Autochthony and the Politics of Belonging
The aim of this chapter is to explore the recent upsurge in various regions of Africa of the notion of ‘autochthony’ (literally ‘from the soil itself’) as a virulent political slogan that seems to imply, perhaps almost inevitably, a call for excluding strangers (‘allogènes’ or ‘allochthons’). For the African continent, this intensification in the politics of belonging seems to be directly related to democratization and decentralization, the two main trends dominating the post-Cold War moment. However, it is important to place this in a wider, comparative perspective. Indeed the African cases fit in with a much broader, even global, concern with belonging that seems to be the flipside of intensified processes of globalization, a process seen also in wealthier parts of the world. The contrast with the parallel notion of ‘indigenous’– also undergoing a recent renaissance, but following a strikingly different trajectory – can help to outline certain ambiguities in this volatile quest for belonging and for limiting the ranks of those who can claim to be ‘real’ citizens.1
The terms autochthony and indigenous go back to classical Greek history and have similar implications. Autochthony refers to ‘self’ and ‘soil’. Indigenous means literally ‘born inside’, with the connotation in classical Greek of being born inside the house. Thus, both notions inspire similar discourses on the need to safeguard the ‘ancestral lands’ against ‘strangers’ who ‘despoil’ this patrimony; they uphold firstcomers’ rights to special protection against later immigrants. Nonetheless, these two terms followed quite different trajectories and they impact differently on present-day issues of belonging. Over the last decades, the notion of ‘indigenous peoples’ acquired a new lease of life with truly global dimensions. This is especially so since the founding of the United Nations (UN) Working Group on Indigenous Populations in 1982, representing groups from all six continents. The spread of the notion of ‘autochthony’ remained more limited. During the 1990s it became a burning issue in many parts of Africa, inspiring violent efforts to exclude ‘strangers’, especially in Francophone areas but with a spillover into Anglophone countries.2 At the same time it became a key notion in debates on multiculturalism and immigration problems in several parts of Europe, notably Flemish Belgium and the Netherlands.
The spread of the notion in Western contexts is of particular interest. While most Westerners think of ‘indigenous peoples’ as ‘others’ who live in distant regions and whose cultures can only ‘survive’ if they receive special protection, the epithet of ‘autochthon’ is claimed by important groups in the West itself. This term thus reinforces the preoccupation with belonging and the exclusion of strangers, which have become major issues in everyday politics throughout the world, in the North as much as in the South.
The new dynamics of autochthony discourse on a global scale can therefore serve as a strategic entry point for understanding the enigmatic intertwinement of globalization with intensified struggles over belonging and exclusion. The New World Order, announced by President Bush, Sr, and others at the end of the Cold War, seems to be less marked by freely circulating cosmopolitans than by explosions of communal violence and fierce attempts towards exclusion. Appadurai (1996) already signalled some years ago that globalization and the undermining of the nation-state inspire a vigorous ‘production of locality’. Meyer and Geschiere (1999: introduction) characterized globalization as ‘a dialectic of flow and closure’. For Southeast Asia, Tania Murray Li (2002) speaks of a ‘current conjuncture of belonging’ that poses ‘deep dilemmas’. It is clear that this conjuncture takes on global forms – widely different trends all over the world converging towards a growing concern with belonging. Neo-liberal economics inspiring new development policies of bypassing the state and decentralization; democratization turning questions like ‘who can vote where?’ into burning issues; the global concern with ecological degradation inspiring a celebration of local knowledge and a preoccupation with disappearing cultures; popular concerns over immigrants who refuse to integrate: all these trends seem to work towards a defence of local roots. It is also clear that this conjuncture creates great uncertainty that can have violent effects. Belonging promises safety, yet raises fierce disagreements in practice over who really belongs.
This global conjuncture of belonging may express itself in different forms between regions, yet two common points stand out, although regional differentiations are manifest. First of all, notions such as ‘autochthony’ or ‘indigenous’ appear to defend a return to the local, but in practice are more about access to the global. This point is made most explicitly for Africa by Achille Mbembe (2001: 27) and AbdouMaliq Simone (2001: 25). It may seem logical to equate autochthony with a celebration of the local and of closure against global flows, yet in practice it is often directly linked to processes of globalization. Simone (2001: 25) is right to insist that ‘the fight is not so much over the terms of territorial encompassment or closure, but rather over maintaining a sense of “open-endedness”‘. What is at stake is often less a closer definition of the local than a struggle over excluding others from access to the new circuits of riches and power.
A second point is the surprising elasticity of autochthony discourses, allowing for constant shifts and re-definitions, which can also make this discourse a somewhat hollow one. It is striking that similar discourses, inspiring almost identical slogans, can have great mobilizing power in highly different contexts, from present-day Africa to Europe. Studies that place the notion in a longer historical perspective show how easily autochthony discourses can switch from one ‘Other’ to the next without losing their credibility (Geschiere and Nyamnjoh 2000). This may explain their great resilience in the face of modern developments, easily adapting to the constant re-drawing of borders that seem to be inherent to processes of globalization. The flipside is a certain diffuseness. In a given situation it may appear to be self-evident who can claim autochthony. Yet, any attempt to define the autochthonous community in more concrete terms gives rise to fierce disagreements and nagging suspicions of ‘faking’. Indeed, autochthony discourse is of a segmentary nature: belonging tends to be constantly redefined in increasingly narrow circles. It is an identity with no particular name and no specified history, merely a claim to have come first, which can of course constantly be contested. Precisely these vagaries can give it highly violent implications.
Below, I will briefly discuss the genealogy of ‘autochthony’ in Africa, notably its role in the imposition of French colonial rule, a crucial link to its present-day upsurge on the continent. Next I discuss its new dynamics in post-colonial Africa in the 1990s, in the context of what can be termed the new politics of belonging, using Cameroon and Côte d’Ivoire as specific examples. A brief comparison with its manifestations elsewhere on the continent can help to bring out a common pattern – notably the aforementioned paradox between apparent security and a practice of deep uncertainty.
Colonial Roots: Autochthony and French Rule in the Sudan
The term ‘autochthony’, which is now current in Francophone Africa in particular, was introduced in Africa by French military, researchers, and administrators immediately after the colonial conquest at the end of the nineteenth century. It was meant to play a vital role in categorizing the new subjects in order to make the administration of the vast, newly conquered areas possible. For instance, for Maurice Delafosse (1912), administrator-cum-ethnographer, and a towering figure in the imposition of French rule in West Africa, autochthony was a first criterion in his influential book Haut-Sénégal-Niger. He used the notion as a basic categorization within the dazzling variety of indigènes: some indigènes were autochthons, whereas others were definitely not (Delafosse 1912; Arnaut 2004: 207).
The background to the emphasis on this distinction was the politique des races, a fixed principle for setting up a colonial administration during the early decades of French rule (Suret-Canale 1964: 103). Whereas the British with their policy of Indirect Rule were preoccupied with finding ‘real’ chiefs, French policy was (at least initially) to bypass chiefs (who might be troublesome) and instead form homogeneous cantons, populated by the same race, hence the need to separate ruling immigrant groups from true autochtones. In practice, however, things were not that different: the French also soon began to involve local chiefs in the administration of the vast territories they had conquered (Crowder 1964). It is characteristic, therefore, that Delafosse, despite his search for autochtones in line with the politique des races, was clearly much more interested in mobile groups that had created larger political units. For instance, in his book on Haut-Sénégal-Niger the Peul get nearly 40 pages – clearly the author is deeply interested in their peregrinations throughout West Africa and their reputation as empire builders – while most ‘autochthonous’ groups only get a brief mention (Triaud 1998). Striking is also that Delafosse refers to the latter in quite condescending language, describing them, for instance, as les malheureux (ibid.: 230).
This paradox of looking for autochthons as an anchor for the administration, but at the same time treating them as some sort of humble group became more pronounced as the autochthon/ non-autochthon distinction became canonized under French rule. In many societies in the Senegal-Niger area described by Delafosse, local patterns of organization were indeed dominated by a complementary opposition between ‘people of the land’ and ‘ruling’ groups that claimed to have come in from elsewhere. Thus, ‘the chief of the land’ formed (and still forms) a kind of ritual counterpoint to the chief of the ruling dynasty. To the French, the term ‘autochthony’ proved to be an obvious one to describe this opposition. A good example is the vast literature on the Mossi (the largest group in present-day Burkina Faso). For generations of ethnologists this opposition between what they termed autochtones and ‘rulers’ became the central issue inspiring highly sophisticated, structuralist studies (Izard 1985; Zahan 1961). In this context the notion of autochthony again acquired somewhat condescending overtones. Luning (1997: 11), for instance, indicates that in the prevailing discourse of the Mossi Maana, the tengabiise (now translated as autochthons) were characterized as some sort of ‘pre-social’ terrestrial beings, who had only became classified as a human society since the coming of the naam, their foreign rulers. She also notes that in practice naam power was in all sorts of ways limited by the tengabiise. Still, the naam, as foreign rulers, were formally at the top of the prestige scale, decidedly above the autochthons.3 This stands in striking contrast with how the distinction between autochthon and stranger came to be seen in later phases of post-colonial rule.
Autochthony in the Post-Colony
In many parts of Francophone Africa, the autochthony notion was initially appropriated by the local populations, becoming an important categorizing principle. Yet after independence (for most countries around 1960) its role seemed to decline, at least formally. During the first decades after independence in Cameroon, for instance, it was not done to talk about autochthons or allogènes, at least not openly. ‘We are all citizens of Cameroon’ would be the inevitable, politically correct rejoinder. However, this changed dramatically in the 1990s following the end of the Cold War and the demise (at least formally) of one-party authoritarianism on the African continent. Under political liberalization, the seemingly matter-of-fact categorizations of colonial administrators according to the autochthons/non-autochthons divide turned out to be highly explosive. In the 1990s and 2000s Côte d’Ivoire made headlines because of the fierce hatred behind the violence with which self-styled autochtones tried to expel immigrants, but similar outbursts have been reported from elsewhere. One factor behind this was clearly the practical effect of the wave of democratization that overran the continent. Democratization as such was certainly welcomed, but several authors have stressed how the reintroduction of multi-partyism inevitably turned questions like ‘who can vote where?’ and, crucially, ‘who can stand as a candidate where?’– in other words, questions of where one belongs – into red-hot issues (see Geschiere and Nyamnjoh 2000; Socpa 2003).4 Particularly in more densely settled and urban areas, the locals’ fear of being outvoted by more numerous ‘strangers’– often citizens of the same nation-state – ran so high that the defence of autochthony seemed to take prevalence over national citizenship. A striking complication was that in many countries incumbent regimes encourage such strife over belonging: the old slogans of nation-building and reinforcement of national citizenship give way rapidly to a support of localist movements with the clear aim of trying to divide the opposition.
A more hidden factor was an equally dramatic switch in the policies of the development establishment during the 1980s, from a decidedly statist approach (emphasizing nation-building as a prerequisite for achieving development), to an emphasis on decentralization, bypassing the state and reaching out to civil society and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Several authors emphasize that this, again, almost inevitably triggered fierce debates about belonging over who could or could not participate in a ‘project-new-style’ (Chauveau 2000; Geschiere 2004).
Yet, most importantly, nearly all authors warn that upsurges of autochthony during the 1990s were not simply triggered by political manipulations from above, but equally carried by strong feelings from below. Some authors discuss the proliferation of funeral rituals, turning the burial ‘at home’ (that is, in the village of origin) into a key moment in the contest over belonging (Geschiere and Gugler 1998; Monga 1995; Vidal 1991). Others point to land (see Lentz 2003 on Ghana and Burkina Faso) or ritual associations (see Austen 1992 on Duala) as crucial issues in popular movements to defend autochthony. The themes outlined above will be elaborated for two specific examples, Cameroon and Côte d’Ivoire, with shorter examples from other regions.
Cameroon: Autochthony Versus National Citizenship
The upsurge of autochthony as a virulent issue in Cameroon during the 1990s must be understood in relation to the determined, sometimes even desperate, struggle of President Paul Biya, the leader of the former one-party, to remain in power. Probably under direct pressure of then-President of France François Mitterrand, Biya permitted freedom of association only towards the end of 1990. This immediately brought a proliferation of opposition parties. However, Biya refused to give in and after 1992 the opposition petered out. The crucial presidential elections of 1992 became a scandal since it was quite clear that Biya obtained his narrow victory (38 per cent against 35 per cent) over his main rival, John Fru Ndi, due to massive rigging. However, in subsequent years Biya held out against all pressure and his party won all subsequent elections.
Biya’s capacity for political survival is, indeed, impressive – all the more so since this took place in the midst of a deep economic crisis. This begs the question of how he and his team succeeded nonetheless in completely outmanoeuvring the opposition, which seemed to be in such a promising position in the early 1990s. An obvious answer is the regime’s success in playing the autochthony card. Indeed, Cameroon offers a prime example of the effectiveness that autochthony slogans can acquire in national politics. Geschiere and Nyamnjoh (2000) show how the regime used the growing fear among ‘autochthons’ in the Southwest Province and Douala city, the country’s core economic areas. Their concern was that they would be outvoted under the new and increasingly democratic constellation by more numerous immigrants from the highlands of the northwest and West Province. After the 1996 municipal elections, the government actively supported large-scale and quite violent demonstrations by ‘autochthons’ in Douala to protest against the fact that in four of the six communes of the city politicians who identified themselves as ‘Bamileke’ had been elected as mayor on an opposition ticket. The demonstrators’ slogans were all too clear: the came-no-goes (the Pidgin term for immigrants) should go home and vote where they really belonged. The government defended its support for this viewpoint with reference to the new Constitution of 1996, which emphasized the need to protect the rights of ‘minorities’ (i.e. indigenes).
There is a telling contrast here with the earlier Constitution of 1972, at the high tide of nation-building, which emphasized the right of any Cameroonian to settle anywhere in the country. Nyamnjoh and Rowlands (1998) show that the regime’s support for newfangled elite associations created another arena for struggles over belonging and autochthony. Again, there was a striking reversal of former policies. Under one-party rule any form of association outside the party was severely discouraged, but after the onset of democratization, the regime even obliged regional elites (mostly civil servants and therefore in the pay of the government) to constitute their own associations. These associations often had ostentatious cultural aims, but in practice there was an underlying obligation to go home and campaign for the president’s party. Such regional associations offered, therefore, a welcome channel to mobilize votes and to neutralize the effects of multi-partyism. This was all the more so since they also served to exclude elites who were not really autochthonous to the area and thus blocked the political participation of allogènes who mostly supported the opposition parties.5 Konings (2001) discusses how effective the regime has been in dividing the Anglophone opposition, which in the early 1990s still seemed to form a solid front. They achieved this through a tactical mix of support to elite associations and minority groups, coupled with a general emphasis on belonging. In subsequent years the southwest’s autochthons (Anglophones) – fearing, like the (Francophone) Douala, that they would be overwhelmed by come-no-go immigrants – became the regime’s staunchest supporters (see Konings and Nyamnjoh 2003).
These events triggered a fierce debate among academics and other intellectuals over the rights of autochtones versus allogènes. The Cameroonian review La Nouvelle Expression offered a seminal overview of various perspectives in its May 1996 issue. While several contributors such as Ngijol Ngijol, Bertrand Toko, and Philip Bissek warned against the dangers of the political use of discourses on autochthony, the contribution by Roger Nlep was to attain a central position in the debates in Cameroon. With his ‘theory’ of le village electoral, Nlep takes a different view, arguing that ‘integration’ is the central issue in Cameroonian politics, and people can only be fully integrated in the place where they live if there is not un autre chez soi (another home). Therefore, if a person runs for office in Douala and still defends the interests of his village elsewhere, this must be considered as ‘political malversation’. The relation to the regime’s manipulation of voters’ lists, telling people to go ‘home’ and vote there, is quite clear.6
However, other notions on belonging, less directly linked to the vicissitudes of national politics, also emerged in these debates. A crucial statement, as seminal as it is succinct, came from Samuel Eboua, an éminence grise of Cameroonian politics, in an interview in the review Impact Tribu-Une:
Every Cameroonian is an allogène anywhere else in the country … apart from where his ancestors lived and … where his mortal remains will be buried. Everybody knows that only under exceptional circumstances will a Cameroonian be buried … elsewhere.
(Interview with Samuel Eboua in Impact Tribu-Une 1995: 5, 14)
Such statements emphasize how strongly the Cameroonian version of autochthony opposes the very idea of a national citizenship and the principle that every Cameroonian ‘has the right to settle in any place’, celebrated by the earlier Constitution of the time of nation-building. Geschiere and Nyamnjoh (2000) highlight the growing emphasis, in the context of autochthony politics, on the place of funeral as the ultimate test of belonging. Protagonists of autochthony repeat time and again that as long as immigrants, even if they are Cameroonian citizens, still want to be buried back home in the village, it is clear that this is their home and therefore where they should return to vote (see also Geschiere 2004; Monga 1995).
Similar arguments play a central role in the confrontations between autochthons and allogènes studied by Socpa (2003) in two very different parts of the country: the capital Yaoundé and the Logone area, where the first explosion of violence erupted after democratization. In both areas autochthony has a long history. In Yaoundé it was mainly the issue of land, the supposed tricks with which Bamileke immigrants succeeded in appropriating the land from the Beti auto-chthons. This created animosity between the groups ever since the French made the town the capital of the colony in 1921, but it was the new-style elections that made these tensions acute. Socpa shows that when Bamileke succeeded in buying a plot for building they continued to address the former owner as their ‘landlord’ (bailleur), while former owners talked about their ‘tenants’ (locataires) even though they had sold the land’ (ibid.: 117). Significantly, this implies in the latter’s view that these ‘tenants’ should behave as good ‘guests’ and not vote for the opposition – that is not try and rule in their ‘landlord’s house’. Socpa also highlights the elusive nature of the notion despite all the emphasis it receives. In the competition for political posts, autochthons take it for granted that they should rule in their own area, but some are apparently more autochthonous than others (ibid.: 208). After Biya’s party won the 1996 municipal elections in Yaoundé, furious fighting broke out between different local clans who each claimed the mayoral position on the grounds that they were the ‘real’ autochthons. Thus it is in Yaoundé, which remains a bastion of autochthony in the Cameroonian context, that the discourse shows its ‘segmentary’ character, subject as it is to a constant tendency to redefine the ‘real’ autochthon at ever-closer range.
The vicissitudes of autochthony in a very different part of the country – the sparsely populated forest area of the southeast – highlight other factors that can exacerbate these issues of belonging: the impact of globalization and the new style of development politics that emphasizes decentralization and ‘bypassing the state’. With the dramatic fall of world market prices for Cameroon’s main cash crops (cacao, coffee, and cotton), and the threatening depletion of its oil reserves, timber has become a crucial export product. Thus the southeast, long seen as the most backward part of the country, became a region of central interest because of its rich forest resources. However, there was vehement opposition from global ecological movements, strongly supported by the World Bank, against the further plundering of this ‘lung of the world’. The result was the new forest law of 1994, which the Cameroonian government only accepted under heavy pressure from the Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
As is typical in the new approach to development, the law emphasizes the role of local ‘communities’– unfortunately not further defined – as central stakeholders in the exploitation of the forest, advocating moreover far-reaching financial decentralization. Consequently, municipalities of a few thousand inhabitants were to receive almost half of the taxes on logging in their areas. This no doubt well-intentioned insistence on redistribution and protecting the ‘community’ immediately triggered fierce contestations over belonging in this sparsely populated area. Local communities here are notoriously diffuse, constantly splitting up according to malleable oppositions between lineage branches. In practice, the village committees that are supposed to manage the new ‘community forests’ are constantly divided over accusations that some people do not ‘really’ belong. Even kin can be unmasked as allogènes who belong in another village and should therefore join the new development project there. Clearly the segmentary tenor of the autochthony discourse is perpetuated, hence its violent implications. Even within the intimacy of these close-knit villages that seem lost in vast tracts of forest it has become possible to unmask one’s neighbour or relative as a stranger.
Côte D’ivoire: Autochthony and the Difficult Birth of a ‘New’ Nation
The trajectory of the autochthony notion in Côte d’Ivoire during the same troubled period of democratization is markedly different, notably in its relation to the nation. In Cameroon, autochthony seems to be some sort of rival for citizenship, denying the formal equality of all citizens and defending special forms of access to the state. In Côte d’Ivoire, by contrast, it refers to efforts to redefine or even ‘save’ the nation.
In this country, the concept of autochthony, again introduced by French colonials, was quickly appropriated by local spokesmen. One of the first signs of a new local vigour was the foundation, already in 1934, of an association that baptized itself Association de défense des intérêts des autochtones de Côte d’Ivoire (Arnaut 2004: 208; Dozon 2000a: 16). In those days, Senegalese and Dahomean clerks occupying the lower ranks in the colonial administration were the main targets for Ivorian autochthony, although other ‘strangers’ were soon to replace them. From the 1920s, cocoa production in the southern part of the colony attracted ever greater numbers of immigrants from the north who first came as labourers, but soon managed to create their own farms. Especially after Independence in 1960, this immigration became one of the mainstays in the miracle ivoirien, the spectacular flowering of the country’s economy. Both Dozon (2000b) and Arnaut (2004) mention the role of President Houphouët-Boigny’s pan-African ideas in his conscious encouragement of immigrants to push the ‘frontier’ of cocoa production ever further in the country’s southern areas. Local communities were encouraged to grant land to enterprising immigrants.
Chauveau (2000: 107) demonstrates that the autochthons’ main chance to continue to profit from their original rights was to hang on to their role as tuteurs, which allowed them to ask for regular ‘gifts’; over time, with the value of land rising, this ‘tutorship’ became a ‘permanent and conflict-ridden negotiation’. Immigrants came mainly from both the northern parts of the country and neighbouring countries (Mali and, especially, Burkina Faso). However, Dozon (2000b) emphasizes that southerners hardly distinguish between Ivorian citizens and others among these northerners. Commonly called ‘Dyula’, whether Ivorians or non-Ivorians, they all shared similar characteristics – many are Muslims – and this created an idea of le grand Nord from which all these people came.
However, towards the end of the 1980s Houpouët-Boigny’s miracle seemed to stagnate: the scarcity of land led to increasing tensions; world market prices for cocoa collapsed; and, because of the crisis, the return of young urbanites to the village increased rural tensions. This gave rise to a réactivation de l’idéologie de l’autochtonie (Chauveau 2000: 114). After the 1990 elections, the southern opposition parties openly accused Houphouët-Boigny of owing his re-election to the votes of ‘strangers’, and even alleged that he himself was some sort of ‘allochthon’ (Arnaut 2004: 216; Dozon 2000a: 16). The developments after his death in 1993, particularly since 2000, have confirmed the fears of several authors that such tensions would result in the consolidation of a cleavage between a bloc of self-proclaimed southern autochthons and the north (Chauveau 2000; Dozon 2000b; Losch 2000).
It is important to signal that this broad trajectory, which in retrospect appears almost inevitable, involved all sorts of twists and turns and may still involve a variety of different trajectories. Chauveau (2000) highlights, for instance, that the definition of the autochtone keeps shifting together with the moving frontier of the cocoa zone. Production began in the southeast of the country and expanded from there gradually to the southwest and the west. In earlier phases, Baule (from the centre of the southern part of the country) were the main migrants. They moved first into the southeast when cocoa production took off there. Later on, cocoa entered their own region, but they continued to expand, following the frontier into the western and southwestern parts of the country. Thus in the 1960s the claim to autochthony was mainly raised by groups in the southwest and west (notably the Bete and Dida) against Baule ‘immigrants’. Now, terms like allogène or immigrant are nearly synonymous with northerners. However, Chauveau warns that the Baule are very conscious of the fact that ‘real’ autochthons may at any time redirect their grievances against them (ibid.: 121). Since Houphouët-Boigny, the Baule may have been highly represented in the national centres of power and they may have been at the forefront of defending the autochthony of the southerners against northern immigrants, but they are increasingly reminded by the ‘true’ locals, especially in the southeast, that they are also immigrants and could therefore be marked as ‘fake’ autochthons.
After 1993, the defence of autochthony was couched in more ideological terms when Houpouët-Boigny’s successor, Henry Konan Bedié, launched the notion of ivoirité. He introduced this notion in order to oust one of his main rivals for the presidency, Alassane Ouattara, from the electoral competition on the grounds that both the latter’s parents came from Burkina Faso. Dozon (2000a) and, in rich detail, Arnaut (2004), show that this was part of a broader ideological offensive, trying to justify the need to distinguish Ivoiriens de souche (of the trunk) from others. Dozon speaks of an aéropage of intellectuals and writers around Bedié, brought together in the journal Curdiphe.7 Similarly, Politique Africaine published part of the Acts of a colloquium of this institute in which, for instance, Professor Niangoran-Bouah (the country’s first anthropologist, as director of the patrimoine culturel of the Ministry of Culture) proposed a ‘regrouping’ of ‘the ancestors of Ivorians, or Ivorians de souche’ (Curdiphe 2000). On the basis of this, he describes ‘the autochthons with a mythical origin’ and then les autochtones sans origine mythique. He insists – and this is clearly very important to him – that all these groups were already settled in the country on 10 March 1893 when ‘Ivory Coast was born’ (ibid.: 66).8 This tendency to develop ever-finer distinctions on very shaky basis (how can the learned anthropologist distinguish between groups who claim a mythical origin and those who do not?) is a striking example of the dangerous, ‘segmentary’ tendency of discourses of autochthony.
In such enumerations ivoirité seems to coincide with the notion of a southern autochthony, but Dozon (2000a) warns that, again, there are sub-texts hidden in Bédié’s celebration of ivoiriens de souche. At a deeper level it highlights the special vocation of the Baule (the group to which both Bédié and Houphouët-Boigny belonged) as some sort of super-autochthons. As part of the broader Akan group (which also includes the neighbouring Ashanti in Ghana), Baule see themselves as blessed with state-forming talents that distinguish them from other southern groups (like the more ‘segmentary’ Bete). The idea of Ivoiriens de souche therefore implies a double exclusion: on the one hand of northern immigrants, and on the other of certain southerners, supposedly less capable because of their cultural heritage to lead the nation.
Arnaut highlights that the discourse shifts not only per region but also over time. In 1999, Bédié was pushed aside by a military coup under general Guéï. In 2000, Laurent Gbagbo, another southern politician (but a Bete from the southwest), won the elections from which Ouattara, the candidate of the north, was excluded. However, in September 2002 a military insurgency in the north effectively split up the country between north and south, ‘the kind of geographical framework within which the discourse of autochthony flourishes so well in Côte d’Ivoire’ (Arnaut 2004: 240). Under Gbagbo the idea of ivoirité acquired a new lease of life, one in which there were new aspects: the ivoirité of Gbagbo had a more global outlook and it set up the ‘frontier’ in Bete land (rather than any Baule element) as a symbol of the nation, but now a new, emerging nation of Ivorians (ibid.: 242, 252). As Arnaut concludes, ‘Autochthony is … also a powerful discourse for a regional minority to reinvent itself as a “national” majority’ (ibid.: 247).
Thus, while autochthony in Côte d’Ivoire may remain more closely linked to the nation, albeit in purified form, it shows similar segmentary tendencies as elsewhere. Who the ‘real’ autochthon is remains an object of deep controversies, just as ‘the Other’ takes on constantly new guises.
Other African Settings
Another hotbed of autochthony is the Great Lakes Region, notably Rwanda, Burundi, and the adjacent parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC, specifically North and South Kivu). Stephen Jackson’s recent thesis (2003) on ‘War-Making’ in Goma, the capital of North Kivu, is based on research from the late 1990s when Congolese ‘rebels’, backed by Rwandan and Ugandan troops, conquered this part of the DRC. He speaks of ‘a breakneck chase to exert control over fluctuating identity categories’ (Jackson 2003: 247). His second chapter, on ‘Making History and Migratory Identities’, evokes a dazzling vortex of identities with constantly changing names and historical claims. However, a recurring dividing line in all this is apparently the opposition between autochthons and allochthons, and a fixed point of reference in defining the latter are the much-resented Banyarwanda –’Rwandophones’ who are constantly suspected of plotting to deliver the region to neighbouring Rwanda.
Yet, even this more-or-less fixed beacon has its ambiguities: it can refer to recent Hutu refugees (who fled to the DRC after the 1994 genocide of Tutsi in Rwanda and the subsequent takeover by Kagame and his Tutsi army); but it can also refer to their arch-opponents, the Banyamulenge, whom autochthons often call ‘Congolese Tutsi’. Jackson’s study highlights both the surprising resilience of the idea of a Congolese nation among the ‘autochthons’ of this remote part of the country and the fierce debates over history in this context: Where do these Banyamulenge come from? When did they settle in Congo? How can they claim to belong here as well? Jean-Claude Williame (1997) similarly highlights an important factor behind all these uncertainties. Former President Mobutu’s volatile manipulations of national citizenship initially promised the Banyamulenge recognition of their Congolese citizenship when he needed their support, which he subsequently denied when he required the support of other groups.
Liisa Malkki’s (1996) references to ‘autochtonisation’ as a central trait in the construction of a group history among Hutu refugees from Burundi similarly highlight the narrow link – albeit with a somewhat different tenor – between autochthony claims and the struggle over national citizenship. The Hutu historical claim for autochthony is essential to their hope of being liberated from their domination by Tutsi with their false pretence of superiority. However, Malkki also shows that such claims to being autochthonous have additional consequences: Hutu have to share their autochthony with Twa (often termed ‘pygmies’ and who constitute around 1 per cent of the population). This indicates how easily the notion of autochthony can be associated with an idea of ‘primitive’, as though in the first stage of development. There are similarities here with the term as it was originally conceived when it was first introduced in western Sudan by French civil servants, when almost ‘pre-human’ autochthons were seen as only being socialized by incoming foreign rulers. Malkki is certainly right to emphasize that for the Hutu refugees ‘autochthony can be a double-edged sword’ (ibid.: 63).
Various authors highlight the centrality of preoccupations with autochthony in recent political developments in other parts of Africa. Carola Lentz (2003) emphasizes the long history of these tensions, going back to pre-colonial times, in Burkina Faso and neighbouring parts of Ghana. However, she also notes that autochthony became a powerful political slogan, particularly in the 1990s, in the competition for posts, but even more so in struggles over access to land. The language of autochthony also seems to penetrate into Anglophone parts of the continent, not only in Cameroon (see above), but also in areas of northern Ghana that border on Burkina Faso and Togo (Wienia 2003). Yet even where the notion is not current or even explicit, similar discourses prove to be highly mobilizing. Comaroff and Comaroff (2001) are certainly right to compare the threatening upsurge of xenophobia in South Africa against the makwere-kwere (African immigrants from across the Limpopo) to the autochthony obsession elsewhere on the continent. In reverse, their analysis of the ‘zombification’ of these makwerekwere – the tendency to de-personalize immigrants – is highly relevant for the autochthony examples discussed above.9 Catherine Boone’s (2003) challenging comparison of developments in Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, and Ghana shows how easily similar discourses, again centring on access to land, cross-cut the border between Anglophone and Francophone Africa. Achim von Oppen’s recent Habilitationsschrift (2003) on Bounding Villages in Zambia similarly highlights the paradox of exclusionist discourses on locality and belonging that manage at the same time to remain open-ended and tuned in to globalization.
In general it might be useful to emphasize that this upsurge of autochthony in Africa is cause for surprise. Historians and anthropologists used to characterize African societies as oriented towards ‘wealth-in-people’ in contrast to conceptions of ‘wealth-in-things’ prevailing elsewhere (see Miller 1988; Guyer 1993, 2004). Africa would be characterized by its open forms of organization with special arrangements for incorporating people into local groups. This naturally encompasses elements such as very broad kinship terminology, adoption, and forms of clientelism. The current emphasis on autochthony and local belonging seems, therefore, to be quite a dramatic turn towards closure and exclusion. However, the examples presented here demonstrate that such apparent closure may deceive in view of the extreme malleability of autochthony discourse. It is doubtful whether one can simply characterize it as a ‘retraditionalization’ and a return to the village. Its exclusionary propensity is rather about limiting access to the state and new global circuits.10 Autochthony can present itself as a rival to national citizenship, but it can also pretend to reinforce the nation (often by ‘purifying’ it). Despite its appeal to local belonging as a self-evident criterion, its segmentary proclivity creates nagging uncertainties: one always risks being unmasked as ‘not really’ autochthonous. Indeed, the elusiveness of who is ‘really’ an autochthon gives it an ambiguous quality. African examples of recent autochthony movements suggest that the quest for belonging is a never-ending one, simultaneously promising safety yet raising basic insecurities.11
Conclusion
From the variations discussed above, autochthony clearly emerges as a perpetual mirror game (but certainly not an innocent one). Its apparent ‘naturalness’ hides a constant flux of redefining a kind of belonging that just as constantly seems to slip away. Its highly variable implications for the nation-state are quite striking. In Cameroon it presents itself as an alternative to the very idea of national citizenship. In Côte d’Ivoire, by contrast, it defines itself as the nation, albeit in a renovated, purified form. For the Athenians, long ago, it implied a kind of inborn propensity towards democracy. In modern times it seems more to express a deep disappointment about what democracy has become.
Despite these differences, however, there exist some general trends. A crucial one is highlighted by the classical glorification of autochthony in early Athens, in the challenging interpretation of Nicole Loraux (1996). She evokes the paradoxical instability of a discourse that celebrates stability. Autochthony may invoke staying-in-place as some sort of norm, but for historians movement is rather the norm: any history starts with a migration. Even the Athenian families that were so proud of their autochthony had myths of origin from elsewhere. Similarly, the Beti, who have now become the arch-autochthons of Cameroon, express their unity by a myth of an only partially successful crossing of the majestic Sanaga river on the back of a huge python. Autochthony needs movement as a counterpoint to define itself, and it is precisely this basic instability that makes it a potentially dangerous discourse.
The paradox between a promise of primordial security and a practice of basic insecurity seems to be of all times and places, whenever autochthony or similar notions (like ‘sons of the soil’) become current. Yet it is clear that the force of such notions and their emotional appeal can differ greatly. An obvious question remains why, especially during the 1990s, such discourses on belonging and exclusion became suddenly so strong that they began to dominate politics, not only in many parts of Africa but also elsewhere in the world. It is clear that there is a link with intensified processes of globalization, albeit one with varying outcomes. For Africa democratization and the new style of development policies were mentioned above as specific factors in this context. In Europe the growing concern about migrants, who supposedly refuse ‘cultural integration’, seems to play a big role. Clearly we need to follow much more closely the different historical trajectories in the articulation of globalization and the preoccupation with belonging which always has exclusion as its flipside.
Notes
1This text contains elements from my book (Geschiere 2009), notably from the Introduction and chapters 2, 3 and 4. Cf. also a text I published with Bambi Ceuppens (Ceuppens and Geschiere 2005).
2This is further complicated by the fact that since 2000 the UN working group began to use the term autochtone as the official translation in French of ‘indigenous’, which created considerable confusion in areas where this French term had been used with quite different meanings. See Gausset et al. (2012).
3There is an intriguing similarity between forms of ‘diarchy’ between land-chief and ruler (usually coming from elsewhere) described by anthropologists for Southeast Asia; for an overview article see Schefold (2001).
4This was certainly not limited to Francophone Africa. A notorious case was the ousting in Zambia of former President Kenneth Kaunda from political competition by his successor Frederick Chiluba on the grounds of Kaunda’s descent from foreigners.
5See Geschiere and Nyamnjoh (2000) and Konings (2001) on the ‘Assocation of the Elites of the Tenth Province’, an imagined province (Cameroon has only nine provinces), proclaimed by elites who feel excluded from belonging anywhere else.
6For an overview of more extreme voices (for instance on the supposed ‘ethnofascism’ of Bamileke), see Geschiere and Nyamnjoh (2000).
7This stands for Cellule universitaire de recherche et de diffusion des idées et actions du président Konan Bédié.
8See Arnaut (2004) for a discussion of similar texts.
9On Ghanaian immigrants in Botswana see also van Dijk (2003).
10Cf. Mbembe’s and Simone’s emphasis, quoted above, on the open-endedness of these discourses.
11For reasons of space we can not address here the relation with alternative notions of belonging that seems to feed on people’s perception that the continent is in crisis. Notably a comparison with the upsurge of Pentecostalism would be of interest since it clearly offers a different sense of belonging from autochthony. Most authors (cf. Meyer 1999) signal Pentecostalists’ deep distrust of ‘the village’ and ‘the family’ equated with the Devil; instead they belong to a (global?) community of ‘born-agains’. However, for Malawi, Englund (2004) emphasizes the close links urban Pentecostalists retain with their village of origin. Apparently in the relation between autochthony and Pentecostalism, as seemingly opposite discourses on belonging, varying contradictions and articulations are possible.
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