At the Edge of the World: Boundaries, Territoriality, and Sovereignty in Africa

From a philosophical point of view, globalization might be compared with what Heidegger called “the gigantic” (das Riesige). For among the characteristics of the gigantic as he understood it were both the elimination of great distances and the representation—producible at any time—of daily life in unfamiliar and distant worlds. But the gigantic was for him above all that through which the quantitative became an essential quality. From this point of view, the time of the gigantic was that in which “the world posits itself in a space beyond representation, thus allocating to the incalculable its own determination and unique historical character.”1

If at the center of the discussion on globalization we place the three problems of spatiality, calculability, and temporality in their relations with representation, we find ourselves brought back to two points usually ignored in contemporary discourses, even though Fernand Braudel had called attention to them. The first of these has to do with temporal pluralities, and, we might add, with the subjectivity that makes these temporalities possible and meaningful. Braudel drew a distinction between “temporalities of long and very long duration, slowly evolving and less slowly evolving situations, rapid and virtually instantaneous devia-tions, the quickest being the easiest to detect.”2 He went on to emphasize—and this was the second point—the exceptional character of what he called world time (le temps du monde). For him, time experienced in the dimensions of the world had an exceptional character insofar as it governed, depending on the period and the location, certain spaces and certain realities. But other realities and other spaces escaped it and remained alien to it.3

The following notes, although they adopt the notion of long duration and relativize the airtightness of the distinctions mentioned above, nonetheless differ in several respects from Braudel’s theses. They are based on a twofold hypothesis. First, they assume that temporalities overlap and interlace. In fact, Braudel’s postulate of the plurality of temporalities does not by itself suffice to account for contemporary changes. In the case of Africa, long-term developments, more or less rapid deviations, and long-term temporalities are not necessarily either separate or merely juxtaposed. Fitted within one another, they relay each other; sometimes they cancel each other out, and sometimes their effects are multiplied. Contrary to Braudel’s conviction, it is not clear that there are any zones on which world history would have no repercussions. What really differ are the many modalities in which world time is domesticated. These modalities depend on histories and local cultures, on the interplay of interests whose determinants do not all lead in the same direction.

The central thesis of this study is that in several regions considered— wrongly—to be on the margins of the world, the domestication of world time henceforth takes place by dominating space and putting it to different uses. When resources are put into circulation, the consequence is a disconnection between people and things that is more marked than it was in the past, the value of things generally surpassing that of people. That is one of the reasons why the resulting forms of violence have as their chief goal the physical destruction of people (massacres of civilians, genocides, various kinds of killing) and the primary exploitation of things. These forms of violence (of which war is only one aspect) contribute to the establishment of sovereignty outside the state, and are based on a confusion between power and fact, between public affairs and private government.4

In this study, we are interested in a specific form of domestication and mobilization of space and resources: the form that consists in producing boundaries, whether by moving already existing ones or by doing away with them, fragmenting them, decentering or differentiating them. In dealing with these questions, we will draw a distinction between Africa as a “place” and Africa as a “territory.” In fact, a place is the order according to which elements are distributed in relationships of coexistence. A place, as Michel de Certeau points out, is an instantaneous configuration of positions. It implies a stability. As for a territory, it is fundamentally an intersection of moving bodies. It is defined essentially by the set of movements that take place within it.5 Seen in this way, it is a set of possibilities that historically situated actors constantly resist or realize.6

Boundaries and Their Limits

Over the past two centuries the visible, material, and symbolic boundaries of Africa have constantly expanded and contracted. The structural character of this instability has helped change the territorial body of the continent. New forms of territoriality and unexpected forms of locality have appeared. Their limits do not necessarily intersect with the official limits, norms, or language of states. New internal and external actors, organized into networks and nuclei, claim rights over these territories, often by force. Other ways of imagining space and territory are developing. Paradoxically, the discourse that is supposed to account for these transformations has ended up obscuring them. Essentially, two theses ignore each other. On one hand, the prevailing idea is that the boundaries separating African states were created by colonialism, that these boundaries were arbitrarily drawn, and that they separated peoples, linguistic entities, and cultural and political communities that formed natural and homogeneous wholes before colonization. The colonial boundaries are also said to have opened the way to the Balkanization of the continent by cutting it up into a maze of microstates that were not economically viable and were linked more to Europe than to their regional environment. On this view, by adopting these distortions in 1963 the Organization of African Unity (OAU) adhered to the dogma of their intangibility and gave them a kind of legitimacy. Many of the current conflicts are said to have resulted from the imprecise nature of the boundaries inherited from colonialism. These boundaries could not be changed except in the framework of vigorous policies of regional integration that would complete the implementation of defense and collective security agreements.7

End of Excerpt | Access Full Version

Notes

Thanks are due to Carol A. Breckenridge for ongoing discussions on several of the issues broached in this essay. I am also grateful to Sarah Nuttall, Jean Comaroff, and Mamadou Diouf for their oral comments.

1. Martin Heidegger, Chemins qui ne mènent nulle part, trans. W. Brokmeier (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), 124–25.
2. Fernand Braudel, Civilisation matérielle, économie, et capitalisme (XVe–XVIIIe siècles), vol. 3, Le temps du monde (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1979); Civilization and Capitalism, The Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century, vol. 3, The Perspective of the World, trans. Siân Reynolds (New York: Harper and Row, 1984).
3. In his foreword to this volume, Braudel went so far as to assert that “There are always some areas world history does not reach, zones of silence and undisturbed ignorance” (Civilization and Capitalism, 18).
4. See Achille Mbembe, Du gouvernement privé indirect (Dakar: CODESRIA, 1999); On Private Indirect Government, trans. Steven Rendall (in press).
5. “Space occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflictual programs or contractual proximities. . . . In contradistinction to the place, it has thus none of the univocity or stability of a ‘proper.’” See Michel de Certeau, L’invention du quotidien: arts de faire (Paris: Union Générale des Éditions, 1980), 208; The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 117.
6. See Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991).
7. On this subject, consider views that are apparently divergent but are in fact ultimately based on the same misunderstandings: Paul Nugent and A. J. Asiwaju, eds., African Boundaries: Barriers, Conduits, and Opportunities (London: Pinter, 1996); J. O. Igué, Le territoire de l’état en Afrique: les dimensions spatiales du développement (Paris: Karthala, 1995); J. Herbst, “The Challenges to African Boundaries,” Journal of International Affairs 46 (1992): 17–31; and the fantastic views of the same author in “Responding to State Failure in Africa,” International Security 21 (1996–97): 120–44.