Abstract
This chapter takes a postcolonial angle to foreground the precarious conditions of migrants by transcending cultural, national, and ideological boundaries to demonstrate the roots of modern migration crises. The chapter historically interrogates the geo-cultural politics of space in relation to the technical manipulations of race by highlighting histories of colonization, both as a catalyst in the creation of a global diaspora and the cause of forced migrations. It argues that the string holding up the paradoxes of race, indentured labor, and perceptions of belonging as it relates to migration and the diaspora, is the unequal relationship between the “dominant” and its supposedly weak “subaltern” subjects.
Similar content being viewed by others
Keywords
Introduction
This chapter concerns itself with the root cause of migrants across Europe and North America, particularly the period of colonial conquests (1881–1914) as it affects racial minorities or Black demographics globally, likewise its implications on the political economy of the West as well as the racial manipulations to justify its course. Though focused on the so-called Third World, among others, that have experienced colonialism, the chapter transcends cultural and national boundaries to delineate the situation-ship of migrating people under a globally entrenched imperialism.
Many have forgotten that most of the destination countries for present-day migrating people by virtue of having invaded or colonized countries of these migrants, have involuntarily left future invitation letters to their own countries at the point of departure, thereby “creating a fault line that lives on” (Mbembe, 2017: 6). This is to say, the migration challenge is not only a problem that colonized nations have to grapple with but also a Western problem. One could argue the situation is akin to that of a prisoner and the warden being paradoxically yoked under incarceration: the prisoner-nations for their wealth of resources and the warden-west to watch over the prisoner-nations as keepers of their treasures. The migration/diaspora challenges fit into the Panopticon concept of surveillance where the observers are also implicated in their observation and by so doing have their fate bound up with the observed (Bentham, 2000: 177; Foucault, 1995: 204, 207, see also Bentham, 1995).
The intrusion of the African space on the so-called civilizing missions, for example, has played the West into a compromising position of dependence and reliability for sustenance. One then wonders whether it was the African or non-Western worldview that birthed colonialism. Or, should we believe that the erosion of non-Western cultural values will make Western thought the gold standard for rights (re)presentation, social justice, and racial equality?
The issue of diaspora/migration is a modern world problem because of its globalizing effect on the socioeconomic and political histories of the global North and the global South. Akyeampong (2013: 170) is right in stating that “the history of the modern world cannot be divorced from the historical processes of slavery and indentured labor” because it triggered off the initial migrations of racialized people that have caused the present challenges of belonging, forging a new identity to fit one’s demographic space or adopted space. While a surging interest locates instances of moral miscalculations and geopolitical divisions that have been caused by the migration crisis, our focus interrogates the West’s attraction—appetite, for black wealth, and how the politics of occupied spaces influence the technicalities of race/racism.
This chapter explores the praxis of new historicism and postcolonial discourses to delineate histories of colonization as spurred by capitalist explorations that instigate the formation of diasporic consciousness. It interrogates limitations of migrants in the context of their “conditional situation-ship” which transcends cultural and national borders by holding colonial conquests responsible for the dispersal of populations, particularly the creation of boundaries for economic exploitations in the global South. The chapter interrogates how a migrant consciousness is formed, thematically delineates the role of colonialism in the creation of the diaspora/displacement, as well as demonstrates the capitalist implications of colonial boundaries. It also indicates how power dynamics and the politics of denial of the global North are responsible for the initial batches of migration, and how regions—spaces—inform and influence the poetics of race.
Formation of a Migrant Consciousness
C. L. R James (1989) referred to the hero of one of the most successful enslaved people’s revolutions in recorded history saying, “Toussaint [Louverture] did not make the revolution. It was the revolution that made Toussaint” (x). In tandem with the present challenges of movement, it could be argued that the colonized nations did not create the migrant, but it is the colonial powers that create the migrants and the problems in-between. Though contemporary migration has shown a leaning toward Third-Worldism, in the sense that most migrants are from nation-states in Latin America and Africa and have struggled economically and politically, spurring batches of migrants to look elsewhere, is important to understand that contemporary migrations are not necessarily decided along racial, ideological or religious lines; rather, they are united in a transnational world by their situation or a “cultural mobility” (Greenblatt, 2010) that the challenges of the present have imposed on them. Along this line of logic, the migrants fall short of reclaiming control of their lives and situations, and it is therefore important to delve into the history and roots of the creation of this “situation-ship,” and those responsible for it which in most cases concern more than one nation or state. In light of this chaotic atmosphere, the notion of cultural mobility by Greenblatt et al. (2010) is significant:
We need to understand colonization, exile, emigration, wandering, contamination, and unintended consequences, along with the fierce compulsion of greed, longing, and restlessness, for it is these disruptive forces that principally shape the history and diffusion of identity and language, and not a rooted sense of cultural legitimacy. At the same time, we need to account for the persistence, over very long periods and in the face of radical disruption, of cultural identities for which substantial numbers of people are willing to make extreme sacrifices, including life itself (2).
The issue of migration is one of life and death. There are people whose prevailing circumstances are worse than their fears of facing border patrols or being alienated from spaces they have taken up residence or found themselves by geo-political accidents. What often traps migrating people in a complex web of possibilities is the struggle to “negotiate the tension between articulating a sense of self (in its wholeness and unity) and interrogating a sense of a finished self (on the basis of gender, class, race, ethnicity, nationality)” (Saul, 2006: 130). To deal with the diaspora is to confront a “roaming subject” caught up in a tension of relational selves and a restless wave of circumstances. This sophistication is teased out of the migrant experience to which Rushdie (1991) posits:
The effect of mass migration has been the creation of radically new types of human being: people who root themselves in ideas rather than places, in memories as much as in material things; people who have been obliged to define themselves – because they are so defined by others; people in whose deepest selves strange fusions occur, unprecedented unions between what they were and where they find themselves. The migrant suspects reality: having experienced several ways of being, he understands their illusory nature. To see things plainly, you have to cross a frontier (124–125).
The masterstroke of Rushdie’s assertion concerning this new breed of migrants is the pluralism of their experiences, sense of acculturation, and willingness to improvise on the journey of self-identification, and definition in spite of the views of racial absolutists. It aligns with the position of Soyinka (2011) in his discussion with Tommie Shelby on the concept of the Global Black when he posits, “you can be what you are and yet have an allegiance to what unites you with other nationalities within the same newly-created state border” (40). It is this desire to transcend both the structure of the nation-state and the constraints of ethnicity and national particularity that Gilroy (1993: 19) advocates in The Black Atlantic. Gilroy (2002) observes that “it is the terrifying prospect of conquest by aliens that is for many Brits, the most vivid and constant form of elemental jeopardy” (xxvii). Ironically, the declassification of this racial register is what Coates (2015) celebrates about being at Howard University—called The Mecca—because individuals accepted their migratory status but with rights as citizens or permanent residents.
This culminates fears in the hearts of neocolonialists whether at the edges of Western borders or administrative blocks of the metropole. They would have to understand that industrialized economies and the growth of modern industries will certainly birth a color problem, at the root of which are urbanized or detribalized natives (Mamdani, 1996: 6; see also Du Bois, 2015: 15). It is to this city space that “the migrants, the minorities, the diaspora come to change the history of the nation, marking the liminality of cultural identity, producing the double-edge discourse of social territories and temporalities” (Bhabha, 2000: 320). But racism has not been taken as a measure of modernization or national progress, it was “generated in part by the move towards a political discourse which aligned ‘race’ closely to the idea of national belonging and which stressed complex cultural difference rather than simple biological hierarchy” (Gilroy, 2002: xxxiv; 1993: 10).
Mamdani (1996) further suggests that the way to “stabilize racial domination (territorial segregation) was to ground it in a politically enforced system of ethnic pluralism (institutional segregation), so that everyone, victims no less than beneficiaries, may appear as minorities” (6). This, too, is unreliable as it could be inferred that the quest for expanding capital markets demands more hands and more expertise to sustain it and therefore changes the migrant population at any given time. There are efforts in recent history to segregate migrating people from Africa, for instance, through a door-keepers’ law that cherry-picks on passports and sometimes demands unassailable requirements claimed to be well-intentioned for the safety of the host, but will never be reversed in the case of the Other (see Chap. 6).
Boehmer (2017) argues that “the nation is a space on which the people and the state entity ‘collude’ in generating and exchanging the signification of power, while narrative at once reflects on, and participates in, this process” (141). If the nation-state is a formation of colluding ideas, a rainbow of differences unified by a shared narrative, who then is the migrant? How do we disambiguate the claim made by Quayson and Daswani (2013: 4) that the “diaspora of whatever character, must not be perceived as a discreet entity but rather as being formed out of a series of contradictory convergences of peoples, ideas, and even cultural orientation?” This is why Greenblatt (2010) submits that “even in places that at first glance are characterized more by homogeneity and stasis than by pluralism and change, cultural circuits facilitating motion are at work” (5). Whatever becomes the defining tenet of our nationhood “is imbricated in the overriding logic of exploitation and deception” (Boehmer 143). This is so because the “diaspora are often regarded as posing challenges, if not threat, to nation-states, because the very ‘construction of diasporas is fundamentally about the efforts to sustain social boundaries across space and time to make oneself at home in the world” (Al-Rustom, 2013: 480). Bhabha (2000) attests to this when he submits that “it is by living on the borderline of history and language, on the limits of race and gender, that we are in a position to translate the differences between them into a kind of solidarity” (320).
The tension of the migrants’ makeshift existence robs them of a sense of themselves and sometimes the space they try to occupy. This displacement is captured by Mphana (2021) as follows: “I am often a stranger to myself. I have no place of origin, no home. I keep remembering everything in two time zones at once. Who knows, maybe I myself am called something other than myself” (18). The poem is culled from a collection titled The Rinehart Frames, which ironically resonates with Rinehart, a character in Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (1995) in which the Black protagonist is “invisible” because White people refused to see him and therefore resolves to be irresponsible stating that “responsibility rests upon recognition, and recognition is a form of agreement” (19). In the context of this chapter, the diaspora or the migrants have become invisible and subaltern subjects, because their rights are not only unrecognized but have been denied representation. By enunciating the plight of the migrant, Mphanza suggests he might be called something other than himself, which is true, because the migrant is also called diaspora.
Ethno-politicized divisions and wars of conquests or religious crusades for territorial expansion have spurred migrations of every type. Of all these forces whether internal or external, the most outstanding factor in the historiography of migration or the diaspora is colonialism and its contingent forms of imperialism.
Colonialism and the Creation of the Diaspora
The migration narrative is as old as every civilization and peculiar to every group. It is important to locate this movement through a new historicist discourse because it helps to foreground how the “migration crisis” presently being witnessed gained momentum and the implication of seeing it as a challenge to both the global North and South. There have been series of migrations across Africa which are considered internal and external in minor cases, but the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885 was a monumental period that triggered a cause and effect on the African exodus. It is worthy to note that authoritative British imperialism, as C.A. Bayly observes, came of age as early as 1783–1820, some hundreds of years before the Partition of Africa (Boehmer, 2005: 29). Though colonizers like King Leopold of Belgium was still in the Congo carrying out his executioner’s exploitation, Mamdani (1996) observes that “the end of slavery in the Western hemisphere underlined the practical need for organizing a new regime of compulsion, except this time with newly acquired African possession” (37). This Conference detonated the explosives of the major crisis that sparked African migrations, enforced and institutionalized the enslavement, exploitation, objectification, commodification, defilement of spiritual grooves, environmental assaults, desecration of the sociocultural fabric, and Afrocentric sensibility of the African people. It officialized the right of the European colonizers which disguised itself with an evangelical mission of saving the soul of the Noble Savage (more so in North America), to become a full-blown militarized capitalist venture where “writing in the form of treaties was used to claim territory” (Boehmer, 2005: 14). And this highlights one of the major concerns of looking at the migration challenge through a new historicist lens because it is a space where power relations are made visible.
Ngūgī in A Grain of Wheat (2002) tells of this theatre of historical manipulation by illustrating how religion was first introduced, followed by men that carried “bamboo poles that vomit fire and smoke” (41), men who constructed the railways for carting away raw materials that served their interests. The welded weapons were used to create “masters willing to risk their lives, and a class of slaves who gave in to their natural fear of death” (Fukuyama, 1992: xvii). Note also that not all the skilled Indian workers between 1887 and 1968 who were among laborers that constructed the Kenyan railways returned “home.” Some oscillated between the two countries, making Kenya a second homeland that gives them territorial and generational claim (Aiyar, 2015: 7). In the manner that Indians brought to South Africa for different purposes later became colonizers through the enslavement of Black South Africans, the Indians dislocated from their ancestral space—occupied by Britain—were imposed on Kenya, making this space occupation a migration anchored on double displacements. Unfortunately, the emphasis on territorial and racially bound scholarship on Kenya resulted in the historiographical marginality of Indians. This demonstrates the absence of Indians in mainstream Kenyan politics despite their contributions. It also illustrates that “being African, Indian, and Kenyan signified historically specific affiliations and concerns that shifted over time and space” (20).
Colonizers, in general, always relocate influential leaders or oppositions. This is to say that the root causes of this relocation—migration—are both internal and external in the sense that it was caused by both European colonization as well as wars of conquests among indigenous peoples. An example could be drawn from the arrest and deportation of Nana Agyeman Prempeh I of the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana) in 1896 to Freetown Sierra Leone. Slaves from the United States were also relocated there and finally to Seychelles Island in 1900. Akurang-Perry and Indome (2018) posit that the British earlier on relocated King Amoaka Atta of Akyem Abuakwa and his royal family to Lagos (Nigeria) between 1880 and 1885 for alleged slave dealing (376). Falola (2009) avers that King Jaja of Opobo, for opposing the British advance into the interior market, was crushed and exiled in 1887; King Nana Olomu of Itsekiri on the Benin River was removed from his base at Ebrohimi in 1894; King Ibanichuka of Okrika was removed and exiled in 1898 (2); Oba Ovonramwen was exiled to Calabar in 1897 (11).
Nigeria and Cameroon, for instance, fought over the Bakassi Peninsula which was finally ceded to Cameroon under the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in spite of thousands of Yoruba-speaking ethnic group identifying as Nigerians, thereby creating an internal diaspora. The geo-cultural politics in play did not put into consideration the aspirations of the people in the lived spaces; it became a tussle between two superpowers—the English and the French, over a supposedly two independent African states. The colonialists, though powerful in their own right, were unfortunately “instruments in the hands of economic destiny” (James, 1989: x) because they were driven by capitalist gains, not the sociocultural factors at hand. This creates an “Intra-African diaspora,” which is the dispersion of African groups from one part of the continent to another (Anyaduba, 2016: 513). Thus, passports have been placed between a free space where the inhabitants not long ago did not need travel documents or called by a different name under a different constitution. This policy of forced migration as informed by intimidation, a divide-and-conquer mentality of the imperialists, has fast-tracked the conquering phases of European colonization.
The Berlin Conference as supported by Article XI, Berlin Act of 1885 (Kyle, 1999: 13) which was the division of people “into policies and stocks” (Coates, 2015: 61), becomes the enabler of most migration that happened during colonization and “was at the root of the epochal inception of this new imperialism and the rivalry that defined its hegemonic promulgation” as captured by William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (Chandler, 2021: 41). This very act “offered a macabre bouquet of total colonization of Africa to the imperialists who effectively occupied their spheres of influence” (Akurang-Perry & Indome, 2018: 375). It also marked what Chandler calls the “single most distinctive form of accumulation within what is now thought of as Western Europe derived from the trade and exploitation of these rivers of Black Gold” (41). The gravity of this venture caused James (1989) to assert “it was easier to find decency, gratitude, justice and humanity in a cage of starving tigers than in the council of imperialism” (282).
Western powers only had 25 percent of Africa in 1878—which is already too much for a continent of the size of Africa, but as at the eve of WWI (1914–1918), it held 90 percent. France had the largest share, followed by Britain, Germany, Italy, Belgium—King Leopold took Congo as a personal trust—and Portugal exerted almost similar shares (Chatterjee, 2012: 269). Chatterjee notes that while writing in 1916, Vladimir Lenin observed that the colonial policies of the capitalist countries have completed the seizure of the unoccupied territories of our planet. This means that in the future, territories could only pass from one owner to another (269). This raises the question of what prompted WWI: European loss of power and living space, its balance, or the fight for relevance?
The forceful seizure of spaces once belonging to Africa is informed by the poetics of race. Hence, the need to justify it. In 1739, the Bordeaux’s Royal Academy of Sciences under Louis XIV set up a prize to justify blackness which was in tandem with growing dependence of European economies on African slave labor. For over a century, they defined human variation in terms of hierarchy and fixed categories with anatomical or humoral claims, including embryology, divine providence, and blackness as a moral defect among other reasons (Gates & Curran, 2022: 109, 133, 266). Thus, from Enlightenment thinkers like David Hume, G. W Hegel, and Immanuel Kant who justified the inferiority of the Black race by challenging anyone to cite black intellectual acumen either in science or human relations, to Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species (1859), the notions of race and matrices of belonging were ideologically and geographically encrypted at the same time targeted to serve Western interests (Kant, 2011: 58; Hume, 1888: 614). Ironically, in the present dispensation, individuals with exceptional skills are sometimes offered incredible opportunities in order to maintain them if they contribute to the agenda of their host communities. Taken together, Konadu (2018) surmises how the past centuries have witnessed unprecedented forms of forced migrations, overlapping cultures and histories that coalesced into servile and racialized categories bordering the Mediterranean Sea, Indian Ocean, and Atlantic Ocean (942).
Large populations were dispersed in this struggle; there are those relocating to safety or caught up in the mayhem midway to their destinations. What was more important in this division was not about who got what but that the economic zones have been safeguarded for the financial groups and their interests (Fanon, 2004: 27). Akurang-Perry and Indome (2018) observe that in the early colonial period, “migration was the movement away from colonial conquest, while in the late colonial period, voluntary migration was the pull of social change and urbanization” (373). They further stated that the mode and manner of the implementation of colonial policies by imperialists to a large extent determined the forms and timing of African migration (374). It is regrettable that in the course of this movement, as Falola (2002) observes, in exchange for productive labor and tropical products, Africans received goods of less significance like firearms to fight more wars to create more slaves that were beneficial to Western political elite (110). Slave raiding during this period depleted populations of exploited societies as war parties were forced to travel distances to reduce chances of successful raids (Lovejoy, 2002: 29). This caused streams of migrations, particularly by minorities who sought fortunes elsewhere.
The Capitalist Implications of Colonial Boundaries on Migrants
One of the most instrumental phenomena that has spurred colonialism and inspired the abolition of slave trade, propagated the creation of the diaspora, is the hunger for raw materials and cheap labor for Western industries. This did not happen from mere justification of cultural difference; it comes in the form of violation of national boundaries which ironically was the benchmark of sovereign states in the Europe of seventeenth and eighteenth centuries after the 30-years war. Europe during this period created treaties to mark their territorial limits, but when they found empires overseas, they were unconcerned about violating the sovereignty of the conquered nations. They claimed “there was no international law; the only law that prevailed was the law of force and conquest” (Chatterjee, 2004: 93). This gave colonial explorers and merchants like the Niger or East Indian Company the impetus to invade territories or indigenous spaces on behalf of The Crown. It is in line with this imperialist posturing that most of what came to be called The Horn of Africa comprising Somalia, Ethiopia, and parts of Sudan bordering the Red Sea was brought under subjugation by three key actors of the Scramble for Africa: Britain, France, and Italy.
Following the colonial style of seizing territory by running up one’s flag, rendering it territorium nullius—as “uninhabited and masterless land,” and overriding natives’ rights and having sovereignty over it (Ghosh, 2020: 95; Mbembe, 2001: 183), Italy acquired the territory that later became Eritrea in 1869. The French took Somaliland and some parts of Djibouti in 1885 and Britain took a slice of it in 1887 (Woodward, 2002: 15). This region became a site or a confiscated space for superpower rivalry. Taking a step back, the Suez Canal was built in 1869 by a Frenchman, Ferdinand de Lesseps, and bought by Britain (from a single individual not minding territorial violation) who in 1882 seized control of Egypt. Woodward (2002) argues that this strategic rivalry for Egypt has been seen as the spring from which European Scramble for Africa flowed.
Cajetan (2018) contributes to this discourse when he interrogates postcolonial resistance and ecological violence that has bestridden an African space like Somalia where incessant civil wars “opened the environment up for exploitation” and the country’s territorial space became “subjected to illegal fishing and dumping of toxic waste by Western vessels” (14). This single act ruined the source of livelihood of the people and displaced them from their ancestral space. Even if they were to remain, they will not be able to compete with commercial farmers with modern vessels smuggling out its resources with impunity. It is important to also state that thousands of migrants scattered all over the world came from this region. But most part of the problem—if not the first—concerning ethnic rivalries and civil wars (1977–present) that spurred phases of migrations from this region was due to the international boundaries bequeathed by the departing imperial powers (Woodward, 2002: 3).
Another compelling example of the formation of White boundaries for the exploitation of Black labor, or “turning human beings into property by stripping them of every element that made them individuals” (Hannah-Jones et al., 2021: 108), is the American history of the Black experience. Baldwin who at a point had to migrate from the United States to France due to the racial discrimination (recounted in Nobody Knows My Name, 1993) has in his much-publicized debate with William Buckley Jr. at the Cambridge Union in 1965 lamented how the America soil is filled with corpses of his ancestors for over 400 years while his citizenship status is still being questioned. The African American experience is central to the discourse of migration because they are one of the most transitional groups that have been dislocated from their homelands and traded as chattels throughout the Americas. The conditional situation-ship of enslaved migrants corresponds to the industrial potentials of the South when it mattered to their “masters,” but lacking compensation for their labor even after a Civil War (McPherson, 2015: vii).
Enslavement “was one of the central mechanisms through which European [and American] pretension of universal domination was made manifest” (Mbembe, 2021: 57). The insignificant factor of the Self and Other driven by skin pigmentation continues to disenfranchise Africans, African Americans, among other demographics that contributed to its success and emergence as a World Power. Chattel slavery was the very spine of the country’s rise that one of its apologists claimed it “was the nursing mother of the property of the North” (Desmond, 2021: 353). Of the many instances where Blacks have been cheated out of their inheritance, two formidable examples stood out in relation to race and migration: the Great Migration, and the attack on Elaine and the Greenwood District.
The Great Migration of African Americans was roused after the promises of Reconstruction failed to redistribute land to former slaves which would have changed the southern economic landscape, as it also led southern states to restore a racist oligarchy in their social and political system (Gates, 2019: 61–66; Kilson, 2014: 9). The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) armed themselves with Jim Crow Laws and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 that permitted the forceful return of fugitives from slavery residing in free states (Hannah-Jones et al., 2021: 404), thereby causing a northbound migration from the South. Wilkerson (2010: 24) posits that these migrations started in batches from about 1882, 1915, and was at its peak in 1919 and through WWII to the 1970s (see also McPherson, 2015; Fabre & O’Meally, 1994). The year 1919 is very significant in the discourse of identity and race which is tied to belonging because it marked the arrival of the 369th Infantry Regiment that fought WWI to Harlem. But the triumph was short-lived as White people were intimidated by the prospects of African Americans in uniforms with rights to claim full citizenship. It sparked a race riot so bloody that it was called Red Summer (Tally, 2007: xv).
Another fitting example is the year 1919, in the town of Elaine, Arkansas, when a dispute broke out between wealthy landowners and African American sharecroppers and lives were lost. Blacks who escaped left the town for good (Anderson, 2021: 486). A similar example could be drawn when the 4th Tennessee Infantry Regiment destroyed Black homes because a kind sheriff tried to spare a Black man from a White lynch mob (488). Another crucial incident was the massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921. White people backed by law attacked Greenwood District which was one of the wealthiest Black towns that it was referred to as the Black Wall Street—the original Wall Street was built by the enslaved at a site that served as the city’s first organized auction in 1711 (Miles, 2019: 40), leaving behind deaths and damaged businesses (Alexander & Alexander, 2021: 933). This state-sanctioned violence has been reenacted in Levittown, Pennsylvania, in 1954 when a crowd mobilized to evict the first African American family—Bill Myers—to move to an all-White neighborhood (Rothstein, 2017: 196). These incidents historicize how the legacy of racial terror affects black wealth, diasporic movements, and migration. Incidents of this nature illustrate what it means to live on the margins of societies, and resonate with the view shared by Young (2004) that “the legacy of colonialism is as much a problem for the West as it is for the scarred lands in the world beyond” (165).
The Colonial Roots of Forced Migration and Power Dynamics
Human movement is the most static variable in the development of human progress. However, it is important to note whose progress it is and to what degree and at whose expense? African migration intensified at the end of WWI and the beginning of WWII because the wars depleted the resources of the powers involved both at home and abroad. The French, for instance, tried to cushion their fall by embarking on a policy of compulsory cultivation of cotton in the Upper Volta, Mali, and Niger. This facilitated the forced migration of many French colonial subjects, particularly the Mossi and Dagari in the Upper Volta district to the Gold Coast. Akurang-Perry and Indome (2018) observe that in Kenya, for instance, the Resident Ordinance of 1918, the Labor Circular of 1919, and Native Registration Ordinance of 1920 aimed at making African laborers work on European farms and plantations—which was not theirs in the first place—caused massive migrations within and outside of Kenya.
The Land and Freedom Army (LFA) dubbed the Mau Mau by the British revolted against colonial domination in 1952 (Ngūgī, 2016: 11), causing migration challenges due to re-habitation that caused landlessness without reformulating the country’s long-standing agrarian policy of reserving Highlands for European settlers. Though unjust land ownership has been condemned by the Royal Commission of 1953–1955, aggrieved peasants who have lost out in litigation over land disputes also wish to benefit from opportunities presented by cash-crop farming (Maloba, 1993: 149). To ensure supply of free labor, housing was provided for Kenyans at farms and mines—of which wage and price of produce are determined by settlers—but legislation was needed to issue rooms at the urban settlements (Mosley, 2009: 125,134; see also Alao, 2006).
Again, the activation of Private Location Ordinances of 1902, as practiced in Rhodesia, low employment, among other factors, contributed to armed struggles that displaced Kenyans to neighboring countries. In the case of Nigeria, the Collective Punishment Ordinance of 1909 empowered colonial officers to punish groups, villages, or towns for the transgression of a member (Falola, 2009: 26). This caused the displacement of people to more peaceful environments. Similarly, in the Belgian Congo, records have it that in 1935, over 900,000 peasants were involved in compulsory cultivation and production of cotton and rubber which had caused migration to other parts of the Congo with less demand after its wealth had been drained by the colonizers (Davidson, 2005: 219). In most of the occupied territories of Africa, British imperialists passed labor ordinances that triggered several batches of migrations.
The imperialist instinct to push colonies to the brink for the benefit of Western economies continues to rear its tentacles across the globe and enhance forced migrations. If the global North complains about migrations from the global South, she had to look at how she destroyed indigenous communities, industries, and forced poor populations into seeking better fortunes elsewhere. Marx (2008) observes that England, in causing a social revolution in Hindostan, for instance, was wrong, but concludes that “whatever have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution” (212).
England has unconsciously played a vital role in spurring a migration revolution and sustaining its flow and narratives. The insurrections and mishandling of power led to the division and breaking away of Indian Muslims to Pakistan during the Partition. Similar friction created the state of Bangladesh in 1971 with refugee camps and squatter colonies in West Bengal and Calcutta (Chatterjee, 2020: 110; Hajari, 2015). Ironically, the Partition was a space for double freedom for Muslims in East Pakistan of 1947. They were freed from both British rule and the dominant Hindu ruling class (Chakrabarty, 2002: 116).
The issue of genocides or the aftermath of mass atrocities cannot be understated because it has become one of the major veins pumping blood to every artery-corner saturated with migration challenges. Of much significance in this discourse is the colonial factor and its rationalization in the European imagination. Anyaduba (2021) contends that genocides occurring in the Postcolony are “derived mainly from the twin legacies of European colonization and modernity,” through the nation-state system foisted on the people. This is based on “the ideas of sovereignty, and political and moral subjectivity that the system enabled and depended on” (2). Mamdani (2012) sees the colonial powers as the first political fundamentalists who institutionalized discrimination through the racialization and tribalization of societies by creating “a hierarchy of rights as an entitlement of different races said to occupy different positions on the civilizational ladder” (50). This splitting of populations into privileging groups became the bedrock of mass atrocities in the Postcolony, igniting streams of migrations.
In fact, the “colonial desire to divide and classify, to create hierarchies and produce difference, leaves behind wounds and scars” (Mbembe, 2017: 6) as witnessed in the Namibian, Sudanese, Congolese, Biafran, Burundian, Rwandan, and Armenian massacres. Prunier (2009) argues that the Rwandan massacre which has caused an unceasing stream of migrants across the world “could never have occurred without the manic cultural engineering of the Belgian colonial authorities” (xxx). Let us not forget that the 1948 Convention on the Prevention of Genocide was flunked during this massacre as the West had its media following its development, but without an immediate humanitarian response. Prunier again observes that the bureaucracy of the United Nations (UN), obsessed with its preferred goal, forfeited local opinions of those on board to counter it. After all, it is a “Third World” catastrophe.
Of Western Sensibilities and the Politics of Denial
The Brexit failed to proffer solutions to the challenges of migration in the United Kingdom (UK), and it seems to be getting worse as the influx of people mostly from formerly colonized nation-states are on the rise. Britain infamously devised a plan of relocating “illegal” migrants to Rwanda. The political calculation for this movement is ill-advised on several fronts. It highlights global inequality, especially for an African country not responsible for the migration. This also complicates why a country that has witnessed firsthand the tragic consequences of colonial divisions and instrumentalization should accept, decades later, to join forces with a former European power to deny human rights to migrating people, the majority of whom are Black and racialized people. The migration situation is akin to when slavery was woven into the British social fabric through its active participation (1560s–1807) but disguised as though it was an overseas event unfolding by itself.
What makes it ironic and contradictory is the fact that the UK is inviting people just like the Macmillan Government did (Rushdie, 1991: 133), has armies of uncompensated volunteers of the Windrush Generation knocking at its doors (Gentleman, 2019: 141–152), but will grant High Potential Individual (HPI) visas to “the best and brightest” (Bubola, 2022) from the first 50 non-UK universities of the world. Beside China and India, Nigeria has the highest number of international students in the UK (International Student Recruitment Date, 2022), and the visa’s stipulation of non-UK graduates is a tactical, political, and steeped in racial exclusion associated with Third-Worldism. The political impulse accommodates contributors to its economy but robs local communities the agency of its budding societal transformers. This policy is steeped in geo-cultural politics of social difference and elitist or middle-class space creation.
Chakrabarty (2002) observes a similar irony in British history of Colonial India and remarks that “the British became political liberals at home and at the same time as they became imperialists abroad” (85). It appears as a move to restock contributors to UK’s political economy lost in the Brexit movement. This is akin to the demand for indentured labor shortly after the exodus of slaves from the plantations during slavery. It challenges the moral right and cultural boundaries that inform modern identity and the politics of space in a globalized world. While it could be viewed against the backdrop of a European assumption of cultural superiority and political supremacy, it “had a salient effect of what one may call the interiorized realm of European experience – namely, the space of sense and sensibility” creation (Gikandi, 2011: 8).
Politics of Space and Its Interface with the Poetics of Race
Quayson (2013) captures the crux of migration politics of space as it informs and is informed by the poetics of race when he submits that:
Population dispersal appears to have been a central plank of colonial governmentality and space-making. Space-making itself involved not just the constitution of a geographically demarcated political reality but was first and foremost the projection of a series of sociopolitical dimensions onto geographic space. These sociopolitical dimensions involved society and politics as well as economy, culture, and a wide range of symbolic and decisive practices. Colonial space-making is thus to be understood in terms of the relations that were structurally generated and contested across interrelated vectors throughout the colonial encounter, with population dispersal being central to the entire process (144).
This demonstrates that the present migrants do not fit into the space structure of their modern societies as designed. It is easily forgotten that between 1630 and 1780, far more Africans than Europeans disembarked in Great Britain’s Atlantic colonies (Mbembe, 2017: 14) because it served its capitalist interests. Following this line of logic, Armstrong (2018) contends that spatial politics is at the heart of migration, especially “in cases where the politics of place and space is complicated by the politics of otherness present in many migration narratives” (224). Most importantly, the question of “who” the migrant is and “where” the migrant comes from informs the type of displacement experience. History shows a repetitive trajectory in the United Kingdom (UK) where manifestation of racial hatred sent Blacks “back” to Africa or the Caribbean. This is to maintain White racial purity by deporting Blacks in lieu of granting equality with Whites (Lowe, 2015: 68). For instance, Chinese and South Asian natives were “imported” to work in the West Indies, Peru, Cuba, Australia, Brazil, the United States, Hawaii, Fiji, South Africa, and Mauritius. However, the population dispersal policies of colonial governments in Britain sent London’s Black poor to Sierra Leone (1786–1791); indentured South Asian and Chinese laborers to East Africa and the Caribbean (1850–1920s); and much could be said about what their policies resulted to in the 1947 Partition of India (Quayson, 2013: 145). Following the historiography of modern slavery, it illustrates that the present deportation of migrants by Britain is the playing of an old script to a new audience.
In Race-ing Justice, En-Gendering Power, Morrison (1992) argues that if self-hatred is the fruit of being hated, it also mirrors the “image of the aggressively inverted act of self-denial that is already at work in all racism, bigotry, or imperious nationalism” (137). This resonates with neoliberal critics that profess fair play and rights of space for all, but will arm themselves with policies that undermine the priorities of Others (migrants) under their protection. This reiterates the “temporary lowering of the physical, cultural and legal barriers that had been erected between the races and the people of the empire” to create a Million Black Army for WWI, on the one hand and, on the other, the demand that Blacks hired during the war be dismissed to make way for demobilized White men (Olusoga, 2016: 701, 741). This subdued “migrants” into a docile acceptance of their marginalized space.
If most colonized peoples after independence view service to their countries as duty to their father lands, but under colonial imperialism, Britain was the motherland, how then could she tell her children not to come home to roost? Recent as April 2022, a 17-year-old Black British boy who never left England was arrested and detained by Immigration Enforcement. Home Office documents revealed a Nigerian identity was already imposed on him to enable deportation till his mother intervened (Abdul, 2022). This lends weight to the claim made by James (1989) that “the race question is subsidiary to the class question in politics,” because there are also non-Blacks being subjugated by their lack of means, and “to neglect the racial factor as merely incidental is an error only less grave than to make it fundamental” though with a few exception (283). This also complicates why Euro-Americans could be relegated to an impoverished cluster of the Black population but will never be subjected to the ill-treatments faced by Blacks. This has always been the path travelled by the Black population of the world—“the wretched of the earth”—but has found expression in the global response to migration and diasporas. This “new fungibility, this solubility, institutionalized as a new norm of existence and expanded to the entire planet” is what Mbembe (2021) calls “the Becoming Black of the World” (6).
Though sociocultural and political forces, even failed leadership, have influenced migrations and notions of belonging, the history of colonization has been instrumental in the foundation that facilitates such movements especially in the context of racialized people or minority groups. A historical underpinning necessitates or helps to highlight the implication of race, space occupation, and the cultural politics in-between because “an intricate connection exists between an aesthetics object—a text of any work of art, and that all texts must be analyzed in their cultural contexts, not in isolation” (Bressler, 2003: 188). Thus, the geo-cultural politics of space and racial poetics stimulate the need to find common grounds of convergence among diverse races and creeds.
Conclusion
From survivors of the slave trade to dislocated populations across borders is the monumental footprints of capitalism and its concomitant imperialist tentacles stretching across ocean floors and oil rigs of colonial wealth. It is problematic that the global North, built on, and still benefiting from a long history of suppression, acts as though it is doing the colonized a favor by letting it cross its borders. The chapter shows how the hunger for resources detonates the bombs of postcolonial crisis of revolutionary migrations and initiates a Darwinian tussle which could have been avoided if the “dominant power” respected the sovereignty, agency, humanity, and worldview of the subalterns. It exposes globalization as being structurally one-sided, and hence, the need to rewrite histories of colonialism within the context of the postmodern condition.
Following traditions of imperialist subjugation, the currents of diasporic hurdles suggest that migrants are children of the future. This implies that ideologies of difference have to be dissolved through an honest interrogation of the past in order to weld a future soldered by the electrodes of justice, tolerance, and racial equality. Taken together, the history of multiple displacements, inconsistent variables lurking in the shroud of identity, race, and the crucibles of belonging challenges all to a cross-cultural understanding and meditation on Ralph Ellison’s unnamed narrator’s rhetoric: Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
References
Abdul, G. (2022). Non-verbal teenager who has never left the UK detained at the immigration Centre. The Guardian. 28 April, 2022. Accessed July 5, 2022, from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/28/non-verbal-black-teenager-who-has-never-left-uk-detained-at-immigration-centre
Aiyar, S. (2015). Indians in Kenya: The politics of diaspora. Harvard University Press.
Alao, A. (2006). Mau Mau – Warrior. Osprey Publishing.
Alexander, L., & Alexander, M. (2021). Fear. In N. Hannah-Jones, R. Caitlin, S. Ilena, & S. Jake (Eds.), The 1619 project. One World.
Al-Rustom, H. (2013). Diaspora activism and politics of locality: The Armenians of France. In A. Quayson & G. Daswani (Eds.), A companion to diaspora and transnationalism. Blackwell.
Akurang-Perry, O. K., & Indome, I. (2018). Colonialism and migration. In M. S. Shanguhyia & T. Falola (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of African colonial and postcolonial history. Palgrave Macmillan.
Akyeampong, E. (2013). Slavery, indentured labor, and the making of a transnational world. In A. Quayson & G. Daswani (Eds.), A companion to diaspora and transnationalism. Blackwell.
Anderson, C. (2021). Self-defense. In N. Hannah-Jones, R. Caitlin, S. Ilena, & S. Jake (Eds.), The 1619 project. One World.
Anyaduba, O. A. (2021). The postcolonial African genocide novel: Quests for meaningfulness. University of Liverpool Press.
Anyaduba, O. A. (2016). Broadening the canon: Africa and its non-migrant diasporas. Critical Arts, 30, 4. https://doi.org/10.1080/02560046.2016.1226728
Armstrong, H. A. (2018). Mapping ‘sacred’ space in Leila Aboulela’s the translator and minaret. In C. Iheka & J. Taylor (Eds.), African migration narratives: Politics, race, and space. University of Rochester Press.
Baldwin, J. (1993). Nobody knows my name: More notes of a native son. Vintage Books.
Bentham, J. (2000). An introduction to the principles of morals and legislation. Batoche Books.
Bentham, J. (1995). The Panopticon writings (M. Bozovic, Ed.). Verso.
Bhabha, H. (2000). DisseminNation: Time, narrative, and the margins of the modern nation. In H. Bhabha (Ed.), Nation and narrative. Routledge.
Boehmer, E. (2017). The nation as metaphor: Ben Okri, Chenjerai Hove, Dambudzo Merechera. In Stories of women: Gender and narrative in the postcolonial nation. University of Manchester Press.
Boehmer, E. (2005). Colonial and postcolonial literature: Migrant metaphors (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press.
Bressler, C. (2003). Literary criticism: An introduction to theory and practice (5th ed.). Longman.
Bubola, E. (2022). U.K.’s ‘Brightest and Best’ Visa Leaves Out Africa, India and Latin America. The New York Times. June 3, 2022. Accessed July 8, 2022, from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/03/world/europe/uk-visa-high-potential-individual.html
Cajetan, I. (2018). Naturalizing Africa: Ecological violence, agency and postcolonial resistance in African literature. Cambridge University Press.
Chakrabarty, D. (2002). Habitations: Essays in the wake of subaltern studies. The University of Chicago Press.
Chandler, D. N. (2021). Towards an African future – Of the limit of world. State University of New York Press.
Chatterjee, P. (2020). When victims become rulers: Partition, caste, and politics in West Bengal. In S. Dube, S. Seth, & A. Skaria (Eds.), Dipesh Chakrabarty and the global south: Subaltern studies, postcolonial perspectives, and the Anthropocene. Routledge.
Chatterjee, P. (2004). The politics of the governed: Reflections on popular politics in most of the world. Columbia University Press.
Chatterjee, P. (2012). The black hole of empire: History of a global practice of power. Princeton University Press.
Coates, T. (2015). Between the world and me. Spiegel and Grau.
Darwin, C. (1859). On the origin of species by means of natural selection. John Murray.
Davidson, B. (2005). The black Man’s burden: Africa and the curse of the nation state. Spectrum Books.
Desmond, M. (2021). Capitalism. In N. Hannah-Jones, R. Caitlin, S. Ilena, & S. Jake (Eds.), The 1619 project. One World.
Du Bois, W. E. B. (2015). The souls of black folk. Oxford University Press.
Ellison, R. (1995). Invisible man. Random House Inc.
Fabre, G., & O’Meally, R. (Eds.). (1994). History and memory in African American culture. Oxford University Press.
Falola, T. (2009). Colonialism and violence in Nigeria. Indiana University Press.
Falola, T. (2002). Key events in African history: A reference guide. Greenwood Press.
Fanon, F. (2004). The wretched of the earth. Grove Press.
Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. Vintage Books.
Fukuyama, F. (1992). The end of history and the last man. Penguin Books.
Gates, H. L., Jr., & Curran, S. A. (Eds.). (2022). Who’s black and why? Hidden chapter from the eighteenth-century invention of race. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Gates, H. L., Jr. (2019). Stony the road: Reconstruction, white supremacy and the rise of Jim crow. Penguin Press.
Gentleman, A. (2019). The Windrush betrayal: Exposing the hostile environment. Guardian Faber.
Ghosh, D. (2020). Rights and coercion: Adivasi rights and coal mining in Central India. In S. Dube, S. Seth, & A. Skaria (Eds.), Dipesh Chakrabarty and the global south: Subaltern studies, postcolonial perspectives, and the Anthropocene. Routledge.
Gikandi, S. (2011). Slavery and the culture of taste. Princeton University Press.
Gilroy, P. (2002). There Ain’t no black in the union Jack: The cultural politics of race and nation. Routledge.
Gilroy, P. (1993). The black Atlantic: Modernity and double consciousness. Verso.
Greenblatt, S. (2010). Cultural mobility: A manifesto. Cambridge University Press.
Hajari, N. (2015). Midnight’s furies: The deadly legacy of India’s partition. Penguin Books.
Hannah-Jones, N., Roper, C., Silverman, I., & Silverstein, J. (Eds.). (2021). The 1619 Project. One World.
Hume, D. (1888). A treatise of human nature. The Clarendon Press.
International Student Recruitment Data. (2022, May 5). Accessed July 7, 2022, from https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/universities-uk-international/explore-uuki/international-student-recruitment/international-student-recruitment-data
James, C. L. R. (1989). The black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo revolution (2nd ed.). Vintage Books.
Kant, I. (2011). Observations on the feeling of the beautiful and sublime and other writings (P. Frierson & P. Guyer, Ed.). Cambridge University Press.
Kilson, M. (2014). Transformation of the African American intelligentsia, 1880–2012. Harvard University Press.
Konadu, K. (2018). African diaspora and postcolonial Africa. In M. S. Shanguhyia & T. Falola (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of African colonial and postcolonial history. Palgrave Macmillan.
Kyle, K. (1999). The politics Independence of Kenya. Palgrave Macmillan.
Lovejoy, E. P. (2002). Transformation in slavery: A history of slavery in Africa (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press.
Lowe, L. (2015). The intimacies of four continents. Duke University Press.
Maloba, O. W. (1993). Mau Mau and Kenya: An analysis of a peasant revolt. Indiana University Press.
Mamdani, M. (2012). Define and rule: Native as political identity. Harvard University Press.
Mamdani, M. (1996). Citizen and subject: Contemporary Africa and the legacy of late colonialism. Princeton University Press.
Marx, K. (2008). Dispatches for the New York tribune: Selected journalism of Karl Marx (James Ledbetter, Ed.). Penguin Books Ltd.
Mbembe, A. (2021). Out of the dark night: Essays on decolonization. Columbia University Press.
Mbembe, A. (2017). Critique of black reason. Duke University Press.
Mbembe, A. (2001). On the Postcolony. University of California Press.
McPherson, J. (2015). The war that forged a nation: Why the civil war still matters. Oxford University Press.
Miles, T. (2019). Municipal bonds: How slavery built Wall Street. The 1619 Project. New York Times Magazine. August 18, 2019.
Morrison, T. (1992). Race-ing justice, en-gendering power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the construction of social reality. Pantheon Books.
Mosley, P. (2009). The settler economies: Studies in the economic history of Kenya and southern Rhodesia 1900–1963. Cambridge University Press.
Mphana, C. (2021). The Rinehart frames. University of Nebraska Press.
Ngugi, W. (2016). Birth of a dream weaver: A writer’s awakening. The New Press.
Ngugi, W. (2002). A grain of wheat. Penguin Books Ltd.
Olusoga, D. (2016). Black and British: A forgotten history. Macmillan.
Prunier, G. (2009). From genocide to continental war: The Congolese conflict and the crisis of contemporary Africa. Hurst and Company.
Quayson, A. (2013). Postcolonialism and the diasporic imaginary. In A. Quayson & G. Daswani (Eds.), A companion to diaspora and transnationalism. Blackwell.
Quayson, A., & Daswani, G. (2013). Introduction: Diaspora and transnationalism: Scapes, scales and scopes. In A. Quayson & G. Daswani (Eds.), A companion to diaspora and transnationalism. Blackwell.
Rothstein, R. (2017). The color of law: A forgotten history of how our government segregated America. Liveright Publishing Corporation.
Rushdie, S. (1991). Imaginary homelands: Essays and criticism 1981–1991. Granta Books.
Saul, J. (2006). Writing the roaming subject: The biotext in Canadian literature. University of Toronto Press.
Soyinka, W., & Shelby, T. (2011). From Africa to the global black. Transition, No 106 (p. 40). Indiana University Press.
Tally, J. (Ed.). (2007). The Cambridge companion to Toni Morrison. Cambridge University Press.
Wilkerson, I. (2010). The warmth of other suns: The epic of America’s great migration. Random House.
Woodward, P. (2002). The horn of Africa: State, politics and international relations. I. B Tauris Publishers.
Young, J. C. R. (2004). White mythologies: Writing history and the west (2ed ed.). Routledge.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Aboi, D.J. (2023). The Geo-cultural Politics of Space and the Poetics of Race. In: Maiangwa, B. (eds) The Paradox(es) of Diasporic Identity, Race and Belonging. Politics of Citizenship and Migration. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38797-5_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38797-5_7
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-38796-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-38797-5
eBook Packages: Political Science and International StudiesPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)