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- Convenor:
-
Uoldelul Chelati Dirar
(University of Macerata )
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Short Abstract:
This panel seeks to investigate African experiences of territorial mobility connecting education, professional skills and social mobility. Social mobility through migration is suggested as a crucial step to understand the struggle for citizenship and the formation of modern African elites.
Long Abstract:
In colonial Africa migration has often been the only alternative left to the youth looking for better educational opportunities and to those who wanted to make the best use of the education or professional skills they had achieved, in order to climb the social ladder. Through territorial mobility young Africans were able to escape from restrictive colonial regulations and to connect their educational or professional skills to the opportunities offered by the labour market outside their territories of origin. By physically dislocating themselves those people were both challenging colonial rules and struggling to affirm their right to become full fledged citizens and not anymore colonial subjects. At the same time the processes that they ignited, often, implied the disruption of existing social and economic models.
This panel seeks to investigate, in a comparative perspective, African experiences of territorial mobility which connected education, professional skills and social mobility. Contributions should explore how, in different colonial contexts, the African agency was able to negotiate room for social mobility by making the best use of the knowledge acquired in colonial or missionary educational institutions. To this regard, social mobility through territorial dislocation is suggested as a privileged lens through which analyse the struggle for citizenship and the formation of modern African elites.
The panel invites papers focusing on individual's or groups' case studies of migration trajectories activated, within and outside colonial Africa, by educated youth, youth looking for education, colonial troops, religious communities or professionals.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 13 June, 2019, -Tara Dosumu Diener (Stanford University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper traces the migratory patterns of professional nurses, finding what began as a slow-moving eddy in the colonial period changed to a transcontinental circuit c.independence, a northward flood during the civil war, and back to an eddy, but one propelled by different winds.
Paper long abstract:
The visually striking uniforms worn by nursing and midwifery staff and students in Freetown's hospitals and clinics reflect an elaborate system of color-coded ranking and identification mandated by the Ministry of Health and Sanitation. The uniforms are complemented by a range of accessories, some (starched white caps, elaborate metal scrollwork belts) appearing to come straight out of Victorian England and others (scrubbable rubber shoes, upside-down timepieces worn on the lapel) representing the latest innovations in clinical attire. Like the education, training and status with which it is associated, the uniform must be composed. The 21st century nurse's uniform is a semiotic bricolage, combining African and European elements from past and present in a material form that conveys a nurse's place in the administrative hierarchy instantly. In the same way that obtaining the elements necessary to compose and embellish a standard uniform involves navigating multiple distinct and guarded bodies of social, scientific, and geographic knowledge, wearing the uniform demonstrates mastery of the system. In this paper I demonstrate how generations of nurses in Freetown have leveraged social capital to achieve the mobility professional nursing affords; yet along the way the meaning of mobility has been contested by the very educated cosmopolitans it produced. Through a comparative analysis of material objects, I explore the tension between social and geographic mobilities, demonstrating how the trajectory of migration amongst members of the Sierra Leonean nursing profession once followed, then disrupted, and finally subverted the efforts of colonial and post-colonial policies designed to circumscribe it.
Uoldelul Chelati Dirar (University of Macerata )
Paper short abstract:
Aim of this paper is to analyse the life experience of colonial subjects which, starting from the late 19th century, decided to cross the colonial borders trying their luck in the metropolitan space as well as in neighbouring countries.
Paper long abstract:
Historiography plays a central role in the functioning of the nation-state as a political system. It produces the illusion of a shared past and distinct national identity, facilitates a sense of belonging among citizens, and shapes collective desires for the future. Hence governments across the world have invested in historiography as part of nation-building projects.
To this regard the Horn of Africa is not an exception. The painful experience of protracted and conflicts which have shaped the history of the region have contributed to foster nationalist narratives based on polarised and exclusive representations of citizenship, belonging and, ultimately nationalism.
Aim of this paper is to challenge some of those narratives analysing the life experience of colonial subjects which, starting from the late 19th century, decided to cross the colonial borders trying their luck in the metropolitan space as well as in neighbouring countries. Anticipating some findings from an ongoing research, I intend to show how the plurality of experiences that populated that whirlwind period provides a fascinating glimpse on the complexity of processes of social mobility and on notions of belonging, which unveil the narrowness of nationalist narratives. The period, object of my investigation, though often overlooked in a stereotypical and slightly dichotomous perspective, emerges from the literature and from the rich archival documentary collections as an extremely rich and dynamic moment in the history of the Horn, which still waits for full and dispassionate investigation.
Moritz Mihatsch (University of Cambridge -- The British University in Egypt)
Paper short abstract:
The paper traces the history of the Afro-Palestinian community of Jerusalem. While the first generation arrived in a time of permeable borders, their descendants struggle with complicated regimes of nationality and statelessness.
Paper long abstract:
The Afro-Palestinian community of Jerusalem's old city consists of second, third and fourth generation Palestinians of African descent, who have migrated from such places as Chad, Nigeria, Senegal and Sudan. The first generation arrived in Jerusalem between the late 19th century and 1948 and they undertook the journey for a variety of reasons, with the majority travelling to complete the Muslim pilgrimage to Mekka. Travelling or migration was perceived as a catalyst for social mobility, either through education or economic advancement. The paper contrasts the stories of the first-generation Afro-Palestinians and other travelers from West Africa who passed through Jerusalem in the same period, with the struggles of the contemporary community with statelessness and the administrative regimes of citizenship of Israel and Jordan. Through contrasting these different narratives, the paper discusses shifting concepts of borders, citizenship and sovereignty. The paper is based on interviews with members of the community conducted in 2018, the works of German Africanist Rudolf Prietze who travelled to Tunis, Cairo and Jerusalem extensively between 1897-1914, as well as a few accounts in the very limited academic literature on the Afro-Palestinian community.
Immanuel R. Harisch (University of Vienna)
Paper short abstract:
Based on archival research for my doctoral dissertation this contribution examines individual trajectories of African labour college alumni through their exchange of letters with the faculty staff after the students have returned to their home countries.
Paper long abstract:
The wave of political decolonization of the late 1950s opened up new channels of territorial mobility for African actors. For the East German Free German Trade Union Confederation (FDGB), this period marked the beginning of close relations with trade unions and liberation movements on the African continent. As a result, trade unionists from at least nineteen African countries came to study at the labour college Fritz Heckert in Bernau close to Berlin. During their stay they acquired a theoretical-political education in Marxism-Leninism and "tools" for the concrete application of the training to their national (liberation) contexts and trade union work.
Based on archival research for my doctoral dissertation, this contribution examines life situations of educational and social (im)mobilities through personal letters written by the African alumni of the school. This exchange of letters with the faculty staff provides us with exceptional insights into the personal motives, wishes, emotions, goals as well as difficulties and hardships of the trade unionists after they had finished their education and returned to their respective home countries: some alumni quickly climbed the career ladder in their trade unions while others faced refusals towards an education obtained in a socialist country during a time of Cold War rivalries and global system competition. Besides emotional ties with the Fritz Heckert college, many African students tried to utilize their newly gained education and acquaintances at the labour college to secure scholarships for a university education—in the socialist "East" or in the competing capitalist "West".