Borders, Sociocultural Encounters and Contestations
This book examines the enduring significance of borders in Southern Africa, covering encounters between people, ideas and matter, and the new spatialities and transformations they generate in their historical, social, economic and cultural contexts.
Situated within debates on borders, borderlands, sub- and regional integration, this volume examines local, grassroots and non-state actors and their cross-border economic and sociocultural encounters and contestations. Particular attention is also paid on the role they play in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region and its integration project in its multiplicity. The interdisciplinary chapters address the diverse human activities relating to cross-border economic and sociocultural encounters and contestations that are manifested through multiform and -scalar interactions between or among grassroots actors, involving engagements between grassroots actors and the state or its agencies, and/or to the broader arrangements that bear consequences of the first two upon regional integration. By bringing these different, at times contrasting, forms of interaction under a holistic analysis, this volume devises novel ways to understand the persistence and role of borders and their relation to new transnational and transcultural integrative phenomena at various levels, extending from the (nation-)state and the political to the cultural and social at the everyday level of border practices.
Scholars and students of African studies, geography, economics, politics, sociology and border studies will find this book useful.
Christopher Changwe Nshimbi is Director & DST-NRF RCA Research Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Governance Innovation (GovInn) at the University of Pretoria, South Africa.
Inocent Moyo is a Senior Lecturer and Head of the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, University of Zululand, South Africa.
Jussi P. Laine is an Associate Professor of Multidisciplinary Border Studies at the Karelian Institute, University of Eastern Finland.
Global Africa
Series Editors: Toyin Falola and Roy Doron
11 Oppression and Resistance in Africa and its Diaspora
Kenneth Kalu and Toyin Falola
12 Slavery in the Global Diaspora of Africa
Paul Lovejoy
13 Emotions in Muslim Hausa Womens Fiction
Umma Aliyu Musa
14 Yoruba Oral Tradition in Islamic Nigeria
A History of DDKD
Abdul-Rasheed Naallah
15 Development in Modern Africa
Past and Present Perspectives
Edited by Martin S. Shanguhyia and Toyin Falola
16 Borders, Sociocultural Encounters and Contestations
Southern African Experiences in Global view
Edited by Christopher Changwe Nshimbi, Inocent Moyo and Jussi P. Laine
17 Governance and Leadership Institutions in Nigeria
Edited by Ernest Toochie Aniche and Toyin Falola
18 African Indigenous Knowledges in a Postcolonial World
Essays in Honour of Toyin Falola
Edited by Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso, Ngozi Nwogwugwu and Gift Ntiwunka
For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com
First published 2021
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2021 selection and editorial matter, Christopher Changwe Nshimbi, Inocent Moyo and Jussi P. Laine; individual chapters, the contributors
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ISBN: 978-0-367-40846-6 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-01374-7 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by codeMantra
To the misunderstood grassroots actors who criss-cross and inhabit Africas borders and borderlands. The hope for a shared humanity still lingers.
The geographical and socio-economic landscapes of the contiguous borderlands of Southern Africa suggest de facto processes of regional integration. They teem with cross-border activities. The activities involve the movement of people as well as wildlife, where the boundaries constitute national parks, wildlife and forest reserves or game management areas (such as the Malawi-Zambia Transfrontier Conservation Area (TFCA)).
Regarding the movement of people, the historical, socio-economic and cultural interactions in these spaces are enhanced by geography. The interactions contribute to the formation of localized border regions that not only defy border controls. They also achieve alternative processes of cross-border integration that boost regional integration and regionalism.
Scholars and policymakers have not paid much attention or clearly recognized the richness and dynamic potential of the processes that occur in these spaces. The processes can (and, in the case of movement of people, do) contribute to the advancement of scholarship and development in general. The challenge, however, is that for the most part, the interactions that involve the cross-border movement of people seem to attract vilified responses from policymakers and some scholars.
The legislation of most countries in Southern Africa restricts the free movement of people from regional neighbours into their territories. Regional free movement of people is generally the elephant in the room in most deliberations on regional integration at many a Southern African Development Community (SADC) official gathering. Regional legislation on free movement of people has eluded SADC since the early 1990s, from the time the idea to open up the regions borders was introduced. But the literature that tags people who move across nation-state borders in Southern Africa (indeed, all of Africa) as illegal migrants, tax evaders, among other negative labels, abounds too. Actually, this book volume includes a chapter contribution that focuses on aspects of cross-border trade, which it labels smuggling.
Broadly though, this edited book takes as its point of departure, debates on borders, borderlands and regional integration, to interrogate cross-border encounters that involve grassroots actors and nation-states. The discussions are based on and engage with the rich historical, socio-economic and cultural interactions facilitated by geographical proximity of people and countries in Southern Africa, and the borderlands of the countries in the region. The first two chapters of the volume detail this and the other contents of the book.
