Decolonising borders in Africa A scholarly interrogation of the coloniality of African borders

THAT the border which separates South Africa from Swaziland, for instance, is a colonial artefact has become an academic argument.

Academic because everyone admits the lofty and distant truth of the argument but no one really believes in its importance and relevance.

Arguing over the coloniality of borders might look like the stuff for bored intellectuals and angry political activists looking for a new fight out of the old and tired issues.

It is also a political argument, for example, to point out the fact that what separates Zimbabwe from Botswana is a fence that was erected by the British to manage the movement of Africans and to administer colonial rules and regulations, nothing more. Someone took his time to design and create these borders for economic and political reasons.

These borders, as political and economic artefacts, are not holy. They were not built for charitable reasons but for conquest and domination, for control, surveillance and punishment.

They are not very different from the prison walls, in a way. It matters who is inside and outside of these borders; they are for sure. Crossing or jumping the border is a phenomenal experience. Border jumpers and border crossers are two different human and political identities that matter.

One of the enduring successes of colonialism in the Global South is the durability of colonial maps and colonial borders. The borders and maps that the coloniser created in Berlin, 1884-5, have become so natural, normal and real. The Africans who were the first and are the last victims of colonial maps and borders now paradoxically believe in these maps and borders; the maps and the borders have become a natural reality that cannot be challenged or changed.

If the borders and maps, in veracity are a colonial artefact that was imposed upon the natives of Africa then the project of decolonisation and liberation may not be complete without the undoing of the borders, their reversal, or at least their reform and retooling for purposes of liberation.

Achille Mbembe has used his 2019 Ruth First Lecture to deposit into the political and intellectual debate exactly that argument that the colonial borders must be decolonised or Africa must prepare to sink deeper into the populist, racist, xenophobic and bloody realities of the violent politics of artificial but powerful differences. As Africans, the things that make us believe that South Africans are different from the Mozambicans are things that can be powerful, seemingly real, but are very silly in their content. And political silliness runs the world in the present.

No African is a foreigner in Africa The aphorism that “no African is a foreigner in Africa” has now achieved the status of an intellectual and political slogan of a kind. It is Achille Mbembe, in 2015, in an interview with The Daily Vox, who coined and deposited that phrase into the public domain. By its nature the phrase is dissident and irreverent of coloniality.

It is intellectually and politically prophetic and truism; but it is not sustainable in the current African legal order. I cannot as a Zimbabwean and a South African turn up at the Nigerian port of entry with my bags and ask for passage into Lagos and Ibadan purely on the grounds that I am an African, and I am black.

The legal and political regimes in Africa, the laws of citizenship are nationalist and statist, and therefore colonial. That is how much alive colonialism still is in the Global South. It takes a stubborn intellection such as that of Achille Mbembe to, in the background of bloody and deadly xenophobic violence in South Africa to use such a platform as the Annual Ruth First Lecture to propose the abolition of colonial borders. Mbembe is Cameroonian-born historian and philosopher that is a research Professor at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER). For many years he has been in South Africa.

Educated and worked in French universities and academies of the United States of America, perhaps, Mbembe can be relied upon to philosophise on migrancy and human mobility, because he has been mobile. He is one of those thinkers that Edward Said in his forceful essay of 1984, Reflections in Exile, described as foreigners at home and citizens of everywhere. Mbembe has endured exile and enjoyed thinking from everywhere, sometimes about everything. From that platform of the exilic thinker, and the thinker who reflects from the nativity of everywhere Mbembe has noted that somehow: “There is not one single corner of the Earth where black people or people of African descent are considered to be legitimate inhabitants of our planet.”

So, there we have it. From that observation of Achille Mbembe, just when we might think that black Africans from other African countries are hated and not welcome in South Africa the true bomb is that black people are not welcome anywhere in the world including their own countries, not just in South Africa.

So, what appears like xenophobia against Africans from other African countries in South Africa is actually racism against all black people under the sun. In that way, what we call Afrophobia or xenophobia in South Africa is a local name for global racism against black people in the planet at large.

In that light, or in the light of that dark truth, like colonial statues and monuments everywhere in Africa, colonial borders and maps are living things that have power and are still on behalf of Empire governing the lives of Africans. Like the colonial statues they are not just there as decoration, no, they are idols of Empire and monuments to conquest. What the coloniser created in Africa the Africans cannot uncreate, it seems, at least not so easily. It sounds irreligious and politicidal to even imagine that one day we might have to bid goodbye to colonial borders; at least the present state of colonial borders. We might need to invest some thinking in what a decolonised border in Africa would look like.

What Mbembe Said Mbembe said we, in Africa, should understand and name our times for hope.

We should be able to “testify” truth even in the times of virulent populist politics, which I think is a defence of the human right to dissent. In these troubled and also troublesome times reason itself, Mbembe says, is on trial.

Populist politics, I think, is the very definition of unreason. It is for that reason that mayors of cities and other politicians in South Africa, for easy applause and the hope for some votes, may whip up xenophobic feelings and select the foreign other for blame for crime, disease, the scarcity of jobs and shortage of happiness itself in the Republic.

Africans, like any other people in the world, should have the “right to inhabit the earth” and share the land and the air with everyone. Colonialism came with the displacement of natives in the past, now the deportation of the foreign other is the current form of punishment.

Where deportation is a tool of government such leaders as Donald Trump become the true men of history that use their power to spell out the deportation and expulsion of foreigners at a world scale. Trump might be speaking from the United States of America against Mexicans, but his words get imitated, reproduced and enacted elsewhere including South Africa. Blacks, anywhere in the world, including Africa, are always people from elsewhere.

Importantly, Mbembe noted that the South African as a political animal seems to have two important enemies: The almighty white person that is feared and the pathetic black African from elsewhere in Africa that is loathed.

It is the loathed enemy that daily gets punished for being a foreigner and an enemy. In that way, what we call xenophobia might actually be “black on black racism.” Not just the punishment of Africans from elsewhere in the streets of South Africa but South African immigration laws have over the years become much tougher and more prohibitive for Africans from elsewhere in the continent.

This is publicly denied in the South African media where a picture is painted that so called foreigners find it easy to get in and settle in South Africa.

Mbembe has bravely asked for “deborderisation” and a “borderless Africa.” In that request Mbembe is prophetic, he envisages an Africa of the future that is “a vast space of circulation” for Africans first and others next in the continent that seems more closed to itself and open to outsiders. South Africa has the opportunity to abandon colonial exceptionalism and take the lead in the creation of a borderless continent and a decolonised future.

On the same night of 3 October 2019 when Mbembe was delivering his lecture, titled: Blacks from Elsewhere and the Right of Abode, which appears in New Frame, Boaventura de Soussa Santos was addressing, together with Siphamandla Zondi, Zethu Cakata and William Mpofu, the Wits Centre for Diversity Studies Annual International Conference.