On July 10, 1638, skipper Cornelis Pietersz Croeger and pilot Pieter Tamesz arrived in São Tomé with theAlkmaar. The ship had been freighted by Jacob Pietersz de Vries, merchant in Amsterdam, and was manned by a Dutch crew. Yet she was traveling with “passes and licenses” issued by the city of Dunkirk in France. Following the arrival of the ship, these documents were presented to the Portuguese royal governor for inspection, who expressed doubts about their authenticity. As a consequence, the ship, crew, and cargo were held in São Tomé for more than six months, while the governor consulted...

This chapter explores the relationship between law, mobility, and violence in colonial Africa. Its particular concern is how this relationship affected the lives of Africans caught up in a forced labor regime in central Mozambique during the first half century of colonial rule. Though the empirical analysis is regionally focused, the conceptual argument is one that applies, to varying degrees, to many other parts of colonial Africa. To this end, the chapter focuses on the ways laws made Africans subject to forced labor, for the state or for private employers, thereby displacing them from their home communities and compelling them...

Rwanda is a country that is most known to the outside world as the site of one of the worst crimes against humanity of the twentieth century. The 1994 genocide left around 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu dead in the course of three months. The present government has gone to great lengths to distance itself from what it terms “genocidal mentalities” and to promote unity and reconciliation among a population where no family was untouched by the killings that took place all over the country and often between family members and neighbors. Rather than explore whether these attempts at creating...

Planned segregation is one of the main ways states in Africa have channeled mobility. Colonial African states used considerable energy to control the movements of “native” peoples both to and within cities. While many forms of cross-border movement were rarely enumerated and frequently unregulated,¹ the movement of black populations (and sometimes Indian, Arab, and Chinese populations) into and within urban areas was often regarded as deeply problematic and threatening. Colonial states routinely segregated settlements to appease settlers’ fears of miscegenation, respond to pseudoscientific theories of disease management, and assuage security paranoia. In the process, these governments developed a range of...

In recent years, there has been a reconfiguration of the relationship between states and international migrants. From a perception of migration as a problem to be solved through preventing undesired population movements, a number of international development agencies, policy makers, and academics are taking the position that migration contributes to national development—if well managed.¹ This aspiration indicates the (re)discovery of nonresident citizens or diaspora groups as populations to be governed by their states of origin. During the last decade, the World Bank and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) have become patrons of this position, and it has been...

The present chapter contributes to this volume’s aim to theorize the state and mobility in Africa by exploring the relation between centralized states and those nomadic societies that resisted state control by following alternative and at times antagonistic rationales of power as control over mobility, which I call “kinetocracy.”¹ The study of African governance is conceptually ill equipped to investigate forms of political rule that do not fit the state model.² A narrow focus on the modern state has resulted in a purely negative characterization of nomadic and seminomadic societies in the desert as the state’s “exteriority.”³ Yet desert-like environments,...

European decolonization was always a messy affair, both for those in power and those dispossessed of it.¹ Very often, it resulted in the mass migration of a large portion of the colonial population, suddenly and abruptly. This chapter conceptualizes decolonization less as a historicalevent; rather, as a series of overlapping ethnographicmoments, its postcolonial dissonances reverberate across oceans and national boundaries, amid acts of everyday and ordinary affect performed by citizens, wherein ideas of legal governance, citizenship, respectability, and entitlement get tested in and out of the water. The focus is Portuguese decolonization in Lusophone Africa (Mozambique and Angola),...

In 1996, Mwinilunga in the far northwest of Zambia seemed close to the edge of the world, at the gateway of the small pedicle jutting between two of Africa’s large and chaotic states,¹ the Democratic Republic of Congo to the north and east and Angola to the west. In particular, Angola was caught in the painful extra time of its civil war and most of its Moxico Province, which bordered Zambia’s Mwinilunga District was controlled by rebels of the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) rather than the Luanda government. Mwinilunga itself was a reasonably peaceful and...

African cities’ rapidly transforming morphology and social composition starkly illustrate the remarkable power of human mobility. Whatever the reason—failing rural economies, conflicts, spatialized material inequalities, gentrification, and urban development programs—people are moving into, out of, and through African cities as almost never before. As elsewhere in the world, countries’ elite and well connected are evacuating inner-city neighborhoods and established residential suburbs in favor of purpose-built suburban estates and gated communities.¹ Those remaining behind are joined by migrants from smaller towns, rural areas, across borders, or further deprived parts of their own cities. Elsewhere, once sparsely occupied periurban areas...