HISTORICIZING XENOPHOBIC ENVIRONMENTS

Our first task was to historicize the different repertoires of belonging and exclusion that we came across. The Africanist literature on autochthony, for instance, has focused on two main historical moments. Firstly, autochthony has been studied as an outcome and a driver of the formation of colonial and postcolonial states; this dramatically shaped the categories of citizens and subjects, of ‘first-comers’ and ‘late-comers’ (Bayart et al. Reference Bayart, Geschiere and Nyamnjoh2001; Jackson Reference Jackson2006; Kuba and Lentz Reference Kuba and Lentz2006; Mamdani Reference Mamdani2002), and emphasized the specific type of nationalism and exclusion that liberation struggles and their rhetoric have given rise to in post-liberation periods (Chipkin Reference Chipkin2007). The second historical moment that was marked by an upsurge of autochthony discourses and mobilizations is that of the ‘global conjuncture of belonging’ described by Geschiere (Reference Geschiere2009). In Africa, this expression has been associated especially with the democratization and decentralization processes of the 1990s that had the paradoxical effect of triggering an obsession with belonging. For some authors, while the promotion of national citizenship and the idea of ‘nation building’ had dominated the 1970s and 1980s, the following two decades – the 1990s and 2000s – represented a radical break with the former period (Geschiere and Nyamnjoh Reference Geschiere and Nyamnjoh2000: 425). Others saw a historical continuity running through the post-independence and nationalist periods, as, for instance, in Nigeria and Côte d'Ivoire (Akinyele Reference Akinyele, Locatelli and Nugent2009; Anthony Reference Anthony2002; Chauveau Reference Chauveau2000; Fourchard Reference Fourchard, Nugent and Locatelli2009; Marshall-Fratani Reference Marshall-Fratani2006).

Our intention in selecting the four countries of Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa is not to try to build forced similarities or to homogenize a situation that would be unique to the continent, but instead to pinpoint singularities and contingencies in the making of xenophobic practices. Comparative analysis highlights differences instead of reducing their importance (Bayart Reference Bayart2008). This is obvious from a very brief survey of contemporary xenophobic practices, rooted in colonial and national history, and shaped by the position of outsiders (whether domestic or international migrants) in the political economy of host societies, by different institutional arrangements, heterogeneous discriminatory legal cultures, and unequal openness to local citizenship. Key to the performance of exclusion is the naturalization of language categories intended to differentiate and legitimize differentiation. This reveals the power of designation and the capacity to assign specific identities or stigmas to groups or individuals (Noiriel Reference Noiriel2007).

In Nigeria, the categories ‘indigenes’ and ‘non-indigenes’, institutionalized by the Federal State, not only are poorly contested by most citizens, but in most instances their legitimacy is internalized (Fourchard in this issue). Indigeneity has progressively acquired a political centrality, on the basis of which many differences and forms of exclusion have been manufactured. Nigerian political leaders were inspired by the legacy of Indirect Rule – which shaped and dramatically increased differences between natives and non-natives – and by the ideology of 1950s and 1960s regionalism – which favoured citizens of one region over the other two. Eventually, they formalized a form of indigeneity that granted rights and privileges to groups designated as indigenes in the 1970s. This policy led to discrimination against those labelled as non-indigenes as well as numerous violent conflicts between indigenes and non-indigenes; these conflicts were often shaped by the politics of defining who was the ‘true’ indigene of a specific place (Osaghae Reference Osaghae1991; Adebanwi Reference Adebanwi2009; Higazi Reference Higazi2007). As in Nigeria, the word ‘indigenous’ is preferred in Kenya to the word ‘autochthon’, which is not used commonly. Indigenous land claims crystallized around the deployment of majimboism, which is understood by many to imply the forced expulsion of non-indigenous peoples from the Rift Valley and the restoration of ancestral lands to the native Kalenjin and Maasai communities (Boas and Dunn Reference Boas and Dunn2013: 56). But in the past two decades, other Kenyan communities have felt increasingly frustrated and indigenous claims to the land have recently appeared as a vindicatory strategy against intruders thought to have voted for the governing party and/or as a form of historical revenge by groups who were perceived to be marginalized by the state (Lonsdale Reference Lonsdale2008: 310). In the DRC, similar categories, called in French ‘originaires’ and ‘non-originaires’, and overlapping with the notion of ‘sons of the soil’ as identified by Jackson (Reference Jackson2006), constitute the backbone of a civil registration system strictly based on territorial origin. Yet, these categories enjoy only intermittent recognition by state and non-state actors across the territory and are inconsistently used to determine access to public services or patronage networks. While they are used as a systematic redistribution system to balance all regional origins in the capital city of Kinshasa, in Katanga they are used as binaries to exclude Kasaians and to benefit South Katangese (Vinckel in this issue). Interestingly, the all-encompassing term ‘expatriés’, which used to designate mostly Western private sector immigrants in the 1960s and 1970s, alongside ‘coopérants’ (Westerners posted to Congo under cooperation agreements), is now used for all foreigners, including second- or third-generation West African immigrants to Congo. In South Africa, historical legacies seem to be rooted in apartheid-era processes of displacement (Nyamnjoh Reference Nyamnjoh2006: 56; Landau Reference Landau2011: 5–7); these processes served the migrant labour system, which confined Black South Africans to the homelands and neighbouring countries in subaltern positions of surplus labour, the reproduction of which had to be subsidized by their place of origin (Burawoy Reference Burawoy1976; Arrighi et al. Reference Arrighi, Aschoff and Scully2010). Stigmatization of and violence against non-nationals in the post-apartheid period then emerge as the outcomes of a triple legacy: the continued, albeit transformed, use of migrants as cheap, disposable labour in a context of structural unemployment in which waged labour has come to be strongly identified with post-apartheid citizenship (Barchiesi Reference Barchiesi2011; Jinnah and Segatti Reference Jinnah and Segatti2013); the racial and social stereotyping of migrants by township dwellers rooted in the history of urban residency rights (Matsinhe Reference Matsinhe2011; Morris Reference Morris1998; Nieftagodien Reference Nieftagodien and Landau2011); and the indeterminacy of migrants’ place in South African society produced by the South African public administration of home affairs through a corrupt and chaotic system of permits and a massive deportation policy regulating the presence of foreigners by removing them (Wa Kabwe-Segatti Reference Wa Kabwe-Segatti2008). Thus, while overtly xenophobic terms have been in use over the past two decades, and reserved mostly for African immigrants, Monson (this issue) illustrates how the polarization between insiders and outsiders, long-term residents and newcomers, first-generation squatters and the newly settled, predates the national/non-national distinction, has influenced it very strongly in some localities, and constitutes an often poorly understood blueprint on which post-apartheid immigration is superimposed.

MANUFACTURING DIFFERENCE

All these related terms clearly indicate that processes of exclusion or inclusion are closely intertwined. Geschiere (Reference Geschiere2011: 212) rightly insists on the necessity of analysing the tension between inclusivist and exclusivist tendencies, but a quick look at the literature indicates that the attention paid to exclusionary discourses and practices that haunt the politics of belonging throughout the continent is not always balanced by an interest in countervailing discourses and practices (reconciliation, diffusing ethnic oppositions, everyday conviviality, etc.) (see, however, Page et al. Reference Page, Evans and Mercer2010). In addition, while studies abound on processes of exclusion leading to violence and conflicts, much less has been written on the multiple tactics used by groups and individuals to deflect and escape discrimination. What therefore binds the works presented here and constitutes the originality of the issue is its emphasis on the everyday manufacture of difference and commonality (such as techniques used, repertoires mobilized and historical antecedents). The articles all document the sociology of authorities that claim to have legitimacy over the production of difference within a specific space; their target groups or individuals; and whether the ‘excluded’ define themselves as such and how they may accept, refuse or defuse the ‘difference’ ascribed to them.

All the articles are based on ethnographic research developed in four countries that have all gone through specific types of exclusionary violence over the past two decades: the DRC, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa. Yet, unlike studies of the national contexts of conflicts over land ownership (Chauveau Reference Chauveau2000; Kuba and Lentz Reference Kuba and Lentz2006; Lund Reference Lund1998; Lund and Boone Reference Lund and Boone2013) or state attempts at imposing political hegemony (Banégas Reference Banégas2006; Reference Banégas2010; Boas Reference Boas2009; Marshall-Fratani Reference Marshall-Fratani2006), the articles here focus on local and urban scales, since xenophobic practices also rely on struggles over local political leadership, claims over localized resources, and competing definitions of belonging to a certain territory. The issue focuses on the local as the primary scale for the manifestation and performance of exclusionary practices or the materialization of alternatives to them. The issue does two things in particular. Firstly, it offers multiple, fine-grained explorations of these urban configurations of autochthony claims, mundane practices of xenophobia and very localized outbreaks of deadly xenophobic violence. If the literature on vigilante groups has documented the ways in which the performance of violence shapes insider/outsider boundaries (Pratten and Sen Reference Pratten and Sen2007), vigilante groups are just one among many different competing authorities. This issue hones in on the manner in which everyday practices and episodes of extreme violence reshape the making of authority, the self-definition of groups making claims to ownership over resources (Adunbi Reference Adunbi2013; Hilgers Reference Hilgers2011), and the boundaries of citizenship (Geschiere and Nyamnjoh Reference Geschiere and Nyamnjoh2000).

Another important yet overlooked dimension is that of the intersection between class differentiation, economic indigenization and the politics of belonging. Very little attention has been devoted to emerging class differences hiding underneath xenophobic statements. While it is beyond the scope of this introduction to provide a full account of the literature on economic indigenization in Africa (see Segatti in this issue), suffice it to say here that it has essentially focused on the economic impact of post-independence nationalization processes and the ways in which trade has been the reserve of nationals and affirmative action programmes; it has hardly ever analysed the discursive patterns and identity dynamics produced by these processes. Even where studies of indigenization and autochthony have emphasized the role played by decentralization and liberalization processes (Cutolo Reference Cutolo2008), most have tended to neglect the class dynamics that inform interactions between national discourses on citizenship, global economic models and economic realities. Only a few scholars have pointed to autochthony-based discourses and mobilizations as an expression of social differentiation, and as a way to re-politicize the social scene and the public space (von Holdt Reference von Holdt2013) or as a refuge of the weak in their resistance to the new rich and the land-grabbers who seem to be outside the law (Lonsdale Reference Lonsdale2008: 311; Cutolo Reference Cutolo2008: 9). An unveiling of class differentiation beyond usual xenophobic registers is therefore necessary: Noiriel recently showed that the most long-lasting trend in immigration discourses in modern France was that of discrimination against the poor (Noiriel Reference Noiriel2007: 656). Too little is known in many African countries about how differentiation on the basis of insider/outsider boundaries triggers new (or renewed) mobilization patterns and political subjectivities and exacerbates class dynamics in postcolonial contexts of neoliberal governmentality. These are contexts of ailing economies with ultra-rapid class differentiation among the ‘liberated’ (Southern Africa) or ‘democratized’ (DRC, Kenya, Nigeria) masses whose political leadership has enriched itself exponentially while the poor and the lower middle classes have seen their income levels plummet. In the DRC, histories of dispossession under the colonial and Mobutuist eras continue to inform contemporary discourses. Since the advent of the Kabila regime, the reorganization of internal rents has marginalized former regime clients, tempting them to enter into alliances with subaltern classes in an attempt to reclaim the economy from foreign operators. In South Africa and Nigeria, the largest two economies on the continent, the indigenization of public goods has emerged very strongly as a polarizing dynamic. The rising, albeit paradoxical, importance of waged labour in a time of high unemployment together with post-apartheid social resources in the form of grants and housing have considerably tightened the boundaries of formal citizenship since 1994 (Mosselson Reference Mosselson2010; Hayem Reference Hayem2013).

STATE FORMATION AND REPERTOIRES OF INCLUSION

The country studies highlight the prominence of national paths that therefore offer plural forms of governmentality of both exclusion and inclusion. Xenophobia emerges as something that is intricately linked to the reshaping of postcolonial citizenships, as well as to unresolved issues of symbolic and economic resource redistribution. In these processes of exclusion, state institutions have been found to play an instrumental role, whether by turning a blind eye to discrimination or by institutionalizing it. This calls for a systematic exploration of the role of state bureaucracies, and their decentralized avatars, in engineering and manufacturing difference – or in not doing so. We suggest two directions. First, following recent scholarship of African state bureaucracies and the actual working of the state from below in the governance of daily life (Blundo and Le Meur Reference Blundo and Le Meur2009; Chalfin Reference Chalfin2010; Chipkin and Meny-Gibert Reference Chipkin and Meny-Gibert2012; Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan Reference Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan2014; Darbon Reference Darbon2001), we propose to look closely at the making of boundaries through the provision of public services to citizens and non-citizens, or to insiders and outsiders, in the contemporary period. As suggested by John Lonsdale:

This is one last thread that this issue explores more specifically. Discrimination has been systematically institutionalized in Nigeria through federal and state bureaucracies; there are apparently few exceptions to this, one being Lagos state (Mustapha Reference Mustapha2006; Akinyele Reference Akinyele2014; Fourchard, this issue), another being Gombe state, which has a more efficient conflict management system as shown by Higazi and Lar in this issue. Other national contexts offer less visible forms of state discrimination. In Kenya, government programmes aimed at redressing forced evictions following electoral violence have resulted in an ethnic fragmentation of urban space. In South Africa, while the constitution guarantees fundamental rights, social and labour policies are increasingly restricted to nationals and locals (with the exception of recognized refugees). Interestingly, in the DRC, different arms of the state have different agendas, either favouring outsiders who generate material or symbolic rents or harassing and excluding them to favour local elites.

Secondly, there is a need to re-examine the state not only as an institution but also as a political arena, a discursive space and a process in which there are winners and losers (Boas and Dunn Reference Boas and Dunn2013: 33). The groups that claim to be autochthonous in each case are more a consequence of state-building practices than historically coherent groups with a common past (Boas and Dunn Reference Boas and Dunn2013: 123). Autochthony is frequently linked to the desire for order inherent in contemporary state making, which invariably relies on multiple manifestations of violence (Dunn Reference Dunn2009). Many claims ‘to be rooted’ or ‘to belong’ are political strategies that rely on the arbitrary patronage of the modern Kenyan state, colonial and postcolonial (Lonsdale Reference Lonsdale2008: 306). This is also clear in Nigeria, where the federal regime is said to be ethno-redistributive and where large parts of political life are organized around infra-national identities and patronage networks (Adebanwi and Obadare Reference Adebanwi and Obadare2013). In the DRC, regional legacies, entrenched in civil registration and the new decentralization policy, continue to inform the distribution of patronage but are inconsistently mobilized – less so in large, cosmopolitan urban and trade areas, more so in ethnically polarized regions with mineral resources. In South Africa, the 2008 riots can be seen as a key moment in the history of South African statecraft, revealing the gestation of two social dynamics: the creation in official speeches and institutional practices of an amorphous group of outsiders identified as a hindrance to the well-being and hard-earned liberation of the South African people; and the set of discursive patterns, ethical norms and practices through which violent exclusion is made possible and performed (Landau Reference Landau2011).

While our work primarily focuses on exclusion and its effect on citizenship, we have tried to devote equal attention to the practices and repertoires of inclusion, which is understood as a dialogical dynamic of resistance to xenophobia yet has been largely under-researched. This issue documents precisely how processes of exclusion based on religious, ethnic, national and local forms of belonging are contested, disputed, ignored or fought against by a number of actors. What the studies also reveal is a vast array of resistance mechanisms, counter-mobilizations and subversion techniques, as well as emerging subjectivities (among the youth, gangs, women) that have appeared in response to exclusionary dynamics. How exclusion or identity assignation is subverted, resisted or ignored is documented in the issue. In Ongata Rongai, in Kenya, the bold use of ‘cosmo’ is a new form of local yet global identity that transcends fragmentation (Landau in this issue); in Kinshasa's markets, foreign traders use passive resistance, strategies of invisibilization and micro-arrangements with their Congolese counterparts (Segatti); while in Kolwezi and Likasi, reconciliation from below is based on silence and avoidance as interactional norms of peaceful coexistence between former enemies (Vinckel). All of them call attention to processes of counter-mobilization, deliberate non-involvement or open contestation of xenophobic practices through political mobilization or local or trade sociability. They also show the fragility of informal arrangements and individual or collective reconciliation processes ‘from below’, especially in times of crisis. In Nigeria, the political machinery appears to be inclusive in some states, and the centrality of patronage helps sideline discrimination in access to public goods (Fourchard in this issue). In comparing Gombe and Bauchi states, Adam Higazi and Jimam Lar argue that, although there are complaints of marginalization among different non-indigene groups in both cases, Gombe state has developed a more inclusive system of government and local conflict management than that of Bauchi state. The manufacturing of difference itself generates new forms of political subjectivities in contexts of hypermobile cosmopolitan areas as one of the ways out of structural legacies of discrimination. While the papers themselves provide too little evidence to proffer categorical statements on the emergence of alternative forms of belonging, they are at least an indication that some African urban polities are active centres for the contestation of exclusive forms of citizenship.