Writes Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena On the coloniality of the passport

The passport is an anthropological, political, legal, psychological and spiritual tool of global coloniality of power that legitimises colonial maps, borders and the displacement of and trade in human beings as labourers, accessories and items of Empire,

ORDINARILY and randomly, the passport is understood as not only an important and powerful document but a classy symbol of legality and descent international relations and travel. The passport denotes that talisman which allows a citizen of one country and nation to “pass” the “port” or cross the border between and among geographical and political principalities.

The passport is accepted globally as the legal document that allows the legal traffic of citizens from one part of the world to any other part. For that reason, the passport is enjoyed as a political and legal qualification, a distinguishing classifier that separates border jumpers from legitimate border crossers and travellers. For a very long time now, since biblical times and distant ancestral epochs, the passport has been in the world. Yet, in that long durée, very little has been observed or fleshed out on how the passport is connected to global coloniality and imperiality of power.

The actuality of the passport as an instrument of classification of human beings according to identity, origins and difference, control and surveillance is a matter so little discussed if noted as a matter at all. That the passport is a small but powerfully instrumental fetish of the global political, economic and cultural octopus is never a subject or even topic of discussion, the document has been naturalised, normalised and turned into part of the common sense of national lives and international relations. To the interpretation of this brief exposition, the passport is an anthropological, political, legal, psychological and spiritual tool of global coloniality of power that legitimises colonial maps, borders and the displacement of and trade in human beings as labourers, accessories and items of Empire. Next to money itself, as currency of commerce and as the legal tender, the passport is that one document on the use of which even enemy countries find consensus, proof that the passport belongs to the pleasure and the peace of the hegemonic World Oder and tyrannical World System, Empire itself. Like money, the usability and acceptability of the passport is an article of faith, it relies on it being accepted and believed to bear some power and value; otherwise it is another dispensable piece of paper that is invested with belief and awarded purposeful functionality, a powerfully symbolic document.

The origins of the passport in the

world In the biblical narrative, in the year 450 Before Christ, one Nehemiah served under the imperial king Artaxerxes of Persia. When the king sent Nehemiah to the Kingdom and land of Judah with a message concerning the building of borders, Nehemiah (Nehemiah: 2 v 7-9) was given a “letter to the governors beyond the river” to lend weight to his mission and legitimacy to his person and message. In the Medieval Islamic Caliphate, those citizens and subjects who paid their taxes and acquitted themselves well in matters religious and national were awarded stamps that allowed them free and unmolested travel across rivers and principalities. In the England of 1540, the Privy Council of England under the rulership of King Henry V, gave distinguished citizens and subjects the letter of “safe conduct” that recommended them to those who meet them in foreign lands as trusted subjects of Empire with whom business could be done. Closer to our times, in 1920, the predecessor to the United Nations, the League of Nations met in France under the banner of the Paris Conference on Passports and Customs Formalities and Tickets, to deliberate and achieve consensus on the traffic of persons and goods across maps and borders. Up to this day the world has the passport as an agreed and accepted instrument across sovereignties and establishments. Like human beings themselves, and yes, money again, in the modern colonial world system, the weight of a passport, its political stamina and the force of its recommendation depends on the kingdom and the country that issued it, its economic and political influence within the world system is defined by its national origins. Passports don’t weigh the same. The

effects and affects of the passport In terms of the information and the quantity of details about a person and his or her identity, the passport summaries the entire history and DNA of an individual, it swallows both the birth certificate and the national identity document; it becomes a summary of ones’ entire life and history, and more. It is a deeply anthropological and sociological document that does not only identify one but also describes physical features, the colour of eyes, that of hair and ones’ race and complexion of the skin. The passport fixes an individual to the village of his birth; it takes and gives to whoever it may concern one’s full identity and power. The privacy and confidentiality of an individual is sold to foreign powers by the passport, it is an exposing and dehumanising document. While on the outside the passport appears to allow the bearer to pass the port, the passage is timed by the visa or the work permit, one is fixed to a place and reminded of when his work and stay expires, and that one must seek new permission or return to one’s mother and village. The passport itself expires, it is timed and placed. No single individual owns a passport, it is entrusted to one by a State and can be denied on withdrawn, it gives borrowed power and permission. Powerful States have a power and right not to recognise certain passports and refuse some. In a world where human beings are classified and declassified according to race, nationality, ethnicity, gender and other differences, the passport is a perfectly usable instrument of classification and hierachisation. It is a prohibiting and limiting document that does more prevention of movement than it permits. In having a passport in the pocket, a person carries not only a talisman of the power of the state, but a contract of surrender to the world system and its workings. In foreign lands, depending on the passport and its nationality that one holds, one is either a nonsensical immigrant or the exalted expatriate. The passport is a certificate of foreignness.

While the multitudes of black peoples of the Global South work in Europe and America as permitted immigrants, refugees, exiles and asylums, the white people of Europe and America work in the Global South as valued expatriates, experts and investors. The passport is colonial in its classification of people and it is racist in its differentiation of citizens and subjects. The passport, in its powerful way recognises and endorses colonial and imperial maps and borders; it polices demarcations and maintains territories. The passport is an object of surveillance, already; Euro-America is experimenting with the micro-chip implant, a human sim card as a replacement for the paper and text passport, an invention that will give Big Brother total view of and control of small brothers from small countries. Easily, the passport is seen as an empowering and enabling document, but a close look shows that it enforces coloniality and subjection of powerless states and peoples by Empire.

In developed countries, citizens of other countries who have no passports and the permits and visas are declassified as illegal immigrants and made available as illegal and cheap labour that is exploitable for lower pay and these illegals have no rights at law, cannot appeal to labour tribunals but have to live in pain under modern slavery as disposable labour and dispensable lives. Those of the Global South who possess passports have the limited right to traffic themselves, export their labour, to work in developed parts of the world, the former colonisers, with permits and visas, but the label of immigrant, foreigner, alien and lower person is not erased. Closely looked at, indeed, the passport is a facilitator of coloniality of power and that of being.

Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena is a Zimbabwean academic that is based in South Africa: Feedback mailto:decoloniality2016@gmail.com.