Bridging Histories of East and Central Africa

*** Submitted version, before peer review *** Revised version meanwhile published as: Castryck, Geert, Achim von Oppen and Katharina Zöller, “Introduction: Bridging Histories of East and Central Africa,” History in Africa 46 (2019), 217–229. doi:10.1017/hia.2019.3 Bridging Histories of East and Central Africa Geert Castryck (Leipzig University), Achim von Oppen (University of Bayreuth) and Katharina Zöller (University of Bayreuth) Abstract: Regional distinctions such as “East” and “Central” Africa have been constructed, originally very much from an outsiders’ perspective. Different East and Central African historiographies reflect – and reproduce – these distinctions. However, the inhabitants of those spaces never stopped crossing and entangling them. Likewise, this section approaches East and Central Africa empirically as a space of historical entanglement. Moreover, the authors tackle the traditional divide between both regions epistemologically, by transferring research perspectives from one region’s historiography to the other. They thus illustrate that bridging histories of East and Central Africa can reveal histories that would otherwise remain hidden or marginal. Introduction 1 Knowledge production about Africa and its history reflects an underlying spatial ordering of the continent. Part of the historiographical production makes claims about Africa as a whole – either 1 The articles in this section are a selection of contributions to the conference “Bridging Histories of East and Central Africa” (Bayreuth, 7-8 June 2013). The authors thoroughly revised their articles in order to take up the central question of this section. The conference was jointly organized by the Professorship of African History (Department of History) at the University of Bayreuth and the Centre for Area Studies at Leipzig University. Special thanks go to Adam Jones, Jochen Lingelbach and the participants at the “14th Workshop on African History & Culture” (Polenz, 4 May 2018) for their useful comments on an earlier version of this introductory text. limited to Sub-Saharan Africa or including Northern Africa. Other parts take states or cities as units of analysis. Yet other historical research is regionally subdivided, following seemingly neutral geographical orientations (e.g. West or Southern Africa) and ecological differences (e.g. Sahel or Great Lakes), but also reflecting linguistic and colonial divisions. The division between scholarship on East and on Central Africa is a case in point. The distinction between regionally defined research areas tends to follow the divisions between former colonial empires and their languages, reflected in an inclination towards English (and German) in research about East Africa versus French (and Portuguese) for Central Africa. Analogous to methodological nationalism, we are here confronted with the legacy of a kind of methodological imperialism. For instance, Anglophone scholars of East Africa typically consider Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda, but refrain from including in their analysis the areas formerly associated with Belgian or Portuguese colonial rule. Conversely, a Francophone Central African focus on the two Congos tends to take little notice of the historiographical production on what used to be British or German colonies. Our message is not that these somewhat separate historiographies are flawed. Rather we want to illustrate that paradigms and insights gained from research on East Africa can be made productive in Central African historiography, and vice versa. This area-based epistemic divide is relevant to such an extent that it inadvertently influences international politics. The diversity of recent views on Rwanda can serve as an example. During the first decade of the 21st century, Rwanda has at times been hailed as a well-performing, reliable state, which could become a model for the rest of Africa and the world. At the same time, Rwandan authorities have been blamed for causing havoc and violence in eastern Congo and violating human rights domestically. Rather than wanting to mediate between these positions, we assert that such contradictory appreciations reflect not only tensions between domestic, regional and international perspectives, or between humanitarian considerations and economic criteria, but also a difference between an East African and a Central African perspective on Rwanda. 2 Seen from Central Africa, Rwanda’s involvement in the wars and plundering in eastern Congo strikes the eye. The Rwandan 2 Filip Reyntjens, “Rwanda, Ten Years on: From Genocide to Dictatorship,” African Affairs 103 (2004), 177– 210; Id., “Post-1994 Politics in Rwanda: Problematising ‘Liberation’ and ‘Democratisation’,” Third World Quarterly 27-6 (2006), 1103–1117. government, however, prefers to be perceived as East African, as can be seen in the decisions to join the East African Community and the Commonwealth, and to adopt English as an official language. In a comparatively tranquil East African setting, Rwanda’s economic performance and apparent political stability can be contemplated as a success story. 3 The example makes clear that it is negotiable whether a particular place belongs to East or to Central Africa (or both), and that each attribution opens its own registers of appraisal and association. Regional demarcations are neither neutral nor clear-cut, but have old and ongoing histories. The articles in this section endeavor to bridge empirically these historical and historiographical divisions, which the people in East and Central Africa have never stopped crossing and entangling. The historical construction of East and Central Africa Few would deny that East and Central Africa are historical constructs. However, knowing that regions are constructs does not yet tell us how spatial constellations, demarcations and connections have been produced, represented and lived across time and space. Just as the idea of Africa as one large “continental” space is a construct in its own right, 4 so too subdivisions such as “East” and “Central” Africa have been constructed, originally very much from an outsiders’ perspective. Only gradually, from the colonial period onwards, the regional divisions were appropriated by the inhabitants of those spaces themselves. There is today a bewildering variety of official delineations of “East Africa” as well as of “Central Africa”. 5 This diversity of regional definitions can be traced back to colonial times. “Directional divisions”, named after the cardinal directions, were introduced from the mid-nineteenth century, when continents came to be envisaged – always by outsiders – as large territorial blocs, divided into spheres of geographical and cultural peculiarity, of economic interest and for political 3 See for instance Christian Putsch, “Chance und Risiko,” Die Welt Kompakt, 13 September 2017, 6. V.Y. Mudimbe, The Idea of Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). 5 See for instance the differences between the definitions of geographic areas by the United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD) and the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), who use more or less the same regional denominations (the four cardinal directions and Central/Middle), yet assign states differently. Most regional economic communities in Africa also refer to cardinal directions in their names, yet they show marked overlaps and differ yet again from the UNSD and UNECA divisions. 4 conquest. 6 “Central Africa”, in this context, implied a distinction from neighboring “directional” regions. It was imagined as a part of Africa that had little or no connection to the outside “civilized” world, yet was at the same time seen as a strategic position to gain control of the continent as a whole – classically expressed by Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Consequently, in the nineteenth century many “Central Africas” emerged from the European perspective, either linked to European “exploration”, to missionary societies, or to each of the aspiring colonial empires. With the related advance of modern geography and colonial expansion, it became increasingly of interest for European thought to go beyond a perspectival approach and to conceive regions as territorial blocks, defined – like the continent as a whole – by an assumed internal homogeneity and external difference. It was only at this point that the idea of territorial (i.e. clear-cut and continuous) borders began to shape African regional distinctions – in other words, the idea of regional borders came later than regionalization as such. Yet, despite the seeming clarity of clear-cut, territorial borders, there were still many “Central Africas” and “East Africas”, depending on the perspective of the European colonial powers. Another set of criteria for regional distinction, besides political and geostrategical interests, were economic as well as cultural production and exchange. Such criteria were underpinned by the refining of geographical, economic, anthropological, religious, linguistic and historical research. However, the phenomena and processes (such as migration, trade, productive innovation and specialization, political or religious expansion) examined here were far more mobile and changeable than (apparently) natural phenomena or political borders, which provided a new source for disagreement. Furthermore, the social sciences and humanities, because of their practical importance for the colonial project (and for the postcolonial nation state), came to be subsumed more fully under imperial (and national) forms of organizing research. This entailed considerable pressure to adhere to political units of analysis with their respective research cultures and paradigmatic traditions, even where the phenomena observed clearly went across their boundaries. 6 Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen (eds.), The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 162. In recent years, the ambivalences in demarcating regions in Africa (and beyond) have contributed to a rethinking of academic approaches to the problem of defining and dealing with regions. 7 Helmut Bley, for instance, proposed to define African “macro-regions” (Großregionen) by the intensity of their internal exchanges and their particular connectedness to the wider world. 8 Such approaches clearly owe much to the advance of transnational or translocal and global perspectives in the social sciences and humanities. A probably even stronger stimulus for this rethinking has been the result of another paradigmatic shift that has occurred from the 1980s onwards: the constructivist turn. 9 In many ways, they have both removed borders from, and moved connections to, center-stage in the definition of regions, while regarding indisputable spatial distinctions (similar to inter-state borders) as “frontiers” or interfaces (“borderlands”) rather than divisions between spaces. 10 There remains, however, a difference as to whether such interfaces are approached from one side of the dividing/connecting line or from the other. Empirical approaches to overcome epistemic divisions In this journal section, we illustrate how research approaches prevalent in either East or Central Africa can cast new light on the history of the other area. All five articles approach East and Central Africa as a space of historical entanglement, empirically reconstructing connections and relations across this space. We thus contribute to academic research that has dealt with connections as well as comparisons between East and Central Africa before.11 Additionally, however, the authors tackle the traditional 7 For a general overview see Matthias Middell (ed.), Handbook of Transregional Studies (Abingdon: Routledge, forthcoming) 8 Helmut Bley, “Die Großregionen Afrikas oder die Grenzen des Autochthonen,” Periplus - Jahrbuch für außereuropäische Geschichte 4 (1994), 1–14; Id. “Ostafrikanische Welt,” in: Friedrich Jaeger (ed.) Enzyklopädie der Neuzeit (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2009), vol. 9, col. 587-89. 9 For instance Lewis and Wigen, The Myth of Continents was particularly influential for constructivism in spatial history. 10 See for instance Ulrike Freitag and Achim von Oppen (eds.), Translocality: The study of Globalising Processes from a Southern Perspective (Leiden: Brill, 2010); Paul Nugent and A.I. Asiwaju (eds.), African Boundaries: Barriers, Conduits and Opportunities (New York: Pinter, 1996). Also see the African Borderlands Research Network (ABORNE), http://www.aborne.org. 11 To name but a few, see for instance Abdul Sheriff’s emphasis on the extension of Zanzibar’s “East African commercial empire” of the 19th century far into what is now eastern Congo, Johannes Fabian’s reconstruction of the appropriation of Swahili in (parts of) the Belgian Congo, and Jean-Luc Vellut’s insistence on the “multivocality of concepts of space" in Central Africa. All these proposals, however, are more concerned with qualifying “their” particular regional vantage points than with questioning regional divisions. (Abdul Sheriff, Slaves, Spices and Ivory in Zanzibar: Integration of an East African Commercial Empire into the World divide between East and Central Africa at an epistemological level, by productively transferring research perspectives from one region to the other, and by analyzing how these regions have been and can be conceived. Bridging histories of East and Central Africa can reveal histories that would remain hidden or marginal within the context or from the perspective of only one of the regions. This approach is further enlarged by perspectives from Indian Ocean studies and from the distinct field of the African Great Lakes region. The critical thrust of this approach is to show that dominant narratives, topoi and historical constellations in each of these regionally defined and region-defining research fields tend to blind out phenomena that become visible or tangible when one adopts viewpoints that are commonplace in another research field. Thus, the contributions envisage a methodological and epistemological reconsideration of East and Central African history and of regionally organized historical research in general. Stephen Rockel, in his article, reconstructs the position of Tutsi pastoralists in the social and economic context of Unyamwezi (present-day Central Tanzania) in the late nineteenth century. Whereas Tutsi pastoralists are usually depicted as politically dominant in research on their “Central African” heartlands in the Great Lakes region, an inverted narrative emanates when we try to understand Tutsi pastoralists in the “East African” setting of Unyamwezi. This article on the one hand counters the prevailing narrative of Tutsi or pastoralist dominance as developed in the Great Lakes context. On the other hand, it illustrates the transregional entanglements between the Great Lakes dynamics of population movement and the caravan trade system connecting the Indian Ocean and the African interior. Tracing, conversely, coastal or Swahili connections in the Great Lakes region, the article by Geert Castryck makes sense of religious developments among the Muslim community of colonial Bujumbura (present-day Burundi) as a combination of facing local challenges and discriminations, making use of “Central African” connections, and picking up currents of Islam prevalent in “East Economy, 1770-1873 (London: Currey, 1987); Johannes Fabian, Language and Colonial Power: The Appropriation of Swahili in the former Belgian Congo 1880-1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Jean-Luc Vellut, “Configurations of Space in Central African History,” in: Katja Füllberg-Stolberg, Petra Heidrich and Ellinor Schöne (eds.) Dissociation and Appropriation: Responses to Globalization in Asia and Africa (Berlin: Das Arabische Buch, 1999), 255–264). Africa”. So far, this group of people has remained all but absent in the historiography. The author argues that this absence is not an indication of their limited relevance for the history of the area, but of not fitting the respective master narratives. Adopting a translocal approach, seen from within the community, allows us to overcome the limitations of Burundian national, Great Lakes, Central African and East African perspectives. Whereas Castryck adopts the perspective of one locality, Katharina Zöller traces a highly mobile group across East and Central Africa. The “Manyema” are people who have roots in what is today known as eastern Congo and who moved in the direction of or right up to the East African coast – and often back – since the time when their area of origin was under Swahili-Arab domination. In East African historiography the Manyema are known as a group of people that had some importance in East African towns, but their continuing connections with Central Africa received negligible attention so far. In Central African research traditions, on the other hand, Maniema is associated with a region or province in eastern Congo, but is hardly known as a group of people reaching into East Africa. However, following the approach adopted in this section, the bridging of these East and Central African perspectives discloses how Manyema actors, in relation to colonial and postcolonial contexts, have negotiated their mobility and identity across East and Central Africa as a single social and geographical space. Even though the Manyema do not figure prominently in the existing historiography, the historical context in which this group came into being did not go unnoticed. Swahili-Arab domination in what is today known as eastern Congo, and its defeat by the Congo Free State during the wars of colonial conquest, is well covered by historiography on Central Africa. However, its aftermath and legacy in the region – and beyond – have been largely ignored. Maarten Couttenier, focusing on the imagination and representations of “the East” in the Congo Museum (today the Royal Museum for Central Africa) in Tervuren (Belgium), reconstructs how museum displays systematically externalized this inherent and constituent part of Congolese history. We observe a flashing and dwindling of attention paid to “the East” which, rather than showing a genuine interest, merely casts a negative image of an “East” that allegedly does not – or must not – belong to the Congo. The concluding article treads the thin line between tracing an apparent Indian Ocean cocoon as far inland as possible, and reflecting on how this can provide a productive relational way of conceiving regions. Julia Verne takes as her starting point a critical reflection about the relational character of maritime worlds in general and of the Indian Ocean in particular. She then goes on to trace this “maritimity” in the way of life of a coastal family living and trading in the East Central African town of Sumbawanga (present-day Western Tanzania). Whereas established Indian Ocean studies tend to limit their scope to coastal areas and at best to the immediate hinterland, the “emic” perspective of people making up that maritime world shows a lived experience of “their” Indian Ocean world that is much less bounded and reaches much further into the interior of the continent. The central point is not so much that the Indian Ocean world reaches far into the interior, but rather the need for a relational approach to regions in general. People, their imaginations and their relations constitute the basis for analysis of regional connectivity. In sum, this section on “Bridging histories of East and Central Africa” illustrates the epistemic divide between East and Central African historiographies and offers different ways to overcome this divide by making it heuristically productive. Whether by applying “East African” perspectives on “Central Africa” and vice versa, by analyzing trans-local connections seen from one locality, by tracing the mobility of people across the East-Central divide, by reconstructing the making of master narratives through museum representations, or by proposing a “maritime” or relational way of conceiving of regions, the articles all contribute to a historiography that bridges East and Central Africa in particular, and established regional distinctions in general. References Bley, Helmut, “Die Großregionen Afrikas oder die Grenzen des Autochthonen,” Periplus - Jahrbuch für außereuropäische Geschichte 4 (1994), 1–14. ———, “Ostafrikanische Welt,” in: Friedrich Jaeger (ed.) Enzyklopädie der Neuzeit (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2009), vol. 9, col. 587-89. Fabian, Johannes, Language and Colonial Power: The Appropriation of Swahili in the former Belgian Congo 1880-1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Freitag, Ulrike, and Achim von Oppen (eds.), Translocality: The study of Globalising Processes from a Southern Perspective (Leiden: Brill, 2010). Lewis, Martin W., and Kären E. Wigen (eds.), The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). Middell, Matthias (ed.), Handbook of Transregional Studies (Abingdon: Routledge, forthcoming). Mudimbe, V.Y., The Idea of Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). Nugent, Paul, and A.I. Asiwaju (eds.), African Boundaries: Barriers, Conduits and Opportunities (New York: Pinter, 1996). Putsch, Christian, “Chance und Risiko,” Die Welt Kompakt, 13 September 2017, 6. Reyntjens, Filip, “Rwanda, Ten Years On: From Genocide to Dictatorship,” African Affairs 103 (2004), 177–210. ———, “Post-1994 Politics in Rwanda: Problematising ‘Liberation’ and ‘Democratisation’,” Third World Quarterly 27-6 (2006), 1103–1117. Sheriff, Abdul, Slaves, Spices and Ivory in Zanzibar: Integration of an East African Commercial Empire into the World Economy, 1770-1873 (London: James Currey, 1987). Vellut, Jean-Luc, “Configurations of Space in Central African History,” in: Katja Füllberg-Stolberg, Petra Heidrich and Ellinor Schöne (eds.) Dissociation and Appropriation: Responses to Globalization in Asia and Africa (Berlin: Das Arabische Buch, 1999), 255–264.