embraces a theory and methodology of social action which integrates and necessarily goes beyond a merely actorcentred approach.24 I consider that agency and negotiation of meaning leading to institutionalisation and structuration must be the basis of looking at social spaces. Social space needs to be conceived as an operationalisation of the life-world concept, rather than as a static unit of analysis. By extension, the consideration of transnational space involves the analysis of dynamic interfaces of systems of knowledge.25 If globalisation and localisation are produced in a constructivist sense, i.e. by women activists and researchers, everyday life, organisational life and links between these have to be brought together. We capture the micro-macro relation through the approaches of structuration and institutionalisation.26 Regarding the definition of the various levels of interaction, we distinguish different complexities of societal organisation. Given the global and translocal phenomenon of connectedness, relational studies can also overcome ‘methodological nationalism’, even when national cases serve as points of departure.27 By considering the negotiating processes in different spheres we can render more visible the multitude of relations and interactions, and by systematic contextualisation we highlight those instances where national situatedness actually produces borders. In order to operationalise this type of analysis, concepts such as arena, platforms, public sphere(s) are helpful to denote spaces in which power relations are played out and are challenged, meanings of policy issues are negotiated as well as images of

24 Norman Long, “Introduction: From Paradigm Lost to Paradigm Regained? The Case for an Actor-Oriented Sociology of Development,” and “Conclusion,” in The Battlefields of Knowledge: The Interlocking of Theory and Practice in Social Research and Development, eds. idem and Ann Long (London, 1992), pp. 3–15, 16–46, 268–277; Norman Long, “Exploring Local/Global Transformations: A View from Anthropology,” in Anthropology, Development and Modernities: Exploring Discourses, CounterTendencies and Violence, eds. Alberto Arce and Norman Long (London, 2000), pp. 184–222. 25 Long, “Exploring Local/Global Transformations.” 26 Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Berkeley, 1984). 27 Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch and Christina Szanton Blanc, Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration: Race, Class, Ethnicity and Nationalism Reconsidered (New York, 1992).


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gender constructed. This brings into focus the negotiation of meaning of institutions in translocal/transnational spaces and the creation of new forms of social cohesion and collective action, social movements and civil society organisations. The production of hybridity, a concept which is supposed to overcome old dichotomies between developed and underdeveloped countries28 can be used as the concept of glocalisation to show how translocality is produced in translocal spaces. The processes of ‘localisation’ and ‘glocalisation’ can be linked to the concept of ‘politics of the place’. Harcourt and Escobar and Gupta and Ferguson characterise these as the perceived need to defend local identities.29 Consequently, communities will try to uphold certain characteristics even in global processes of negotiation, but at the same time contribute to social transformation by translating global issues— something which our approach brings out nicely through the linking of various life-worlds. This methodology further takes up current concerns about the necessity of multi-sited research and respectively about global ethnography and anthropology of globalisation.30 In this project, a more sociological perspective is taken by combining “thick and complex methods” such as trajectories, multi-level analysis, mobile research,31 complex designs etc. Rather than a single researcher undertaking multi-sited research, systematic comparison was chosen, offering a wider perspective on developments. The comparative aspect, based on intense exchange amongst members of the research team, allowed them to elaborate grounded theories, develop typologies and identify interstices. Thus, it helps to understand modes of the constitution of translocal public spheres through “translocalising networks, issues and bodies”.32

28 Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Development Theory: Deconstructions/Reconstructions (London, 2001). 29 Wendy Harcourt and Arturo Escobar, “Lead Article: Women and the Politics of Place,” Development 45, 1 (2002), 7–13; Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, eds., Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Cultural Anthropology (Durham, 1997). 30 George E. Marcus, Ethnography through Thick and Thin (Princeton, N.J., 1998); Michael Burawoy et al., eds., Global Ethnography: Forces, Connections, and Imaginations in a Postmodern World (Berkeley, 2000); Jonathan Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo, eds., Anthropology of Globalization (Maiden, MA, 2002). 31 Guenther Schlee, “Mobile Forschung bei mehreren Ethnien: Kamelnomaden Nordkenias,” in Feldforschungen: Berichte zur Einführung in Probleme und Methoden, ed. Hans Fischer, (Berlin, 1985), pp. 203–218. 32 Regarding Malaysia, see Spiegel, Striving for Social Change in Translocal Spaces, p. 331; This approach resembles in both its concern as well as its methodology that of Michael Burawoy (Burawoy et al, Global Ethnography), in addition to further

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Our research has shown how not just Islamist networks, but also critical feminist organisations such as the Malaysian Sisters in Islam (SIS) have managed to build special forms of translocal knowledge and capacity by translating their concerns in ways relevant to organisations elsewhere. Such links are enforced by ‘travelling activists’ who through their personal and professional trajectories establish a multitude of connections, but receive also feedback which is re-inserted at a variety of local levels.

Women’s Organisations and Their Agendas: Between Local Concerns and Global Gender Concepts The following description of the women’s organisations and movements, as well as their typology is based on a qualitative analysis of their own conceptualisations of activities in the field of development, of their agency, as well as on their translocal connections and references.33 In order to situate these, however, it is necessary to characterise the different contexts somewhat further. In Malaysia, gender discourse is influenced by a high rate of urbanisation and participation of women in the industrial workforce, whereas the issue of poverty takes the prime place in Senegal, and questions of conflict and peace dominate Sudanese concerns. Similarly different are the moral discourses on gender and religion by society and state. The ‘good Muslim woman’ has become a standard reference in (otherwise quite diverse) discourses in Malaysia, where neither Islam nor ethnic Malayness are uncontested in terms of the composition of the population. In Senegal, where such concerns play a minor role, it takes a more or less secular stance on the basis of a classical ‘women in development’ approach, while feminism is regarded as Western or nonAfrican. In Sudan, ethnic and religious differences are highly politicised and conflictive. In this context, the Islamist government takes a stance of complete othering as Western and un-Islamic global gender concepts, although more and more local NGOs are created which position themselves accordingly and cooperate with external donors.

systematization of translocal relations and contextualisation through the a.m. complex methods. 33 Lachenmann, “Introduction: Methodology and Comparison,” pp. 13ff.


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The civil society context also varies greatly between the three countries of our case study. In Malaysia, successful economic development has tended to de-politicise civil society. Development discourses outside the state hardly exist. Instead, civil society organisations with outside links focus on violence against women (VAW) and human rights. In Senegal, the (state co-opted) women’s movement rather has lost its force in the public sphere. The issue of livelihoods is very prominent due to the great and growing poverty; however discourses on vulnerability play a major role as against agency and policy changes, notably in the context of the “Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper”.34 Finally, in Sudan, the state has tried to instrumentalise civil society, and notably the women’s movement. Civil society is mostly concerned with income generating activities and conflict transformation. In all three countries, foreign NGOs are co-operating with civil society organisations, albeit under different conditions. While women’s NGOs in Senegal have been mostly co-opted by the state, Malaysia tries to control and limit such co-operation. The widest space exists, somewhat surprisingly, in Sudan, where the international cooperation contributes to the opening and restructuring of the public sphere. Senegal What do these general observations mean more specifically for the ways in which women strategise gender and development? In Senegal, the state took the classical developmentalist approach by ‘organising the women’ in a way to improve their domestic skills within the state services. This was done in the context of separate activities for the ‘promotion of women’, which excluded them from mainstream (especially agricultural) activities. This caused the sometimes very open confrontation with urban secular feminism, which used to be very strong, but has lost importance of late. Supported by the classical ‘women in development’ approach of international donors, women have been advised to establish women’s organisations as target groups for these state services and conventional women’s projects (small credit etc.). These Groupements de Promotion Féminine (GPF) 34

This was elaborated according to the strategy of the World Bank, incorporating other donors, although other action plans already existed before, and the participatory approach was not seriously followed, see République du Sénégal, Document de Stratégie de Réduction de la Pauvreté (Dakar, 2002).

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(as against Groupements à Intéret Économique (GIE) mainly founded by men) still form the basis of the National Federation of Groups for Promoting Women (FNGPF). In spite of being very close to the state, it is nevertheless often considered to “have given women a voice”.35 In the context of the crisis of the groundnut-based economy, the peasant movement gained high organising power.36 The defining power of concepts of sustainable development and societal solidarity in the 1980s was very important in creating platforms allowing women to enter into certain negotiations regarding gender relations, development concepts and work. Women’s groups within peasant organisations as well as the a.m. GPF recognised by the state often coincided. Currently, however, there is a clear void as regards their future as a societal force. The local WID organisations have lost much legitimacy and have not (yet) found a way to interact with the democratic Community Councils established with decentralisation. On the contrary, their official organisations were left in an insecure position after the regime change in 2000. In the rural areas, even those groups which were set up by women and which promoted collective action, such as health committees, volunteer midwives, leaders of re-established rice schemes, operators of collective gardens, water supply or cereal banks were not integrated into the newly elaborated local development plans. These plans are currently void of any female perspective which would include grain mills, cereal banks etc.; instead they concentrate mainly on infrastructure.37 There are some women’s organisations which seem to be able to combine revivalist and reformist Islamic movements with the a.m. efforts of secular social and economic organisation, as well as with traditional local institutions of female cooperation (often attached to religious occasions). The Association pour la Promotion de la Femme Sénégalaise (APROFES) is a case in point. This organisation is based

35

Sieveking, “Negotiating Development in Senegal,” p. 7. Lachenmann, “Civil Society and Social Movements in Africa”; idem, “Decentralisation and Civil Society.” 37 Lachenmann, “Weibliche Räume in muslimischen Gesellschaften Westafrikas”; idem, “Decentralisation and Civil Society”; idem, Frauke Bleibaum, Judith Ehlert, Lalla Khadeija ElOumrany, Daniel Krenz-Dewe, Sascha Vennemann, and Bertrand Zohy, “Décentralisation, société civile, développement au Sénégal, Projet de recherche d’étudiant(e)s 2004/2005: Rapport d’étude de terrain,” WP 357 (2006), www.unibielefeld.de/tdrc(de)/agsozanth/publications/workingpaper (accessed May 22, 2009). 36


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in the regional capital Kaolack, and I have been following its activities since 1994.38 It grew out of the developmentalist approach to women by explicitly taking into account religious considerations as well as discussing and challenging ‘tradition’. This evolution is reflected in the trajectory of the founding president, who had received a technical education and nowadays works in order to accommodate the felt need of the women to embed all development efforts in everyday religiosity. One could call it a certain degree of Islamic revival. The organisation succeeded in creating a space for the negotiation of new concepts of gender relations and rights, but also created adequate formal new institutions such as local health insurance etc. This represents a new mode of interacting with the state by accepting its modernistic approach and challenging its balancing act between its traditional good relations with the classical brotherhoods and ambivalent relation to the groups propagating Islamic revival and reform. These latter are clearly following the well known strategy of instrumentalising the woman question in order to protest against state secularism and Western development concepts. This helps create new female spaces and modes of entering the public sphere at different interfaces, such as inviting secular and religious authorities and developing a clear localising relationship with regard to (global) development and gender concepts (see below). This constitution of local female spaces for the negotiation of concepts of development in the broadest sense which are considered local rather than foreign proved very important to foster a sense of social cohesion. APROFES clearly works in the direction of an inclusive approach, rather than the earlier approach to Women in Development, which segregated the male and female spheres. They focus on classical approaches of establishing health care centres. At the same time, however, networking takes place with midwives’ organisations on the national as well as on the local level. In these meetings two different systems of knowledge are clearly interfacing. The question, however, is in how far this cooperation and the reference to the male connoted Marabout authority, that integrates state and development representatives of the laicist state and development institutions, can be upheld in the sense of negotiating gender order. Amongst development experts and critical academic circles, the power structure and

38 Lachenmann et al., “Décentralisation, société civile”; extensively Sieveking, “Women’s Organisations Creating Social Space.”

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influence of religious authorities are considered advancing and even as menacing. In the urban sphere, local governance has long been in the hands of the religious brotherhoods. Women have increasingly participated in public religious ceremonies such as pilgrimage, but remain without further authority. Women’s organisations have, in their own public events, tended to emphasise strongly the inclusion of religious authorities who support the gender agendas put forward through progressive religious interpretations. Although this might seem to occur on a less intellectual and more popular level than in the other two case studies, it is an important feature of the new women’s NGOs which are not explicitly ‘Islamic’. Contrary to these new forms of combining development and piety,39 the Islamic revivalism and reform in Senegal has led to different organisational forms which do not provide women with much public visibility. On the one side, there is a certain recovery and institutionalisation of the brotherhood contexts in the form of the cult of Mam Diara (the mother of the Murid founder A. Bamba). They organised dahiras, i.e. local Koranic schools, with little relationship to modern Islamic education. They show, however, the transformative potential with regard to societal development of the Sufi Brotherhoods.40 On the other hand, the diversity and pluralism of Muslim society in Senegal includes the new movement of Jama’aatu Ibadu Rahmane (JIR), the ‘Ibadous’, where women become more visible through wearing the veil (often by the older generation othered as ‘Arabic’) and receiving good formal education.41 The revivalist and reformist Islamic movement stands up as a clear opposition to the state’s secular ‘Western’ development model as well as the Sufi movement by demonstrating the ‘right social order’. But female Islamic movements are largely excluded from the interaction with secular authorities and politics. Malaysia In the much better economic circumstances of Malaysia, negotiation of development concepts in traditional women’s groups is much more 39

Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, 2005). 40 Sieveking, “Negotiating Development in Senegal,” pp. 2ff. 41 Sieveking, “Women’s Organisations Creating Social Space,” p. 53.


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confined to marginal areas and strata of the population than in Senegal and Sudan. Spiegel’s study has shown that in Kelantan, one of the two states in Malaysia that are governed by the Islamist opposition party Parti Islam Se Malaysia (PAS), women from the upper classes have founded charities and women’s centres to “help poor women”.42 Without challenging it, their approach follows the classical global Women in Development concept combined with moral discourse through the implementation of income generating programmes, training and legal counselling. These programmes mainly address women who are clearly at the margins of Islamic society, i.e. divorced women or widows, enabling them to maintain their own families—a case not foreseen in traditional Islamic visions of the family. These NGOs co-operate with the regional government, so to speak as state proxies, although they have started to develop certain critical positions with regard to the quality of society and social reality including the practical implications of Islamic institutions. Overall, however, this charitable approach has been criticised by feminists for its failure to address fundamental economic and social injustices. Indeed, these women’s organisations have more recently begun to apply the global concept of ‘empowerment’ advocated by global women’s action programmes (UN conferences in Nairobi, Beijing) as an integral element in eliminating discrimination of women and as a step towards fundamentally changing the gender orders of societies in development. This is a clear sign of the usefulness of the concept of translocality for analysis as the contact with feminist groups such as Sisters in Islam (SIS) in the capital has led them to critically reflect on the situation. A completely different type of approach is represented by feminist organisations in urban settings, such as Women’s Aid Organisation (WAO), All Women’s Action Society (AWAM) and especially the aforementioned SIS, whose orientation is clearly translocal. The latter has been very active in networking with all types of local and international organisations.43 One example is their active collaboration with

42

Spiegel, “Women’s Organisations and Social Transformation in Malaysia,” pp. 69ff. Norani Othman, “Islamization and Modernization in Malaysia: A Competing Cultural Reassertion and Women’s Identity in a Changing Society,” in Women, Ethnicity and Nationalism, eds. Rick Wilford and Robert L. Miller (London, 1998), pp. 170–193; Norani Othman, “Introduction: Muslim Women and the Challenge of Political Islam and Islamic Extremism,” in Muslim Women and the Challenge of Islamic Extremism, eds. idem and J. Petaling (Kualalumpur, 2005), pp. 1–10. 43

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the research team in translocal events such as Summer Schools (see below). Sudan In Sudan there exists an even deeper distinction between women’s organisations oriented towards charity and ‘gender NGOs’.44 The former usually work on the basis of Islamic notions of supporting the needy. Given the character of the state, they mostly sympathise with its Islamist orientation and thus can often be regarded as semi-official welfare organisations. The latter group of organisations basically focus on advocacy work. They have lately gained room for manoeuvre within the framework of peace and human rights discourses and depend on support from international organisations. Within the former, the Islamic organisations, the debate about gender issues is appropriated by a strong fraction of women who are clearly interested in and prepared for translocal exchange. The diversity of Islamic discourses reflects the different positions which these women adopt vis à vis global gender concepts (see below).

Production of Translocality through Localising and Popularising Global Concepts: Female Social Spaces and Modes of Interaction, Communication and Networking The popularisation of global gender concepts observed in all three countries can be said to have created one of the translocal spaces which allow the negotiation of gender constructs and relations.45 The explanatory power of this process, as well as the innovative and creative forms in which it sometimes resulted, have proved very surprising. Biographic interviews and trajectories of activists have shown how different types of Islamic discourses and affiliations have developed. For Senegal this is seen by elaborating on three different types of

44

Nageeb, “Women’s Organisations and Their Agendas in Sudan,” pp. 95ff. Petra Dannecker and Anna Spiegel, “ ‘Let’s not rock the boat’: Frauenorganisationen und Demokratisierung in Malaysia,” Internationales Asienforum 37, 3–4 (2006), 297–319; idem, “Women’s Organisations and the Reshaping of the Public Sphere: A Comparative Analysis,” in Negotiating Development in Muslim Societies, eds. Lachenmann and Dannecker, pp. 123–144. 45


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“rebellion of the daughters”46 with regard to Islam and the personal vision of gender in society as against the generation of the mothers. Their post-independence generation was mostly active in the modern, secular state institutions and promoted (feminist) conceptions of selfidentity, activism and political struggle. The first type of daughter is clearly wearing the veil both against her rather feminist mother and her secular father who interestingly criticise this style as Arabic. The second type concerns women in so-called reformist Islamic organisations, who sometimes call themselves Muslim feminists and have a discourse of enlarging their space within the rather tough and aggressive masculine modern, mainly urban environment. The third type are women in Islamist groups, directly connected to male authorities who are at the same time restructuring the traditional Islamic institutions of male teaching such as dahiras. Contextualisation of the local debates, as a methodological principle, was done by relating them to the way in which the discriminations and inequalities characterising women’s everyday life are articulated in popular discourses. To explain why the abstract global notion of equality is often rejected in local contexts by Senegalese women,47 they often refer to religiously prescribed differences between men and women. At the same time, however, women refer to the injustice of their obligations and workload and uphold that their specific claims are “perfectly in line with the Quran”. Without laying claim to profound religious knowledge themselves, they often leave this field to Islamic authorities who are asked to support the women in their campaign. In addition, they introduce translocal examples of developments in other Muslim countries (especially from Morocco, but also non-African countries) in order to show the legitimacy of their discourse. Thus, the weak position of women with regard to claims to a hegemonic discourse is demonstrated by a certain ambivalence in their claims which actually enlarges their room for manoeuvre. An important event which was studied is the global institution of Women’s Day. In Senegal it has even acquired the quality of a fortnight during which women are celebrated. In the last year of the failing socialist development regime under Abdou Diouf, the women’s

46 Nadine Sieveking, Country Report Senegal (unpubl. paper, Univ. Bielefeld, Sociology, Transnationalisation and Development Research Centre, 2006), pp. 79ff. 47 Sieveking, “Negotiating Women’s Rights from Multiple Perspectives,” pp. 153ff.

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organisations invited to be honoured by the president on the national level clearly demonstrated the cooptation of these organisations by the regime in an effort to shore up its legitimacy.48 However, the celebration organised after Diop’s fall in 2004 by APROFES showed a clear translocal approach of localising development concepts in a dynamic religious and traditional surrounding.49 The same occasion in Malaysia in 2004 took on the very spectacular form of popular consumer culture including actors and singers.50 Nevertheless, this rather post-modern event very clearly raised the issue of the contestation of certain institutions of gender order and of the relevance of the global concept of gender equality.51 The organiser was in this case the internationally active organisation of Sisters in Islam in Kuala Lumpur. It combined Islamic authority, which was used to seek public exchanges and discussions with Islamic and state authorities, with popular culture, consumerism and lifestyle. The staging in a shopping mall was symptomatic for the event’s character, as were the actors, a famous popular female singer, combined with speakers about gender and women’s rights in an Islamic and multiethnic-religious society. This was typical of attempts to defend traditional female spaces and practices, such as dancing, by bringing them into the open and stressing their local and traditional character. Thereby, SIS counters the declaration of such practices as ‘non-Islamic’ by Islamist groups which claim to refer to universal Islamic norms. SIS follows the same strategy with regard to dress, which it presents as an issue of national heritage—versus those who seek to impose a ‘foreign’ (in this case Arabic) dress code which includes veiling. No similarly dramatic strategies have been found in the other two cases. A contrasting space of popularising gender has been extensively studied in Sudan. There, women’s groups have slowly and quietly begun to appropriate mosques as their social space, starting during the strictest

48 Lachenmann, Gudrun, “Transformation der Frauenoekonomie und Dimensionen der Einbettung in Afrika,“ in Die geschlechtsspezifische Einbettung der Ökonomie: Empirische Untersuchungen über Entwicklungs- und Transformationsprozesse, eds. idem and Petra Dannecker (Hamburg, 2001), p. 85. 49 Sieveking, “Women’s Organisations Creating Social Space in Senegal,” pp. 41ff. 50 Spiegel, “Women’s Organisations and Social Transformation in Malaysia,” pp. 69ff. 51 Spiegel, “Women’s Organisations and Social Transformation in Malaysia,” pp. 69ff.; idem, Striving for Social Change in Translocal Spaces, pp. 97ff.; Dannecker and Spiegel, “Let’s not Rock the Boat,” pp. 312ff.


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‘Neo-Harem’ regime of the fundamentalist Government.52 Whereas in former times women hardly attended evening prayers, religious or Quranic groups in Khartoum (also reported from Egypt)53 began to meet in local mosques at particular times of the week to realise their objective of studying the Quran and the religion of Islam. Thereby they accumulated knowledge and a certain authority, while situating themselves within the competing forces of Islamism. The groups observed were residentially based and of mixed social backgrounds. They were not officially registered and had their own teachers, usually educated women from the neighbourhood, but also occasional invited carriers of authoritative knowledge, i.e. male Islamic scholars, in order to sharpen their arguments regarding specific claims. Although they did debate societal gender issues which occurred in their daily lives, their activities were embedded within the context of Islamisation politics and only to a certain extent implicitly went against the cultural homogenisation guided by the notion of Islamic society. In this process, they distanced themselves from ‘traditions’ viewed as un-Islamic, while at the same time helping them to master modernisation without losing their identity.54

From ‘Vulnerability’ to ‘Rights’: Translocal Discourses by Civil Society Confronting the State We have demonstrated how women create translocal gendered spaces through different forms of interaction and discourses, thereby entering and restructuring the public sphere.55 Our focus lay on development concepts in the broadest sense, to which women gave new meaning in increasingly Islamised surroundings and thus contributed to a process of differentiating the local discourses on Islam. By doing so they enlarge their room for manoeuvre through seeking alternative approaches to women and gender issues based on agency instead of

52 Nageeb, New Spaces and Old Frontiers; idem, “Appropriating the Mosque: Women’s Religious Groups in Khartoum,” Afrika Spectrum 42, 1 (2007), 5–27. 53 Mahmood, Politics of Piety. 54 Nageeb, “Appropriating the Mosque,” p. 9. 55 Anna Spiegel, “Public Spheres, Public Islam, and Modernities,” WP 347 (2005), www.uni-bielefeld/trdc/(de)/agsozanth/publications/workingpaper (accessed May 22, 2009).

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victimisation, and on rights instead of notions of vulnerability.56 As a consequence, these global concepts of rights also became increasingly differentiated, according to their multiple local experiences. This, as in other societies, shows the social transformation going on through active involvement of women’s organisations in development policies and thereby of the gender order of society.57 Overall, the situation in the three countries under investigation differed greatly. In Sudan, criticism of violence against women was seen by the regime as fundamentally opposed to the national construction of an Islamic umma.58 In spite of this, activists and NGOs have begun to work on the localisation of global development concepts by interpreting the agenda of VAW in a new way in relation to local politics and development. In this, they even touch the (still hardly touchable) question of what goes on in Darfur59 where the Government refutes the international accusation of systematically applying sexualised violence (rape) as a tool of combat, and women’s organisations broaden the concept of VAW in the direction of general hardships and displacement. At the same time, in Malaysia the debate of women’s and (especially) human rights was seen to be very critical by the regime, and thus used only sparingly,60 whereas in Senegal the rights discourse is the most easily acceptable with regard to local milieus and concepts of tradition. By adopting the agenda of VAW, women activists have begun in all three countries to renegotiate the relationship between civil society and the respective states, and are implicitly or explicitly contributing to processes of democratisation and peace building. The integration of VAW in female activists’ agendas is the result of translocal networking. For Sudan, this becomes evident through the trajectories of typical activists61 who represent different backgrounds and epistemic communities, even including Marxists. This variety helps to spread VAW, and is of particular importance in the light of 56 Salma A. Nageeb, “Diversified Development: Constituting Translocal Spaces through Agency,” in Negotiating Development in Muslim Societies, eds. Lachenmann and Dannecker, pp. 224. 57 Diane Elson, “Gender Justice, Human Rights, and Neo-liberal Economic Policies,” in Gender Justice, Development, and Rights, eds. Maxine Molyneux and Shahra Razavi (Oxford, 2002), pp. 78–114; Molyneux and Razavi, eds., Gender Justice, Development, and Rights. 58 See Nageeb, New Spaces and Old Frontiers. 59 Nageeb, “Diversified Development,” pp. 193ff. 60 Spiegel, “Negotiating Women’s Rights in a Translocal Space,” p. 178. 61 Nageeb, “Diversified Development,” pp. 200ff.


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the enmity of the regime which represents VAW as a ‘foreign agenda’, and ‘anti-Islamic vision’, not relevant to ‘Sudanese culture’ and ‘Islamic society’. Thus non-Islamist women’s NGOs who were able to maintain some activities around the concept of VAW nevertheless avoided the open adoption of human and women’s rights as well as VAW. The translocality of the feminist, respectively Islamic, reinterpretative positions of women’s organisations on the political level is clearly strengthened through connections with institutions of the African region and thereby with national politics. Given the above-mentioned dominance of the vulnerability discourse in Senegal, the debate about women’s rights is a clear step towards overcoming the view of women as weak subjects needing help and denying them agency. From the NGO perspective, which here includes those affiliated to the state, it is not the government but local sociocultural patterns that constitute the major constraint for women in claiming their rights. This implies the well known contradiction consisting in blaming local cultural institutions on the one hand, but at the same time stressing the autonomy of women in the frame of ‘traditional’ female spaces on the other. In my opinion, this situation is to a large extent due to the economic crisis, after which women through informal economic activities ( petit commerce) tend to contribute significantly more to the family income and adopt more and more the position of the head of the household. Also, the experiences during and after the droughts within the peasant movement and even the forms of official organisation in women’s groups made a lot of difference regarding the recognition of women’s economic importance. However, the informalisation of these institutions and the dwindling of ‘traditional’ female spaces in the decentralisation processes endangers their livelihood capacity as well as their capacity to enter the public debate, e.g. on land tenure etc., and especially on Family Law. As mentioned before, the latter is claimed to officially recognise these contributions of women towards the well-being of the family. The global notion of gender equality has a very confrontational ring in the Senegalese context. In the public political field, it is strongly associated with Western feminism and can thus be easily turned against certain female actors, whereas in development policies this concept plays no role.62 Instead, the concept of ‘gender equity’ is better

62

Sieveking, “Women’s Organisations Creating Social Space in Senegal.”

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understood, as is globally the case, as corresponding to culturally different societies in the world. This is based on notions put forward at the Beijing Conference on Women in 1995 by an alliance of Islamic countries and the Vatican.63 The National Strategy for Equity and Gender Equality in Senegal (Stratégie Nationale pour l’Égalité et l’Équité de Genre au Sénégal, SNEEG) has been elaborated with the support of the United Nations Fund for Population (UNFPA/Senegal) in a cooperation of diverse ministries, together with political parties, trade unions, a range of national and international NGOs, networks and various international donor institutions.64 However, the strategy can be hardly called analytical. It mentions some basic facts concerning the “fundamental inequality” between men and women, but does not really explore gender relations and concrete policy issues and institutions. Thus in its outlook the SNEEG refers to a global development discourse and responds to the expectations of Senegal’s international partners, but hardly reflects on the dynamics at the interfaces between the state and local organisations which are actually involved in the implementation of national legislation and development plans. An earlier official publication, which had been coordinated by critical Senegalese social scientists,65 had a distinctly more radical outlook. The process of ‘translating’ state development concepts into local discourses is mainly left to the NGOs as the classical women’s extension services have widely failed. A telling example is the ongoing discussion concerning the reform of the Family Law,66 which the SNEEG characteristically ignores. The network organisation Réseau Siggil Jigeen (RSJ),67 of which APROFES is a member, had cooperated in the elaboration of SNEEG. They started the campaign regarding family law reform. This is opposed by Islamic circles such as the Comité islamique pour la réforme du code de la famille du Sénégal (CIRCOFS) who would like to see family law conforming more to Sharia law. Both sides refer to global discourses. Meanwhile, the Sufi brotherhoods have

63 Lachenmann, “Weltfrauenkonferenz und Forum der Nichtregierungsorganisationen in Peking.” 64 Sieveking, “Negotiating Women’s Rights from Multiple Perspectives,” pp. 152ff. 65 République du Sénégal, Senegalese Women by the Year 2015, abridged version (co-ordinated by Fatou Sow, and Mamadou Diouf) (Dakar, 1993). 66 Sieveking, “Negotiating Women’s Rights from Multiple Perspectives,” pp. 150ff. 67 Sieveking, “Women’s Organisations Creating Social Space in Senegal,” p. 42; idem, “Negotiating Women’s Rights from Multiple Perspectives,” p. 152f.


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kept conspicuously silent, while the government pronounced itself clearly against the reform. The localisation of the concepts can also be observed at the level of everyday life, which we distinguish methodologically from the level of organisations and movements. In the city of Kaolack, life in one quarter of the city is very much shaped by the mosque which is linked to a special branch of the traditional brotherhoods. The translocal relations of the Marabout link this locality with other Senegalese and foreign countries. Interestingly, the Marabout’s local activities are based on the cooperation with an American NGO. They use the argumentation from ‘progressive Islamic scholars’, e.g. the Secretary General of the Islam and Population Network founded with the support of the UN Population Fund. Thus, translocal discourse enters the national space through a decidedly Islamic network.68 An important point of reference for debating local issues based on translocality is CEDAW, which has been referred to as containing valid arguments by women’s groups by its very existence. Its role was enhanced by the Platform of Action of the Beijing Conference for Women in 1995, as well as the globally established ‘post-Beijing’ process of regional debates and global connectedness.69 Whereas in Beijing Islamist participants had still been marginalised and not given a voice, as religion was regarded as leading to culturalist argumentations, this position changed in the process of the formation of epistemic communities of women activists. It is now argued that there is a two-way negotiating process of meanings and concepts which needs to take religion into account.70 In Malaysia, the participatory observation of the process of preparing and debating a so-called shadow report on the country’s situation with regard to CEDAW showed very clearly the diversity of women’s groups and their agendas.71 It also confirmed the authority gained in the national public sphere from basing certain positions on global concepts and regional networks.

68

Sieveking, “Negotiating Women’s Rights from Multiple Perspectives,” pp. 154ff. Christa Wichterich, “Strategische Verschwisterung, multiple Feminismen und die Glokalisierung der Frauenbewegungen,” in Frauenbewegungen weltweit: Aufbrueche, Kontinuitäten, Veraenderungen, eds. Ilse Lenz, Michiko Mae and Karin Klose (Opladen, 2002), pp. 257–280; Women Watch—Beijing+10 Global Forum, http:// www.un.org/ womenwatch/ followup/beijing10/#to (accessed March 1, 2008). 70 Nageeb, Sieveking and Spiegel, “Negotiating Development.” 71 Spiegel, “Negotiating Women’s Rights in a Translocal Space,” pp. 172ff. 69

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Regarding the situation in Sudan, Nageeb has also presented an interesting event analysis of a meeting which discussed women’s rights and CEDAW.72 It took place in the relatively protected space of an international organisation as part of its programme to support the process of democratisation and peace building. Her analysis reveals subtle but distinct differences between women activists regarding how their religious position framed their interpretations of rights. Interestingly, the international organisation included Islamic authorities in the event, who were treated as most honoured guests and speakers. A prominent woman activist appeared in traditional Sudanese (not Islamic) dress, talking in Arabic and thus demonstrating political and religious allegiance to Sudanese society and culture as against global homogenisation. Nevertheless, she was criticised for her close cooperation with international organisations. This implied also a critique of her reference to global development concepts. The second speaker was an Islamic scholar known for his position against FGM/C (female genital mutilation/circumcision), as well as his outspoken views on HIV/AIDS and reproductive health. This ‘Imam of the women’s NGOs’ transmitted the important message that there is no contradiction between women’s rights and Islam. The most explicitly glocal form of localisation studied at the interface between women’s civil society organisations and the state, and respectively the political situation, has thus been clearly seen in Sudan. As mentioned before, it seems that the particular confluence of the peace process between North and South, as well as foreign cooperation in the exploitation of oil has opened up space for women’s organisations to participate in the public sphere. In the course of this, it is also possible to adapt such controversial concepts as VAW. The large-scale presence of international development agencies and donors creates a supportive environment for civil organisations, particularly women’s NGOs working in the area of human and women’s rights.

Diversity of Discourses on Islam and Negotiation of Authority of Knowledge in Translocal Spaces When examining how connections between globalised concepts and local discourses are established within an Islamic societal framework, 72

Nageeb, “Women’s Organisations and Their Agendas in Sudan,” pp. 95ff.


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we can identify different modes of intensity of negotiation and of translation. The most intensive and publicly established form can be found in Sudan where fundamentalist concepts have penetrated not only politics but every sphere of life. On all levels of society permanent disputes regarding authoritative knowledge and the right to interpretation take place. In Malaysia the political struggle to define the connection between religion and society is very acute. It includes political parties in power and in opposition, and struggles to maintain concern about different regions and legislations. Astonishingly enough, in both Malaysia and Sudan economic liberalisation is to a certain extent excluded from such debates. As has been shown, the campaigning for women’s rights and gender equality in Senegal takes place at a very local level, embedded in everyday Islam. Such a local interpretation of gender, however, seems often to be one of the basic barriers to advancing creative understandings of new forms of interaction. Thus, ‘patriarchy’ is often seen as a very local issue which has no translocal relevance and is considered as ‘culture’, not as part of ‘religion’.73 Of course this is due to the apparent opposition between religion, considered to be sacred, as against culture, which can be more easily blamed for shortcomings in the relations between men and women, even if the need to defend it against Westernisation is also stressed. Women’s organisations legitimise their global development agendas often through a differentiated discourse on Islam. Nageeb distinguishes two different patterns. She calls the first one a “progressive interpretation of Islamic sources”, in accordance with the use of this term in the countries studied. Women “seek to legitimise these development goals or visions by linking global politics and concepts of moderate Islamic ethics and interpretations of religious sources”. They do this “by emphasising its compatibility with general Islamic ethics”.74 Thereby they contest current global Islamisation flows. The second mode is to “advocate Islamisation politics, projects, and Islam reformist discourse and movements” as, contrary to the a.m. orientation, they believe that they

73 See Ulrike Schultz, “Report on the Summer School ‘Perspectives of Feminism and Politics of Identity in Africa: Finding a Common Ground, 27 August–7 September 2007’,” Usmanu Danfodiyo University Sokoto, Nigeria, Free University Berlin, http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/Sokoto/ (accessed March 1, 2008). 74 Nageeb, “Diversified Development,” p. 225.

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gudrun lachenmann offer the appropriate frame to address the issues they want to address, especially regarding gender. This means they move within the context of Islamic movements and politics,

but at the same time they work on changing gender relations.75 The progressive Islamic discourse is represented in Senegal where, as shown above, women adopt an Islamist argumentation for gender equity embedded in the local norms of solidarity, thereby transcending more traditional Sufi notions.76 However, this discourse is different from the Islamic reform discourse which on the global level represents an alternative concept of gender and rights. Senegalese women do not challenge the position of the state which shifts ambiguously between its secularity and its strong links to the local Sufi orders, but opposes Islamist orientation. In Malaysia and Sudan the situation is different due to the Islamisation processes of the states. Women either criticise the process of Islamisation in general as leading to the control of women, or they consider Islam in the framework of the ongoing ethnicised differentiation processes. In Sudan, women’s NGOs can adopt a translocal discourse on Islam thereby contesting the state’s control on religion and the profound process of cultural change it promotes. Here development cannot publicly be discussed without reference to Islam, including very particular gender issues such as reproductive health etc.—mostly referring to progressive interpretations mainly taken from the Maghreb. Like in the debates about Islamic reforms of civil society and the definition of the common good,77 the contest is about authoritative knowledge and its different representatives/carriers. It is clear that translocal knowledge provides authority and structures the public sphere as well as social order. Women activists and social science scholars are constructed by their opponents as ignorant and not legitimised to talk

75 Nageeb, “Diversified Development,” p. 225, following Roman Loimeier, “Islamic Reform and Political Change: The Example of Abubakar Gumi and the Yan Izala Movement in Norther Nigeria,” in African Islam and Islam in Africa: Encounters between Sufis and Islamists, eds. Eva Evers Rosander and David Westerlund (London, 1997), pp. 286–307; Salvatore, “The Problem of the Ingraining of Civilization Traditions into Social Governance.” 76 Nageeb, “Diversified Development,” pp. 226f. 77 Salvatore, “The Problem of the Ingraining of Civilization Traditions into Social Governance.”


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about Islam in public challenging their public position.78 We have seen that in Malaysia, organisations such as SIS have acquired Islamically relevant authority at least in certain fields (family, the social). This consciously female intervention in scholarly debates on the basis of textual knowledge seems, however, to be limited to Malaysia. More common are situations like those in the Sudan, where there clearly are Islamically educated women as well.79 Nevertheless, women typically make strategic use of specific liberal male scholars, as has been discussed above. This strategy was widely used in all countries studied, in addition to Nigeria. Only in Malaysia SIS dares to claim, at least partly, the knowledge and authority to argue with a rather theoretical reference to scholars and texts, but their analysis is linked to the social reality of phenomena such as wife battering, polygyny, inheritance etc. In all cases, women very clearly avoid any rhetoric of radical change (or liberalism in Sudan) of the existing social and gender order, but base their arguments on an everyday logic of rights and obligations in gender relations. Further arguments refer to the societal image of motherhood, of suffering, of carrying the increasing responsibilities for livelihood provision of families in all countries. However, the problem of political motherhood in the sense of instrumentalisation and nationalist ideology including differences in Family Law looms large in many countries. In the Senegalese case, the debate clearly draws on locally established cultural norms and values concerning women’s duties and obligations in the framework of the traditional family on the one hand, and an ideal of social solidarity and moral economy based on reciprocity on the other. This has been very much advanced by the peasant movement including women’s groups. In this context I often observed consultation with local Marabouts about how to bring about local socio-economic change without going against ‘rules of Islam’ (such as the issue of paying interest etc.). In Senegal, as mentioned above, sympathetic speakers of Islamic authority are also brought into the discussion. This means there is no female epistemic religious community entering the general debate and public sphere. Female Islamic scholars take part in global debates on Islamisation. As far as such debates take place in the transnational public sphere of UN conferences and women’s fora, they are very often based in

78 79

Spiegel, “Striving for Social Change in Translocal Spaces,” pp. 275ff. Nageeb, “Appropriating the Mosque.”

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non-Muslim countries or limited to the academic sphere. This often shapes the positions taken, and might on occasion contribute to defensive reactions. Where there are long-established links of co-operation, and where women activists participate, debates often become much more open and controversial, i.e. with regard to the question of what should or should not be explained (and/or changed) in terms of religion.80 Badran makes the strong argument that “Islamic feminism” can be considered to be more radical than “Muslims’ secular feminisms”.81

Constituting Translocality through Global Connections and Knowledge Spaces As has been shown above, global concepts of women’s rights and gender policies are developed in translocal spaces and through translocal networking relations. Women are doing this by negating the homogenisation of Islamic discourses and of identities, thereby restructuring the global sphere.82 This allows for the creation of a global discourse on Islam which includes critical consideration of the growing influence of Islamist thought and movements, and of the general opposition contained in the discourse on ‘Islam and the West’. Nevertheless, these negotiation processes may also lead to comparisons between societies, and to discursive hierarchisations positioning Muslim societies morally above ‘the West’ which becomes identified with negative impacts of globalisation and neo-liberalism.83 In Senegal, translocal networking is not limited to the urban-based women’s movements. Activists of rural background and with a less formal education participate in peasant organisations and in networks created after the Beijing conference such as Women in Law and Development in Africa (Wildaf ).84 Similar observations apply to Malaysian activists, who, at the Bangkok meeting of the Asia-Pacific NGOs plat-

80 Balghis Badri, “Feminist Perspectives in Sudan,” gender politik online (2006), http://web.fu-berlin.de/gpo/pdf/tagungen/fatima_l_adamu.pdf. 81 Margot Badran, “Islamic Feminism: What’s in a Name?” Al-Ahram Weekly Online 569 (January 17–23, 2002). 82 Nageeb, “Diversified Development,” pp. 240f. 83 See final workshop of the a.m. research project bringing together researchers and activists from the three countries, Nageeb, Sieveking and Spiegel, “Negotiating Development.” 84 See Christine Mueller, Local Knowledge and Gender in Ghana (Bielefeld, 2005).


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form of action, participated in the shaping of a collective identity of sisterhood through contributing their local experiences when participating in the framing of a joint women’s agenda.85 The aforementioned processes of differentiation and hierarchisation between societies on the basis of specific understandings of ‘good Islam’ were particularly obvious in two cases regarding Sudan and Malaysia. Thus, Nageeb gives an interesting account of an international meeting of the Muslim Women International Bond, an Islamist women’s NGO whose head office in Khartoum organised a meeting to “bring Muslim women together and unify their efforts to improve the status of the Muslim in the world”.86 Nevertheless, during the meeting, categories such as ‘traditional’, ‘westernised’, ‘ignorant’ and ‘lazy Muslims’ were used to establish hierarchies between Muslim societies. In the Malaysian example, the situation in Malaysia was compared to that of Tanzania and Lebanon.87 The strife for authoritative knowledge shows how important it is for women to participate in translocal interactions, be it at the national or the transnational level. In Sudan the translocal activity is used to widen the room for manoeuvre, and legitimise activities at the national level. This is also the case in Malaysia, where especially regional activities are so important that the government is unable to suppress them. A case in point is the local discussions of the shadow report on CEDAW. Thus, the investigation of knowledge production has enabled us to uncover different forms of Islam and claims of everyday Islam as against evidence of global homogenisation and fundamentalism(s). The same applies to different types of feminism as regards regional and political diversity. Within the various debates on Islamic feminism, I could observe on the occasion of international workshops that some representatives want to include the official statement of faith and groundedness of rights in religion, whereas many others (including participants from Sudan, Iran, and most clearly from Senegal or Egypt) insist on not being labelled ‘Muslim women’. Here there is of course a large field of possible conflict and separation of platforms. Some activists and feminist scholars have started to describe themselves as “Islamic feminists”,

85 86 87

Spiegel, “Negotiating Women’s Rights in a Translocal Space,” pp. 185ff. Nageeb, “Diversified Development,” pp. 241ff. Spiegel, “Negotiating Women’s Rights in a Translocal Space,” pp. 185ff.

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some as “Muslim feminists”88 which would imply an internal debate within global female networking, possibly but not necessarily excluding non-Muslims. Although there is consensus on the diversity of feminism in the global arena, this can create certain new boundaries and produce new types of othering and exclusion. The Malaysian women’s movement claims that there is a global solidarity of women and sisterhood,89 i.e. that they are not anti-Western but—as is often the case in global feminist discourse—anti-neoliberalism and critical of the impact of globalisation. In Senegal, the process of othering at the local level works through the different cultural constructions of gender and equality, without taking into account global feminist discourses on difference. This debate takes place between claiming universal negotiation on the one hand, and working for the consideration of specific, nationally relevant contexts of culture and tradition on the other. In the emerging concept of ‘African feminism’90 othering is more cultural than religious and refers more to gender concepts with regard to development, while it is often still linked to the colonial past and being defined from the outside. However, here too some women activists and scholars claim to have reached the very important stage of being able to discuss Muslim interpretations with (male) Islamic authorities.91 However, the label of ‘feminist’ seems to become more contested in this context. Overall, the relatively young epistemic community focusing on debates about African and Islamic feminism is very pluralistic in its approaches and strategies.92 This became evident at a summer school at the University of Sokoto in 2007. The concept of African feminism was only upheld at all among those directly struggling within an Islamist state university who faced difficulties with

88 See Othman, “Islamization and Modernization in Malaysia” and idem, “Introduction: Muslim Women and the Challenge of Political Islam”; Ziba Mir-Hosseini, “Stretching the Limits: A Feminist Reading of the Shari’ah in Post-Khomeini Iran,” in Islam and Feminism: Legal and Literary Perspectives, ed. Mai Yamani (London, 1996); Valentine M. Moghadam, “Islamic Feminism and its Discontents: Towards a Resolution of the Debate,” in Gender, Politics and Islam, eds. Therese Saliba, Carolyn Allen and Judith A. Howard (New Delhi, 2002), pp. 15–52. 89 Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham, 2003). 90 Rosander, Evers and Westerlund, eds., African Islam and Islam in Africa. 91 E.g. Fatima Adamu, Universitiy of Sokoto, Nigeria, during a workshop in Bielefeld in 2005 and a conference in Berlin 2006. 92 See Ali Mari Tripp, “Transnational Feminism, Regional Networking and Women’s Political Representation in Africa,” Feminist Africa 4 (2005).


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other Nigerian researchers and activists present. Scholars like Adamu, the main organiser, would represent the necessity of a translocal feminism,93 but at the same time used the marker of ‘African feminism’ as against ‘Islamic feminism’ to distance herself from global Islamist homogenisation. In different working groups some participants pleaded clearly for dropping the concept altogether. Another opinion was to maintain it in a qualified manner. This position was supported by arguments about important elements of African feminism such as the notion of balance between the sexes, the ability of negotiation and diplomacy, as well as an emphasis on African history, culture and religion. Feminism was seen as needing to integrate socio-economic aspects, notions of daughterhood, intuition, and to find a common ground. Furthermore, as feminism was seen to be fraught with negative connotations in Africa due to the men’s fear of losing power, there was a felt need to modify its connotations. Alternatively, there was the suggestion to use the term of ‘Afro-central gender movements’. This concept was criticised for its (African) particularity. Interestingly, the politics of global development funding entered the debate through the argument that ‘African feminism’ might attract donors. When searching for commonalities regarding African feminism, Sudan’s proximity to the Arab world proved divisive.94 Equally contested was the question of the in- or exclusion of some Nigerian religious movements (of which quite a number of the participants were members), depending on whether they were seen to fight for women’s rights or not. A dominant notion was that while Western feminist movements were seen to exclude men, the “African reality” demanded collaboration, rather than confrontation, with them. Our research project has thus shown that the strategy of actively pursuing a progressive Islamic discourse is very much contested by liberal feminists from Muslim countries.95 Differences within Islamic

93 Joy Ezello, “Feminism and Islamic Fundamentalism: Some Perspectives from Nigeria and beyond,” Signs. Journal of Women in Culture and Society 32, 1 (2006), 40–47. 94 See also the longstanding Link Programme between Ahfad University for Women, Sudan and Humboldt University of Berlin financed by DAAD German Academic Exchange Service, to which I participated extensively; see Parto Teherani-Kroenner and Brigitte Woerteler, eds., Gender Research and Networking: You Can’t Clap with One Hand, 1, Gender Studies (Herbolzheim, 2008). 95 Badri, “Feminist Perspectives in Sudan”; Othman, “Introduction: Muslim Women and the Challenge of Political Islam”; Nageeb, “Diversified Development,” pp. 230ff.;

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discourses are certainly reinforced by the ‘gender question’ which connects to our discussion regarding the authority of knowledge. There is a growing epistemic community which is “re-reading the foundational and canonical Islamic texts from a gender perspective which does not essentialize ‘Islam’ ”. This is part of a “ ‘new’ critical Islamic scholarship engaged in re-dynamizing Islamic thought within the framework of a double critique of modernity and Islamic orthodoxies”.96 Mir-Husseini, who was one of the first to use the term ‘Islamic feminism’, draws legitimacy from Islam regarding justice and equality and at the same time insists to introduce her faith into her scientific position.97 The forces to combat through this argumentation are supposed to be Muslim traditionalism, Islamic fundamentalists who hold political power, as well as secular/enlightened fundamentalists who conceive religion to be inherently patriarchal and in a non-historical essentialist way. This position is represented by Norani Othman, a member of SIS in Malaysia. She argues that there is a “cultural battle” to be fought in order to retain religion in modernity and democratisation. At a talk on Islamic feminism she gave in Bielefeld in May 2007 on the basis of her publication “Muslim Women against Islamic Extremism”,98 she traced back the debate on interpretation from a women’s perspective. The example of Malaysia is indeed very interesting and leads to her recent challenge of what is supposed to be an ‘Islamic state’,99 arguing that it had been meant to guarantee freedom of religion and social justice as well as gender equality. A group within the Malaysian Association of Women Lawyers had reacted against the ‘patriarchalisation’ of Islamic family law during the process of political Islamisation because they felt the need to address the Quran from a historical perspective. They distinguish between Islamic and Muslim feminism, the first comprising classical Islamic scholars and the second all feminists using Islamic sources which in practice were not universalist regarding other epis-

Fatou Sow, Fundamentalisms, Globalisation and Women’s Human Rights in Senegal,” Gender and Development 11, 1 (2003), 69–76. 96 Gudrun Krämer et al., “Reconsidering ‘Islamic Feminism’: Deconstruction or the Quest of Authenticity?” Call & Programme workshop, Berlin, April 26–28, 2007 (Europe in the Middle East. The Middle East in Europe, Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Fritz Thyssen Stiftung, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin). 97 Mir-Husseini, “Stretching the Limits” and a talk in Berlin 2006. 98 Othman and Petaling, eds., Muslim Women and the Challenge of Islamic Extremism. 99 Talk given May 2008, Humboldt University Berlin.


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temic cultures or even non-Muslim women. In this surrounding, ‘liberal Islam’ is rejected as referring to political Islam. In guise of conclusion we can say that our methodology of studying translocal social spaces constituted by women’s movements in very different societies has allowed us to gain a very diversified picture of global concepts of development being negotiated within a framework not of globalisation forces and processes, but of processes of glocalisation which do neither imply homogenisation, nor clashes of dualistic positions of cultures or religion. So we have found reference to different ‘Islams’, and claims of everyday Islam as against global homogenisation and fundamentalisms, different feminisms as regards regional and political diversity. Also, the question of different modernities as regards public space, secularism, and economic institutions is very relevant. At the same time, translocality is clearly discernable in all social spaces constituted through women negotiating development in the widest sense, whereby globalisation can be observed in the making. Transnationally women in their multiple encounters and interactions deconstruct Islam as well as development concepts; they transcend global dichotomies and differentiate Islamic discourses upholding global gender agendas, even if fragmentation of identity politics is going on.100 The structuring of the global sphere through difference goes against homogenisation of identities and religious discourses by making diversity a feature to be used against all forms of clashes.

100

Nageeb, “Diversified Development,” pp. 244ff.

ABOUT ‘TURKS’ AND ‘GERMANS’: THE TURKISH PRESS IN GERMANY AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF MULTIPLE MEMBERSHIPS* Christoph Schumann Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg

Introduction “Will Turks decide the election?” This was the disturbing question asked on the front-page of Germany’s biggest and most influential tabloid newspaper Die BILD-Zeitung on September 14, 2005, just eight days before Germans went to the polls for federal elections. Of course, the idea that Turks could decide German elections was more than just unfamiliar for most Germans. So far, Turkey has not had a record of direct interference in German electoral politics. In addition, the large majority of Turkish citizens residing in Germany, i.e. the former ‘guestworkers’, have not gained German citizenship yet. Their electoral participation in Germany is therefore restricted to the socalled ‘aliens councils’ (Ausländerbeiräte). However, these institutions have little political impact. For this reason, the turn-out of voters (only citizens of non-EU member countries) has been dwindling for years. Yet, the front-page story of the BILD-Zeitung was not based on nothing. It rather responded to Germany’s biggest Turkish-language newspaper, Hürriyet, which had stated in its headline of the preceding day: “The vote of the Turks shifts to the SPD1 (Türkler’in oyu SPD’ye kayıyor)”. This contention referred to a telephone poll conducted among its readers which had concluded that 77 percent of German citizens of Turkish descent would cast their vote for the Social Democrats. The poll did not even claim to meet scientific standards. Most importantly, it was not clear whether the people polled by Hürriyet did, in fact, hold German citizenship and, thus, were allowed to vote. However, apart from this, the headline was clearly meant to give the

1

Social Democratic Party of Germany, led by the then-chancellor Gerhard Schröder.

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then-chancellor Gerhard Schröder a warm welcome on his visit at the Frankfurt-based headquarters of Hürriyet that same day. In the following days, the ostentatious exchange between the two papers triggered some debate in the German public sphere on whether German citizens of Turkish origin should be called ‘Turks’ and whether they really constitute a decisive voting block. Eventually, the election turned out to be rather undecided: neither the Red-Green government nor the Christian Democrat-Liberal opposition could win a majority. In the aftermath, the noisy struggle for the chancellorship superseded any debate on the actual role of ethnic Turks in the elections. Nevertheless, this brief anecdote sheds light on two interesting developments. First, Turkish media and particularly the Turkish press have established themselves in Germany. Far from being a mere extension of the Turkish public sphere into German territory, Turkish newspapers have taken root by adapting themselves to the specific situation in the diaspora. They became a vibrant part of the German public sphere in two ways: by giving a voice to the Turkish community vis-à-vis the receiving society and by providing a forum for internal discussions among ethnic Turks. Second, it is generally agreed that the former Turkish guestworkers and their descendants have become ‘members’2 of German society. The large majority of them hold the right of permanent residency and, resulting from it, significant social rights. Beyond this, there is an obvious inclination to identify with certain aspects of German society such as the city or region of residence or certain companies with a longer local tradition (e.g. AEG, Opel). Yet, since only a minority of them have also become ‘citizens,’3 they have remained disenfranchised politically. In the following article, I will discuss the interconnection between ethnic media and the construction of ‘multiple memberships’ in more depth. Questions of belonging, membership, and citizenship are crucial topics in the European editions of the Turkish press, because they are connected to the demand for recognition and equal rights. Analysing the discourse of the most influential Turkish newspaper on the German market, Hürriyet, from the 1970s to the present, I will show how the mono-national concept of citizenship has given way to

2 Roger Brubaker, “Introduction,” in Immigration and the Politics of Citizenship in Europe and North America, ed. idem (Lanham, 1989), p. 16. 3 Ibid.

about ‘turks’ and ‘germans’

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a complex notion of membership. Today, I argue, Hürriyet describes ethnic Turks in Germany simultaneously as members of Germany and Turkey, as a distinct ethnic community, and as belonging to particular localities. In this sense, membership can imply the legal status of citizenship, but it can also refer to an affiliation in a wider sense. For this reason, the discourse in Hürriyet challenges the idea of a homogeneous nation—be it Turkish or German—in its core belief, namely the co-extension of the national community, the national territory, and the national culture.

Theoretical Perspectives: Citizenship between ‘Mediascapes’ and ‘Ethnoscapes’ In his book Modernity at Large, Arjun Appadurai theorises the combined effects of migration and media on the production of modern subjectivity.4 He applies the neologism ‘ethnoscapes’ to global movements of individuals and groups like tourists, guestworkers, refugees and exiles. Similarly, he uses the notions ‘mediascapes’ and ‘ideoscapes’ to describe the technical facilities to distribute information and “images of the world” created by the media. In both cases, the suffix -scape allows him to stress two aspects. On the one hand, media and migration have fluid and irregular shapes like a landscape. On the other hand, these phenomena cannot be described ‘objectively’ from one single point of view. Instead, they are “deeply perspectival constructs, inflected by the historical, linguistic, and political situatedness of different sorts of actors.”5 The individual actor is, according to Appadurai, the last locus of these landscapes since actors are part and parcel of these formations. Moreover, actors navigate these formations according to their own perspectival perceptions and their expectations of what these landscapes might offer them. The connection between mass mediated communication and collective imagination is an established fact since Benedict Anderson’s seminal book on the emergence of nations as “imagined communities”.6

4 Appadurai, Arjun, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, 1998), p. 3. 5 Ibid., p. 33. 6 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1991).

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Appadurai expands Anderson’s theory in several directions. First, he points out that media and cultural artefacts such as movies travel together with the migrants and thus transcend the boundaries of the nation-state. Accordingly, media producers systematically take into account the distribution of their products to the diaspora communities beyond the national boundaries. By doing so, some media such as movies maintain their specific form and content, while other media, most notably the press, adapts to the particular environment of the diaspora. In both cases the appropriation and reception of this media is likely to be different in the homeland and abroad. Second, Appadurai agrees with Anderson that mass media induce the emergence of imagined communities, but he adds that this imagination applied not only to national communities but more generally to what he calls “imagined worlds”. Following Appadurai, these imagined worlds provide people with interpretations of their environments; they create “communities of sentiment;”7 and they feed collective memories and expectations. Yet, the sheer multiplicity of different media and contents provides not only shared imaginations but also individual imaginations. The latter offer “resources for self-imagining as an everyday project” thus facilitating the imagination of individual lifeprojects. Hence, mass mediated communication shapes communal and individual imaginations alike, while both are tightly interwoven. The individual decision to emigrate is, according to Appadurai, the most striking example for an individual life-project based on imagination: Those who wish to move, those who have moved, those who wish to return, and those who choose to stay rarely formulate their plans outside the sphere of radio and television, cassettes and videos, newsprint and telephone. For migrants, both the politics of adaptation to new environments and the stimulus to move or return are deeply affected by a massmediated imaginary that frequently transcends national space.8

In short, mass mediated communication is effective in a seemingly paradoxical way: on the one hand, it supports the emergence and reproduction of imagined communities and, on the other, it creates a fertile ground for the imagination of individual life-projects such as

7

Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” in Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalisation, and Modernity, ed. Mike Featherstone (London, 1990), pp. 296–310. 8 Appadurai, Modernity at Large, p. 6.


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the decision to migrate. As a result, the constant movement of people disperses communities world-wide, while mass media allows for their collective sentiments to prevail. Having this in mind, Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities raises important questions which are relevant in our context.9 Anderson puts much emphasis on the link between mass mediated communication, the use of a common language, and the emergence of imagined communities. However, migrants, and even more their offspring, are usually exposed to media in more than one language and from more than one source. It is well known, for instance, that ethnic Turks in Germany and particularly the younger and welleducated among them read newspapers in both German and Turkish. So, what kind of effect does this have on their sense of membership and belonging? The majority of ethnic Turks in Germany are still Turkish citizens. However, their participation in Turkish politics is severed by the fact that they live outside the national territory. At the same time, they are politically active in Germany and demand more rights there—despite the fact that they are not German citizens. Peter Mandaville has called this poignantly the “disjuncture between one’s legal identity as a citizen and one’s political identity as an actor in the public sphere.”10 This picture is rendered even more complex by the consumption of mass media in several languages and from multiple sources. I will argue below that this media consumption creates a variety of imagined communities and, hence, more complex notions of membership. Some of them are in contradiction with one another, while others are not. Of course, not all ‘imagined communities’ are ‘nations’ with a claim to sovereignty, in the sense of Benedict Anderson. The idea of a ‘community’ of ethnic Turks in Germany exists in the ethnic media and among many of its readers, even though it is well known that the group of immigrants and post-migrants from Turkey in Germany is fragmented along religious, ideological, and even ethnic lines. Nevertheless, the mere imagination of a community is the prerequisite for the expression of shared experiences and the formulation of common goals.

9

Anderson, Imagined Communities. Peter Mandaville, Transnational Muslim Politics: Reimagining the Umma (London, 2001), p. 12. 10

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On the other hand, mass media, and particularly the press, is usually dominated by the political agenda of one particular nation-state. German media, for instance, cover mainly German politics thus addressing mainly an audience of German citizens. Likewise, Turkish media assume that its readers are Turkish citizens. The motto of Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine is “Zeitung für Deutschland (newspaper for Germany)” and Hürriyet still uses its old slogan “Türkiye Türkler’indir (Turkey for the Turks).” Yet how do these concepts relate to the political and social realities of ethnic Turks in Germany? Or, to put it differently, in how far do ethnic Turks in Germany find their specific situation and their experiences reflected in the Turkish and German media? Do they have a chance to make their own voices heard?

Hürriyet and the Turkish Mediascape in Germany Today, the Turkish mediascape in Germany has become extremely diverse by the import of video tapes from Turkey, the proliferation of satellite dishes and local TV and radio networks, and, of course, the internet. Nevertheless, print-media have maintained a crucial function by addressing ethnic Turks of all generations in Germany as one audience. By doing so, they create a “partial public sphere (Teilöffentlichkeit)”11 where political views and arguments on the situation and prospects of ethnic Turks in Germany can be exchanged. Of course, the communicative realities fall short of Jürgen Habermas’s ideal of a public sphere, but the press meets many of these criteria better than any other ethnic media.12 The satellite TV, for instance, which is broadcast from Turkey, is completely dominated by the coverage of Turkish society while neglecting the concerns of the Turkish audiences abroad, let alone giving them a voice. On the other hand, German-Turkish TV

11 Bernhard Peters, “Der Sinn von Öffentlichkeit,” in Öffentlichkeit, öffentliche Meinung, soziale Bewegung, ed. Friedhelm Neidhardt, special issue of Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 34 (1994), 42–76; Christoph Schumann, “The Turkish Press in Germany: A public in-between two Publics?,” in Islam and Muslims in Germany, eds. Ala al-Hamarneh and Jörn Thielmann, Minorities in Europe 7 (Leiden, 2008), pp. 441–461. 12 Jürgen Habermas, Faktizität und Geltung: Beiträge zur Diskurstheorie des Rechts und des demokratischen Rechtsstaats (Frankfurt a.M., 1992), esp. pp. 399–467; Lutz Wingert and Klaus Günther, eds., Die Öffentlichkeit der Vernunft und die Vernunft der Öffentlichkeit. Festschrift für Jürgen Habermas (Frankfurt a.M., 2001).


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and radio stations have emerged, but their distribution is restricted to local cable networks.13 For this reason, they constitute only local public spheres. Last, but not least, the internet has become a cheap and effective platform for communication. However, its use is still mainly confined to the younger generation, while Turkish-German web-pages like vaybee.de are remarkably apolitical. The history of Turkish newspapers on the German market began in the 1960s. The first copies were brought from Turkey to Germany by air. In 1971, Hürriyet established its first printing plant in Zeppelinheim, Neu-Isenburg which was used by other Turkish newspapers as well. From then on, Hürriyet established itself as the dominant Turkish paper on the German market. Hürriyet has adapted itself successfully to the needs and expectations of its readers in Germany and, beyond this, in Europe. In fact, all the Turkish newspapers available on the German market are distributed throughout Europe. Hürriyet’s European edition consists of two parts: the main part, which consists of 33 pages, is produced in Turkey. The second part is a supplement of four to five pages, which is dedicated to covering the Turkish diaspora in Europe. Here, the main focus of this coverage is directed at Germany, but there are also reports on Turkish communities in neighboring countries, particularly Austria, Belgium, and the Netherlands. In line with the general conception of the paper, this part consists of news, human interest stories, interviews, entertainment, and some commentaries. Besides, Hürriyet addresses the political, legal, and social concerns of its readers on a regular basis. This format allows, at least, for some diversity of opinions. The spectrum of voices in Hürriyet includes the paper’s own columnists, German politicians and bureaucrats, ethnic Turkish members of the Bundestag and the state parliaments as well as representatives of other public and private organisations. Also the readers can voice their opinions—of course within the due limits of the Kemalist mainstream—in the section “Your Words (söz sizin)”. Since late 2007, these letters can also be downloaded from hurriyet.de. This webpage, which is mostly in Turkish, corresponds to the main webpage of Hürriyet, www.hurriyet.com.tr. For a long time the German-based website has been kept very simple.

13 Kira Kosnick, Migrant Media: Turkish Broadcasting and Multicultural Politics in Berlin (Bloomington, Indianapolis, 2007).

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During the last year, however, there has been a remarkable effort to improve the internet presence of Hürriyet in Germany. Nevertheless, a major shortcoming of Hürriyet’s print and online versions are, in my view, the insufficient adoption of the German language. Hürriyet has only a thin weekly German supplement prepared with fairly low quality around TV programs, some life style news, and commercial advertisements. However, an important step in the right direction was taken in summer 2007 with the new weekly supplement called Young Hürriyet. This new publication tries to attract the attention of young readers using German and an extremely colorful layout. Its contents are more or less apolitical and rather centered around sports and entertainment. In May 2008, the German Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung accused Young Hürriyet of a very sharp form of plagiarism. Soon after, the Turkish leftist paper Evrensel made this allegation known to the Turkish reading public.14 Subsequently Young Hürriyet was suspended for a while and restarted with a new staff in 2009. Hürriyet is certainly the best-known Turkish paper among ethnic Turks in Germany.15 Although, the German market has been extremely volatile for Turkish papers in the last decade, Hürriyet’s presence in Germany has been uninterrupted since the early 1970s. During the same period, other papers such as Cumhuriyet or Sabah had to be withdrawn temporarily from the German market for economic reasons. During the 1970s and 80s, Hürriyet’s main competitor in the German market was the conservative-religious paper Tercüman. After Tercüman ceased to exist, the liberal tabloid paper Sabah gained strength rapidly, but it was withdrawn in 2001.16 Since then,

14 Thomas Thiel, “Die Gedanken der Anderen: Plagiatsfall bei Hürriyet,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (May 9, 2008), http://www.faz.net/s/Rub475F682E3FC24868A8 A5276D4FB916D7/Doc~EB77AD11 D682F45659EF6F0ED6DADDB6E~ATpl~Ecom mon~Scontent.html; “Hürriyet yorum hırsızı,” no author, Evrensel (May 14, 2008), http://www.evrensel.net/haber.php?haber_id=30814. On the “art” of plagiarism see Kevin Kopelson, “Confessions of a Plagiarist,” London Review of Books (May 22, 2008), http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n10/kope01_.html (all websites accessed May 23, 2008). 15 Ferda Ataman, “Das Leid-Medium: ‘Hürriyet’ wird 60,” Süddeutsche Zeitung (April 29, 2008), http://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/artikel/426/171820/print.html (accessed April 30, 2008); Martina Sauer, “Perspektiven des Zusammenlebens: Die Integration türkischstämmiger Migrantinnen und Migranten in Nordrhein-Westfalen,” (Essen, 2007), http://www.zft-online.de/index.php?site=31 (accessed May 2, 2008), p. 178. See the numbers in more detail below. 16 Sabah was re-launched once more in 2006, but in Germany it never could gain the strength it has in Turkey.


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the moderate Islamist paper Zaman has stepped in and expanded its circulation constantly. Today, Hürriyet and Zaman are the only two Turkish papers in Germany which publicise their circulation figures. These numbers give some insight into the composition of their audiences. In the first quarter of 2008, the printed edition of Hürriyet was 75,249 of which 38,171 copies were sold, while the printed edition of Zaman was 20,414 of which 20,302 were sold.17 So, Hürriyet’s number of sold papers is almost double that of Zaman’s. Yet the difference between printed and sold papers is remarkable in the two cases. Readers of Hürriyet purchase their paper almost exclusively at (urban) newsstands. Most of them do this irregularly. Since Hürriyet is known to be passed on from hand to hand in Turkish associations, tea houses, mosques and in private homes, each issue reaches more than just one reader. Observers estimate that Hürriyet reaches up to 200,000 readers this way.18 In contrast with this, Zaman relies almost exclusively on distribution by subscription. Despite its remarkable growth during the last years, the paper has been unable to transcend the boundaries of its religious-ideological milieu shaped by the teachings and writings of Fetullah Gülen, a neo-Nurcu Sufi now resident in the United States. Hürriyet has—very much like most other Turkish newspapers—a sharp ideological profile, which it propagates in its news section and, of course, in the commentaries. However, the cutting edge of Hürriyet’s ideological discourse is moderated by the large non-political sections filled with sports news, societal gossip, human interest stories, bikini girls, etc. Even those readers who are unlikely to agree with Hürriyet’s political line will probably find some entertainment there. This makes Hürriyet a newspaper for the whole family. Most of its competitors lack this popular mixture. Particularly the radical papers such as the Islamist Millî Gazete, the Kurdish nationalist Yeni Özgür Politika, the leftist Evrensel, and to some extent also the moderate Islamist Zaman address their readers by a never-ending flow of ideological indoctrination while allowing for little light relief. In the research literature, the role of the Turkish press in Germany has been discussed controversially. Until the present day, most discussions revolved around the overwhelmingly dominant paradigm of

17 Numbers according to IVW (Informationsgemeinschaft zur Feststellung der Verbreitung von Werbeträgern e.V.), www.ivw.de (accessed April 29, 2008). 18 Ferda Ataman, “Das Leid-Medium.”

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‘integration’ versus ‘segregation’. In other words, it is asked whether the Turkish press serves the goal of ‘integration’ of migrants (and post-migrants) into German society. Many researchers try to address the fears of the public by using notions like “demarcation”,19 “media isolation,”20 “parallel society,”21 and “media ghettoization”22 in the titles of their publications. Notwithstanding the merits of these studies, they contribute implicitly to the endless reproduction of German society’s worried perspective of the Turkish minority including its implicit dichotomy of ‘we-versus-them’. This narrow research paradigm leaves little room for demonstrating the actual complexities of the ethnic press such as its transnational dimensions.23 With regard to the Turkish press, the fear of a possible ‘media ghettoisation’ of ethnic Turks in Germany can be easily refuted by some basic figures. The Essen-based Center for Studies on Turkey (Zentrum für Türkeistudien) has conducted detailed quantitative studies on the social and cultural situation of Turkish migrants in North-Rhine Westphalia.24 Its report shows that 96 percent of the ethnic Turks in Germany use Turkish-language media and 90 percent use Germanlanguage media.25 This is to say that, on average, 87 percent use media in both languages. Of course, the relative number of those who read newspapers is lower than the number of consumers of broadcast media. 64.5 percent of the respondents read Turkish and 46.4 German newspapers, while every second person (52.3 percent) claims to read

19 “Abgrenzung” as opposed to “integration”. Cf. Jörg Becker and Reinhard Benisch, eds., Zwischen Abgrenzung und Integration. Türkische Medienkultur in Deutschland, (Loccumer Protokolle) 03/00 (Loccum, 2001). 20 Reyhan Güntürk, “Mediennutzung der Migranten—mediale Isolation?” in Medien und multikulturelle Gesellschaft, eds. Christoph Butterwege, Gudrun Hentges, and Fatma Sarigöz, Interkulturelle Studien 3 (Opladen, 1999), pp. 136–143. 21 Kai Hafez, “Globalisierung, Ethnisierung und Medien: Eine ‘Parallelgesellschaft’ durch türkische Medien in Deutschland?” in Zwischen Abgrenzung und Integration, pp. 37–48. 22 Andreas Goldberg, “Mediale Vielfalt versus mediale Ghettoisierung,” Zeitschrift für Migration und soziale Arbeit 2 (1998). 23 Lars Heinemann and Fuat Kamcılı, “Unterhaltung, Absatzmärkte und die Vermittlung von Heimat: Die Rolle der Massenmedien in deutsch-türkischen Räumen,” in Transstaatliche Räume: Politik, Wirtschaft und Kultur zwischen Deutschland und der Türkei, ed. Thomas Faist (Bielefeld, 2000), pp. 113–158; Betigül Ercan Argun, Turkey in Germany: The Transnational Sphere of Deutschkei (New York, 2003). 24 Sauer, “Perspektiven des Zusammenlebens.” 25 Ibid., p. 172.


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newspapers in both German and Turkish.26 Of the German publications, most popular are regional and tabloid papers. Of all the Turkish newspapers, 60.6 percent of the respondents read Hürriyet, while significantly fewer mention the more liberal paper Milliyet (13.5 percent) or the conservative Islamic Zaman (12.6 percent).27 If one compares media consumption of Turks in Germany and Turkey, it can be said that Turks living abroad read significantly more than the average population at home, even though the level of education is higher in Turkey than among ethnic Turks in Germany.28 This points to the fact that the Turkish press in Germany has a function that is different from the mother papers in Turkey. In the diaspora, the function of the Turkish press is twofold. (1) Most importantly, of course, the Turkish newspapers satisfy a need for information: on the homeland, on the daily affairs of the community, and on issues of German politics and society. It is important to know that this function has not always been fulfilled by Turkey-based media. Since the 1960s, public German broadcasting agencies have been providing foreign-language programs for the ‘guestworkers’. This paternalistic effort had three main goals: to provide information on work-related issues in Germany; to preserve the guestworkers’ assumed inclination to return to their homelands; and, last but not least, to protect them against communist propaganda broadcast in Turkish by the neighboring socialist countries, particularly Hungary and the German Democratic Republic.29 The supply of German state programs declined with the increasing import of media products from Turkey: newspapers in the 1970s, videotapes in the 80s, and satellite TV and the internet from the 90s onward. During the process, Turkish media from the homeland adapted to the particular circumstances in Europe and, thus, changed. Today, the focus of Hürriyet’s news coverage, for instance, differs in its European editions from the Turkish edition. 26 Ibid., p. 177. See also Rainer Geissler and Horst Pöttker, eds., Integration durch Massenmedien: Medien und Migration im internationalen Vergleich (Bielefeld, 2006). 27 Sauer, “Perspektiven des Zusammenlebens,” p. 178. 28 Şeref Ateş, “Welches Bild verbreiten türkische Medien von der deutschen Gesellschaft?” in Zwischen Autonomie und Gängelung: Türkische Medienkultur in Deutschland, ed. Jörg Becker and Reinhard Benisch, Loccumer Protokolle 12/01 (Loccum, 2002), p. 88. 29 Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Öffentlich-Rechtlichen Rundfunkanstalten der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, ed., ARD Jahrbuch 1969 (Hamburg, 1969), p. 100; Selçuk Iskender, Medien und Organisationen: Interkulturelle Medien und Organisationen und ihr Beitrag zur Integration der türkischen Minderheit (Berlin, 1983), pp. 27ff.

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(2) Furthermore, the self-proclaimed function of the Turkish papers in Germany differs from papers in Turkey. In Germany, the Turkish press sees itself as an advocate or rather an intermediary between the Turkish community and the German government. Of course, it is a matter of debate whether Hürriyet is able to fulfill this function. Nevertheless, Hürriyet’s aspiration shapes its journalistic discourse significantly. Hence, its eagerness to demonstrate that it pursues the interests of its readers vis-à-vis the government and public institutions.30 In general, intermediary politics was not invented by Hürriyet but is rather rooted in Germany’s peculiar ‘immigration’ history, i.e. the recruitment of the guestworkers and their partial integration into German society. From the beginning, the German government and bureaucracy treated the migrants as supposedly coherent ethnic groups: the Italians, the Greeks, the Serbs, the Croats, and the Turks. German officials addressed these groups by a whole range of intermediary persons and institutions such as charitable organisations (the Workers’ Welfare Association, for instance), social workers, labour unions, the Turkish consulates, and most notably, the Federal Commissioner for Foreign Affairs (Bundesausländerbeauftragter).31 The Turkish press merely joined this pre-existing system of intermediary co-optation by claiming to represent the interests of the community more authentically than other institutions. This whole system of intermediary politics is based on the fact that the former immigrants remained disenfranchised and thus unable to pursue their own interests as full citizens. From this perspective, intermediary politics by paternalistic institutions is a surrogate for citizenship. In Turkey, for obvious reasons, the press does not claim to have the function of representing civil society vis-à-vis the government. For this reason, the Turkish press in Germany is more than just the ‘extension’ of the Turkish public sphere to Germany.32 In the process of adaptation, the press assumed a specific political function, which shapes its focus, its discourses, and its attitudes towards Turkey and Germany.

30 Faruk Șen and Andreas Goldberg, Türken in Deutschland: Leben zwischen zwei Kulturen (Munich, 1994), p. 121. 31 Christian Joppke, Immigration and the Nation-State: The United States, Germany, and Great Britain (Oxford, 1999), pp. 187–222. 32 Argun, Turkey in Germany.


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Hürriyet and ‘Integration’ The 1970s At the end of the 1970s, a group of students of the Berlin Institute of Technology (TU Berlin) conducted a survey on the media supply for Turkish citizens in West Berlin. Their advisor, Prof. Knilli, drew a bleak picture in his introduction to the study. In contrast to the strong and well-established presence of foreign language media of the Western allies in West Berlin, he stated: Only the Turks live in Kreuzberg under terrible circumstances without modern media and, thus, are exposed to the pre-industrial flow of information in the streets and backyards, bazaars and dives, Koran schools and mosques.33

This description was obviously exaggerated. By then, it was already driven by the fear that “fanatical religious groups of Moslems” and “fascist organizations” such as the Grey Wolves could gain followers by ‘pre-modern’ means of communication, i.e. mouth-to-mouth propaganda.34 At that time, the Turkish media had just entered the German market. During this first decade, the coverage on Turkey dominated the contents of all papers. The European headquarters of the papers consisted mainly of the former bureau of foreign correspondents in addition to a number of freelance journalists. Only some papers—among them Hürriyet—provided a thin section on German and European affairs at all. In 1979, the European edition of Hürriyet comprised 16 pages of which only one was designated for West Germany.35 This section was mainly focused on activities of the community. Thereby, the paper provided at least some means for “internal communication between Turks abroad.”36 Apart from this, the Turkish papers made little effort to provide orientation for the immigrants in German society. This

33 Dietrich Klitzke, ed., Das Medienangebot für die Bevölkerung aus der Türkei in Berlin (West): Eine Dokumentation (Berlin, 1980), p. 6. 34 Ibid., p. 14. 35 Ibid., p. 67ff. 36 Mehmet Aktan, Das Medienangebot für die ausländischen Arbeitnehmer in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland: Untersucht am Beispiel türkischsprachiger Zeitungen und Hörfunksendungen, (Doctoral thesis, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Munich, 1979), p. 197.

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field was completely left to German publications. During this period, the periodicals of the German labour unions filled this void most efficiently. Their publications in Turkish (and other languages of the guestworkers) such as DGB Haberler (1973–1990; circulation in 1979: 200,000) and Metall Haberler (since 1964; circulation in 1979: 175,000) encouraged social and political participation of the guestworkers in German society.37 The 1980s During the 1980s, ethnic Turks in Germany faced a surge of antiimmigrant sentiments which was accompanied by electoral gains of right-wing parties. This development had an important impact on the change of the Turkish press and particularly Hürriyet. It was when Hürriyet increasingly assumed the role of a speaker for the community. A major part of the articles was aimed mainly at documenting the activities of Hürriyet on behalf of its readers such as, for instance, letters to German officials, bureaucrats or other persons or institutions.38 In this, Hürriyet tried to demonstrate that it was “playing an active role in societal development.”39 Initially, Hürriyet drew a rather simplified picture of both Germans and Turks. It depicted Germans as rather ill-willing and jealous of their Turkish colleagues.40 On August 20, 1982, for instance, Hürriyet explained the anti-Turkish feelings of Germans as follows: The Germans envy us because the Turkish population here has gained a standard of living that is in great part equal to Germans. Germans envy

37 Aktan, “Das Medienangebot für die ausländischen Arbeitnehmer,” p. 69; HansWolf Rissom, “Arbeitnehmer im Ausland,” a documentation, German UNESCO commission and Friedrich-Ebert-Foundation (Köln, 1974); Faruk Șen, Türkische Arbeitnehmergesellschaften: Gründung, Struktur und wirtschaftliche Funktion der türkischen Arbeitnehmergesellschaften in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland für die sozioökonomische Lage der Türkei (Frankfurt, 1980). 38 Karl Binswanger, “Die türkische Presse in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland,” in Die türkische Presse in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und ihr Einfluß auf die Integration von Türken—Standpunkte und Analysen (Bonn, 1988), pp. 16–38. 39 Șen and Goldberg, Türken in Deutschland, p. 121. 40 Wolfgang Scharlipp, “Aufmachung, Inhalt und Sprache türkischer Tageszeitungen in Deutschland,” in Begegnung mit Türken—Begegnung mit dem Islam, eds. HansJürgen Brandt and Claus-Peter Haase (Hamburg, 1984), pp. 213–221; Hans-Günter Kleff, “‘Die Deutschen’ in türkischen Tageszeitungen: Eine Untersuchung am Beispiel der Europa-Ausgaben von Hürriyet und Tercüman,” Deutsch lernen 1 (1989), 34–63; Binswanger, “Die türkische Presse in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland,” pp. 30ff.


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us because many Turks work hard at their work places for the construction of the German economy, while many Germans are unemployed. Many Turks have even succeeded in becoming employers.41

Hürriyet and other secular papers addressed their readers as ‘fellow citizens’ (vatandaşlar) in contrast to the religious papers which used the notions ‘Muslims’ (Millî Gazete) or ‘Turkish Muslims’ (Tercüman). Semantically, the bond to the ‘homeland’ (vatan) is a basic constituent of the Turkish word for ‘citizen’ (vatandaş). During the 1980s, Hürriyet still assumed that the majority of its readers wished to return to Turkey at some later point. The preservation of their identity was therefore a stated goal of the paper, while naturalisation in Germany remained anathema then. The second notion used by Hürriyet to address its readers was ‘gurbetçi’, evoking the image of a person living in an alien environment (gurbet), lonely and in need of help.42 Of course, this notion reinforced the paternalistic claim of the paper to mediate between the guestworkers and public institutions of both Germany and Turkey. In the late 1980s, Hürriyet became more aware of the changing composition and, thus, changing demands of its readership.43 At that time, ethnic Turks perceived the program of the Kohl government to encourage their return to Turkey by financial aid, the so-called ‘Rückkehrförderung’, as guided by xenophobia rather than a real willingness to assist. Partly in response to this, Hürriyet encouraged the settlement process by family reunification and promoted adaptation with a simultaneous call for the preservation of Turkish culture. Last, but not least, it tried to persuade its readers to invest their savings in Turkey.

41 Quote following İskender, Medien und Organisationen, p. 62, translated from German to English by the author. 42 Binswanger, “Die türkische Presse in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland;” Kleff, “‘Die Deutschen’ in türkischen Tageszeitungen.” 43 Ahmet Külahçı (Hürriyet), “Wie müssen uns an den Erwartungen, Bedürfnissen und Wünschen unserer Leser orientieren,” in Die türkische Presse in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und ihr Einfluß auf die Integration von Türken: Standpunkte und Analysen, ed. Zentrum für Türkeistudien [Center for Studies on Turkey] (Bonn, 1988), pp. 42–49; Zentrum für Türkeistudien, ed., Zum Integrationspotential der türkischen Tagespresse in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland: Ergebnisse einer quantitativen und qualitativen Inhaltsanalyse türkischer Tageszeitungen (Opladen, 1991), pp. 48ff.

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The 1990s The 1990s, until the end of Helmut Kohl’s chancellorship, can be called a lost decade for the integration of ethnic Turks in Germany.44 From the fall of the Berlin Wall onward, the influx of ethnic Germans from the collapsing GDR, first, and the former Soviet Union, later on, absorbed most of the government’s attention. Since these immigrants were considered to be Germans, they not only gained citizenship immediately, but also received the financial support and the language courses that the former ‘guestworkers’ had desired for so long. Simultaneously, the Kohl government initiated a public debate on the need to reduce immigration and particularly the influx of asylum seekers. The discussion was accompanied by a wave of racist violence which peaked with arson on private houses in Mölln and Solingen in 1993. By the time the asylum law was finally changed, forty-nine persons had been murdered in racist attacks—most of them foreigners.45 The extremely negative impact of these events on the Turkish community was reflected in all the Turkish papers in Germany.46 The immediate result was a deep feeling of insecurity and helplessness. The German government was criticised for not intervening decisively against the violence. In addition, it was pointed out that no leading representative of the government came to the scene of the crimes in the aftermath to pay tribute to the victims. Besides, the press directed its criticism also at the Turkish government for its insufficient efforts to defend the security of its citizens abroad. Some voices even spoke about the necessity to re-migrate to the Turkish homeland, but the Turkish papers calmed these fears and no such migration took place.47 Instead, the tragic events of Mölln and Solingen became a cornerstone of a distinct collective memory of Turks in Germany. Since then, Hür-

44

See the piercing critique of the Green politician of Turkish descent, Cem Özdemir, ‘Deutsch oder nicht sein?’ Integration in der Bundesrepublik (Bergisch Gladbach, 2000). 45 Ulrich Herbert, Geschichte der Ausländerpolitik in Deutschland: Saisonarbeiter, Zwangsarbeiter, Gastarbeiter, Flüchtlinge (München, 2001), p. 320. 46 Makfi Karacabey, “Türkische Tageszeitungen in der BRD: Rolle—Einfluß—Funktionen. Eine Untersuchung zum Integrationsverständnis türkischer Tageszeitungen in der BRD,” (unpublished doctoral thesis, Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt/Main, 1996), pp. 176–237. 47 Gülay Durgut, “Tagsüber Deutschland, abends Türkei? Türkische Medien in Deutschland,” in Deutsche Türken: Das Ende der Geduld (bi-lingual, Turkish-German), eds. Claus Leggewie and Zafer Șenocak (Reinbek, 1993), p. 117.


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riyet has reported annually on the commemoration ceremonies celebrated publicly.48 While these ceremonies refer to a common identity based on shared suffering, they also establish a link to Germany’s political culture of public commemoration. German-Turkish Alevis even take this one step further and criticise Hürriyet for only commemorating the racist attacks in Germany but not the simultaneous Islamist attacks on secular/Alevi intellectuals in Sivas, Turkey.49 Another ramification of the xenophobic wave in the early 1990s was the fact that citizenship became a primary political goal of the Turkish community in Germany and a common demand in all Turkish papers. It has already been pointed out above that the Turkish press in Germany did not always promote naturalisation. Instead, the return to the homeland was, for a long time, a dominant theme. German citizenship seemed, therefore, only necessary for the second and third generations of those born in Germany. The political shift to embrace naturalisation in Germany was, therefore, the most notable public admission that the guestworkers had settled in Germany and that re-migration was nothing but a nostalgic dream. The ‘guestworkers’ had already become ‘members’ of German society and most of them had gained the right of permanent residency. What citizenship promised, beyond this, was official recognition and electoral leverage. After the negative experiences of the 1980s and 1990s, direct political participation was seen as an absolute necessity. The ethnic Turks did not want to become the object of anti-immigration campaigns any longer or, at least, they wanted to have the option to use their votes as a counter-balance.

Hürriyet’s Current Discourse on Citizenship In the mid-1990s, all Turkish newspapers in Germany—from the Islamist Millî Gazete to the leftist-Kemalist Cumhuriyet—took part in a broad campaign for a reform of the German citizenship law including the option of dual citizenship. The Red-Green government, which

48 E.g.: Osman Korutürk (at that time Turkish embassador in Berlin), “Benzer olaylar hic yașanmasın” [Similar events must not happen again], Hürriyet (November 23, 2001), 18. 49 Bektaş Doğru, “Hürriyet’in ‘Editör’ü neyi arzuluyor?” alevilerin sesi 12, 70 (2003), 22f. Reply in Hürriyet: Murat Ince, “Almanca Alevi (Din) dersleri üzerine,” Hürriyet (February 19, 2004), 18.

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came to power in 1998, embraced this demand. Yet, during the legislative process, the power balance in the Upper House of the German Parliament (Bundesrat) changed after elections in the state of Hesse. The eventual law of citizenship disgruntled the Turkish community and the Turkish press. It did not allow for dual citizenship—not even for the first generation of guestworkers. In addition, sufficient skills in the German language and loyalty to the Basic Law were made prerequisites for naturalisation without, however, defining the concrete regulations for the verification of these demands. In the following years and up until the present day, there have been controversies on the implementation of the law. This has been framed by more general debates on the integration of immigrants on the job market and in the educational system. In the following section of this paper, I will analyse the discourse in Hürriyet on these issues. The analysis is based on my reading of Hürriyet from 2001 to 2005. The discussions mostly took place in the daily columns of professional journalists and in the section for readers’ letters. The readers’ section entitled “söz sizin” (literally, ‘the word is yours’) is particularly open to academics of ethnic origin like the director of the Center for Studies on Turkey in Essen, Prof. Faruk Șen,50 German party politicians with a Turkish background such as the former member of the European Parliament, Ozan Ceyhun,51 or leaders of ethnic associations such as the president of the European Federation of Associations for the Promotion of Atatürk’s Thought, Dursun Atılgan.52 Many other authors, however, are more or less unknown. If at all, they introduce themselves only by mentioning their city or country of residence. The Expectations of German Officials from the Ethnic Turks Besides the Turkish contributors and the readers’ section, Hürriyet regularly gives German politicians and bureaucrats the opportunity to promote their opinions in interviews. Sometimes Hürriyet even translates and publishes their op-ed articles. Most German representatives appreciate this occasion to address the Turkish residents directly in their native language. Of course, the variety of views presented by 50

Cf. Hürriyet (January 6, March 5, and April 21, 2008). Cf. Hürriyet (December 6, 2007, March 18, 28, and 31, 2008, April 4, 8, 14, 18, 20, 24, 29, and 30, 2008, May 2, 2008). 52 Cf. Hürriyet (December 28, 2007). 51


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Hürriyet is as broad as the political spectrum in Germany—with the obvious exception of the far right. Seen from a general perspective, the statements made in Hürriyet have some remarkable commonalities. One aspect of the official German rhetoric directed at a Turkish audience is the assurance that Turks in Germany should no longer be regarded as “guests” (“misafir değilsiniz”), but as permanent residents.53 Some even add a notion of affection for the Turks. The former Federal Commissioner of Foreign Affairs, Cornelia Schmalz-Jacobson, for instance, was quoted as saying that the Turks came as “friends and will stay on as friends.”54 The Christian Democrat Dr. Kuno Böse, formerly Bremen’s Senator of the Interior, stated that the “Turks are our biggest friends (Türkler en büyük dostumuz)”.55 This language reflects the problem of identifying the status of the ethnic Turks who live ‘with us’, but are not completely a ‘part of us’. With a different emphasis, German officials repeat ‘German society’s’ expectations of the ‘Turks’ over and over again. These expectations are generally formulated in the language of ‘integration policies’ (Integrationspolitik). The underlying assumption is always that ‘integration’ is not a fact but rather a goal that needs to be realised in the future. Although the word ‘integration’ is seldom properly defined, it is generally meant as a political answer to an astonishing variety of societal pathologies attributed to the migrants and post-migrants such as: the poor performance of young ethnic Turks in the educational system, high unemployment rates among the youngsters, deficits in German language skills, honor crimes, and political extremism particularly Islamism—just to mention some frequent topics. The remedies under discussion include language courses, Islamic religious instruction in the German language, better vocational training, political education, etc. The potential efficiency of all these proposals, however, is rather limited due to the shortage of public funds. Simultaneously, integration by political participation is much less an issue in the official discourse, since this would highlight the fact that most ethnic

53 “Misafir değilsiniz” [You are not guests (anymore)], Hürriyet (December 28, 2001), 17. From an article on a symposium in Ahlen titled “From Working Class to Citizenship” [Von der Arbeiterschaft zur Staatsbürgerschaft]. MP Reinhard Schulz (SPD) argued that the notion ‘guestworker’ should be abandoned. 54 Hürriyet (November 7, 2001), 18. 55 “Türkler en büyük dostumuz” [The Turks are our biggest friends], interview with Bremer Innensenator Dr. Kuno Böse (CDU) conducted by Recep Şeplin, Hürriyet (January 13, 2002), 6.

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Turks do not enjoy the same political rights as Germans. The ‘integration process’ is not even meant to lead routinely to naturalization. Dr. Kuno Böse (Bremen), for instance, who was already quoted above, described for Hürriyet the attitude he would like to hear from young ethnic Turks as follows: “I want to live here and I want to be a part of this society. I want to respect the constitution and the laws. I want to contribute whatever I can.”56 Here, ‘integration’ sounds more like peaceful coexistence rather than political inclusion. Ethnic Turks and Membership in German Society At this point, it is important to underline that the German discourse on ‘integration’ sets the general framework for almost all public discourses of ethnic Turks on their situation in Germany. Of course, this is not to say that they would accept all expectations and preconditions set by Germans right away. Yet, in order to gain a voice in the German public sphere, ethnic Turks must connect their statements to the dominant German discourses—be it in a critical or in an affirmative way.57 The notion of ‘integration’ as a general goal and a positive value is, therefore, hardly ever questioned. The Turkish words used in this context, uyum sağlamak, uyumak or entegrasyon etmek, have an overall positive connotation of ensuring harmony (uyum) by adaptation. Nevertheless, by using these notions Turks imbue their specific understanding of integration and, with it, their notion of citizenship. Most ethnic Turks who have a voice in Hürriyet such as commentators, selected readers, leaders of ethnic associations, and party politicians emphasise that ‘integration’ of the Turks into German society is not only a desirable goal, but is already a fact. This stands in contrast to the aforementioned tendency of German officials to refer constantly to the deficits, problems and abnormalities in the integration process. For years Ali Gülen ran a regular column in Hürriyet called “Letters from Europe (Avrupa’dan mektuplar)” until his recent move

56

Ibid. See Christoph Schumann, “Integration aus Sicht von Muslimen in Deutschland,” in Integration von Muslimen, eds. Petra Bendel and Mathias Hildebrandt, Schriftenreihe des Zentralinstituts für Regionalforschung 1 (München, 2006), pp. 53–75. A counter-discourse that rejected all notions of integration and adaptation could be found, earlier on, in the publications of radical Islamist organizations such as the Caliphate State (hilafet devleti) and the Hizb ut-Tahrir. Both have been banned in the years following September 11, 2001. 57


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to Sabah. While he was still working for Hürriyet, he claimed that Hürriyet made more efforts for ‘integration’ than most German newspapers.58 With this argument, Gülen implicitly responded to a statement that Christian Wulff, the prime minister of Lower Saxony, had made earlier in an interview with Hürriyet. There, Wulff lamented the negative effects of foreign-language media consumption on children’s integration. “Concerning Hürriyet,” Gülen continued, “we are always on the side of ‘integration’; always on the side of a multicultural society (Hürriyet olarak, her zaman “uyum” dan, her zaman multi-kulti [sic]59 bir toplumdan yanayız).” Gülen’s reaction to Wulff is typical of the discourse on integration in the Turkish press regarding the following three arguments. First, Turkish speakers frequently point out that the efforts of their community to integrate have not been sufficiently appreciated by Germans. Second, there is an underlying suspicion among ethnic Turks that Germans actually think ‘assimilation’ when they say ‘integration’. Therefore, Gülen’s avowal of integration is immediately followed by the emphasis on Hürriyet’s commitment to cultural diversity. Third, there is a constant irritation between German officials and ethnic Turks about the role of the native language. Both agree on the crucial role of the German language for integration. While German officials give clear priority to education in German, most writers in Hürriyet emphasise the need to know one’s native language in order to learn any second language. What is not discussed, however, is the fact that the Turkish language skills of ethnic Turks are, in the long run, also a crucial prerequisite for the economic survival of the Turkish press in Germany as long as Hürriyet and the other Turkish newspapers continue to rely almost exclusively on Turkish language editions at the expense of supplements in German. Apart from the role of Turkish media, the value of Turkish cultural contributions to German society is another point of controversy. In the readers’ section (söz sizin), Zeki Önsöz, who does not specify where in Germany he lives, argued that the first generation of Turkish ‘guestworkers’ had to maintain their culture and values in an alien

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Ali Gülen, “Genç başkanın iki hatası” [The two errors of the young prime minister], Hürriyet (August 24, 2003), 18. 59 The usual Turkish expression for the English word ‘multicultural’ is ‘cok kültürlü’.

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environment.60 Their desire to cultivate their language did not result from a nationalistic attitude but rather from the human desire to preserve their language that was also felt by the German poet Heinrich Heine during his exile in Paris. Yet, instead of appreciating the enrichment of German culture by the Turks, Germans would discriminate against Turkish culture in schools, in the public, and in the movie theatres.61 Contrary to what he sees as a prevalent misconception of many Germans, Önsöz argued that Turkish culture had been European since the fourteenth century. “To ask them [i.e. the Turks] to abandon this culture,” he continues, “is against human rights and it means not recognizing Turks as human beings.” In spite of all this, ethnic Turks made “major economic and social contributions to the society they live in”: Successful persons emerged in sports, arts, trade, the crafts and other fields. At the same time, they founded associations to maintain their own particular culture and values. Some Germans hold a negative attitude towards Turks and their culture based on outdated prejudices. They are angry because Turks in Germany are successful without giving up their culture.62

Forty years after the recruitment, the author pointed out, Germany had still not yet recognised that “specific societies of the Turks have become a reality” (Türkler’in kendi toplumlarının bir gerçeği olduğunu). Although German society was, for demographic reasons, in need of the immigrants and their children, the German educational system had not yet adapted to these circumstances and there was widespread discrimination. Turks who live in Germany, Önsöz sums up, should use all democratic and legal means possible to change this situation to their favor. Overall, the author draws on some argumentative patterns that have been familiar to the readers of Hürriyet for many years. The explanation of German xenophobia as a result of envy at the material success of Turks was already mentioned. More important today

60 Zeki Önsöz (Almanya), “Almanya’da Türk Kültürü” (söz sizin), Hürriyet (March 31, 2006), 19. 61 At the time of Önsöz’s article, there was much discussion about the Herbert Hoover middle school in Berlin where teachers, students and parents agreed on a pact to use only the German language during the classes and the breaks. In addition, the Turkish film Kurtlar Vadisi triggered much controversy for its alleged or real anti-Americanism. 62 Zeki Önsöz (Almanya), “Almanya’da Türk Kültürü” (söz sizin), Hürriyet (March 31, 2006), 19.


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is the argument of Hürriyet and the other Turkish newspapers that ethnic Turks are ‘members’ of German society by virtue of their contributions to it. With a view to the concerns of Germans about their economy, ethnic Turks in Germany frequently mention taxes, social security payments, and the creation of jobs. Remarkable, however, is the aptness of Önsöz of justifying the attachment of Turks to their language by using Heine to remind the Germans of their own attachment to their language. Another argument that is made regularly in the Turkish press is the claim that it was a ‘human right’ of the Turks to maintain their cultural distinctiveness, particularly their language. Önsöz refers to human rights as well, but he adds that the goals should be achieved on the basis of the German Basic Law. It seems to be obvious to relate this issue to the German constitution, but, in fact, this second argumentative step has rarely been made. The reason for this might be the fact that ethnic Turks in Germany, due to their predominant lack of German citizenship, still have not embraced the German Basic Law as their own constitution. Instead, they refer to an abstract universalism or wait for the Turkish consulates or other intermediaries to help them realise their goals. Another site where the discursive construction of membership in German society takes place is the local level. Although Hürriyet has a German or even European scope, it reports regularly on local activities such as labour disputes and strikes. While the coverage of the workers’ demands is generally friendly, the main news is always the fact that Turks participate in these activities—shoulder to shoulder with their German colleagues. A recent example was the strike of the Electrolux workers against the closing down of the production plant in Nuremberg, which had formerly been an independent company known as AEG. This aspect of local identification gave the strike a remarkable intensity vis-à-vis the despised headquarters of Electrolux in Stockholm. In Hürriyet, Gökhan Özkan from Nuremberg described the ongoing strike in a letter to the editor entitled “AEG’s Turks are not ‘guestworkers’ (AEG’li Türkler ‘Misafir işçi’ değil).”63 He praised the solidarity between the workers disregarding their descent or gender: “There is only localism (yerlilik). Instead of foreignness (yabancılık), there is

63 Gökhan Özkan (Nuremberg), “AEG’li Türkler ‘Misafir işçi’ değil,” (söz sizin), Hürriyet (February 7, 2006).

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only Nurembergism (Nürnberg’lilik).” This solidarity and local rootedness, he continued, was rapidly affecting the public opinion while the feeling of solidarity was spreading like an “avalanche”. In his last paragraph, Özkan went on to attack the production manager, Horst Winkler, whom he quoted as saying “You can take your compensations, go back to your countries, or rather open a taxi company.” Özkan responded angrily: I think Horst Winkler mistakes us, who live in Germany these days, for the first earn-some-money-and-return generation. Yes, those came, worked, earned money, and returned. But we, who still live here in the second, third, and even fourth generation, we are local (buralıyız). Dear Mr. Winkler, we are not guestworkers anymore whom you can tell ‘Take the money and go back!’ We are, at least, as local as you are.64

Today, the membership of ethnic Turks in German society is uncontested in the Turkish press. ‘Integration’ is generally accepted as a positive value, even though the precise meaning is a matter of controversy. A future return to the former homeland may still be a dream of some individuals, but it is anathema in the press. More than that, Turkish newspapers and Hürriyet in particular contribute actively to constructing membership of ethnic Turks in German society. As was argued above, this is done in several ways and on different levels. Most common are references to contributions to German society and the coverage of diverse forms of participation and collaboration. Furthermore, the levels of justification can be local such as by reference to rootedness, universalistic by reference to human rights, or national by reference to citizenship. Of course, the last mode is precarious, since most ethnic Turks in Germany are “denizens”65 rather than citizens, i.e. they enjoy the right of long-term residence but lack the fundamental rights and duties of citizens. Ethnic Turks and German Citizenship It is generally agreed among theorists of citizenship that the principle of equality, which is basic to any concept of democracy, stands in stark

64

Ibid. Tomas Hammar, “State, Nation, and Dual Citizenship,” in Immigration and the Politics of Citizenship in Europe and North America, ed. Roger Brubaker (Lanham, 1989), pp. 81–95. 65


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contradiction to the division of the population into citizens and denizens.66 It is controversial, however, when and under which conditions denizens should be naturalised and thus made citizens. The former guestworkers’ campaign for dual citizenship was so important because, in this way, they acknowledged publicly that they had definitely settled down in Germany. From their perspective, their demand for dual citizenship merely reflected the societal realities they live in. It was their implicit assumption—which eventually turned out to be wrong—that they had gained the right to dual citizenship after 40 years by their economic contributions to German society. Together with the RedGreen government, they were overwhelmed and shocked by the massive popular resistance against the idea of dual citizenship orchestrated by Roland Koch of the Christian Democratic Union in his campaign for the state elections in Hesse in 1999. It was in the course of these events that the bill that included the option of dual citizenship was withdrawn. In spite of this, the Turkish demand for equal political rights continued to be a major issue in the Turkish press. The demand for citizenship was mainly fostered during the 1990s when ethnic Turks in Germany had two painful experiences. First, ethnic German immigrants from the Eastern European countries obtained German citizenship immediately and received the bulk of state funding for language courses and other integration measures. Second, permanent residents from EU member states were allowed to participate in municipal elections, while Turkish citizens remained restricted to the marginal ‘aliens councils’. ‘Equality’ (eşitlik) was, therefore, another demand that became tightly attached to the concept of ‘integration’ in the Turkish press. “Integration can only work with equality (Uyum ancak eşitlik ile olur),”67 for instance, was the telling title of an article on the differential treatment of German immigrants and the previous generations of Turkish immigrants. The author argued that only 10 percent of non-German immigrants had the opportunity to attend socalled integration classes, while all ethnic Germans could do so.

66 Hammar, “State, Nation, and Dual Citizenship;” Brubaker: “Introduction;” Yasemin Nuhoglu Soysal, Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Post-national Membership in Europe (Chicago, 1994); Ruth Rubio-Marin, Immigration as a Democratic Challenge: Citizenship and Inclusion in Germany and the United States (Cambridge, USA, 2000). 67 Celal Özcan (Munich), “Uyum ancak eşitlik ile olur,” Hürriyet (May 23, 2001), 15.

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In an op-ed article of May 2002, the vice president of the Turkish Society of Hanover (Hannover Türk Toplumu), Remzi Kocak, drew a disillusioned picture of 40 years of Turkish immigration to Germany, while searching for a political solution to this situation. In the first half of his article, he described the “bitter situation” of the Turks. According to Kocak, they were treated as second or even third class “human beings” administered by specific laws [i.e. the foreigner law]. In addition, migrants were blamed for all kinds of societal problems such as the bad performance of German pupils in the PISA test, a comparative international survey on educational systems. Even the former political allies in the governing Red-Green coalition were now placed in the position of defending the “German race” against the Turks. For this reason, Kocak continues, the new citizenship law had turned out to be a “law for the prevention of Turks (Türkleri Engeleme Yasası)” and the immigration bill under discussion would make it much more difficult for Turkish immigrants to obtain permanent residency. The basic reason for all these problems, Kocak argued, was the fact that all political parties in Germany could do without taking the potential votes of the Turks into consideration. This would lead to paternalistic politics for foreigners rather than with foreigners. In this “bogus democracy”, some parties used foreign born persons as “fig leaves” to cover this structural deficit without, however, changing the general situation. Although Germany presented itself to the world as a teacher of democracy, 7.5 million of its own population were disenfranchised and, therefore, could not participate in the “formation of a public opinion (siyasi iradenin oluşumu).” Even if the whole foreignborn population in Germany had German citizenship, they would make up only 3.5 percent of the electorate. Of course, this would hardly be enough to change German politics, Kocak concludes, but it would, at least, make it more difficult for the German political parties to run their election campaigns on the backs of the immigrants. Hence, a sense of belonging to German society could only be created by political equality on the basis of citizenship. On the whole, the discourse on citizenship and political rights in the Turkish press has two remarkable aspects. First, the demand for political equality is synonymous with the demand for public recognition of the ethnic Turks as full members in German society, thereby also acknowledging their contributions to this society. Contrary to the official German discourse, equality of political rights is therefore seen as a precondition for the integration process rather than its final


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goal. In this sense, ‘integration’ is understood as a movement in which two sides encounter and approach one another on an equal basis.68 ‘Assimilation,’ however, is not only associated with the eventual loss of identity but also with unfavorable power relations. Secondly, and complementary to this first observation, elections on all political levels are covered extensively in the Turkish press, whereas the role of the Turkish candidates is always a key issue. It is also remarkable that the influence of the Turkish vote tends to be largely overstated. Apparently, the wish for more political rights is the source of this estimation. The Expectations of Turkish Officials from the Ethnic Turks The relationship between the Turkish Republic and its citizens in Europe has changed tremendously over the years. Its whole breadth is too complex to be reviewed at this point, but the regular statements of Turkish officials in the Turkish newspapers allow for some analytical remarks. The group of Turkish officials featured regularly in the Turkish press consists of diplomats and government representatives. Hürriyet tends to cover the predominantly Kemalist establishment of diplomats rather favorably, while it is often more critical with regard to the current AKP government. Apart from the legal aspects of citizenship and naturalization, Turkish officials use the Turkish press to highlight the important role the Turkish diaspora should play in support of Turkey’s application for EU-membership. Ethnic Turks in Europe, they argue, gave Turkish culture and Islamic religion a significant presence in Europe. Therefore, the diaspora should function as a bridge between Turkey and the EU. Mehmet Ali Irtemçelik, the former ambassador of Turkey,69 expressed this idea in his New Year’s address of January 2004 in the words “every European Turk is a Turkey (Her Avrupalı Türk bir Türkiye’dir).”70 With a view to the awaited decision of the European Commission to start accession negotiations with Turkey, the ambassador reminded his compatriots of Kemal Atatürk, who had led the nation towards 68

Cf. Özdemir Ince, “Göçmenin entegrasyon işleri,” Hürriyet (February 25, 2002), 18. Mehmet Ali Irtemçelik served as Turkish ambassador to Berlin from September 12, 2003 until March 18, 2008. Being a member of the Turkish Motherland Party (ANAP), Irtemçelik was a member of the Turkish parliament from 1999 until 2002 and minster of European affairs and human rights in the government of Bülent Ecevit between May 1999 and May 2000. 70 “Her Avrupalı Türk bir Türkiye’dir,” Hürriyet (January 3, 2004), 15. 69

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the West. Today, the ambassador continued, it was the duty of every individual to work on behalf of this goal. Disregarding citizenship, the voices of all “our human beings who settled in Europe (Avrupa’da yerleşik insanlarımız)” are useful. In addition, Irtemçelik called upon the Turkish associations to overcome their quarrels and rather unite in order to change the prejudices in European public opinion. The idea that ethnic Turks should form a lobby for their homeland in their countries of residence is frequently discussed in the Turkish press, but it always remains vague. During a visit of Tayyip Erdoğan to Berlin, the prime minister addressed this issue in a speech he gave on a meeting with German-Turkish economic associations. He welcomed the ongoing foundation process of the European Turkish Union (Avrupalı Türk Demokratlar Birliği) by saying: “I call upon all organizations of the civil society to develop a lobby. I want a mobilization for the support of Turkey. Similar organizations should unite . . .”71 He recently repeated his call for building an ethnic lobby in a speech before an audience of 16,000 visitors in the soccer stadium of Cologne.72 Although this proposition is convincing in theory, it is difficult to realise in practice. The extreme political diversity of the Turkish associations in Germany has been an almost insurmountable barrier to unification ever since. In addition, the priority of homeland politics became more contested over the years. With good reason, some activists argue that issues in Germany like unemployment, education and the struggle against discrimination should have precedence over the interests of the mother country.73 Abdullah Gül, then Turkish foreign minister,74 seemed to support this orientation when he advised his compatriots to seek their future where they reside and become happy there (“Bulunduğunuz yerde mutlu olun!”).75 Of course, Gül emphasised that there was a need to integrate (entegre olması gerek) in those

71

Ali Gülen, “Tepsi parasından profesyonelliğe,” Hürriyet (October 5, 2004), 18. “Das sagte Ministerpräsident Erdogan in Köln,” documentation, Welt online (February 11, 2008), http://www.welt.de/meinung/article1660510/Das_sagte_Minterpraesident_Erdogan_in_Koeln.html (accessed May 7, 2008). 73 Ertekin Özcan, Türkische Immigrantenorganisationen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Berlin, 1989); Murat Cakir, Die Pseudodemokraten: Türkische Lobbyisten, Islamisten, Rechtsradikale und ihr Wirken in der Bundesrepublik (Düsseldorf, 2000). 74 Abdullah Gül, member of the moderate Islamist AKP, Turkish prime minister 2002–2003, minister of foreign affairs 2003–2007, president of the Turkish Republic since August 28, 2007. 75 Abdullah Gül, “Bulundugunuz yerde mutlu olun,” Hürriyet (February 19, 2003), 15. 72


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countries and he encouraged political engagement. At the same time, however, he admonished the European Turks not to lose their distinct identities (kimliklerini) but to maintain their bonds with Turkey particularly by investing there. Especially those with dual citizenship would face no obstacles at all. At the time of this speech, in 2003, this implicit encouragement to seek dual citizenship was very problematic, because it was already illegal under the new German citizenship law of 2000. The re-application for Turkish citizenship after naturalisation in Germany confronted the ethnic Turks with the risk of losing their German citizenship again—a problem that has filled the pages of Hürriyet for months in the last years. Very similar to Abdullah Gül’s line of argument, in February 2008 Erdoğan called upon his “fellow citizens” in the Cologne area to integrate and participate in German society. He also emphasised the necessity to learn German. Simultaneously, he told them that he was fully aware of their fears about cultural assimilation: No one can expect from you to tolerate assimilation. No one can expect that you submit to assimilation, because assimilation is a crime against humanity (bir insanlik suçudur). [. . .] Of course, your children will learn Turkish. It is your native tongue and it is your most natural right to pass it on to your children.76

While this brief passage drew fierce criticism in the German public and particularly from conservative politicians, Ahmet Külahçı, one of Hürriyet’s columnists,77 could not understand where this anger came from.78 It is clear for him—and Külahçı supposes the same for his readers—that “integration” could only include the preservation of one’s “culture and identities.” In this sense, all ethnic Turks were against assimilation. Ethnic Turks and Turkish Citizenship The statements of the Turkish officials in Hürriyet usually draw mixed responses. On the one side, it is being criticised that Turkey had done little for its citizens abroad, even though ethnic Turks in the diaspora

76

“Erdoğan’ı 20 bin kişi dinledi,“ Hürriyet (December 22, 2008), 15. Ahmet Külahçı is responsible for the coverage of German politics in Hürriyet since 1987. 78 Ahmet Külahçı, “Bu öfke niye” [Why this anger], Hürriyet (February 19, 2008), 18. 77

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had always supported Turkey politically. Dr. Yüksel Cavlak, president of the Atatürk Thought Association (ADD), wrote an article in Hürriyet, criticising that all governments so far, disregarding their composition, had little interest in the “pitiable expatriates (zavallı gurbetçi)” except for their foreign currency transfers and the military duty of the young men.79 Yet, when Turkish citizens became victims of racist attacks and discrimination, the same governments had done little on their behalf. Now, Cavlak demanded, the Turkish associations in Germany should concentrate on the tremendous problems of the third generation that might end up torn between the two cultures. He added angrily that the “empty talk” of Turkish officials and diplomats was of no use at all in this regard. On the other side, critics claim that the Turkish government would not sufficiently look after expatriates’ interests back home in matters like social security or the pension system. In a letter to the editor, Murat Bozkaya reminded Prime Minister Erdoğan of the fact that not only Turks in Turkey should enjoy full rights but also “we Turkish citizens abroad (biz gurbetçi Türk vatandaşları).”80 Rather than taking care of all Turkish compatriots, Bozkaya continued, those abroad would be looked upon as parasites. Zeynel Lüle, correspondent of Hürriyet in Brussels, argued recently in the same line while adding an interesting demand to it.81 Lüle agreed with Abdullah Gül that Turkish expatriates should integrate in their countries of residence, get involved in politics there, and work for the benefit of Turkey. Yet, this engagement was not at all detrimental to their continuing participation in Turkish politics. After all, Turkish media and particularly the press enabled the emigrants to trace current events in the homeland. In order to allow them to pursue their interests in Ankara, Turkey should follow the recent example of Italy and grant the diaspora communities seats in the Turkish National Assembly. If there were between fifty and one hundred seats reserved for deputies from abroad, Lüle concluded, the Turkish government would certainly listen more carefully to the voices of the expatriates. Although the Grand National Assembly of Turkey has not yet allotted special seats for expatriates, Hürriyet and Sabah have made the voting rights of Turkish expatriates a major issue very recently, during the run-up to the Turkish parliamentary election

79 80 81

Dr. Yüksel Cavlak (Almanya / ADD Başkanı), Hürriyet (November 5, 2001), 18. Murat Bozkaya (Erlenbach), “Başbakana mektup,” Hürriyet (October 25, 2005), 18. Zeynel Lüle, “Darisi bizim başımıza,” Hürriyet (April 8, 2006), 16.


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of July 22, 2007.82 Both papers demanded that Turkish citizens who reside abroad be allowed to cast their votes not only at the Turkish border station but also by absentee ballot.

Conclusion In conclusion I would like to highlight three main points of my argumentation concerning (1) the connection between migration and media, (2) the role of Hürriyet in the German public sphere, and (3) its discourse on citizenship. (1) Migration and mass mediated communication are two key forces of the globalisation process. In this sense, Turkish media followed the ‘guestworkers’ to Germany, adapted there, and finally took root. During this process, the Turkish press in Germany took on a particular shape that is remarkably different from the press in Turkey concerning its contents and its social role. Today, the Turkish press in Germany fulfills three basic functions. First, it serves as a forum for the exchange between ethnic Turks in Germany thus enabling them to imagine themselves as a distinct community. Second, it provides its readers with information on German society; it gives German officials the opportunity to address the community in its native language; and it functions as a mouthpiece for the community vis-à-vis German institutions. Thus, the Turkish press helps to construct the membership of ethnic Turks in German society. Third, Turkish newspapers provide their readers with information on Turkey which they cannot find in the German media. By doing so, they help the emigrants to maintain their bonds with the homeland. (2) The discourse on the European pages of the Turkish press in Germany and Hürriyet in particular provides an interesting insight into the development of the community during the last few decades. It documents the change of the dominant notions (e.g. from gurbetçilik to yerlilik), the developing membership in the receiving society, and the migrants’ change of priorities, memories, and expectations. Yet it cannot be said that the Turkish press was the driving force in this development. By and large, Turkish newspapers in Germany have adopted the dominant German discourse on ‘integration’ while merely

82

“Hürriyet und Sabah schüren Vorurteile,” Evrensel (March 3, 2007), http://www .evrensel.de/index.php?news=804 (accessed May 2, 2008).

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trying to imbue some specific meanings. Most of the time, the papers respond to challenges rather than work proactively. During the last decades, major challenges came in the form of racist attacks and discrimination from the German environment or in the form of political instability and economic crisis from the homeland. Last, but not least, Hürriyet does not speak with one voice but rather includes a variety of voices: its own commentators, German and Turkish officials, German politicians from Turkish descent, the readers, and activists of the civil society. The views presented on its pages are not representative of the Turkish population in Germany but, at least, they reflect some ongoing discussions within an important spectrum of the ethnic Turkish population in Germany. (3) Benedict Anderson has established the connection between printcapitalism and the emergence of nations as ‘imagined communities.’ Today, international migration and globalised communication by mass media have obviously made matters more complex. In this sense, the discourse on the pages of Hürriyet challenges both the traditional German and Turkish ideas of nation and citizenship with their emphasis on ethnic homogeneity and unilateral loyalty. The ‘we-versus-them’ notion appears frequently in Hürriyet, albeit in many different ways. Most important are the following three lines of distinction. First, the Turkish press in Germany reflects a particular identity that is different from the majority of societies of Germany and Turkey. Its particularity results from common experiences of living as an ethnic and religious minority in Germany. However, this feeling of distinctness has not yet found an expression in a common voice or in strong organisations. Second, the discourse in the Turkish newspapers emphasises that ethnic Turks have indeed become members of German society. Integration, for them, is a fact that can be improved, but cannot be put into question. As a consequence, ethnic Turks demand equal rights as the most visible form of their public recognition. Beside the legal and political equality, they demand the right of cultural difference—ethnically, linguistically, and religiously. In this context, they see their preeminent bonds with Turkey as one feature of their cultural and political distinctness in Germany. Third, ethnic Turks conceive their relationship to Turkey not at all as exclusive and at odds with integration in Germany and loyalty to the Basic Law. Their political support for Turkey is strong, but not unconditional. In return, they demand from Turkey to be treated as equals rather than being paternalised as ‘pitiable’ expatriates.

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INDEX OF PERSONAL NAMES

ʿAbduh, Muhammad 302 Abu Lughod, Janet 1 Adamu, Fatima 365 al-ʿAğlūnī, Muḥammad ʿAlī 98, 102 Ahidjo 219 Akbar 249, 251, 253–255, 260 Akhtar, Hakeem Muhammad 326 Ancel, Jacques 159 Anderson, Benedict 11, 371–373, 400 Anwar, Syafiʾi 322 Appadurai, Arjun 5, 144, 208, 229, 335, 371f. Arnaut, Karel 221–224 Ashton, Hugh 288f. Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal 91, 386, 395, 398 Atılgan, Dursun 386 Augé, Marc 50, 130 Aurangzeb 253, 255 Babur 249, 251f. Badran, Margot 362 Bahadur Shah 256f. Bamba, A. 348 Barewli, Ahmad Raza Khan 298 Baudelaire, Charles 27 Bayat, Zubair 308 Bedié, Henry Konan 222 Ben Aly Chérif 164f., 167 Bissek, Philip 217 Biya, Paul 215, 219 Böse, Kuno 387f. Bozzoli, Belinda 278f., 285 Braudel, Fernand 160, 172, 178 Buchner, Max 190 Bungulu 185, 200 Buschmann, Nikolaus 87 Bush, George W. Sr. 208 Cadornega, António de Oliveira de 181 Capello, Hermenegildo 192 Carvalho, Henrique Augusto Dias de 180, 184, 191–194, 196–199 Cavlak, Yüksel 398 Ceyhun, Ozan 386 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 21 Chauveau, Jean-Pierre 221f.

Chiluba, Frederick 214 Churchill, Winston 140 Cleary, David 118 Clifford, James 26 Cohen, Anthony P. 128 Comaroff, Jean 210f., 226 Comaroff, John 210f., 226 Cooper, Frederick 1 Deedat, Ahmed Hoosen 311 Delafosse, Maurice 211f. Diouf, Abdou 351 Ditend, Naweja 183f., 196 Douglass, William A. 127 Dozon, Jean-Pierre 221–223 Eboua, Samuel 218 Edholm, Felicitas 27 Englund, Harri 227 Erdoğan, Tayyip 396–398 Esack, Farid 323 Farrer, James 66 Finkelstein, Joanne 281f. Folke Frederisken, Bodil 272 Fowkes, C.C. 142 Freitag, Ulrike 85 Friedman, Jonathan 280f. Fru Ndi, John 215 Gandhi, Mahatma 265 Gangohi, Rashid Ahmad 297, 302 Gbagbo, Laurent 223f. Geschiere, Peter 9, 12, 208, 216, 218 Ghalib, Mirza 253, 257 Ghamidi, Javed Ahmad 316, 326 Glubb, John Bagot 91, 97, 104f. Green, Nancy 72 Guchu, Wonder 273 Guéï, Robert 223 Gül, Abdullah 396–398 Gülen, Ali 388f. Gülen, Fetullah 329, 377 Guye, Djibril 122f. Habermas, Jürgen 374 Hafiz, Muhammad Shams al-Din

252

442

index of personal names

Hamid Raza Khan 321 Ḥ annā, ʿAbdallāh 107 Ḥ annā, Ğūrğ 102f., 105, 109 Heine, Heinrich 390f. Hinfelaar, Marja 286 Ho, Engseng 14 Höpp, Gerhard 85, 94f., 139 Houphouët-Boigny, Félix 221–223 Humayun, Nasir ul-Din Muhammad 252f. al-Ḫ rayšā, Sheikh Ḥ adīt ̠a 101 Husain, Maulana Nazir 298 al-Ḥ usaynī, Ḥ ağğ Amīn 93 Hynes, Samuel 83, 87, 108 Ibn Ḥ usayn, ʿAbdallāh 91, 101f. Ibn Khaldun, Abd al-Rahman Ibn Mohammad 32 Irtemçelik, Mehmet Ali 395f. Ivens, Roberto 192 Jacka, Tamara 65 Jackson, Stephen 224f. Kaarshom, Preben 272 Kagame, Paul 224 Kalipeni, Ezekiel 271 Kaunda, Kenneth 214, 288 al-Kailānī, Rašīd ʿAlī 92f., 95, 109 Kocak, Remzi 394 Koch, Roland 393 Külahçı, Ahmet 397 Lefebvre, Henri 137–139 Lentz, Carola 225 Loraux, Nicole 210, 228 Lovering, Timothy J. 146 Luckmann, Thomas 341 Lüle, Zeynel 398 Malkki, Liisa 225 Mandaville, Peter 373 Mann, Thomas 233, 237 Manyungo 189 Maududi, Abu’l Ala 299, 304, 316f. Maulana Wahiduddin Khan 317 Mauss, Marcel 51f. Mbembe, Achille 209 Meyer, Birgit 208 Mir-Husseini, Ziba 366 Mirza, Ghulam Ahmad 298 Mitterrand, François 215 Mollenhauer, Ernst 234 Morokvasic, Mirjana 25

Mugabe, Robert 280 Murray Li, Tanja 208 Mūsā, Sulaimān 104 Musharraf, Pervez 316 Mutashi 201 Muzaffar, Chandra 322 Mwangi, Wambui 276 Nadir Shah 250 Nageeb, Salma A. 337, 358f., 363 Naheed, Usma 308 Naik, Zakir 332 Nanaotawi, Muhammad Qasim 297, 302 Nazir Ahmad 262f. Neate, Patrick 283f. Ngijol, Ngijol 217 Niangoran-Bouah, Georges 223 Niʾmatullah 299 Nkomo, Joshua 280 Nlep, Roger 217 Nyamnjoh, Francis 216, 218 Olley, Charles 275 von Oppen, Achim 85, 112, 226 Othman, Norani 366 Ouattara, Alassane 222f. Parwez, Ghulam Ahmad Pechstein, Max 233 Phiri, William 285 Pittin, Renée 29

316

ul-Qadri, Muhammad Ilyas 297, 310 ul-Qadri, Muhammad Tahir 311 al-Qaradawi, Yusuf 14f. al-Qāwuqğī, Fauzī 94, 96, 103, 105, 107 Rahn, Rudolf 88 Raza Khan, Hamid 321 Raza Khan, Mustafa 321 von Ribbentrop, Joachim 95 Rida, Rashid 302 Rifāʿī, Maḥmūd 96 Rogler, Lutz 85, 139 Rowlands, Michael 216 Rushdie, Salman 15 as-Sakhawi, Shams al-Din Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Rahman 262 Salejee, Ebrahim 303 Sayyid Ahmad Khan 299, 316 Schmalz-Jacobson, Cornelia 387

index of personal names

443

Schmidt-Rottluff, Karl 233 Schröder, Gerhard 369f. Schuetz, Alfred 341 Şen, Faruk 386 Shah Akbar II 256, 258f. Shah Tahmasp 252 Shah Wali Ullah 267 Siddiq Hasan Khan 298 Simone, Abdou Maliq 209, 227, 269f., 272, 279 Sindhi, Ubaidullah 299, 317 Socpa, Antoine 218f. Spiegel, Anna 337, 349

Vera, Yvonne 274, 282, 284, 290 Voll, John 14, 249

Thanawi, Ashraf ʿAli 303 Thornton, Robert 270 Timur (Timur Lenk) 251, 253 Toko, Bertrand 217

Zakariyya, Muhammad 303 Zeleza, Paul 271f., 275 Zia-ul-Haq, Muhammad 300, 313, 315

Wahiduddin Khan 317, 326 Wallerstein, Immanuel 1, 160, 178 Werbner, Richard 274 White, Luise 281 White, Thyrene 68 Williame, Jean-Claude 225 Winkler, Horst 392 Wulff, Christian 389 Yongping, Jiang

65

INDEX OF PLACE NAMES

Abalak 31 Abidjan 33, 118 Abyssinia 140, 141, 145 Accra 39 Addis Ababa 145 Afghanistan 250, 253, 301, 320 Africa 1, 3, 8f., 11, 21, 144, 149, 207–211, 213, 215, 225f., 228, 270–272 Central Africa 144, 179–182, 185, 188f., 198, 202, 210, 286 East Africa 34, 135f., 140f., 143, 145, 149, 151, 277, 281, 313 North Africa 140, 143, 162, 167, 277, 296 South Africa 111, 210, 226, 270–272, 275, 283, 286, 289, 303, 307–312, 315, 320–324, 326 West Africa 10, 26, 28, 33, 36, 40, 43, 127f., 169, 176, 178, 211f., 277, 296, 309, 313 Agra 253 Aleppo 88f., 106 Alexandra 278f., 285 Alexandrette 105 Aley 90 Algiers 162f., 165f., 168, 170, 172–174, 176 Aligarh 264, 299, 305, 316 America 321 Latin America 3 North America 25, 55, 59, 111, 283, 300, 309, 312–314 United States 72, 275, 304, 377 Angola 181f., 189f., 200f., 279 Arabia, cf. Saudi Arabia 249, 253f., 302, 312 Ardennes 161, 172 Armenia 238 Asia 1, 3, 11, 21, 59, 77, 145, 270, 302, 323 Central Asia 250, 253, 257, 260, 320 South Asia 140f., 144, 146, 250, 293, 296f., 299–301, 307, 312f., 315–317, 320, 324, 329f., 332 South East Asia 72, 143, 149, 213, 307, 313, 320, 322

Atlantic Coast 167, 189f. Atlantic Ocean 271 Australia 111, 309 Awadh 255–257 Azadville 307f. Baixa de Cassange 189f. Baltic Sea 332f., 239 Bangkok 270, 362 Bangladesh 298f., 307, 314 Bareilly 298, 309 Bari 89, 106 Bechuanaland 286 Beijing 59, 349, 356f., 362 Béjaïa 161, 163, 168f., 173, 175f., 177 Belgium 208, 375 Benin 38, 116, 119, 121 Berlin 3, 12, 15, 36, 44, 303, 259, 364, 366, 381, 384, 390, 395f. Bhopal 298 Bielefeld 335, 338f, 364, 366 Birmingham 312 Bobo Dioulasso 117 Bougie 165, 170, 174 Bougouriba 112 Boumerdes 174 Bradford 307 Brazil 118 Brazzaville 280–282 Bremen 387f. Britain, cf. England 11, 57, 93, 307–309, 312–314 British Empire 136, 256, 296, 300 Bulawayo 273–290 Burkina Faso 6, 16, 33f., 111–115, 117–123, 125, 127–129, 131f., 212, 214, 221f., 225 Burma 140, 142,–144, 146, 149, 156, 276 Burundi 224f. Cairo 143, 161, 167, 170f. Calcutta 141, 146, 151 Cameroon 33, 122, 210, 213–217, 219f., 226, 228 Canada 111, 300, 307, 316, 321

index of place names Cape Peninsula 210 Cape Town 270f. Cape Verde islands 47 Casamance 28 Ceylon 136, 142, 144f., 149, 151, 155, 157 Chechnya 301 Chenab Nagar 313 Chicago 12, 308 Chicapa 182, 192, 196 China 16, 55, 57f., 60–68, 73–82, 280 Chiumbue 191, 197, 199 Colombo 142, 146, 151, 156 Congo 224f., 281 Constantine 161f., 164, 168, 170 Coromandel Coast 250 Curonian Lagoon 231–233 Curonian Spit 229, 232–238, 240–243, 245f. Dakar 31, 33, 38, 40, 43, 52, 270 Dakoro 31, 38 Damascus 89, 94, 96, 98 Dar es Salaam 143 Darfur 354 Deccan 254f. Delhi 252–257, 262f., 298 Denmark 15, 316, 321 Deoband 297–299, 302, 304, 308, 324 Derby 309 Dewsbury 307 Donezk, see Stalino Dongbei 59, 61, 66, 70, 73–76, 79–81 Douala 216f. Durban 271, 303, 310f., 331

445

Fujian 61 Fushun 59 Georgia 238 Germany 15, 29, 57, 93–95, 97f., 234, 236, 240, 245, 247, 321, 369–371, 373–385, 387–394, 396–400 German Democratic Republic (East Germany) 235f., 247, 379 German Federal Republic (West Germany) 235f., 381 Ghana 38, 113f., 116, 214, 223, 225f., 270, 278 Goma 224 Great Lakes Region 210, 215, 224 Greece 96, 100, 143, 207 Guangxi 59 Guangzhou 59 Gujarat 300, 311 Gulf region 312 Gulf states 300 Haut-Senegal-Niger 211f. Hebei 59 Heilongjiang 59 Herat 252 Hesse 386, 393 Hijâz 166, 171 Hindukush 251 Holcombe, Bury 303, 307 Houet 112 Hungary 379 Hyderabad 255–257

East Prussia 232, 234–236 Egypt 89, 106, 168, 253, 363 England, cf. Britain 263, 275, 282 Eritrea 141, 143 Essakane 113 Essen 378, 386 Europe 1, 11f., 21, 25, 55, 57–59, 61, 64, 67, 69–71, 73, 76–80, 84, 173, 176, 208f., 227f., 257f., 275, 290, 309, 315, 375, 379, 395f. Eastern Europe 173, 235f., 279 Western Europe 300, 313

India 48, 135, 140, 142f., 151, 249–253, 256–262, 264–266, 297–300, 307–309, 311, 314, 316–318, 320f., 326, 331 Indian Ocean 7f., 135f., 139, 142–146, 148–151, 155–158, 250, 271, 277 Indonesia 208, 250, 296, 307, 322 Ioba 112 Iraq 91–94, 101f., 109 Ireland 57, 275, 321 Isfahan 252 Islamabad 315 Italy 44, 57, 74, 76, 89, 98, 398 Ivory Coast 38, 114, 116, 118, 210, 213, 215, 220, 223f., 226f.

Fez 161, 169 France 6, 12, 16, 55, 57–59, 61, 64, 69–71, 73f., 76–78, 80f., 95, 109, 162, 164, 172, 174–178, 215, 321

Jaipur 254, 256 Jakarta 322 Jerusalem 90 Jiangsu 59

446

index of place names

Jiangxi 59 Jilin 59 Jodhpur 254, 256 Johannesburg 270f., 278f., 321 Jordan 86, 101, 107 Kabul 251, 299f. Kabylia 159–165, 167, 169–173, 175–178 Kalanyi 180f., 183, 187, 197 Kaliningrad Oblast 232, 239, 241 Kanyika 196 Kaolack 347, 357 Karachi 326 Kasai 182f., 191–193, 196 Kasanje 182, 189, 195f. Kashmir 266, 301 Kazakhstan 238 Kelantan 249 Kenya 140, 144, 146–148, 270, 276, 279, 321 Kete 182f. Khartoum 353, 363 Kilindini 142 Kimbundu 181, 200 Kiniama 196 Kisenge 184, 191–193, 195–197 Kivu 224 Kongo 182, 188 Kuala Lumpur 307, 320, 322, 352 Kuba 182f., 201 Kurd Dagh 89f. Kuwait 316 Kwango 181–183, 191f., 197–200 Kwanza 182, 191 Kwilu 185, 191, 198 Lahore 311, 314, 316, 321 Lakhnau 256 Laranjeiro 309 Latvia 232, 239 Lebanon 105, 363 Leicester 315 Lenasia 307 Leningrad 238 Levant 144 Liaoning 59 Lithuania 9f., 230, 232–234, 237, 239–245, 247 Lóvua 181, 185, 195 Lubuku 182, 199 Lucknow, see Lakhnau Luembe 185, 192f.

Luluwa 183, 201 Lungue-Bungu 183, 191 M’Sila 161, 164 Madagascar 140, 143–145 Makokoba 273f., 284–287 Malawi 140, 227 Malaysia 250, 307, 315, 321f., 335, 337f., 343–345, 348f., 352, 354, 357, 359–361, 363, 366 Maldives 142 Mali 35, 38, 116, 221, 283 Malta 299 Marrakech 161, 169 Mashriq 83, 86, 106f., 109 Mataba 181f., 185, 197, 199 Mauritius 140, 321 Mecca 161, 167, 170, 175, 297 Mediterranean 160, 162, 172, 175, 178, 263 Memel territory 232f. Mewat 298 Middle East 3, 11, 21, 83, 86, 93–95, 140f., 143, 162, 169, 177, 276, 296, 301, 317, 322 Mölln 384 Mombasa 142f., 147 Morocco 166f., 169, 351 Moscow 238, 247 Mozambique 276 Mumbai 308, 318 Musumba 180, 182f., 187, 191, 194, 197 Mussumba, see Musumba Nairobi 143, 147, 271, 349 Netherlands 57, 208, 321, 375 Neu-Isenburg 375 New York 48 Nida, see Nidden Nidden 233f., 236, 244–246 Niger 30, 33, 35, 37f., 40, 116, 167, 171, 212 Central Niger 31, 33, 35, 37, 39 Nigeria 28f., 33, 37–40, 116, 270, 361 North-Rhine Westphalia 378 Norway 316, 321 Noumbiel 112 Nuremberg 391 Nyasaland 140, 143, 276, 288 Odivelas 309 Ottoman Empire 11, 98, 250, 265 Ouagadougou 117, 124

index of place names Pakistan 298, 300, 307f., 310f., 313–316, 319, 321 Palestine 86, 89f., 92f., 97, 105, 141, 328 Palmela 307 Paris 12, 16, 27, 48, 59, 57, 77f., 161, 166, 172, 175, 281f., 390 Persia 143, 250, 253, 260 Poni 112 Portugal 31, 36, 46, 57, 307, 309, 324 Poura 113 Punjab 298 Putu Kasongo 181 Qingdao 59 Qingtian 58 Rangoon 249 Reunion 140, 143, 145 Rhodesia, cf. Zimbabwe 143, 146f., 156, 276, 283f., 288 Russia 232, 234, 237, 241 Soviet Union 236, 237–239, 280, 384 Rwanda 224 Rwanda-Burundi 224 Sahara 8, 162, 167 Sahel 35–37, 51f., 113, 270, 277 Salisbury 275–277, 279, 287 Salt 90 Sanaga 228 Saudi Arabia 296, 312 Scotland 275 Senegal 38, 212, 226, 335, 337, 339, 344f., 348–351, 354–356, 359–364 Sétif 164 Seychelles 142f., 145 Shandong 59 Shanghai 59, 76 Shenyang 59 Siberia 59 Sicily 96 Singapore 140, 310, 321 Sivas 385 Sokoto 39, 364 Solingen 384 Somalia 270 Soummam Valley 163f., 168

447

Soviet State, see Soviet Union Spain 57, 74, 307 Sri Petaling 307 Stalino 95 Stockholm 391 Sudan 33, 172, 210f., 225, 315, 335, 337f., 344f., 349f., 352, 354, 358–361, 363, 365 Suez 89 Sumatra 149 Sumbi 189f. Surat 331 Syria 86, 88–90, 92f., 95, 100f., 107f., 171 Taddart 161, 163–166, 168–170, 172, 174f. Tanganyika 140, 143, 146f. Tanzania 363 Thailand 149 Tianjin 59, 76 Tizi-Ouzou 161, 173f. Togo 226 Touba 51 Transjordan 88, 91, 101 Tunis 96, 161, 168 Tunisia 96, 161, 167 Turkey 89, 296, 329, 369, 371, 373–381, 383, 385f., 395–400 Udaipur 256 Uganda 140, 143, 146–148 Uzbekistan 238 Wales 275 Warsaw 44 Wembley 309 Wenzhou 58 Yantai 59 Yaoundé 218f. Yugoslavia 96 Zambia 214, 226 Zeppelinheim 375 Zhejiang 58f., 61, 64 Zimbabwe, cf. Rhodesia

273, 279

Studies in Global Social History Series Editor Marcel van der Linden Until recently, the North Atlantic perspective dominated the mental world order: the “modern” period was believed to have started in Europe and North America and to have spread gradually throughout the rest of the world; the temporality of the core area was considered to have defined developmental periods elsewhere as well. This Eurocentrism is now under fire, and many attempts to circumvent it are in progress. The Studies in Global Social History figure within these new trends. Each volume in this series addresses at least two continents and aims to visualize contrasts and similarities and to reveal long-distance connections to demonstrate how our present global society has materialized from uneven and combined developments and from interaction between acts “from above” and “from below”. 1. Linden, M. van der. Workers of the World. Essays toward a Global Labor History. 2008. ISBN 978 90 04 16683 7 2. Borges, M.J. Chains of Gold. Portuguese Migration to Argentina in Transatlantic Perspective. 2009. ISBN 978 90 04 17648 5 3. Lucassen, J., Lucassen, L., and Manning, P. (eds.). Migration History in World History. Multidisciplinary Approaches. 2010. ISBN 978 90 04 18031 4 4. Freitag, U. and Oppen, A. von (eds.). Translocality. The Study of Globalising Processes from a Southern Perspective. 2010. ISBN 978 90 04 18116 8 brill.nl/sgsh

Translocality (Studies in Global Social History)

Migration History in World History (Studies in Global Social History)

Singapore in Global History

Pakistan: A Global Studies Handbook (Global Studies)

Gender in History: Global Perspectives

Petitions in Social History (International Review of Social History Supplements)

Current Debates in Global Justice (Studies in Global Justice)

Current Debates in Global Justice (Studies in Global Justice)

Human Families (Social Change in Global Perspective)

Social Unrest and Popular Protest in England, 1780-1840 (New Studies in Economic and Social History)

Colonization: A Global History

History global anglicanism

Pizza: A Global History

Olive: A Global History

Chocolate: A Global History

The New Global History

Location & Competition (Studies in Global Competition)

Egyptian Archaeology (Blackwell Studies in Global Archaeology)

Global Price Fixing (Studies in Industrial Organization)

Questioning Cosmopolitanism (Studies in Global Justice, 6)

Global Calculus (Graduate Studies in Mathematics)

Rethinking American History in a Global Age

The World in World Wars: Experiences, Perceptions and Perspectives from Africa and Asia (Studies in Global Social History)

RIPE Studies in Global Political Economy)

Transnational Social Justice (Global Ethics)

Developmental Psychology and Social Change: Research, History and Policy (Cambridge Studies in Social and Emotional Development)

Developmental Psychology and Social Change: Research, History and Policy (Cambridge Studies in Social and Emotional Development)

Documentary Research: In Education, History and the Social Sciences (Social Research and Educational Studies Series, 22)

Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago Studies in Practices of Meaning)

Climate in Earth History (Studies in Geophysics)

Translocality (Studies in Global Social History)

Migration History in World History (Studies in Global Social History)

Singapore in Global History

Pakistan: A Global Studies Handbook (Global Studies)

Gender in History: Global Perspectives

Petitions in Social History (International Review of Social History Supplements)

Current Debates in Global Justice (Studies in Global Justice)

Current Debates in Global Justice (Studies in Global Justice)

Human Families (Social Change in Global Perspective)

Social Unrest and Popular Protest in England, 1780-1840 (New Studies in Economic and Social History)

Colonization: A Global History

History global anglicanism

Pizza: A Global History

Olive: A Global History

Chocolate: A Global History

The New Global History

Location & Competition (Studies in Global Competition)

Egyptian Archaeology (Blackwell Studies in Global Archaeology)

Global Price Fixing (Studies in Industrial Organization)

Questioning Cosmopolitanism (Studies in Global Justice, 6)

Global Calculus (Graduate Studies in Mathematics)

Rethinking American History in a Global Age

The World in World Wars: Experiences, Perceptions and Perspectives from Africa and Asia (Studies in Global Social History)

RIPE Studies in Global Political Economy)

Transnational Social Justice (Global Ethics)

Developmental Psychology and Social Change: Research, History and Policy (Cambridge Studies in Social and Emotional Development)

Developmental Psychology and Social Change: Research, History and Policy (Cambridge Studies in Social and Emotional Development)

Documentary Research: In Education, History and the Social Sciences (Social Research and Educational Studies Series, 22)

Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago Studies in Practices of Meaning)

Climate in Earth History (Studies in Geophysics)

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