African Refugees 0253064414, 9780253064417

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AFRICAN REFUGEES

AFRICAN REFUGEES k TOYIN FALOLA AND OLAJUMOKE YACOB-HALISO

Indi a na Univer sit y Pr ess

This book is a publication of Indiana University Press Office of Scholarly Publishing Herman B Wells Library 350 1320 East 10th Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA iupress.org © 2023 by Indiana University Press All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. Manufactured in the United States of America First printing 2023 Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-0-253-06441-7 (hardback) ISBN 978-0-253-06442-4 (paperback) ISBN 978-0-253-06443-1 (ebook)

To the dedicated frontline humanitarian workers in Africa’s refugee camps and locations, who give their lives to others and To Peace!

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations  ix List of Acronyms  xi Maps xv Preface xxi Acknowledgments xxxv

Part I: Context

1. Refugeehood in Africa 3



2. Refugee Studies 28



3. African Refugee Studies 52



4. Human Rights Instruments on African Refugees 81



5. States and Policy Frameworks 106

Part II: Making Refugees

6. Colonialism and the Making of Refugees in Africa 131



7. Postcolonial Politics, Wars, and African Refugee Problems 169



8. Internal Displacement in Africa 218

Part III: Displaced Lives

9. Refugee Camps and Settlements in Africa 245

10. Urban Refugees 275

11. African Refugee Women: Gendering Policy and Protection 310

12. African Refugee Youth 352 13. Hope in Displacement: Refugees and Cultures of Creativity 379

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Con ten ts

Part IV: Protection and Solutions 14. Refugee Protection and Management 403

15. Durable Solutions and the Crisis of Development 435

16. Home, Return, and Postrelocation 465

Part V: Conclusion

17. Citizenship, Rights, and Development 493

18. The Future: Ending Africa’s Refugee Crisis 517 Bibliography 533 Index 583

ILLUSTRATIONS

M a ps Map 0.1. Map 0.2. Map 0.3. Map 0.4. Map 0.5. Map 0.6.

Refugee locations across all Africa, 2018 Refugee movements in Africa, 2018 Refugees in East Africa and the Horn of Africa, 2018 Refugees in North Africa, 2018 Refugees in Southern Africa, 2018 Refugees in West and Central Africa, 2018

Ta bl e s Table 1.1.

Number of refugees globally, people in refugee-like situations, and Venezuelans displaced abroad, by UNHCR regions, 2019 Table 2.1. Contrasts between refugees and migrants Table 3.1. Punishment for LGBTQ+ offenses in African countries Table 7.1. Taxonomy of generations of African conflicts, 1950s–2010s

Figu r e s Figure 1.1. Number of countries in conflict, 1989–2017 Figure 1.2. Kigeme refugee camp in southern Rwanda Figure 3.1. Hundreds of Somali refugees arriving at the Dadaab refugee camp Figure 3.2. Somali refugees are rescued when their boat capsizes in the Indian Ocean

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x

I llustr ations

Figure 6.1. Refugees from the Second Anglo-Boer War in South Africa, 1899–1902 Figure 7.1. Yida refugee camp in South Sudan, with remains of an Antonov military transport plane Figure 7.2. Somali refugee women and children waiting to enter refugee camp in Kenya Figure 8.1. IDPs affected by floods and conflict in Jowhar, Somalia Figure 8.2. Kibumba displaced persons camp in Goma, North Kivu, in the DRC Figure 9.1. Kiziba refugee camp in western Rwanda, housing mostly Congolese refugees Figure 9.2. Refugee camp in Bria, Central African Republic, 2018 Figure 9.3. Rwandan refugee camp in Kimbumba in eastern Zaire Figure 9.4. Buduburam refugee camp in Ghana Figure 10.1. Eritrean asylum seekers in Levinsky Park in Tel Aviv, Israel Figure 11.1. Malian refugee women in northern Niger Figure 11.2. Refugee woman from Darfur, Sudan, at Farchana refugee camp in eastern Chad Figure 12.1. Youth as a share of the total population by region, 2015 Figure 12.2. Grace, a five-year-old South Sudanese refugee in Dadaab refugee camp, Kenya, plays like all children Figure 12.3. Refugee youth from different countries in the Dzaleka refugee camp, Malawi, meet every Sunday for a game of football Figure 13.1. Nakivale refugee settlement in Isingiro District, Uganda Figure 14.1. Men unloading food aid donated to victims of conflict- and disaster-induced displacement in Jowhar, Somalia Figure 15.1. Refugees in the Cha region of Borkou on the way to Libya Figure 15.2. Sahrawi refugees, a “forgotten” refugee crisis in the Algerian Desert Figure 17.1. Gilbert Ngongo, a Congolese refugee living in Rwanda, whose entrepreneurial abilities established Sea Food Ltd.

ACRONYMS

4Rs

Repatriation, Reintegration, Rehabilitation and Reconstruction ATRCW African Training and Research Centre for Women AGDM UNHCR Age, Gender and Diversity Mainstreaming Strategy AU African Union CAR Central African Republic CEDAW Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women CRRF Comprehensive Refugee Response Framework DAR Development Assistance for Refugees DLI Development through Local Integration DRC Democratic Republic of the Congo DTA Declaration on Territorial Asylum 1967 DTM Displacement Tracking Matrix ECOWAS Economic Community of West African States Excom UNHCR Executive Committee FNLA Frente Nacional de Libertação de Angola (National Front for the Liberation of Angola) FRELIMO Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (Mozambique Liberation Front) GAD Gender and Development GAFM Gender and Forced Migration GCR Global Compact on Refugees IASC Inter-Agency Standing Committee

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xii ICARA IDMC IDP IMF INPFL IOM IRO IWGRW LGBTQ+ MENA MINUSCA

Acron y ms

International Conference on Assistance to Refugees in Africa Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre internally displaced person International Monetary Fund Independent National Patriotic Front of Liberia International Organization for Migration International Refugee Organization International NGO Working Group on Refugee Women lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer+ Middle East and North Africa UN Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in the Central African Republic MPLA Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola) NGO nongovernmental organization NPFL National Patriotic Front of Liberia OAU Organisation of African Unity PAIGC Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde (African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde) PTSD post-traumatic stress disorder RMMS Regional Mixed Migration Secretariat RSD refugee status determination SADF South African Defence Force SADR Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic SAP structural adjustment program SPLM/A Sudanese Peoples Liberation Movement/Army SRS Self-Reliance Strategy (Uganda) UDHR Universal Declaration of Human Rights UNCT United Nations Country Team UNDAF United Nations Development Assistance Framework UNDG United Nations Development Group UNDP United Nations Development Programme UNECA United Nations Economic Commission for Africa UNESCO United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization UNGA United Nations General Assembly UNHCR United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees

Acron y ms

UNITA UNSC UPA WHO WID WIFM WRC ZI

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União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola) United Nations Security Council Uniao das Populacões de Angola (United Peoples of Angola) World Health Organization Women in Development Women in Forced Migration Women’s Refugee Commission Zambia Initiative

MAPS

TUNISIA

MOROCCO

1K 5K

94K

ALGERIA

247K

8.8K

LIBYA

WESTERN SAHARA

EGYPT

83K

SENEGAL

MALI

14.3K

GAMBIA GUINEABISSAU

4K 5K

175K

26.5K

MAURITANIA

25K 4K

12.4K 1K

600

GUINEA

1.1K

9K

SIERRA LEONE

1.1 MIL

451K

NIGER

CHAD

903K 380K

291K

6.7K

C.A.R

RWANDA

COTE D’IVOIRE

700

37.5K

LIBERIA

UGANDA 421K

71.5K

KENYA

TANZANIA

BURUNDI

COMOROS

278K

S

ANGOLA

13.8K

49.8K

NAMIBIA

2K

7.8K

5K

MALAWI

ZIMBABWE

BOTSWANA 2.4K

SOUTH AFRICA 83.3K

Refugees hosted in 2018

Map 0.1. Refugee locations across all Africa, 2018.

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44

MADAGASCAR

1,000 MI

Legend

MOZAMBIQUE

1

39.8K

E

SOMALIA

1.2 MIL

ZAMBIA

W

16.7K

ETHIOPIA

145K

D.R.C 529K

N

18.2K

175K

NIGERIA

12K

2K

SUDAN

879 57

ESWATINI LESOTHO

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M a ps

TUNISIA

MOROCCO

ALGERIA LIBYA

WESTERN SAHARA

SENEGAL

MAURITANIA

MALI

NIGER

GAMBIA GUINEABISSAU

EGYPT

CHAD

SUDAN

NIGERIA C.A.R

GUINEA TOGO COTE BENIN D’IVOIRE GHANA LIBERIA

SIERRA LEONE

W

BURUNDI

EQUATORIAL GUINEA

E S

SOMALIA UGANDA KENYA

D.R.C

CAMEROON

N

ETHIOPIA

RWANDA

GABON

TANZANIA COMOROS

ZAMBIA CONGO

MOZAMBIQUE

ANGOLA

MALAWI ZIMBABWE

NAMIBIA

MADAGASCAR

BOTSWANA

1,000 MI

SOUTH AFRICA

Legend Refugees direction of movement 2018

Map 0.2. Refugee movements in Africa, 2018.

ESWATINI LESOTHO

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M a ps

CHAD

SUDAN

451K

1.1 MIL

2K

ERITREA

YEMEN

ETHIOPIA

CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC CAMEROON

18.2K

SOMALIA

903K

SOUTH SUDAN

DJIBOUTI 16.7K

291K

6.7K

380K

UGANDA

1.2 MIL

KENYA

DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO

37.5K

CONGO

145K 529K

N

421K

RWANDA BURUNDI

W

71.5K

UNITED REPUBLIC OF TANZANIA 278K

E 500 MI

S Legend Refugees hosted in 2018

ANGOLA

ZAMBIA

Direction of refugee movement

MOZAMBIQUE

Map 0.3. Refugees in East Africa and the Horn of Africa, 2018.

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M a ps

N W

E S

TUNISIA

1K

MOROCCO 5K

ALGERIA

LIBYA

94K

MAURITANIA 83K

MALI

EGYPT

8.8K

WESTERN SAHARA

NIGER

247K

SUDAN

CHAD

Legend Refugees hosted in 2018

780 MI

Map 0.4. Refugees in North Africa, 2018.

Direction of refugee movement

xix

M a ps THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO

UNITED REPUBLIC OF TANZANIA COMOROS

ANGOLA

1

MALAWI

39.8K

ZAMBIA

MOZAMBIQUE

13.8K

5K

49.8K

MADAGASCAR

ZIMBABWE 7.8K

NAMIBIA 2.4K

44

BOTSWANA 2K

ESWATINI

879

SOUTH AFRICA 89.3K

Legend 57

LESOTHO

Refugees hosted in 2018

N W

E S

Map 0.5. Refugees in Southern Africa, 2018.

Direction of refugee movement

500 MI

xx

M a ps

WESTERN SAHARA

LIBYA

ALGERIA

MALI

MAURITANIA

NIGER

26.5K

CHAD

175K

451K

SENEGAL 14.3K 4K

SUDAN

GAMBIA 25K

5K

GUINEA 4K

GUINEABISSAU SIERRA LEONE

9K

NIGERIA 1.1K

GHANA

COTE D’IVOIRE

600

BURKINA FASO

34.7K

12.4K

12K

1.1K

LIBERIA

380K

BENIN

CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC

CAMEROON

TOGO

EQUATORIAL GUINEA GABON 700

CONGO DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO

37.5K

N

Legend Refugees hosted in 2018

6.7K

W

529K

E

Direction of refugee movement

500 MI

S

Map 0.6. Refugees in West and Central Africa, 2018.

ANGOLA

PREFACE

I Writings and commentaries on refugees have attracted endless attention, especially in the media, because of the tragedies that produce them and the tragic conditions that people find themselves in and are forced to cope with. Wars, social and political instability, persecution, and drought and desertification have all contributed to the displacement of people. People are inclined to seek out safety, especially amid turmoil, wherever it is attainable. As such, the damages incurred by fleeing one’s residence, the rugged processes of relocation, and the marginalizing experiences encountered in places where relief is anticipated create the ground for research and the growing literature on refugees. This book, African Refugees, is a comprehensive overview of the context, courses, conditions, and consequences of refugee lives, issues, policies, and solutions for African refugees everywhere they may be found—mostly on the continent but also as asylum seekers and new diaspora outside it. Taking a long historical view and a broad thematic lens, we focus on the African refugee situation, review extant scholarship on African refugees, and provide a veritable sourcebook for intellectual analysis of the major themes, debates, policies, and problems in the study of African refugees. While there is some literature on many of the micro aspects of the African refugee experience, this book speaks to the often-elusive grand narrative on refugees, to problematize and map major movements and directions for study of the phenomenon, and to foreground an African perspective and voice throughout that is much needed in current discussions. Many books have been written about refugees, and some about

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Pr eface

refugees in Africa, but there is no single book published in recent decades that covers the scope and range of this book. African Refugees seeks to address this gap. It covers expected topics such as human rights of refugees, policy frameworks, refugee protection, and durable solutions; but it also includes less studied topics such as refugee youth, refugee camps, urban refugees, and refugee women and takes on rare but emergent topics such as citizenship and the creativity of African refugees. It tells the African refugee story from the long historical past to the recent past and covers the range of African refugee experience from the causes of flight to exile experiences, with a persistent focus on solutions and the often-elusive search for them.

II The “African refugee” that is the subject of this book is not an “essential” refugee in any form or shape. Although the book analyses the debate on the defini­ tions of who a refugee is, it focuses primarily on refugees as persons fleeing war and danger and who have crossed an international border, while other forcibly displaced persons are included where the discussion demands, as well as a particular chapter on internally displaced persons (IDPs). A major distinguishing contribution of this text, however, is that it treats the category of the African refugee as embracing a vast diversity of individuals who find themselves in a variety of displacement contexts. For the purpose of this book, the term refugee refers to anyone displaced by conflict or some political or other generalized social crisis, who has actually fled across an international border to seek refuge in a different country than that of their origin or habitual residence. Whereas internally displaced persons (IDPs) are those who have had to relocate from areas of crisis to relatively crisis-free areas but still remain within the territories of their country of origin, the term stateless persons is reserved for those who fall under the 1954 UN Convention on the Status of Stateless Persons’ definition as “a person who is not considered a national by any State under the operation of its law.” While our principal focus is on refugees, we have not ignored IDPs in our consideration of the factors responsible for the crises of forced displacement.

III The justification for this book lies in the very problems of refugee creation and management. It is a human problem and a continental tragedy. The refugee phenomenon is nearly as old as human society. It is a consequence of the fallout

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that results from the coexistence of diverse and conflicting interests within a society. There are, however, important differences between the refugees of earlier centuries and those of the present, as the former were often considered assets rather than liabilities. In an era where control over large territories and populations was considered a measure of power and national greatness, rulers granted refuge to people with religious and ideological views similar to their own. But unfortunately, this “has not been the case for many refugees in the twentieth century.”1 Most of the countries carved out by the colonial empires in Africa were shaped by administrative expediency to maximize economic exploitation and minimize the cost of governance. This meant that borders were often arbitrary, and as a result, “ethnic” groups and “tribes” “were split up across state boundaries, creating dual loyalties and building centrifugal forces into the systems of most of the newly independent countries.”2 Furthermore, the resultant motley of states were especially vulnerable to the types of economic deprivation and political repression responsible for the creation of refugees. These unstable conditions generated tensions that resulted in varying and often violent outcomes. Conflicts based on sectarian, “ethnic,” and “tribal” affiliations became commonplace in most African states and have continued to generate large numbers of refugees in the continent. The 1980s witnessed a new phase in the refugee crisis. This was also a period that saw an increase in the number of internal and regional conflicts with external involvement.3 As a result, Africa produced increasing numbers of refugees who faced extended stays at camps while the UNHCR’s energies were taken up by refugees from Afghanistan and the Horn of Africa. The 1990s were largely the same, with major conflicts in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Congo, Rwanda, South Africa, and Sudan. More internal strife meant more refugees, with the only distinction being the prevention of aid from reaching affected peoples by warring parties, signaling an inadequacy in the traditional solutions to refugee problems. The world now has a population of 70.8 million forcibly displaced people. This number includes refugees, asylum seekers, IDPs, stateless persons, and others whose status could not be ascertained.4 This figure grew from 43.3 1. Loescher, Beyond Charity, 32. 2. Ibid., 78. 3. The second Sudanese war (1983–2005) was prominent among African conflicts in that period, with over two million dead and four million who had been displaced at least once. Also noteworthy were the anti-apartheid struggles in South Africa that contributed to increasing refugee numbers. 4. UNHCR, Forced Displacement in 2019, 4.

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million in 2009 to 70.8 million in 2018. Though this increase was driven mainly by the Syrian conflict and the Arab Spring in northern Africa (Tunisia, Egypt, and Morocco), the Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Sudan, the Central African Republic, and Ethiopia, which together host a quarter of the world’s refugees, also contributed.5 There were an estimated 24.2 million people of concern in the region (sub-Saharan Africa) at the beginning of 2018, including 6.3 million refugees and 14.5 million IDPs. By mid-2018, the numbers increased again with some 170,000 new refugees and 2 million new IDPs, mostly from the Central African Republic, South Sudan, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Nigeria.6 African refugees are made in local conflicts, which are often directly or indirectly connected with foreign interests operating in the area7 or with a more historically rooted colonial legacy. More a result of political instability than of climactic factors, most African refugees migrate toward neighboring countries, especially those with populations with whom they share cultural similarities, rather than making the long, precarious journey to North Africa and then on to Europe. This might also be the simple issue of proximity; however, the higher number of IDPs than refugees supports the hypothesis that African displaced persons would rather not stray too far from their places of origin and/or residence. Many African refugees, except for those who seek political asylum far from the reach of their pursuers and those seeking better social and economic prospects, look forward to an end to crisis and a return to their homelands. This hope keeps them as close as possible to “home.” And in places where the conf licts are not widespread, they relocate to conf lict-free areas within their country’s borders, in some cases staying with friends and relatives or being assimilated into urban centers. Recent economic hardships brought on by state corruption and by climatic changes, however, have increased the number of Africans, especially from the sub-Saharan regions, attempting to cross over to Europe through Libya and the Mediterranean to Italy and onward. These asylum seekers often face deportation and dehumanizing treatment by the immigration agencies of the gateway European countries. 5. Yemen and Iraq in the Middle East as well as the Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh at the end of 2017 also contributed to this monumental increase in number. 6. UNCHR, Africa Regional Summaries, 70. 7. See the activities of the Shell Petroleum Development Corporation, a subsidiary of British Petroleum, in the Niger-Delta regions of Nigeria in the 1990s.

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IV This book fits within the rich library of scholarship on refugees, adding to the multiple conversations and creating a most accessible text on the subject. New research around the causes and consequences of African refugees will continue to expand, and many official publications need to be interrogated for provincial prejudices that obstruct accurate investigation and assessment. The study of African refugees must be set within a comparative framework of global refugees, new theories have to be applied, new areas in the humanities and social sciences have to be researched, various other fields have to be involved, and the human stories have to be told and converted to films and documentaries. Africans are facing the twin melancholies of displacement and falsified narratives. This book has corrected what it could, while offering perhaps the most cumulated knowledge on the topic to date. African Refugees identifies and synthesizes the many strands of knowledge produced on African refugee issues, from across diverse disciplines, to create a coherent narrative of the phenomenon. By integrating the study of African refugees more clearly into broader African Studies literature, recognizing refugees as part of the continent’s social, political, and historical development, this book argues that displacement and relocation are important not only for policy makers but also for intellectual inquiries into the continent’s past, present, and future. African refugees are a field of study that connects to history, economics, politics, culture, society, international relations, diplomacy, law, and other disciplines. This book is a needed contribution to Refugee Studies literature and the African Studies corpus. The field of refugee and forced migration studies is dominated by scholars from the Global North. We conceive of African Refugees as a decolonial project, deliberately designed to (a) expand the body of literature about African refugees globally and within Africa; (b) insert an authoritative, distinctly African perspective into the discourse, influencing the way African refugees are framed and theorized; (c) redefine the scope, subjects, perspectives, and interpretations that are considered valid for inclusion and exclusion; (d) contribute much-needed African authorship to the existing corpus of Refugee Studies literature on Africa; (e) produce knowledge that appropriately recognizes African agency and contributions in pursuit of solutions for African refugees over time; (f) avoid the pitfalls of the colonial gaze—in scholarship on African refugees, refugees are perpetually pathologized and Africa is always the sole cause of its own problems—seeking to complicate these narratives by situating African refugee issues within exploitative global, colonial, and neocolonial systems of

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power and knowledge production; (g) provide a more historically accurate analysis that reinstates African refugees as subjects of political factors such as racism, xenophobia, and nationalism and as political actors and agents themselves; and (h) challenge and critique the Eurocentric foundations on which Refugee Studies, the refugee regime, and the general field of African Studies has been based. African Refugee Studies have been so configured to reflect cases of migrations and their destructive capacities on nations and peoples as well as on the image of the continent so cleverly, and sometimes manipulatively, that the underground causes and their foundational structures are spared, as if the conditions that created the problems can be disconnected from the results they generate. Solutions cannot be effective if the root causes of the problems are unknown. This book starts with the assumption that understanding causation is vital. Therefore, by understanding the reasons behind the susceptibility of many African countries to violence and perpetual instability, we hope to inform decisions that provide lasting solutions to the myriad challenges confronting the continent. And yet, we caution readers not to make the mistake of assuming that the solutions offered are a one-size-fits-all approach to the problems of refugees in Africa. The book is grounded on a number of premises, including the causes, treatment, and status of refugees and solutions. We must come to an understanding that Africa hosted more than two thousand ethnic groups in its precolonial states, and that does not automatically change because the European imperialists came to the continent for their expansionist agenda and imposed new boundaries over ancient homelands. The new territorial maps and renaming to remake Africa was a necessary step for the conquerors to have a smoother experience in overseeing their affairs. The Berlin Conference of 1884 cemented the Scramble for Africa, rearranging the geographical entities of Africa indiscriminately, regardless of their cultural beliefs and political identities. In other words, the colonial state foundation was the basis for future crises—the eventual colonial and postcolonial reactions are just the fruits of the foundational discord. Europeans “mechanized,” machinated, and manipulated African ethnic identities to become a perpetual source of misunderstanding and conflict. As if this were not enough, after the Europeans left a conflict-prone identity for the Africans, they refused to untie the rope of dependency on them. Africa lost substantially to the European imperialists in the negotiations they were forced to comply with. The weak political and economic systems were compounded by poor and corrupt leadership that failed to cater to the

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basic demands of the citizens, who in turn became destabilized in their ethnic arrangements. As conflicts emerged over all sorts of problems, people became displaced and in their quest for safety found themselves in places where they were confined to a lower status than the one they had enjoyed while in their origin countries. In fact, they were tagged refugees requiring emergency assistance for security and support. Depending on the country they find themselves in, displaced persons may be accommodated in camps or organized settlements, or they find their way to urban areas and cities. Women suffer a great deal, whether in camps, settlements, or cities. In wars, most of the casualties are men, but women become the overall victims. The casualties leave behind families, children, and women, and the responsibility shifts exclusively to women, who must find urgent ways out of conflicts and find security. African Refugees carefully and thoroughly distinguishes variations in national and policy contexts; recognizes and foregrounds identities, whether of age, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, race, class, or nation; and shows a present and constant awareness of the implications of these identities for shaping refugee experiences, the policies that are formulated or neglected, and the solutions that are sought. The book contains chapters dedicated to particular refugee demographics, such as youth, urban, and women refugees, but at the same time it eschews any attempt to treat these subcategories themselves as homogenous or self-contained. Therefore, for us, there is no single, prototypical African refugee: even as the book recognizes commonalities of experience where possible, it contests the assumptions of uniformity that are often found in scholarly literature.

V About a third of the book attempts to find solutions to a serious problem. Thus, this book combines academic perspectives with practical suggestions on the matter. It reviews the state of knowledge on the solutions of the twentieth century while offering both a critique and broader recommendations on its own. One innovation is to ground our overarching recommendations on a broader notion of citizenship. Already, the international community proposes solutions that they think would address the hydra-headed challenges facing refugees. These solutions have been collectively tagged durable solutions, and they traditionally comprise local integration, resettlement, and voluntary repatriation. As readers will discover in this book, these solutions, while seeking to protect

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the interests of refugees, in the process retain the sovereignty and interests of governments and the international community. There may not be any solution to the problems of refugees in Africa if the level of Africa’s development remains anemic. One of the drivers of migration is the search for economic solutions to problems associated with food security, employment, health, and shelter. When the continent prioritizes development and makes available industries and establishments where people can compete economically, this will foster the equitable distribution of wealth and convert all energy dedicated to violence into more productive and progressive avenues. The youth, women, and the aged ones in society will feel accomplished when their issues are given primacy. In addition to this, citizenship is an important enhancer of a more peaceful atmosphere. When this is combined with the provision of rights and opportunities to people, they will contribute their quota to the advancement of the continent and desist from conflicts that keep threatening their unity and sending them backward.

VI This book is laid out in five interconnected parts: the context of refugee lives and Refugee Studies in Africa, the making of refugees, living situations of refugees, issues in the management and protection of refugees, and the conclusion. Part I focuses on the context of refugeehood in Africa and carefully traces the development of Refugee Studies and the location of the current text within the extant literature. This preface opens the book by painting broad strokes of refugees and refugeehood in an African context, defining the central arguments threaded through the scope of the book. It defines who qualifies as an African refugee and the various caveats, considerations, and innovations in the approach taken to the study with this book. Chapter 1, “Refugeehood in Africa,” further explains the genesis of African refugees, their different spatial and geographic locations, and the factors and forces engendering similarities and differences among the continent’s refugees. It introduces actors who are involved with refugees throughout their experience, including states, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and the ever-present humanitarian community. The book’s preoccupation with the search for durable solutions is also foregrounded in this chapter, which kick-starts a discussion of the authors’ vision, elucidated throughout the book, of a future for Africa without refugees. The second chapter, aptly titled “Refugee Studies,” offers a historiographical discussion. It engages in several debates with existing literature concerning the

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definition, scope, labels, history, themes, and trends in the field. The chapter provides a long view that reaches back to early studies of refugees from the First World War, continuing through the specific, significantly changed context of scholarly Refugee Studies after the Second World War. It recognizes the specific contributions of the “Oxford school” while introducing other centers of knowledge production concerning refugees and discussing the factors shaping the current study of the subject. The chapter offers a critique of the development of the corpus that defines the field, the main themes of that work, and its historical, ideological, and geopolitical foundations. It examines the subject and students of the field, discussing the limitations and promise of the growing field in relation to contemporary developments. Chapter 3, “African Refugee Studies,” reviews the key themes that preoccupy scholars of African refugees and contemporary trends that challenge the field. It engages the problems of reliable and credible sources of data on African refugees, discussing the preponderance of conflict-induced displacement on the African continent. The growing domain of mixed migration, as an emerging conceptualization of the specific African refugee situation, is given careful analysis in relation to the older literature that eschews such broad visions of refugee management. The chapter also critiques the move by political actors toward such a characterization of African refugees. The current problems of LGBTQ+ African refugees, African refugees at US borders in the Trump era, and neglected issues of refugees’ mental health are examined in this chapter, which provides a panoramic view of the African refugee situation today. The chapter ultimately assesses the state of studies of African refugees, recommending possible directions for African Refugee Studies of the future. The crucial fourth chapter, “Human Rights Instruments on African Refugees,” discusses the core legal framework applying to African refugees, along with the expected rights and responsibilities provided by that framework. It reviews the 1951 UN Convention on the Status of Refugees, the 1967 Protocol, the 1969 OAU Convention Governing Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa, the Kampala Declaration, and the Kampala Convention on IDPs. This chapter is followed by another on “States and Policy Frameworks,” which extends the preceding discussion by focusing on how African states have translated the protection of refugees on paper to the actual treatment of refugees in various parts of the continent. It reveals the gaps between legal policy and practical implementation, identifying the central role of states in determining the quality of life for refugees and the rights available to them. In part II, “Making Refugees,” the book turns to the historical factors and forces that have produced the millions of refugees across the African continent.

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Chapter 6, “Colonialism and the Making of Refugees in Africa,” historicizes the emergence of African refugees as political “products” and as a vivid and enduring social reality. It establishes that Africa’s current refugee crisis is not natural; specific external drivers provided the foundations and the conditions making refugees inevitable beyond the colonial situation. The critical elements of political disagreements that create exiles have always been present in the long historical past of many African polities, but this chapter squarely locates the roots of Africa’s refugee crisis in the colonial era. The argument is advanced by referencing the uniquely damaging effects of European colonial partitioning and fragmentation, which produced the “modern” states of Africa; the colonial economy and its enduring structural constrictions; the forgery of previously nonexistent ethnic, linguistic, and other identities and the modification of existing identities; the implantation of foreign religions; the creation of rural-urban inequalities; and the colonial administrative systems imposed by various European overlords. Chapter 7, “Postcolonial Politics, Wars, and African Refugee Problems,” turns the spotlight on the dysfunctional politics of postindependence African states that have turned into entities that “manufacture” refugees. State collapse has been a recurring problem on the continent, often accompanied by war—starting with the anticolonial/nationalist wars and later secessionist wars, proxy wars of the Cold War era, and internal wars fought for as many reasons as there are states on the continent. These wars and political crises were concurrent with economic crises and struggles for natural resource control. Neocolonial economies and the machinations of former colonial powers also stoked identity conflicts and xenophobia. Although this book is about refugees as defined by existing international frameworks, in chapter 8 it engages in a discussion of IDPs in Africa for several important reasons, including the overwhelming number of IDPs on the continent—almost double the number of Convention refugees today. The reality is that IDP conditions often mirror those of refugees, especially where they form mixed migration movements. This chapter examines the similar causes and contexts of IDPs on the continent, looking at the intersection with the concerns of Refugee Studies. This chapter also discusses Africa’s unique position as the only region in the world to have agreed to a legal framework, the Kampala Convention, for the specific treatment and protection of IDPs. Part III is concerned with the dynamics of refugee existence in Africa, a vast and varied geographical, national, and legal context, with multiple identities overlapping across space and time. Refugee camps and settlements are spatial, ideological, and political constructions of refugee identity that foreshadow

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the range and types of experiences for refugees in exile. Chapter 9, “Refugee Camps and Settlements in Africa,” engages different conceptualizations of refugee accommodations, as distinguished in the literature, while acknowledging the practical impossibility of making sharp distinctions for many scenarios on the African continent. It discusses the dramatic increase in the number of refugee camps in Africa, which has produced imagery of African refugees and constrained their lives and futures. It also considers the situation of women, girls, and boys in camps as well as the problems associated with camps and other organized settlements. The chapter balances a discussion of the impact of refugee settlements with a discussion of how states perceive the impact of these settlements on the host populations, exploring the political, security, economic, and social implications for state policy. Chapter 10, “Urban Refugees,” explores the experiences of refugees who are living in urban areas in their countries of asylum. This subset of refugees has been consistently underestimated and ignored in humanitarian programs while being deliberately targeted for exclusion and punishment by states that would rather relegate refugees to out-of-sight rural areas. This chapter analyzes the impact of urbanization and urbanism on refugees in Africa’s urban areas, as well as the problems associated with refugee status determination in a context that eludes the prima facie determination more prevalent on the continent. It also discusses the securitization impulse of host countries, the protection and assistance of urban refugees, and the UNHCR’s evolving role in mitigating their challenges. The preceding chapters integrate the experiences of refugee women into their various contexts, but chapter 11, “African Refugee Women: Gendering Policy and Protection,” foregrounds the evolution of such an approach in research and policy practice. The initial absence of African women and their eventual admittance into legal and policy frameworks from the post-Second World War era are contextualized within the global political milieu. The recognition of refugee women as subjects of international law and humanitarian practice is shown as the product of vigorous global activism by women in global institutions. This chapter also recognizes the role played by African women in the development of the international human rights instruments and UNHCR policies. It analyzes the development of these currents in the activism and policy arena alongside developments in feminist scholarship on these issues. This chapter also extensively considers the experiences of African women refugees. The continent of Africa has the most youthful population in the world, and this dynamic is reproduced in the continent’s refugee population: it has the world’s highest percentage of young refugees. Chapter 12 engages in a more

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longitudinal analysis than most, discussing young African refugees as a critical force for the continent’s much-desired development and economic advancement. It describes the challenges and resilience of young African refugees on the continent and abroad, making a case for their protection. Chapter 13, “Hope in Displacement: Refugees and Cultures of Creativity,” is a unique chapter. It explores the ways in which African refugees draw on multiple artistic, creative, and cultural resources to weave hope, strength, and resilience into devastating circumstances. Forced displacement is an assault on cultural identities and practices, and the refugees’ ability to recreate their cultures as coping mechanisms to preserve or transform memory and for psychosocial healing is treated as a masterful reclaiming of reality, often with remarkable results. Refugee protection is the core of the international refugee regime. Part IV turns to a critical rereading of the many local and global efforts to assist refugees, provide protection, and find solutions. Chapter 14, “Refugee Protection and Management,” situates African refugees within the broader discourse of African development, providing a nuanced analysis of the socioeconomic context determining whether African refugees have access to protection and solutions. It conducts a careful analysis of the vigorous efforts of states and the UNHCR as they search for the most fitting political and humanitarian frameworks to manage Africa’s refugee crisis, defining solutions in a way that allows refugees to live meaningful lives wherever they may be located on the continent. The most recent iteration of these efforts is the New York Declaration and the resultant Global Compact on Refugees, which are probed for their present and potential relevance to the adequate protection of African refugees. The argument is extended into chapter 15, “Durable Solutions and the Crisis of Development.” This chapter, like the rest of the book, takes a broad and more in-depth view of durable solutions to refugee crisis. Durable solutions encompass the reconfiguration of development alternatives and human security options to which African states and the international community must commit in order to “solve” Africa’s refugee crises. The chapter critiques the multifarious ways in which “traditional” durable solutions are applied in various contexts, identifying the limits of the recently concluded Global Compact—the latest attempt at reinventing durable solutions for refugees. Refugees, as products of politics, can access enduring solutions only when state policies become citizenand people-oriented to attain the long-term objectives of African development and prosperity. What happens to former refugees after accessing so-called durable solutions of repatriation, integration, and resettlement? Returning to the theme of

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centering the refugee experience, chapter 16 on “Home, Return, and Postrelocation” explores the aftermath of relocation for the refugees involved—whether returned to their country of origin, integrated or naturalized in their country of asylum, or resettled in a far-off developed country. The implications are personal and psychological, as refugees reconceptualize the sense of home and belonging. The implications are also political, economic, and cultural, as refugees reconfigure their cultural referents in a search for security, rights, and development while navigating acceptance, xenophobia, and access to employment, education, and other social services. Part V, the conclusion of this book, takes two converging paths that return to the root causes of African refugee flows, probing how the conditions that create refugees may be attenuated and eliminated to end Africa’s intractable refugee crises. Chapter 17, “Citizenship, Rights, and Development,” analyzes the need to remodel state-society relations on the continent, building more open, flexible, and rights-regarding practices and frameworks to deal with Africa’s refugee problems. Chapter 18, “The Future: Ending Africa’s Refugee Crisis,” includes specific recommendations toward better management and protection of refugees, hopefully ending the refugee crisis that has engulfed every nation on the continent. It explores the possibilities for greater international and regional cooperation; development options, including industrialization; self-sufficiency for refugees; the end of impunity for war crimes and crimes against humanity; and the recentering of Pan-African ideals. The latter could lead to a situation where every African, anywhere on the continent, would need not adopt the label of “refugee”—they would have equal access to rights and development wherever they found themselves.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Toyin Falola: This project has been long in the making, starting with encounters with refugees, migrants, and displaced people in several places over the years. My city of birth, Ibadan, started as a refugee settlement in the early nineteenth century. This became the subject of my PhD thesis, and I expanded on it in various essays on Yoruba refugees that settled at Ijaye, Abeokuta, Ogbomoso, and Ilorin. I followed this up with the study of migrations and internal displacements in Nigeria in the 1980s and 1990s, instigated by various cases of religious violence. Events in the second half of the twentieth century consolidated my interest in immigrants, displaced people, and refugees, all falling into different categories even if some of their experiences do overlap. My encounters with the subject of postcolonial refugees provoked strong feelings that ultimately moved me into writing commentaries, the policy world, and academic writing. The feelings, to me and others, were unstable, binary. There were situations where refugee conditions incurred in me the feelings of compassion and sympathy, but I know others who loathed them for a host of reasons. My historical studies of refugees, migration, and displacement became a lived reality in the case of Ghanaian immigrants in Nigeria in the 1970s. Seeking opportunities, migrants from Ghana relocated to Nigeria by the thousands. A disaster struck in 1983 when the government of Nigeria, under the leadership of President Shehu Shagari, ordered their expulsion from the country. As they hurriedly packed their belongings into a bag now famously labeled “Ghana Must Go,” I saw things firsthand, connecting me to the literature of the nineteenth century, but this time it invoked compassionate feelings that later broadened into the experiences of displaced people and refugees. They had left Ghana

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when the economy of their country declined, and they had come to Nigeria to struggle to put food on their tables, many doing menial jobs for sustenance. I was opposed to the policy and wrote a media piece attacking the government for that inhumane decision to expel thousands of people at short notice. As I argued, given the economic conditions of their country during this crisis, it was apparent to me that their return would invite additional burdens to themselves and the economic crisis of their home country. Apart from this, it would lead them to a period of struggle and strife because of the changing of their environment and its resulting consequences. These refugees had settled comfortably in Nigeria, shuttling between the host country and their home country when they could afford it. They had their businesses organized and were thriving in Nigeria, with its prospects and promises. But they were suddenly asked to vacate their settlements because of changes in government policies and the fear that they were taking jobs away from Nigerians. These people were faced with dire conditions that would make them lose their possessions and properties. Others disagreed with me, defending the government decision, arguing that it was correct, and attributing criminal activities to the refugees, without evidence to support their case. The Ghanaian episode marked the beginning of my renewed academic interest in Refugee Studies. Cases of refugees, migration, or internal displacement reflect the binary that I hinted at. Given what migrants, displaced people, and refugees stood to lose economically, socially, and psychologically, their conditions evoked my compassion. Not so for the government and its supporters, who argued that when some immigrants or refugees were guilty of some allegations that bordered on being complicit in security breaches or crimes, the whole group of people deserved to lose not only the public sympathy but also their right to a fair hearing. For example, many immigrants of Ghanaian origin, the internally displaced people of Kanuri origins in some southern Nigerian cities, and the Liberian refugees who found themselves in Nigeria stayed in the metropolis, the urban areas, and were accused of aiding morally reprehensible engagements that could undermine the security architecture of the city. As I became intensely drawn to the media pieces of the 1980s on immigrants and later of West African refugees in Nigeria, I began to see the opinions that were contrary to mine. Some argued that refugees were susceptible to being used for questionable activities, and so they deserved the harsh treatment they attracted from the government. Unless they did not allow their quest for immediate economic development to stop them from following the usual process put in place by the Nigerian communities, refugees were always the primary target of suspicion when there were criminal activities. I was pained by the whole

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exercise, traumatized by it, since I lost friends in the process. While I began to see migrants and refugees’ presence as inevitable, I began to realize that this did not provide the grounds for negatively instrumentalizing their presence, by any group, considering that their stay could be cut short at any time their host suspected them. I began to connect my study of Ibadan in the nineteenth century with the expulsion of Ghanaians in 1983, displaced people in Nigeria in the 1980s and 1990s, and refugees from wars produced in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and other African countries. I must write about it! Postcolonial Africa generated millions of displaced people and refugees— from wars in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Sudan, the fall of Libya, and the explosion in the Sahel that led to massive migrations, those displaced by Boko Haram in northeastern Nigeria, those crossing the Sahara Desert, and Eritreans struggling to go to Europe. I became a member of policy-oriented bodies talking about refugees on the one hand and voluntary migrants on the other. I became drawn to the Afro-Arab Summit devoted to the issue of migration in Africa, the Middle East, and southern Europe. Those regarded as “illegal” migrants are generally on their own, unprotected by laws, as they are regarded as voluntary travelers seeking better lives. Refugees, on the other hand, need state protection and recognition. The immigrants from Ghana to Nigeria were not being fed by the Nigerian government, but the refugees from Liberia had to be taken care of. However, the binary remains, between me (and those who think like me) and those who hold contrary opinions on refugees. In a situation where they are unjustly disrespected and violated, I am bound to share in their grief and in the understanding that refugees are not prisoners of poverty, or that refugees flee their home countries because of reasons beyond their control, such as political challenges. One is bound to identify with these refugees because they are seriously in need of assistance to help them continue with life. One’s sense of sympathy must come alive when one understands the internal struggles that necessitated the displacement of those fleeing from political instability and wars. Knowing that they are facing imminent danger, or more plainly, death, if they are forcefully returned home, one cannot but be compassionate toward them, as every human deserves love and affection even if they are perceived negatively and unfairly by their host societies. The Nigerian refugees faced with the challenges of Boko Haram insurgency in northeastern Nigeria, for example, cannot be pushed to go back to their war-ridden environment to face death. The first instinct must be to generate methods of saving them. My feelings began to feed interest in policies and politics. I participated in some of the conversations in academic and policy circles. I began to think

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more deeply, with some of my ideas incubated in the 1980s creeping back into this book. I think there should be policies established to cater to refugees and displaced people because the current reality does not indicate that there will be an end to the phenomenon. While we have made available in this book recommendations and solutions to be implemented by the policy makers in Africa, we cannot in any way enforce them ourselves. Even if we could, we do not have the assurance of stopping wars that generate refugees in the long run. However, the journey toward an end to the hostile atmosphere that leads to conflicts and strife must begin with the governments’ readiness and intervention. For those whose reason for violence is separation, there must be dialogue. For the ones who are unsatisfied with the colonial boundaries and demand restructured borders, there must arise corresponding bodies to intervene with a view to ending the malice and providing lasting solutions to the enduring challenges. For nations and groups who deliberately take to violence, national governments are encouraged to address their grievances using humane means to curtail threats to innocent people and not cause further displacement. In countries of the African Union where states were formed indiscriminately without recourse to historical, cultural, and geographical backgrounds, there should be efforts to correct this anomaly. Colonial state foundation that was inherited by some countries must be corrected. Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso: For me, this book is a labor of love, having emanated from almost two decades of consistent research on various aspects of refugee issues on the African continent including refugee women, refugee protection, durable solutions, repatriation, transitional justice, refugee children, refugees and gender-based violence, and the politics of postconflict African states. For me, refugees are hundreds of faces and names I have met and spoken to over the course of this time—as my schoolmates and work colleagues here in Nigeria, as children on the streets of Lagos, in camps in the West African subregion, at transit centers during humanitarian processes, as returnees in their “homelands,” in various locales. Having privileged field research using qualitative methods throughout my career, I have personally heard so many African refugees tell of their lives before war, during flight, in exile, wandering in search of asylum, upon return, and in abeyance, waiting to flee yet again. I have seen their physical scars, I have shared (albeit in a relatively small way) the emotional and psychological toll of seeing and bearing so much suffering from war, and I have heard their triumphant testimonials, seen their hope, and witnessed their progress. African refugees, for me, are living, breathing

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persons, not mere research subjects, not just topics to write about—but human beings for whom our every action or inaction in the academic or policy field has tangible consequences. Whenever I have had the privilege of meeting refugees during fieldwork, they have asked me what I planned to do to help them. Every time, adhering to the strict ethics of social science research, I was careful not to promise direct intervention in their circumstances, because that was not my primary objective for conducting research. Rather, my resolve has been consistent: to never stop talking or writing about refugees, bringing their situation, their needs, their concerns, their positionalities, their uniquenesses, imperfections, and aspirations before audiences in their countries of origin and asylum and far abroad, where decision makers and humanitarian actors might learn of these and act. I have done this right across the African continent, from locations here in West Africa to East Africa, North Africa, and Southern Africa. I have shared with audiences across Europe and the United States and further afield in Asia. Interviewing and meeting with humanitarian workers from diverse agencies (including staff of the UNHCR in the field and at the headquarters in Geneva), with innumerable government officials with divergent aims in relation to the refugees, and with brilliant academics who have shared their insights and asked important questions, I have been enriched by my interactions. This book is a convergence of some of the knowledge I have gained, the lessons learned, the language acquired, and the uncountable interactions with the owners of that knowledge, the refugees themselves, and of those in humanitarian and governmental circles who work with them. Both of us are grateful to a long list of people, including refugees whose names we want to protect. The interpretations reflected in this book are tied to a large body of materials drawn from different countries—Sudan, Cameroon, Chad, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ghana, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Morocco, Eritrea, Ethiopia, South Africa, and more. Our colleagues, experts in their own right on various aspects of African Studies, read drafts of various chapters of this work and gave extremely insightful feedback: King (Prof) Fonkem Achankeng I and Professors Julius Adekunle, Biko Agozino, Anene Ejikeme, Bonny Ibhawoh, dele jegede, Amadu J. Kaba, Serges Kamga, Femi Mimiko, Sifiso Ndlovu, Fallou Ngom, Segun Ogungbemi, Samuel Oloruntoba, Bashir Salau, Tim Stapleton, Oluwaseun Tella, and Samuel Zalanga. Professors Michael Oladejo Afolayan and Bola Dauda each read the entire manuscript with breathtaking speed and tender care. Thank you so much. We also appreciate the expert assistance of Jamie DeAngelo in drawing the maps in

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the book and sourcing some of the images. The ever-reliable Mr. Wale Ghazal was very helpful in preparing the images for print. In all, we both accept responsibility for all the contents of the published book. Toyin Falola extends heartfelt appreciation and affection to Olabisi, wife and soulmate, for her steadfast care and support through it all. I became a grandfather three times over while writing this book, and my joy knows no bounds since. My children—Dolapo, Bisola, and Toyin—and their families bring me immense pride and fulfillment. Olajumoke is thankful to several organizations and granting agencies that have made her research and travels possible over the many years: the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, New York; the American Council of Learned Societies; the University for Peace Africa Program; the African Studies Association Presidential Fellowship; the University of Texas at Austin School of Law & the Rapoport Center for Human Rights; the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva; the African Association of Political Science; the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa; and places and centers too numerous to mention, for the opportunity given to search, to learn, and to share. My research on refugees began during my postgraduate studies at the University of Ibadan, and I forever owe my PhD supervisor, Professor Adigun Agbaje, a debt of gratitude for his guidance, mentoring, and facilitation not only in supervising my doctoral thesis but also in my academic and professional advancement. As I traversed the above landscapes and in the long years of articulating this book, my family have sometimes had to do without me. I am most thankful to my husband, Professor Yacob Haliso, for being my pillar and for his wonderful care of our children, Ashenaffi and Betsega, who light up my world every single day with love and laughter and promise. My love and thanks go to my mom, Doris Taiye Oyinloye, for her unflinching faith in me; to my late dad, Zacchaeus Adebayo Oyinloye, for his legacy of intellection and dedication to duty; and to my siblings and their families, Adeola Eunice, Omotola Esther, Oluwaseyi Daniel, Sandra, Samuel, and Jahleel, for their unending love and sacrifices, even traveling long distances to visit me and attend my talks. It has been a singular honor for me to work on this project with Professor Toyin Falola, the doyen of African Studies and leading light in theorizing the conditions of the continent with a long historical view that stretches backward and forward, into the future. This collaboration has given this study a most unique perspective, placing African refugees in the past, present, and future of African society and politics. It has been a great learning opportunity working

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with Professor Falola’s intensity of focus and being challenged by his insights and foresight on all issues. This book is our joint contribution to the discourse on the future of Africa beyond the current crises. Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso, Babcock University Summer 2021

Part I

CONTEXT

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REFUGEEHOOD IN AFRICA

Introduction: A Continent of R efuge e s Human displacement is as old as history itself. People flee traumatic events or go searching for better opportunities; they may leave when their personal safety is threatened or ecological challenges disrupt their lives; or they may flee violence in their communities, regions, or nations. How we define and distinguish between forms of migration has been influenced by the interplay of politics and power over time. Historically, people migrate for economic gain, as seen by European expansionists in their triangular movement from Europe to Africa and to the Americas. Jewish people also migrated to different parts of the world, having faced continued persecution over centuries. Greeks traveled to America, and Africans have migrated within and beyond the continent. More often than not, historical migrations have been inspired by the need to expand one’s economic opportunities, which is very much the case in the recent history of African migrations despite the common and unfair assessment of these migrations as stemming from desperation of a people displaced by their stereotypic incapacity for human and natural resources governance. However, when considered closely, migrations of Africans in the contemporary world parallel those of other peoples. Forced displacement, in our typologies of migrations, results in the creation of refugee populations, which have provoked intense scholarly interrogation. Refugee crises have emerged today as an international phenomenon ranking among other “global mega-trends” such as climate change and rapid urbanization, as former UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) chief and

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current UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres once noted.1 Placed within the broader historical context of rapidly evolving global phenomena that are shaping state and individual power and decision-making, forced migration is an inescapable reality of modern international relations. The most recent statistics indicate that there are almost eighty million forcibly displaced persons worldwide, a record high, prompting the current UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi, to sound the alarm that “forced displacement . . . is simply no longer a short-term and temporary phenomenon.”2 But African nations have known this for a long time, as from the very first years of independence, the late 1950s, to today, refugees have been a permanent feature of the continent and now exist in virtually every African country. While a staggering 85 percent of the global displaced population is hosted by developing countries, sub-Saharan Africa3 alone hosts 39 percent of all refugees and displaced persons.4 There is some awareness of the plight of refugees and forced migrants worldwide, but Africa is the locale of a forgotten refugee crisis, as the vast majority of African refugees are in protracted displacement situations. The real “refugee crisis” is in Africa, yet scholarship and research on African refugees have yet to confront the embeddedness of the refugee situation in African political and social experience and to account for it as a part of African political history, past and present. In this chapter, we elucidate the broad outlines of the refugee crisis in Africa to provide a foundation for our discussion throughout this book.

Th e A fr ica n R efuge e The word refugee invokes a bleak sense of displacement and paints a picture of half-naked and malnourished children, exhausted women, and men in camps without basic amenities. But the term refers to fleeing persons whose initial residence is no longer conducive to or safe for their survival. In government or political circles, and in international law, the concept takes on a more technical description. Refugees are described as people who are forced to flee 1 . In Crisp, “Finding Space for Protection,” 92. 2. UNHCR, Forced Displacement in 2019, 6. 3. The UN refugee agency, which provides the most authoritative refugee statistics, has conventionally presented data on Africa in two parts: the “sub-Saharan” Africa region and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Our use of these statistics is not an endorsement of this bifurcation. Where possible, we avoid these biased labels and divided categories of Africa. 4. UNHCR, Forced Displacement in 2019, 72.

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their country of origin or habitual residence as a result of war, persecution, or violence. In other words, one has to have crossed an international border, sometimes at great personal risk, for fear of safety, to be considered a refugee by states and policy makers. To be officially considered a refugee, one has to express a well-rooted fear of persecution in reference to religion, nationality, race, identity, or political opinion, among other possible causes of forced displacement. It is assumed that one’s country of birth or residence is no longer capable of providing protection of life and property. This conception of a refugee may not encompass the contextual realities of different crises across the globe. Refugees might be fleeing the violence of another country, internal political instability, or aggression against them because of their identity—racial, ethnic, religious, or otherwise. Such individuals, having become defenseless and vulnerable to inhuman acts, may elect to seek refuge in another country. Of course, such decisions may be made collectively by a group of people, leading to mass movements; they could also be made by individuals when they are facing persecution and their safety depends on flight. However, in many situations, the movements of such individuals are met with resistance from the receiving country. This normally results in the fleeing individuals being denied entry or summarily detained. In other cases, if they are accepted into the host country, they may be exposed to hostility and xenophobic acts by the citizens. In extreme cases, fleeing individuals are subjected to refoulement,5 defined in international law as forced deportation to a territory in which they fear persecution, torture, or other inhuman and degrading treatment. In general, the term asylum seeker is used when referring to a person who has fled their country of origin and, having arrived in another country, presented themselves for recognition and protection as a refugee. According to the 1951 UN Convention on the Status of Refugees, a refugee is any person who, owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reason of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion, is outside the country of their nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, unwilling to avail themselves of the protection of the country. This definition is restrictive and reductive, and it suffers some limitations in not considering other categories of persons who fall outside this framing and who may also need international protection. Furthermore, a person has to prove that persecution is the reason for flight and consequently for seeking asylum. How and what proof is enough to demonstrate that the individual is being persecuted is unspecified and left to the discretion of states. Not only is this 5. Kumin, “Revitalizing International Protection,” 5–7.

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definition lacking, but it is also impractical to justify persecution as the only reason for anybody to seek asylum. In the African context, the need to resituate the concept of refugee was important to account for both individualized and collective afflictions that demand asylum provision. Added to this were the temporal and geographical limitations that restricted the 1951 UN Convention’s applicability to European refugees in the aftermath of the Second World War. The 1967 Protocol to the 1951 Convention was concluded specifically to remove these limitations and attempted to make the latter applicable globally. The definition adopted by the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) Refugee Convention in 1969 introduced the prima facie character by which refugees are to be recognized.6 While adopting the definition of the 1951 UN Convention as a starting point, the 1969 Convention broadened this definition to encompass people fleeing from personal, communal, or social violence. The Convention identifies a refugee as any person who, owing to external aggression, occupation, and foreign domination or events seriously disturbing public order in either part or the whole of their country of origin, is compelled to leave their place of habitual residence in order to seek refuge in another place outside their country of nationality or origin.7 The merits of the adoption of the OAU definition, in addition to the UN Convention’s conceptualization of a refugee, are the recognition of various shared factors that are responsible for producing refugees in Africa and the establishment of generalized yet peculiar parameters for the justification of refugee status across the continent. In addition, the Cartagena Declaration of 1984 concluded by Latin American states added persons fleeing internal conflicts and massive violations of human rights to the definition of refugees. These four documents—the 1951, 1967, and 1969 Conventions and the 1984 Declaration—have defined what constitutes a refugee in the world today. However, recent phenomena such as the activities of nonstate actors such as multinational terrorist groups have created other dimensions to the refugee crisis not previously captured in these conventions. The purpose of recognizing a person as a refugee is to grant international protection when their national government has failed in this responsibility. Refugee protection refers to all the means by which refugees are given the opportunity to enjoy legal recognition and rights, enjoy physical security, receive assistance, and access durable solutions to their situation. Right from the start of the international refugee regime, in the aftermath of the Second World War, there was an awareness of the need for international coordination to achieve 6. Milner, Refugees, State and Politics, 7. 7. OAU, Convention Governing Refugee Problems.

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the protection of refugees and seek permanent solutions to their plight. The UNHCR, under its Statute, is tasked with coordinating international efforts in this regard. Throughout, this book integrates discussions of the role of the UNHCR in managing the different aspects of refugee lives and the achievement of durable solutions.

Backgrou n d to R efuge e Cr e ation The creation of refugees is usually a product of a chain of actions. People who become refugees are often persecuted because of a perceived difference, such as their political affiliations, religious beliefs, customs and values, or even physical appearance. Not all differences produce conflicts that lead to displacement, however; in fact, these differences characterize heterogeneous societies. Moreover, the causes of human displacement are hardly straightforward. A single incident could instigate widespread destruction, or a protracted dispute could eventually reach its peak. Significant upheaval and disruption of normal life, through strife and conflicts, leaves people vulnerable because of their perceived differences, which in turn endangers people’s lives and properties. The arbitrary demarcation of borders carried out by colonial powers toward the end of the nineteenth century acted as a catalyst for conflicts that led to mutual intolerance between host countries and refugees. A case in point is the border conflict between the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Rwanda, which was triggered by the handing over of the rich and lucrative regions of the border environs to the DRC, despite Rwanda claiming ownership. This resulted in the Rwandese communities along the border being turned from owners of land to tenants on their land. They could not be easily integrated into the Congolese system, hence the emergence of persistent armed conflicts that further compounded the problem and prevented any meaningful social integration with the Congolese. In other parts of Africa, the situation is no different. There have been wars in Burundi, Central Africa, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Liberia, Mauritania, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Somalia, Rwanda, and elsewhere. These conflicts and their refugee situations are explored in our discourse and provide insights into the situation of African refugees on the continent and beyond. In East Africa, certain conflicts created refugees from Somalia, Burundi, Rwanda, and the DRC trying to navigate their spaces as refugees in various parts of the region. In 1991, in Somalia, after a protracted conflict between rival clans in the country over governance and leadership, the regime of Siad Barre was overthrown, leading to hunger and wars, which have persisted for decades in

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the country. The warring groups continued to fight for power and, in the process, took the lives of rival fighters and innocent citizens alike, crippling the society and economy and forcing over nine hundred thousand persons to flee the country in a short period.8 In the wake of the well-known rivalry and hostility between the Hutu and Tutsi ethnic groups of Burundi, massacres have resulted in millions of killings over several decades. In 1993, the first-ever democratically elected Hutu president was murdered, leading to counterattacks on the Tutsis by the Hutus. While anticipating retaliation from the Tutsis, about seven hundred thousand Hutus fled the country to seek refuge in Tanzania, the DRC, and Rwanda. This went on for a long time, claiming the lives of the Rwandan and Burundian presidents in 1994 in an attack that took down the plane carrying both presidents in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda. This exacerbated the age-old rivalry between the Hutus and the Tutsis, claiming the lives of over 850,000 Rwandans almost overnight. Of course, this generated retaliation attacks in a cycle that led to the flight of about 1.7 million persons, mainly Hutus, from the country.9 This illustration of the chain of events that creates the experience of refugeehood in Africa suggests that the prevalent heterogeneity manifested in the large number of ethnic groups on the continent gives room to a difference in opinions and ideologies and a sense of ethnic, clan, and sectional loyalties, which lead to power struggles and rivalries that often escalate into wars. Among the millions of Africans fleeing war-torn homelands are disproportionately large numbers of women, youth, and children who have specific and unique protection needs due to their gender and age, which we discuss in later chapters. In the southern part of Africa, internal hostilities have led to refugee situations in the past. For instance, the destabilization policies of apartheid-era South Africa in countries such as Mozambique and Angola were among the major reasons for refugee movements in Southern Africa. In addition to these politically motivated factors, the economic distress that many African countries face has also resulted in migration. For example, since the 1980s, in the Central African region, cattle herders have been forced to search for grazing lands for their livestock as a result of famine and drought. While these migrants are not refugees in the conventional sense, the unwelcoming attitudes of the host communities often position them as such. In such circumstances, these

8. UNHCR, Somalia. 9. UNHCR, Background Paper.

R efuge ehood i n A fr ica

9

persons do not fit the conventional refugee definitions and yet may require the international protections accorded refugees. The animosity of Kenyans toward their Somali neighbors is another case in point. While there had been some peaceful coexistence between Kenyans and refugees living in the Dadaab and Kakuma refugee camps, the growing insecurity caused by the Al-Shabaab terrorists in Kenya has led to a growing negative perception of Somalis, who make up the majority in the Dadaab refugee camp. This has led to many refugees (not only Somalis) in the region facing employment discrimination. With no permits to work, refugees might resort to criminal acts or succumb to insurgent recruitment to make ends meet. During the mid-1980s, there was also a large migration of Ethiopians into Sudan. While seeking asylum, they were treated as refugees because their migration coincided with when the Ethiopian government was in armed conflict with guerilla forces aiming to topple the central government. Thus, increasing instability and unrest are the leading causes of displacement and the resultant rise in the numbers of refugees. Among all the likely causes of forced displacement, wars and conflicts continue to top the list. While there was a slight decline in the number of global conflicts in the years after 2000, conflict situations have been on the rise again, with Africa holding a disproportionate share of the world average (see fig. 1.1) and with the number of countries in conflict peaking in 2016.10 One of the most significant conflicts in human history was World War II, which lasted from 1939 to 1945 and created millions of displaced persons who sought refuge in Canada, Australia, Brazil, Europe, and the United States. This situation exhibits the primary motives for flight, which include military action, persecution, and the dire need for self-preservation.11 The volatile Middle Eastern region continues to produce massive numbers of refugees seeking refuge in neighboring countries such as Lebanon. It is estimated that 4.7 million Syrian refugees fled from the 2011 conflict, not counting the 6.6 million persons displaced internally.12 In Asia, the creation of Bangladesh in 1975, owing to the India-Pakistan war, also led to the displacement of many persons in that region. In 2013, of the 69,926 refugees who were resettled in the United States, Africans constituted about 23 percent, which is about 15,988. In 2014, there was a 2 percent increase—that is, of the 69,987 refugees,

1 0. International Monetary Fund, Regional Economic Outlook. 11. Carlin, “Significant Refugee Crises.” 12. Dionigi, “Syrian Refugee Crisis.”

Figure 1.1: Number of Countries in Conflict, 1989-2017

10

Con te xt

Figure 1.1. Number of countries in confl ict, 1989–2017. Source: International Monetary Fund, Regional Economic Outlook , 27.

17,476 (approximately 25 percent) were Africans. Women continue to be disproportionately represented.13 According to the UNHCR, the confl icts in the DRC, the Central African Republic, and South Sudan have most recently created more African refugees, of which only 5,000 were resett led in Canada.14 As of 2019, the UNHCR expressed enormous concern for the safety of about 18 million persons in sub-Saharan Africa due especially to the ongoing crises in the Central African Republic, South Sudan, Nigeria, and Burundi.15 The list of wars and confl icts in different parts of the world leading to the proliferation of refugee situations seems endless. Aside from violence on a mass scale, James L. Carlin categorizes displacement caused by abysmal governance leading to economic conditions that threaten the lives of citizens as a valid reason for refugeehood in society.16 The early postcolonial unrest in African nations, emanating from racial, religious, ethnic, and cultural differences, was also one of the creators of refugees, as this unrest led to the displacement of millions of Africans.17 Unsurprisingly, women

13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

Haffejee and East, “African Women Refugee Resett lement.” UNHCR, “Figures at a Glance.” UNHCR, “Africa.” Carlin, “Significant Refugee Crises since World War Two.” Ibid.

R efuge ehood i n A fr ica

11

and children account for more than half of the population of refugees18 and of the underprivileged or voiceless minorities that experience refugeehood. Refugee crises thrive on imbalance and vulnerability. Even without clear indications of societal unrest or instability, society usually creates binary classes, the perpetrators and the victims, and to be a refugee, one has to be a victim or likely victim of society’s persecution. From this outline, certain overarching factors can be pinpointed as the causes of refugee situations in Africa. These factors, singularly or combined, are known as major catalysts for individual decisions to leave one’s country of origin for another: • Violation of fundamental human rights: this includes persecution of people on account of their religion, race, nationality, ethnicity, or sociopolitical leanings, and denial of fundamental freedoms as a result of repressive and authoritarian regimes, which proliferated across the continent in postcolonial times. • War, civil strife, and unrest: this includes interstate, intrastate, interethnic, and secessionist wars and conflicts that lead to chaos and public unrest in parts or the whole of a country, as well as political and social crises brought about by state collapse, economic crises, xenophobia, insurgencies, and so on. • External aggression and foreign domination: this comes in the form of violent occupation of an individual’s country of origin by foreign states—in particular, colonialism, as well as neocolonial interference in independent African states. • Natural disasters: this includes ecological problems such as drought, famine, floods, earthquakes, wildfires, and hurricanes, which are often magnified by other factors such as poor government policies and inadequate preparation for such disasters. When viewed as “events seriously disturbing public order,” this factor produces refugees and internally displaced persons. To better understand how these factors spark refugee movements in Africa, one needs to examine the colonial period. The present national boundaries of African countries were capriciously carved by the colonial powers. In drawing

18. Shacknove, Who Is a Refugee?

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up these boundaries, the colonial powers failed to consider the variances and disparities as well as commonalities and affinities preexisting among many neighboring communities. That some ethnic groups share proximity never translated to being in peaceful coexistence with each other. A vivid example is the Tiv people south of the River Niger and their Fulani neighbors north of the river. The level of hostilities among such warring ethnic groups remains a perpetual cause of violent conflicts. Forced migration resulting in an influx of people from one country to another remains a big challenge for many African countries. This is because the host country becomes frustrated as more individuals cross the border seeking refuge. It is on this note that international refugee protection initiatives lack any effectiveness concerning the existing challenges.19 One major reason for this is that African countries that host forcibly displaced persons by granting them refugee status are mostly not prepared for such responsibilities due to the limited resources that such countries themselves possess. In addition, refugees are faced with challenges of being accepted by citizens of the host countries who perceive the former as nuisances encroaching on their commonwealth. This results in difficulties regarding socio-communal integration and harmonious living between the citizens of the host countries and the individuals seeking refuge.

R efuge e Locations in A fr ica The “Africa” of this book is at once geographically, historically, and philosophically delineated. Unlike the prevalent states and humanitarian practices that have sought to eviscerate North Africa from the rest of the continent, this book takes the practical position that this separation is historically inaccurate and practically impossible and therefore treats Africa as the entire geographical continent. Current trends by which North African countries have become the middle ground between Africans from other parts of the continent and the European destinations that many migrants and asylum seekers aspire to reach only underscores the silliness of the persistence of “sub-Saharan” as separate from “North” Africa in policy and academic discourses. This book asserts a notion of Africa that is multiracial, ethnically and linguistically plural, and yet politically and historically connected by migration, circulation of peoples, and pan-African institutions. As such, this book discusses

19. Durieux, “UNHCR and Current Challenges.”

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13

refugees from or found in every one of the fifty-five member countries of the African Union. The first refugees from Africa in the postcolonial period were products of anticolonial struggles, with Algerian refugees in Morocco and Tunisia being the first to command international attention starting in 1957. In the 1960s and early 1970s, the majority of African refugees from colonial occupation originated mainly from three territories still under Portuguese rule—Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique.20 These nations were struggling for liberation from Portuguese colonial subjugation, and many had to flee their homes to neighboring states for sustenance and security. These refugees were hosted in countries such as Senegal, Tanzania, and Zambia that were sympathetic to the struggle for liberation.21 Today, Africa hosts up to 39 percent of the total number of forcibly displaced persons globally, according to the UNHCR. Table 1.1 provides a breakdown of the categories and locations of these displaced persons on the continent. Countries located in East, Horn, and Central Africa are the largest refugeeproducing nations in Africa due to the waves of sociopolitical crises. These countries are not the only nations affected by this condition; however, they represent significant instances of refugees fleeing their crisis-torn countries for protection in neighboring countries. Therefore, the refugee crisis in Africa is common to all the countries, as most of the countries hold the status of being refugee sending or receiving states or both concurrently. All the countries in Africa have something to do with refugee making or hosting because there are continuous conflicts as well as ecological and economic challenges that give rise to displacement. Some of these situations are precipitated by wars and provide no opportunity for people to prepare to flee. When the cause of mobilization is ecological, the reactions have always been spontaneous. Since every African country is confronted with a challenge of instability, violence, or environmental issues, it is not inaccurate to characterize all the countries on the continent as locations of refugees. From the Horn of Africa to the Sahara, from Central Africa to the southern part of the continent, and from the western region of Africa to its eastern end, experiences that usually lead to the displacement of individuals abound. When floods are not troubling the people of Madagascar, Mozambique, and Eritrea, for example, because of their location by the Indian Ocean, other conflict-prone areas such

2 0. Adepoju, “Dimension of the Refugee Problem,” 22. 21. Ibid.

238,100

20,059,200

—

—

—

—

2,606,500

—

—

—

2,606,500

*Excluding North Africa. Source: UNHCR, Forced Displacement in 2019, 19.

Total

2,649,800

Middle East and North Africa

28,100

42,900

6,402,500

Europe

54,600

108,800

4,141,600

Asia and Pacific

534,800

3,700

6,330500

Total Africa*

Americas

—

—

777,500

1,164,100

West and Central Africa

3,700

2,602,400

6,543,500

4,133,700

592,800

6,348,700

1,204,700

755,300

4,388,700

Refugees

22,903,800 20,221,100

2,692,700

6,430,600

4,196,200

3,250,100

6,334,200

1,164,100

777,500

4,392,600

Total

224,800

40,300

27,000

48,700

108,800

—

—

—

—

3,582,200

—

—

—

3,582,200

—

—

—

—

People in refugee- Venezuelans like displaced situations abroad

People in refugee- Venezuelans like displaced situations abroad

Southern Africa

4,388,900

Refugees

East and Horn of Africa and Great Lakes

UNHCR region

End of 2019

Start of 2019

−50,000

139,900

−13,800

1,033,700

14,500

40,600

−22,200

−3,900

Absolute

24,028,100 1,124,300

2,642,700

6,570,500

4,182,400

4,283,800

6,348,700

1,204,700

755,300

4,388,700

Total

4.9

−1.9

2.2

−0.3

31.8

0.2

3.5

−2.9

−0.1

Percentage (%)

Total change

Table 1.1. Number of refugees globally, people in refugee-like situations, and Venezuelans displaced abroad, by UNHCR regions, 2019

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as Somalia, Sudan, and Nigeria are producing refugees in startling numbers. All the affected individuals therefore become victims of circumstances looking for alternative settlements that will guarantee their immediate safety. For example, South Sudan alone produced 2.2 million refugees in 2019, of whom a majority are hosted by Uganda. Meanwhile, in Somalia, a little less than 1 million people evacuated their homes to seek refuge in Sudan. This illustrates the complex nature of refugee creation and integration, especially in relation to their alternating conditions in Africa. For example, the same Sudan that houses about 906,600 Somali refugees also produced an unimaginable number of refugees: Sudan produced about 700,000 refugees who fled their country to seek refuge in Ethiopia. This occurs simultaneously with another component of forced displacement—the internally displaced persons who remain within their country but in a different location. This situation makes it difficult for the barometer of migration to be convincingly determined. In the same vein, more than 2 million Nigerians have been displaced and forced to seek refuge either within the country or in a different one. In Niger, about 300,000 people have been displaced because of the sociopolitical conditions in the country. This is in addition to the swelling number of displaced persons in the DRC, which has reached 5 million. Also, 695,000 people are displaced in the Central African Republic. These staggering numbers add to the challenges the continent faces in mitigating and managing refugee situations. In the Southern African countries, Mozambique has produced 615,000 displaced individuals, while Malawi generated more than 100,000 people who were forced to seek refuge away from their homes. All these countries are ravaged by a number of factors, and yet other countries on the continent produce even more refugees.

Som e Th e m e s to Note As previously noted, African Refugees centers a heterogenous African population with diverse concerns, contexts, and identities. This section highlights how some of these themes are dealt with in this book. Scholars have shown that women and men experience conflict, displacement, and peace in different ways due to their sex and the gendered ascription of roles and responsibilities in society. These positions are historically determined and vary from context to context. Refugee scholars and policy makers have recently paid greater attention to these important dynamics to understand how refugee women and men encounter flight, displacement, exile, return, resettlement, and (re)integration differently. While the study of gender and

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forced migration strives to employ a gender lens to understand displacement concerns that emanate from the social relations between men and women, the focus has often been on women’s concerns in particular. Several reasons may be responsible for this: first, women are without doubt the more disadvantaged group in nearly all displacement settings; second, women, by virtue of both their sex and their gender, do indeed have unique needs and vulnerabilities that must be addressed in humanitarian programming as well as in research; third, gender and forced migration, like the rest of gender studies, developed out of an international movement that focused primarily on women and grew out of liberal feminism and Women-in-Development frameworks; and, fourth, the simple fact is that refugees before the 1980s were constructed in policy, research, and the general imaginary as male, and therefore the bulk of the existent policy and programming was far ahead in addressing refugee men’s issues, leaving refugee women’s issues uninterrogated. The gender dimensions of refugeehood are noticeable in the massive displacement of women in troubled societies. One of the first achievements of a focus on gender in Refugee Studies and in the global refugee regime was the recognition and acknowledgment that women and their dependents constitute 75 to 80 percent of any refugee population worldwide, with slight regional variations. Indeed, there is a feminization of forced migration in African societies. Women become the primary victims of displacement for several reasons. The most susceptible victims of chaos in Africa are usually poor rural women, the elderly, children, and the disabled. In times of war and chaos, most of the men may be fighting, apprehended, or killed or have to hide from conscription and so on, while women are often left to the worst struggles of survival in inhumane times. The tasks of daily survival of the family, caretaking of the elderly and children, preservation of traditional and cultural norms, protection of the homestead, and similar responsibilities then fall on women in the absence of most men during conflict situations. Therefore, as part of their efforts to save their families, women flee their home countries in large numbers, often to neighboring countries, or they remain displaced internally. They encounter physical- and emotional-trauma-inducing experiences such as violence, abduction, rape, sexual exploitation, humiliation, and other forms of untold hardships. Therefore, this study examines the challenges of refugeehood for African women, including their struggles and survival strategies. Other categories of refugees also come under the spotlight in this study. Apart from refugees settled in camps by the host government or the UNHCR, some refugees instead settle in urban environments. The reception of refugees in camps and that of refugees in urban communities are quite different in

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character. While the rural settlers (those in camps are usually in rural areas) are restricted economically and politically, the restrictions encountered by urban refugees are more social and sometimes psychological. They are social because the refugees’ movement in the city is keenly monitored and their activities extensively scrutinized and curtailed. To secure accommodation in the urban environment is relatively difficult, and this leads them to settle in slums and areas that are prone to raids by either the government officials or hoodlums looking for quick and cheap exploitation. Denied basic amenities to assist them in sustaining a good living, they are also easily identifiable from the environment even by their looks and are therefore vulnerable to attacks and victimization. Having to contend with this situation drives some urban refugees to take extreme measures to address their problems and escape from the harsh consequences faced in the cities. In a few extreme cases, they resort to making themselves available for criminal recruitment where they believe they will quickly amass sufficient materials to begin a decent life in the city. The refugees in this situation constitute a nuisance in the environment and provide host countries and communities the incentive to further extend their profiling of refugees, which leads to stringent policies against refugees. As such, the problems encountered by refugees are numerous, especially those unable to settle down through the help of their networks of people who have already made progress in their host society. The failure to achieve the needed economic progress exacerbates their conditions. Even their health and medical welfare deteriorate, and they are usually faced with uncertainty about how to access the needed aid from health facilities provided in restrictive urban environments. All of this heightens the challenges that refugees face in cities. This becomes an urgent concern for policy makers, governments, nongovernmental organizations, and humanitarian service providers as well because of the awareness that situations giving rise to the numbers of refugees in urban areas refuse to subside, therefore placing more individuals at greater risk and in difficult situations. On the African continent, though, the usual settlement type allowed for refugees is a camp. Camps are a special space arranged by the host countries or communities to accommodate refugees and displaced persons. Generally, camps tend to be located in geographical proximity to the refugees’ country of origin. Those who are placed in contiguous positions with their war-torn environment face further risk because wars often spill over the border. The displaced individuals in northeastern Nigeria who fled to Chad are in most cases in an area that is still within reach of the insurgent group responsible for terror attacks against them. Therefore, the lives of these refugees are exposed to no

18

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less danger than they were exposed to while in Nigeria, making camps unsafe. Unless camps are situated far from the reach of their destabilized environment, refugees who were displaced because of war are still unsafe in camps. Even when this is not happening, a harsh reality awaits refugees in camp life. Their economic development is uncertain, as they are expected to depend exclusively on the aid that the host countries and communities, together with nongovernmental organizations and humanitarian agencies, provide for them. Ordinarily, camp-based refugees tend to enjoy a relative advantage and may become dependent on the aid they get. The problem, however, lies in the commitment of these parties to fulfill their obligations and keep their promises. The UNHCR sometimes deliberately ceases its provision of aid to the refugees in camps to encourage them to return to their countries of origin, especially when it feels that the conflicts back there have subsided. During this period, refugees may be exposed to what seems like callous treatment as they are pressured to repatriate by the withdrawal of aid. Worse still, in many instances, the UNHCR has misjudged the stability of events in the country of refugees’ origin, or itself is under political pressure. This is further compounded by the host government’s hostility to refugees, which is bound to be exhibited when they themselves are faced with trying economic times. In the case that they have insufficient resources for themselves, answering to the yearnings of the refugees takes secondary importance. In fact, they shift their aggression to the refugees in some extreme situations, manifested as xenophobia. The reactions of nationals to refugees have often been of suspicion because of the xenophobic notions about refugees’ disposition to violence or encroachment. The fact that little effort is usually made by host governments to correct this misinformation contributes to why these stereotypes persist. But when we consider it in a more objective way, we may realize that such profiling hinges on factors that have persisted for a long time and have no hope of subsiding, including the recruitment of refugees into militias and other oppositional groups. When they are apprehended, this provides the basis for the formulation of policies and attitudes against them. Refugees are often the primary targets when host countries reinforce their internal security. The condition of refugees can be very complicated because sometimes they are at the mercy of host community officials who are statutorily mandated to organize routine security checks and take discretionary measures that would promote a peaceful atmosphere required for growth and development. It is fundamental that governments take the security architecture of their people very seriously to forestall the possibility of violence or internal conflicts that can tear down the fabric of their nation’s security

R efuge ehood i n A fr ica

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structure. On encountering security challenges, governments, under the guise of institutionalizing formidable security architecture, are disposed to taking extreme measures. Primarily, they direct their animosities toward the refugee population for a variety of reasons. First, politicians often scapegoat refugees as a way of masking their own political incompetence. In the long run, the refugees fall victim to this scheming because they are most likely to be construed as threats, as the government seeks to launder its own image of failure to provide basic amenities for its own citizens. Second, governments need to constantly send an indirect message to refugees that their stay in the host environment is temporary and is subject to the restoration of peace in their country. In addition to the risks of borderland areas and the xenophobic treatment by host communities, refugees also experience refoulement. Refoulement is a harsher response to refugees’ protection because it not only puts them at severe security risks but also takes their freedom and humanity from them. Refoulement implies the forced deportation, forced return, or repatriation of refugees to countries where they are liable to be persecuted for their identity or to face torture, abuse, and other inhumane treatment. Considering the underlying dangers that are associated with refoulement, the UNHCR in conjunction with other humanitarian groups often condemns the act and encourages governments to avoid using such extreme measures against refugees. In fact, non-refoulement is a cardinal principle of customary international law and is considered binding on states whether they are parties to the refugee convention or not. Thus, refugees face devastating experiences in their attempts to survive daily in their destinations of migration. Many of them face psychological challenges as well as physical ones in their new environment. Figure 1.2 converges many of the features of African refugees discussed in this chapter, including the presence of the UNHCR wherever African refugees are to be found, elaborated in the next section.

Th e U NHCR a n d R efuge e M a nage m ent Rising out of the ashes of the Second World War were various international organizations tasked with managing the massive problem of refugees in Europe. The UNHCR was the successor to these temporary organizations and remains the most visible symbol of global efforts to address refugee problems. The Statute of the UNHCR was established in 1950 by UN General Assembly Resolution 428 (V) Annex of December 14, 1950. The statute sets out the principles

20

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Figure 1.2. Kigeme refugee camp in southern Rwanda, opened in 2012 to accommodate the influx of refugees from eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, converges key features of African refugees—war, camps, rural areas, children’s clothes, and UNHCR presence. Oxfam East Africa, https://www.flickr.com/photos/46434833@N05/8073663190. Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kigeme _refugee_camp_(8073663190).jpg.

and structural relations that the UN agency has to follow22 and also defines the roles and limitations of the Office of the High Commissioner. The UNHCR is the United Nations agency with the mandate to protect refugees, forcibly displaced persons, and stateless people and assist in their accessing durable solutions. The explicit exception to its responsibility is Palestinian refugees, who are to be assisted by a different UN agency: the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. With its headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, and two Nobel Prizes to show for its efforts,23 the UNHCR is reputed for its vast network and reach, partnering with over nine hundred strategic partners, including nongovernmental organizations and other United Nations agencies. The UNHCR was originally conceived as a nonoperational UN agency. It was established to act under the authority of the United Nations General 22. See articles 8 and 10 of the 1950 UNHCR Statute, which deal with the kind of operations to be undertaken by the UNHCR. 23. Twice awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, in 1954 and 1981. Nobel Prize, “Office of the High Commissioner.”

R efuge ehood i n A fr ica

21

Assembly (UNGA). As stipulated in chapter I of its statute, it was to serve two precise functions: to protect refugees and to find a permanent solution to their plight, notably through voluntary repatriation or through assimilation or naturalization.24 The UNHCR’s range of operations at its inception was limited. It was to be a temporary response to Europe’s refugee crisis, and its other nonoperational duties were to be carried out in cooperation with the governments of affected areas, with the latter determining the terms.25 Article 8 of the 1950 UNHCR Statute provides for nonoperational measures in its protection activities. The agency would therefore be in touch with the leadership of countries concerned with the plight of refugees and establish a tangible presence within the borders of the state. The practice of the establishment of this physical UNHCR presence, having not been stipulated in the article, has followed a pattern where the cooperation between the agency and the competent authorities of the host state sees the host state setting the terms and conditions within which the UNHCR shall operate the offices within its borders. In a further demonstration of what appears to be the limited operational ability of the UNHCR in its original mandate, the provision of material assistance to refugees and the protection of internally displaced persons were not originally included in its purview. The frequency of large-scale crises in the succeeding decades necessitated flexibility and expansion of the agency’s mandate. At present, it is involved in the protection, assistance, and resettlement of refugees as well as the relief and rehabilitation of others, such as displaced persons and victims of human-made and natural disasters. It took the 1969 OAU Convention, which set the precedent for group-based determination of refugee status, for the UNHCR to take a more active role in Africa. In 1960s Africa, the UNHCR, to make its efforts and various refugee assistance program more effective, resolved to be part of a larger development program. In the decades that followed, its role in the African region shifted from merely promoting international refugee instruments and legal protection 24. Chap. 1, para. 1 of the 1950 UNHCR Statute reads. “The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, acting under the authority of the General Assembly, shall assume the function of providing international protection, under the auspices of the United Nations, to refugees who fall within the scope of the present Statute and of seeking permanent solutions for the problem of refugees by assisting Governments and, subject to the approval of the Governments concerned, private organizations to facilitate the voluntary repatriation of such refugees, or their assimilation within new national communities.” 25. The United States took active steps within the UNGA to limit the UNHCR’s capacity by attacking its funding and making no contributions to its efforts before 1955. See Loescher, Beyond Charity, 56.

22

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to providing humanitarian assistance. It has, over the last few decades, evolved into a major field-based organization in the region. It has since routinely handled the return of refugees to the countries of their origin and has also facilitated their resettlement and reintegration. The expansion of the UNHCR’s functions in the early years is seen in its involvement in the repatriation of Mozambicans and Angolans in 1975–7626 and the coordination of a UN-wide humanitarian program at that time. Though it is quite difficult to measure the effectiveness of the UNHCR, especially because the agency often must work within highly politicized environments, its involvement in large-scale operations in the past (such as the aid and repatriation programs involving East Bengali refugees in 1971, Burmese refugees in 1978–79, and Namibia in Africa in 1989) have been considered as mostly successes.27 Over the years, it has been applauded by the UNGA for its efforts in assisting countries of asylum on the continent through support to vulnerable host communities and has been conferred with more power to continue to strengthen its support of African governments through capacity-building activities. The acknowledgment also included the organization’s contribution to protection activities associated with climate change and environmental degradation toward vulnerable populations of concern across the globe, especially in least-developed countries. This solidified its place as a veritable humanitarian agency, expanding its scope of operation and securing it better funding. With growing refugee populations in the 1980s and ’90s, the willingness of most African countries to accommodate refugees lost momentum given the socioeconomic pressures such refugee populations placed on their hosts’ already fragile systems. The UNHCR met this challenge by calling for the International Conference on Assistance to Refugees in Africa. But unfortunately, the conference failed to meet its funding mobilization agenda and dealt a blow to the idea of burden-sharing as a pillar of refugee protection in Africa. During this same period, the UNHCR became more involved with the countries of origin of refugees to stem the refugee backflows across borders. It went as far as being integrated into peacekeeping operations in Namibia, involving the cooperation of both military and political actors. Eventually, the UNHCR began to buckle under the pressure of the increasing responsibility, especially due to the expanding dimensions of the crisis. The militarization of refugees in camps in the DRC, the inability of the foreign powers to prevent the Rwandan genocide, the UNHCR’s collusion in 2 6. D’Orsi, “Specific Characteristics and Challenges,” 348. 27. Loescher, Beyond Charity, 146.

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forced repatriations, and the incompetent and often negligent treatment of refugees throughout Southern Africa, the Horn of Africa, and parts of West Africa were some of the issues that cast doubt on its capacity to maintain the mandate given to it. It also received criticisms for what was described as the focus of its energies on humanitarian relief and material assistance rather than on the security of refugees or development-oriented activities. In other instances, the UNHCR has been faulted by humanitarian agencies, as well as by representatives of some of the governments that finance its programs, for its inability to provide protection for all groups of refugees or to offer quick and effective assistance. By this time, an agency previously constrained by its nonoperational status had now become synonymous with human security, especially in crisis-torn areas. The UNHCR launched the Convention Plus initiative in 2003 as an attempt to find lasting solutions to longstanding refugee situations in Africa. The initiative sought to promote the rights of refugees through negotiations with states and international partners in order to obtain stricter commitments on several issues such as increased development aid, clarification of state responsibilities, and a reinstallation of instruments of protection. This was particularly driven by the refugee crises in Ethiopia, Djibouti, Kenya, and Somalia. Unfortunately, the plan never saw the light of day for lack of donor interest. Today, international cooperation on refugee assistance and solutions is increasingly difficult to obtain. Complications such as the disappearance of any humanitarian consensus, the replacement of the “traditional hospitality” of African countries with intolerance and restrictive policies, the politicization of and increasing reluctance of industrialized countries to finance international aid for the resettlement of refugees and admit or consider asylum claims fully, and the implementation of stricter immigration policies, have made it even more difficult for the UNHCR and other humanitarian organizations to operate. The answer to finding long-term solutions to refugee problems lies largely in resolving the abovementioned issues. While not downplaying the roles and contributions of other agencies involved in refugee management (especially in Africa), the UNHCR continues to play the biggest role in this respect. In testament to the extent of its involvement, contributions, and achievements, more than two-thirds of all international assistance to refugees is channeled through the UNHCR, making it the principal international organization servicing the needs of refugees.28 However, to an extent, the perception that the UNHCR in recent times has 2 8. Loescher, Beyond Charity, 131.

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not been doing enough fails to consider that in reality the responsibility for providing protection, assistance, and lasting solutions lies principally with states. Therefore, the task of the UNHCR is to demonstrate how multilateral cooperation can continue to be a more effective means of coping with refugee problems, rather than unilateral alternatives.29 In this capacity, the agency must continue to play a major role by providing emergency aid and technical support and offering legal protection to asylum seekers. It also continues to serve as a catalyst for bringing together affected governments and international agencies to consult on appropriate international responses, such as long-term development assistance, and to provide the administrative medium for more effective cooperation on refugee issues. These themes are further developed in subsequent chapters of this book.

Du r a bl e Solu tions After coming to the understanding that the uncontrolled growth in the number of refugees across the globe is a silent way to incubate future disasters, governments, the UNHCR, and various other stakeholders have combined their efforts to search for lasting solutions to refugeehood. These solutions are often referred to as durable solutions. They comprise strategies that can be applied in the quest to end existing refugee situations by ending refugeehood and its ensuing challenges for displaced persons. Refugeehood has a universal connotation of simply momentary change of location owing to emergency reasons such as war that is affecting political affairs in the refugees’ countries of origin. This perception evokes the feeling that refugeehood is temporary and refugees are mere victims of circumstances and are bound to return to their normal lives when repatriated. In contrast, however, situations that increase the population of refugees in many African countries are protracted, compounding the problems facing them and blurring their chances of repatriation or resettlement. There are cases where wars that led to the displacement of a portion of people in the community have elongated beyond anticipation for decades. Given the reality that an entire ethnic group or other segment of the population could become refugee victims of war for elongated periods in the same host country, the UNHCR has categorized such situations as protracted refugee situations. Durable solutions are the policies created to end the sufferings and horrible experiences of refugees so that their normal lives, devoid of any anomaly, are restored. The primary goal of durable solutions is to restore citizenship and 29. Loescher, Beyond Charity, 130.

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its accompanying rights to persons who were formerly deprived of these as a result of fleeing their country of origin or of habitual residence. The “classic” durable solutions are voluntary repatriation, local integration, and resettlement. Repatriation means that refugees should have the legal right to return to their country of origin in safety and dignity whenever they feel that the conditions that provoked their flight have abated. Understanding that repatriating refugees can be politically motivated and that governments are liable to forcefully initiate repatriation of the refugees, especially when they are having fractured relationships with particular refugee groups, the voluntariness of repatriation has been emphasized over and over in refugee law and policy and in humanitarian practice. A label of indignity is unfortunately associated with the word refugee because it gives the perception of persons that are helpless and unfortunate. The connotation of the term exposes refugees to unimaginable treatment from people in their host destinations, and they have to accept this temporary identity because they are driven by an urgency to seek safety. However, this does not eclipse the reality that refugees are a tormented people who equally want their dignity restored, perhaps after their harsh experiences in their country of origin are brought back to normalcy. Voluntary repatriation ensures that the status of refugees is reversed as soon as possible after their repatriation to the countries of origin. To gain freedom back in their home countries or communities is an indication that their reasons for violence are entirely suppressed, establishing the fact that they now have access to relative peace and a stable environment. This way, refugees have solutions to problems associated with migration and mobility. Refugees who return to their countries of origin normally have a level of confidence in the government to ensure their safety and security. Their citizenship and their access to economic and social security and amnesty are legitimate expectations in the repatriation agreement with the home government. Local integration is another form of durable solution offered by the international community to rescue refugees from facing persecution. It is a formal process by which the host countries provide legal residency for the refugees to settle them comfortably. In the event that refugees are granted local integration status, they are naturalized and able to access the rights enjoyed by the regular citizens of the host country. This reduces the dependence of refugees on agencies that provide aid for them. Integration comes with appropriating rights for the refugees that would facilitate their economic establishment and to an extent their own financial freedom. In theory, local integration is the granting of citizenship to refugees; however, this is usually a difficult process in practice. Host citizens are often skeptical of refugees, suspecting them of relying on the

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citizens’ limited economic resources and infringing on their insufficient finances. This creates an imbalanced relationship, as the hosts consider refugees as existential threats to their economic well-being. Given the reality that local integration may attract more immigrants into the countries or communities that offer it, they risk a flood of more displaced individuals seeking citizenship. This durable solution, as with all others, is always a product of the synergy between the host countries and the UNHCR. In the third instance of a durable solution, resettlement is provided as an alternative to the challenges confronting refugees. Unlike the other solutions, it involves the process of settling in third countries of asylum. Refugees who are considered for resettlement vary in their experiences and dispositions. First, those who are considered victims of sexual violence, domestic violence, and other forms of gender-based violence, and who are still at risk of continuing abuse or suffer the trauma of those experiences, are given priority in opportunities to resettle. Another class of people are eligible for resettlement because their continuous stay or existence within their countries of asylum where they face these challenges, or return to the country of origin, will further expose them to dangers. Given that these people are to be deported to countries where they would face severe persecution because of their religion, ideological perspective, gender identity, or other factors, the UNHCR and resettlement countries offer them the opportunity for resettlement, understanding that their safety would be compromised if they were repatriated or remained in their first asylum country. Many other short- and medium-term solutions have been proffered or implemented over time, with varying degrees of success, especially when applied across contexts. It remains to be seen how the recently concluded Global Compact on Refugees will attenuate the challenges refugees face in accessing truly durable solutions. The impact of implementing the additional solutions offered by the agreement is also unknown.

Conclusion Refugees are a sign of disorder in the global society. They reveal the deep moral and spiritual crisis of a civilization that tolerates conditions that continue to produce refugees. As it is, refugees are likely to remain a permanent outcome of the world order until such a time as nations move to address their underlying causes. The world must come to the realization that the “global village” is not just a catchphrase but that the situation of people displaced and stranded in different states of distress is one that does not bode well for everyone or for any

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nation’s peace, security, and general sense of well-being. Therefore, the search for solutions must be pursued with relentless vigor until lasting ones are found. The search for solutions to the refugee crisis must continue in two directions: providing immediate and long-term assistance to refugees, and preventing and eliminating the underlying causes of refugee outflows. The concept and definition of refugee has to be universal in its connotation, and awareness needs to be created of refugees as victims of forces beyond their control, which often originate outside their countries, and not as isolated individuals to be abused and exploited. Africa’s refugee challenge is not merely a humanitarian matter requiring charity; it is a political one requiring political solutions. Especially seeing that it cannot be separated from such other areas of international concern as human rights, migration, international security, and development assistance, responses should be backed by a conscious political will and directed toward a harmonization of efforts, with clearly stated institutional responsibilities, a fluent coordination of activities, and strategic allocation of resources. Only then can Africa, and indeed the rest of the world, be rid of this global challenge.

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REFUGEE STUDIES

Introduction Refugee Studies is, in the most basic sense, the study of patterns, trends, and issues facing refugee and forced migrant populations over time. The field is highly interdisciplinary and encompasses many traditional disciplines such as international relations, geography, history, sociology, political science, anthropology, demography, health sciences, and international law, as well as other hybrid disciplines such as development studies, human rights, peace and conflict studies, and so on. All of these disciplines are important in that each discipline serves as its own lens to provide answers to complex questions such as who is a refugee, what causes a refugee to come to be, which refugee populations are crucial to study, and how refugee crises can be mitigated.1 Refugee Studies scholars must also consider the nexus of phenomena related to forced migration, such as psychological pressures, causal events, global responses, economic implications, environmental impacts, and social repercussions, among others, to provide analysis rooted not just in statistical data but also in the lived experiences of those most affected by these tragedies.2 Nothing in the above should be taken to imply that the subject, scope, and definition of the field of refugee and forced migration studies are settled; on the contrary, scholars in the field continually question themselves and those they study. Debate continues over several critical issues that are illuminated in this chapter: the very label given to the field (Refugee Studies, forced migration 1 . Skran and Daughtry, “Study of Refugees,” 16. 2. Bloch, “Reflections and Directions for Research,” 436.

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studies, or something else?), the subject of the study itself (who counts as a refugee, what constitutes forced migration), the scope of the field (inclusion and exclusion of topics to address, the relevance or irrelevance of any disciplinary, geographical, thematic, and other boundaries), how and by whom these parameters are defined, the goals and influence of Refugee Studies (theory, advocacy, or policy), the interplay between academic study and policy, and many more issues subsumed within these questions. There is no end in sight to these debates, and the field must remain reflexive and self-critical in order to remain relevant in a context of ever-changing real-world dynamics in refugees’ lives and experiences, the policy arena, and the evolution of intellectual perspectives, theories, and explanations both from within the field and from outside it. In this chapter, we explore the emergence and growth of Refugee Studies and forced migration studies as subjects of scholarly enquiry, the definition and treatment of the persons studied, and the themes and issues that have perplexed the study, and we identify trends and debates within these intellectual domains.

Th e Fi eld of R efuge e St u di e s A starting point for this dissection of the Refugee Studies field is the question of what to call the field. While most scholarship on the subject has found the “Refugee Studies” or “refugee and forced migration studies” label useful, there has been debate about these labels. Labels have been key to these disciplinary debates, and indeed this was signaled by Roger Zetter’s editorial introduction to the inaugural issue of the Journal of Refugee Studies in 1988, titled “Refugees and Refugee Studies—a Label and an Agenda.”3 Signaling a pivotal moment in the creation of the field, Zetter envisioned the new journal as bringing together previously disparate academic, theoretical, and discipline- and policy-oriented research into a field to be “generically termed ‘refugee studies.’”4 Zetter provided one of the earliest agendas for the modern field of Refugee Studies, defining a possible scope for the kind of studies that would be considered as falling within this field as including research “exploring the many characteristics of rapid social change; revealing the complexity of host-migrant interrelationships; analysing the disjunctive and paradoxical patterns of responses and behaviour in individuals and groups afflicted by refugee status; tackling the prodigious agenda of public policy and legal matters; and addressing important 3 . Zetter, “Refugees and Refugee Studies.” 4. Ibid., 2.

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philosophical questions on equity, on distributive and procedural justice, on rights and blameworthiness.”5 This broad agenda demanded interdisciplinary exploration of the dynamics of what had by then emerged as a truly global phenomenon organized around the label of the “refugee.” The Journal of Refugee Studies has gone on to become an important forum for hosting, shaping, and disseminating ideas, debates, and policy recommendations in the field. A few other specialist journals such as the Journal of International Refugee Law, Refuge: Canada’s Journal of Refugees, and Refugee Survey Quarterly and some more broadly defined journals on migration and related themes have been important players in this endeavor. Given the global inequities in the distribution of knowledge, power, and resources in knowledge production processes, the story of the field has too often revolved around the research of centers in western Europe in particular, with only cursory attention given to preexisting works from elsewhere. Thus, Refugee Studies scholars from this dominant region tend to date the field as emerging during the 1980s, concomitant with the founding of the Refugee Studies Program (later, Refugee Studies Centre) in the Department of International Development at Oxford University, and another at York University, Canada, alongside the establishment of the abovementioned journals. In a recent important text, The Oxford Handbook of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies, scholars affiliated with this intellectual tradition seemed to consolidate the claim to this disciplinary fame.6 For these academics, the field of Refugee Studies formally began in 1982 through the Refugee Studies Program at Oxford University. Before this time, Oxford’s Dr. Barbara Harrell-Bond had underscored a need for academia to become more systematically engaged in studying and contributing to humanitarian efforts that include and emancipate refugees. She then created the Refugee Studies Program within the University of Oxford’s Department of International Development. The center’s vision is to expand and promote the study of refugees internationally. And, according to the center’s mission, their goal is to “build knowledge and understanding of the causes and effects of forced migration in order to help improve the lives of some of the world’s most vulnerable people.”7 One of the center’s former directors, Dr. David Turton, summed up the importance of the mission best: “There is no justification for studying, and attempting to understand, the causes of human suffering if the purpose of one’s study is not, ultimately, to find ways of relieving 5. Ibid. 6. Fiddian-Qasmiyeh et al., Oxford Handbook. 7. Refugee Studies Centre, “About.”

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and preventing that suffering.”8 Indeed, the center has played important roles in increasing humanitarian efforts through research, courses of study, and the creation of the Journal of Refugee Studies.9 This history of the field is, however, constrained; it does not account for studies of refugees outside a formal, named center or institute, or studies outside the European region, or the many other studies of refugees in the period before the Oxford program. This Eurocentric definition of the discipline reflects a similar focus of the global community on European refugees, particularly in the first several decades of the twentieth century. As this chapter demonstrates, Refugee Studies did exist before the creation of the center at Oxford. Indeed, Zetter had even alluded to the prior existence of a “limited though rich terrain of social anthropological inquiry” as well as extant “disparate academic and disciplinary” research that had existed on the periphery of academe at that point in time.10 Richard Black, writing several years after Zetter, asserts that “there is also a richness in earlier work on refugees that pre-dates the emergence of ‘refugee studies’ institutions.”11 And, in fact, Dawn Chatty and Philip Marfleet offer an alternative history that ascribes the origins of a modern field of Refugee Studies to developments in the US academy, including a specific call by Barry N. Stein and Silvano M. Tomasi for just such a field in an issue of the International Migration Review in 1981.12 Generally, four phases in the development of the field of Refugee Studies may be identified: from 1914 to 1945, covering the world wars and the interwar years; 1945 to 1982, addressing the new postwar refugee regime and its institutions; 1982 to 2000, during which a formal field of studies was named and inaugurated; and 2000 to the present, perhaps describable as a period of self-critical appraisal and methodological development of the discipline in a transformed global milieu.13 An alternative timeline for the field dates back to at least the 1920s.14 Interest in displaced peoples began in the aftermath of World War I, when millions of Europeans were forced to flee from their homes and countries of origin.15 Historians and legal scholars dedicated energy to the study of refugee movements

8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. Zetter, “Refugees and Refugee Studies,” 2. 11. Black, “Fifty Years of Refugee Studies,” 57. 12. Stein and Tomasi, “Foreword.” 13. Chimni, “Birth of a ‘Discipline.’” 14. See also Skran and Daughtry, “Study of Refugees.” 15. Chimni, “Birth of a ‘Discipline,’” 15.

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and refugee camps across Europe in the postwar and interwar years and to the study of the role of international organizations providing assistance to these refugees.16 These were very important studies given the vastness of the scale of displacement, the involvement of a majority of European countries in either producing or hosting refugees, and the increasingly monumental difficulties of managing such displacement in the national and European political environment at the time. Additionally, in 1950, a European Association for the Study of Refugee Problems was formed by German-speaking refugees in Vienna, which later transmuted to the Association for the Study of the World Refugee Problem when it merged with the German section in 1954.17 Before the 1950s, most studies on refugees were on so-called classical refugees—those from Europe; “new” refugees came after this time. Of course, studies on “new” refugees, given more recent historical events, have become much more common, rendering the dichotomy between “classical” and “new” redundant today.18 Unsurprisingly, the refugees considered most important to study were those most relevant to the times. One of the first major works on refugees was by Sir John Hope Simpson in 1939. His book, The Refugee Problem, was a report for the UK Royal Institute of International Affairs that focused on refugees from the former Ottoman and Russian empires. These people were deemed crucial by Simpson because they were either already receiving aid or about to receive aid from the League of Nations.19 Similarly, in a 1939 article “The League of Nations and the Refugee Problem,” Louise Holborn traced the involvement of the League of Nations in the postwar refugee situation and outlined the political, humanitarian, personal, legal, and operational considerations that made this possible.20 Her work detailed the “refugee problem” of Greece, Asia Minor, Bulgaria, Armenians, Assyrians, and other refugees emanating from the dissolution of European empires in the interwar years. Walter Adams, another early refugee scholar who was a contemporary of Simpson, also studied these groups but showed interest in Armenians (who were under French observation) and Assyrians (who had fled from British conquest).21 Another scholar at the time was Cyrus H. Peake, who, unlike Simpson and Adams, studied the various great displacements of the Chinese since ancient history 1 6. Fiddian-Qasmiyeh et al., “Introduction.” 17. See Union of International Associations, “Association”; Devex.com, “Association.” The association also published a journal, the AWR Bulletin: Quarterly on Refugee Problems. 18. Fiddian-Qasmiyeh et al., “Introduction,” 16. 19. Ibid. 2 0. Holborn, “League of Nations.” 21. Adams, “Extent and Nature”; Adams, “Refugees in Europe”; Chimni, “Birth of a ‘Discipline,’” 16.

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to his present.22 Then, toward the end of World War II, in 1944, Arieh Tartakower and Kurt R. Grossman released their study titled The Jewish Refugee. This started a more intensive series of studies on antisemitism in the 1960s.23 These studies were notable for setting a tradition of studying the humanitarian aspects of refugee situations, a tendency that persisted into the 1970s. The end of the Second World War saw the creation of millions of refugees and initiated the emergence of legal and institutional frameworks for addressing refugee issues. Several studies were carried out to document the situation of the refugee camps and the roles played by the organizations managing refugees in post–Second World War Europe.24 Still, given the magnitude and scale of the problem in the 1940s and 1950s, it is notable that there was relatively little academic attention given to refugee crises until decades later.25 Scholars such as Malkki26 and Chatty and Marfleet27 identify the publication of Hannah Arendt’s 1951 book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, as one of the most important studies of power in Europe.28 The book also, perhaps for the first time, centered refugee problems as political problems inextricably linked to wider political issues such as the emergence of nation-states, nationalism, and xenophobia. As Malkki explains, Arendt “insisted on the necessity of examining displacement through the prism of often xenophobic national states, and she explicitly traced the political and symbolic logics that had the effect of pathologizing and even criminalizing refugees.”29 In spite of Arendt’s direct attention to the political roots of the refugee problem and despite the great attention her work received in relation to authoritarian power, perplexingly, the scholars who studied refugees and migration in the few disciplines involved in the study at the time did not seize on this important linkage or develop it theoretically, and Refugee Studies remained at the “extreme margins” of academic research.30

2 2. Peake, “Refugees in the Far East,” 55–62. 23. Tartakower and Grossman, Jewish Refugee; Chimni, “Birth of a ‘Discipline.’” 2 4. Kulischer and Kulischer, Europe on the Move; Vernant, Refugee in the Post-war World; Stoessinger, Refugee and the World Community; Proudfoot, European Refugees; Holborn, International Refugee Organization; Chandler, High Tower of Refuge; Kee, Refugee World; Elie, “Histories”; Black, Fifty Years of Refugee Studies. 25. Marfleet, “Refugees and History”; Marfleet, “Understanding ‘Sanctuary.’” 2 6. Malkki, “Refugees and Exile.” 27. Chatty and Marfleet, “Conceptual Problems in Forced Migration.” 2 8. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism. 29. Malkki, “Refugees and Exile,” 502. 30. Chatty and Marfleet, “Conceptual Problems in Forced Migration,” 4.

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This persisted during the Cold War as scholars turned their attention toward refugees escaping communist nations as well as refugees fleeing from the recently independent (decolonized) Middle East, Africa, and Asia. These scholars were especially interested in Palestinian refugees who had escaped the 1967 Six-Day War and people evacuating in Indochina regions due to the Vietnam War. In 1966, Atle Grahl-Madsen’s The Status of Refugees in International Law, which provided a comprehensive legal exploration of refugees’ status under the emergent international legal frameworks of the period, was published.31 In 1975, Louise Holborn published an influential history of the global refugee agency, the UNHCR, building on her earlier study of the International Refugee Organization, which preceded the UNHCR.32 Another extant legal analysis of the refugee phenomenon was Guy Goodwin-Gill’s The Refugee in International Law, a now-canonical text first published in 1983 with subsequent editions in 1996 and 2007.33 Goodwin-Gill observes in the preface to the second edition the “extraordinary growth in refugee studies” between the publication of the first edition in 1983 and the 1996 edition.34 Other authors refocused on the narrations of the national refugee histories of Europe generally, the United States, Germany, and the Palestinians, among others.35 More recent work has expanded the scope of Refugee Studies to cover subjects that would be considered nontraditional. In the initial decades of the scattered academic study of refugees, certain distinct features are noticeable in the works in the “nonfield.” Refugee Studies before the 1980s was taking place in disparate academic and policy fields that had little or no conversation with one another and neither formalized the subject nor produced a framework for conceptually or intellectually approaching the subject. These studies have also been critiqued for their lack of independence from the policy arena, a critique that has persisted and remains prevalent into the present time. A vast majority of the studies of refugees in the twentieth century were closely linked to states’ and international organizations’ mandates in various ways and were unable to depart from the parameters created by these institutions. A significant amount of work also focused directly on 31. Grahl-Madsen, Status of Refugees. 32. Holborn, Chartrand, and Chartrand, Refugees; Holborn, International Refugee Organization. 33. Goodwin-Gill, Refugee in International Law. 3 4. Ibid., xi. 35. Marrus, Unwanted; Loescher and Scanlan, Calculated Kindness; Jacobmeyer, Vom Zwangsarbeiter zum Heimatlosen Ausla¨nder; Morris, Birth of the Palestinian. For a broader range of historical studies, see Elie, “Histories.”

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producing knowledge about the various institutions that were created to manage refugee issues in Europe, as well as the organizations that were involved.36 This intercourse between academia and policy practice in Refugee Studies has also partly been occasioned by the desire of the early Refugee Studies scholars to develop a field that would directly influence policy and policy makers and thereby be germane to improving refugees’ lives and situations. Unfortunately, this tendency also led to a situation in which it was states and their accoutrements of power—law and institutions—that were determining not only the agenda of Refugee Studies but also the parameters by which they themselves (the states, law, and institutions) were to be evaluated. Another weakness of this early period of Refugee Studies was that it overlooked social and political trends that had implications for refugee status, welfare, and protection. Bhupinder S. Chimni, in his critique of positivist legal scholarship, censures the latter for perpetrating a trend by which legal analyses of refugee law eschewed the political milieu and motives of the states that invented the European refugee regime.37 While the positivist perspective seeks to lay claim to being ideologically and politically neutral, the reality is that since the law itself was a product of these prejudiced contexts, scholarship that omitted these lenses could be considered to have little utilitarian value. The major instruments of international refugee law—the 1951 UN Refugee Convention and the 1967 Protocol—were products of Cold War politics that the great powers sought to use for their advantage. The depoliticization of these instruments by refugee legal scholarship, Chimni argued, can be said to have served the objectives of the major states in the bipolar world system of the time and continues to do so into the post–Cold War era, with implications for humanitarian action and refugee solutions.38 The omission of “political” topics from Refugee Studies in the earlier days was a consequence of the depoliticization of the law and humanitarian practice as well as of the overbearing influence of Western states, including the United States, in the Cold War and post–Cold War international refugee regime. The outcome of the asylum politics at the time was the restriction of the right to asylum that saw many refugees from outside Europe denied what was previously considered a time-honored principle. The “exilic bias” of refugee law, which had benefited refugees from eastern Europe during the Cold War, was jettisoned in 36. For example, Louise Holborn’s two treatises on the International Refugee Organization and the UNHCR, cited above. 37. Chimni, “Geopolitics of Refugee Studies.” 38. Ibid.

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favor of what James Hathaway called a “non-entrée regime.”39 These Western powers instead sought to blame the “new” states of Africa and Asia where these refugees were coming from for a perceived inability to manage their affairs, and to hold them solely responsible for their refugee outflows. This derisive response foregrounded the domestic causes of refugee flows and ignored the role of global powers, by their capitalist, colonial-imperialist, ideological, and political interference, in producing the conditions for refugee crises in these areas.40 Relevant to our present discussion is the fact that refugee scholars almost universally echoed the perspectives and interpretations of the dominant states in the international refugee regime by mainstreaming the image of a “normal” refugee as white, male, and anticommunist, echoing the so-called myth of difference and paving the way for the imposition of (voluntary and forced) repatriation as the most desired solution for refugees in the developing world. Indeed, there was a marked lack of studies that acknowledged the hypocritical bases of European and US refugee practices in a changing global refugee regime, thereby failing to capture, explain, and influence the negative trends emanating from these geopolitical dynamics. In remedying this record, we concur with Malkki (and quote extensively here) that there is a need to broaden the research agenda of refugee scholars from all disciplines to engage more meaningful and “political” topics: Involuntary or forced movements of people are always only one aspect of much larger constellations of sociopolitical and cultural processes and practices. Nationalism and racism, xenophobia and immigration policies, state practices of violence and war, censorship and silencing, human rights and challenges to state sovereignty, “development” discourse and humanitarian interventions, citizenship and cultural or religious identities, travel and diaspora, and memory and historicity are just some of the issues and practices that generate the inescapably relevant context of human displacement today. In many studies of refugees, however, these are the kinds of “background information” or “root causes” that sometimes have been considered, for many reasons, beyond the scope of study.41

This narrowness must not be allowed to persist into today’s research, which is vitally necessary for overturning these social obstructions to human security and welfare. 3 9. Ibid; Hathaway, “The Emerging Politics of Non-entrée. 4 0. Chapter 5 in this book demonstrates the importance of studying the external basis for refugee production in Africa in the postindependence era. 41. Malkki, “Refugees and Exile,” 496.

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From the above review, it is apparent that Refugee Studies before the emergence of the modern discipline was a Eurocentric enterprise. There is scant mention in many reviews of the existence of work done outside the continent or work about other non-European places before or during the same period. It is surprising, for example, that major refugee-producing events such as the Partition of India in 1947 and the decolonization struggles in Africa from 1945 onward did not gain the attention of academics studying refugees until much later. It is further noteworthy that, for the same reason, whereas these refugees in Africa and Asia already existed in significant numbers at the time of the conclusion of the 1951 UN Refugee Convention (itself a product of the Cold War and designed to serve Western interests), that law was exclusive to Europe and ignored refugee movements in other parts of the world. However, the fact of the Eurocentricity of refugee law and Refugee Studies by itself does not nullify the relevance and usefulness of the studies that were conducted under this framework. The reality that has shadowed studies of refugees to date is that the European origins of the existing refugee regime have been globally applied. It is inescapable that the major contemporary international laws and institutions emanated from Europe; including their modus operandi and the administrators and specialists, all emerged from the application of that European paradigm and practice. Regrettably, this has led to a situation in which the parts of the world tasked with hosting most of the refugees remain beholden to the political and xenophobic currents that continue to serve and maintain the interests of Europe and the powerful (mostly Western) states in the international system. A final key feature of the history of Refugee Studies that we explore in this chapter is the tendency to focus on studies about refugees, of states, organizations, and regimes, without actually centering the refugee as the subject or authority of the discipline. Too many of the studies cited above render the refugee silent in narratives about them, a situation that gave further impetus to the emerging field in the 1980s and onward. As Zetter puts it, “Those best able to define, explain and promote an understanding of the parameters which govern their lives are the refugees themselves and the practitioners, administrators and researchers within and from both host countries and refugee communities.”42 The currents and perspectives that have birthed and defined Refugee Studies from the early twentieth century onward have greatly impacted the now-global refugee protection regime and the contemporary field of Refugee 42. Zetter, “Refugees and Refugee Studies,” 6.

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Studies. The impacts have been two-sided, but the expansion of the field to embrace a diversity of topics and the entry of scholars from around the globe can be seen as especially laudable developments. The discipline has not only expanded its topics to some of the issues raised as deficiencies in the earlier studies; it has more and more assumed a critical stance that questions the role played by powerful states and humanitarian organizations in shaping the refugee regime, often to the detriment of refugees and states in the developing world. It has confronted head-on academic and policy debates related to the restrictiveness and growing irrelevance of legal definitions of refugees; the large numbers of displaced persons who fall outside the legal definitions cemented in Europe and adopted, though modified, by other regional legislations; the nature and extent of the interplay between academic literature and the policy domain of Refugee Studies; the dialectic role of the UNHCR in promoting the political and often nonhumanitarian agenda of powerful states and donors, as well as its responsibility as the major humanitarian agency with the greatest direct interaction with refugees and their problems; the “new” causes of displacement and refugee movements, including climate change and development activities of states and corporations; the search for durable solutions; the vast diversities among refugees themselves; and the appropriate theoretical, methodological, and epistemological frames for engaging these subjects and many more. To return to the problem of labeling the field, the attempted turn in the 2000s from Refugee Studies to forced migration studies has been viewed critically by some scholars.43 “Forced migration studies” was advanced as allowing for a relaxation of the narrow definition of refugees as persons needing protection to embrace the study of migrants in similar situations. Refugee Studies has been accused of serving the objectives of the states and agencies largely responsible for devising the global refugee regime by providing the intellectual ballast, knowingly or not, for xenophobic management of refugees, legitimizing the divestment of northern states from refugee protection, and the physical containment of refugees from the South in their regions of origin there. A change of nomenclature could not evade these criticisms. Once again, the discipline was being co-opted into the colonial and hegemonic projects of the North by legitimizing their intrusion into the internal affairs of countries in the Global South. The discipline still provided the data and statistics,

43. Chimni, “Birth of a ‘Discipline’”; Black, “Fifty Years of Refugee Studies”; Hathaway, “Forced Migration Studies”; Zetter, “More Labels, Fewer Refugees.”

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theoretical and methodological frameworks, and knowledge to facilitate the ever-expanding reach of the countries of the Global North. This move, which has seen the incorporation of other migrants as legitimate foci of the field and of humanitarian action (including internally displaced persons, returnees, trafficked persons, organized crime, and so on), seems irreversible and has proceeded apace. The cynical reality is that this octopus-like overreach of the developed countries did not come about because of any genuine humanitarian concern for the plight of forcibly displaced persons stuck in countries of the Global South. Rather, it was an attempt to micromanage the perceived causes and flows of human displacement in order to reduce the numbers of asylum seekers and migrants reaching the doors of Europe and the United States, evident in the increased securitization of European migration processes and the reinforcement of “Fortress Europe.” Today, refugee (and forced migration) studies has seen a proliferation of academic and professional programs, centers, journals, and a few specialist academic associations as fora for exploring and extending these debates. There are only a few of these academic centers outside the Global North that are dedicated to Refugee Studies and studies of refugees, and some of these bear mentioning in this survey: the Refugee Law Project at Makerere University, Uganda; the Africa Centre for Migration and Society at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa; the Forced Migration and Refugee Studies Program at the American University of Cairo; and the Maharnirban Calcutta Research Group, affiliated with the University of Calcutta, India. It is apposite to admit, however, that a major deficiency that continues to dog the field is the relative invisibility of refugees, refugee-scholars, and refugee communities as producers of knowledge in the large body of literature that has since developed. Refugees are still largely passive objects of study rather than participant actors in shaping and creating the narratives that emanate from studies about them. The overpowering role of Western states and the UNHCR remains potent in shaping Refugee Studies and practices. And, relatedly, while the largest number of refugees are to be found in the Global South, these regions are greatly underrepresented in the refugee knowledge production centers and are only scantily found at the center of the global discourses around refugee issues. The academic programs, centers, institutes, and journals and the policy arenas are mostly located in the Global North, and, as in other globalized spaces of intellectual participation, they continue to feature an overwhelmingly dominant presence of scholars from or based in the North, who set the agenda and have molded the discipline, ultimately in their own image.

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Na m ing th e Su bject: W ho Is a R efuge e? But who or what exactly is a refugee? What distinguishes a refugee from an asylum seeker, a migrant or immigrant, or a displaced person? Many nonspecialists and media reports use these terms loosely and interchangeably and see these groups as equally important in a political sense. But then, the refugee label or status can make the difference between life and death, assistance and lack, security and uncertainty, solutions and suffering. Scholars, states, humanitarian actors, and refugee activists have to grapple with this, and it has been a source of major contention over who has access to the perceived “privileges” of refugee status. Complicating this is the fact that a single individual may get to exchange labels throughout the refugee cycle—from displaced person to asylum seeker, refugee, or migrant, from trafficked to returnee or resettled, citizen, or diaspora—and possibly move back and forth between these labels, and each stage, each label, has its specificity of experience. It is a truism that throughout their cycle of experience, “labels infuse the world of refugees.”44 Refugees and the idea of them have existed throughout history from the premodern era, as extant ideas of Christian refuge, Islamic sanctuary, and African brotherhood signify.45 The emergence of the European state system in the seventeenth century and the state as a sovereign entity established ideas of refuge, sanctuary, and asylum as legitimate functions of that state, albeit taken for granted until the twentieth century. Today, refugees are defined by international laws developed over the last seventy years and reinforced by the activities of states, international organizations, and humanitarian agencies. Of the 79.5 million forcibly displaced persons around the world in 2019, by the United Nations definition, 26 million are refugees, while 4.2 million are asylum seekers—all people who are fleeing violence (oppression, war, or political unrest) in their home countries. Yet while the terms asylum seeker and refugee seem similar if not identical on the surface, it is critical to note that there is a legal difference. An asylum seeker is someone who flees from their home country but does not have a definite refugee status. The asylum seeker must fill out an application requesting protection once they reach the border or shore of a host country. It is through this application that an asylum seeker is offered refugee status (or not). A refugee, on the other hand, has officially been given legal recognition by the receiving state (often working with the United Nations

4 4. Zetter, “Labelling Refugees,” 39. 45. Ajala and Obiozor, United Nations and African Refugees.

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Refugee Agency) as someone who has been forced to flee his or her home because of war, violence, or persecution, often without warning; this recognition confirms that the person fleeing has done so based on a “well-founded fear.” It was during the UN General Assembly Conference of Plenipotentiaries held in Geneva in July 1951 that the contemporary concept of refugee was defined by the organizers. The United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, which proceeded from that conference, formed the basis for the modern definition of refugees applied today. The United Nations declared that a refugee is someone who, “owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it . . . [UN 1951, Article 1A(2)].”46 This definition does not conceal its bias regarding the circumstances necessitating forced migration in the first instance, as it ignores many other factors that make migration inevitable for unsettled peoples. It focuses on persecution to the exclusion of broader social unrest, economic instability, and natural disasters, to mention a few other pertinent factors. Significantly, it also had time and geographical limitations that tethered it firmly to Europe. It is apparent that the concern of the 1951 Refugee Convention, even as it appeared to be interested in finding lasting solutions to the scourge that refugees’ migration ignites in the contemporary world, is colored and could be an impediment to the evaluation of the situation for diagnostic purposes. Inevitably, the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) spotted this gap and decided to correct the definitional inadequacy of the UN Refugee Convention by offering a different conceptualization of the phenomenon. In the process of bringing about this continental consensus on African refugees, the major world powers, fearing a diminution of their influence, as the 1951 UN Convention clearly did not apply to African refugees, quickly contrived the removal of the geographical and temporal limits on that Convention, resulting in the 1967 Protocol.47 Notwithstanding this, the OAU proceeded to establish its own continental regime and Convention and thereby also provided a definition of the refugee that covers a wider range. Hence, the 1969 OAU Convention Governing the Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa sees a refugee as “every person who, owing to external 4 6. Phillips, Asylum Seekers and Refugees. 47. Holborn, Chartrand, and Chartrand, Refugees; Chimni, “Geopolitics of Refugee Studies.”

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aggression, occupation, foreign domination, or events seriously disrupting public order, in either part or the whole of his country of origin or nationality, is compelled to leave his place of habitual residence in order to seek refuge in another place outside his country of origin or nationality.”48 While this definition also does not sufficiently encompass all the underlying dynamics that enforce migration and refugee making, it does include a broader scope than the UN Refugee Convention and therefore projects the African view of the refugee phenomenon. Some scholars argue that the OAU definition of a refugee is preferable to the UN definition because it properly articulates the experiences of refugees in postcolonial regions.49 However, the term refugee has been and still is debated, particularly when distinguishing between a migrant/immigrant and a refugee.50 Simpson made an early distinction, saying that refugees “leave because of political events, not because of economic conditions or because of the economic attractions of another territory.”51 This implies that the reason for flight is an important marker of the definition, which effectively excludes migrants who left their countries of origin for economic reasons. Additionally, a lack of choice in the decision to flee is flagged by the extant perspectives on who a refugee is in contradistinction to some other kind of migrant. This is the most basic distinction, and perhaps the most important one to policy makers and eventually to refugees themselves. A refugee is one who fled their country of nationality or of habitual residence because they were compelled—that is, forced—to leave to protect their life. In contrast, the category of migrant or immigrant includes someone who, within reason, chooses to voluntarily leave their home country and move to another one, according to Oscar Jászi.52 This distinction thus breaks down the categories of migrants into the type of choice propelling movement—forced or voluntary—or what are considered to be “push factors” and “pull factors.” A push factor is something that impels or forces someone outward from their country of habitual residence—such as war, human rights abuses, poverty, or lack of jobs. A pull factor is something that draws someone toward another country— such as peace, prosperity, and available jobs.53 Essentially, then, being a refugee or

4 8. OAU, Convention Governing Refugee Problems, art. 1 (1). 49. Skran and Daughtry, “Study of Refugees,” 21. 50. Skran and Daughtry, “Study of Refugees,” 20. 51. Simpson, Refugee Problem, 4. 52. Jászi, “Political Refugees,” 84. 53. Rosenberg, “Push-Pull Factors in Immigration.”

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R efuge e St u di e s Table 2.1. Contrasts between refugees and migrants Characteristic Motivation Source Homeland Decision Departure Context Visit home Control Time orientation Social network Expectations Country of destiny

Refugees Pushed out Political pressure Rejected by it Involuntary Sudden Tumult, loss Cannot Loses it Past Other expatriates Liberation of homeland Others control

Migrants Pulled out Own aspirations Rejects it Voluntary Planned Planful, hopeful Can Gains it Future Local natives Work, graduation Self-controls

Source: T. F. Rhoden, “Beyond the Refugee-Migrant Binary?”

migrant comes down to the roles of force, choice, and agency on the part of the individual involved.54 Table 2.1 presents an extremely delineated separation of the two categories, a hard definition that has seen both vigorous application by legal scholars, policy makers, and some humanitarian actors and, in recent times, serious empirical and practical challenges. However, Jacques Vernant, as early as the aftermath of World War II, observed that both political and economic reasons can be justifications for refugees to be forced to flee their country. Furthermore, William S. Bernard in 1976 argued that both “immigrants and refugees . . . share problems of language, housing, and . . . needs for social services”—though he granted that refugees usually have worse mental health issues.55 Even with this revised definition, there have been some disagreements among scholars as to how complex and nuanced the determination of refugee status should be. There remains no consensus on the distinctions and definitions relating to the acknowledgement, recognition, and protection of persons on the move—refugees, internally displaced persons, and migrants of various 5 4. van Hear, Brubaker, and Bessa, Managing Mobility. 55. Skran and Daughtry, “Study of Refugees,” 21.

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types—debates that we further discuss elsewhere in this book in relation to mixed migrations of African refugees. While international organizations have done valuable humanitarian work by bringing aid to refugees and bringing awareness about refugees, as we have noted earlier in this chapter, Refugee Studies scholars have also studied how humanitarian efforts may have the unfortunate and unintended effect of simultaneously politicizing, depoliticizing, and dehistoricizing refugees and effectively erasing their individual stories.56 A lot of the studies of refugees and policies of humanitarian organizations effectively deny refugees agency. There are few studies that have investigated how refugees themselves view the term refugee, and more scholars see the need to fill in this gap. Angela Gissi, one such scholar, believes that the controversial nature of asylum seeking and the devastating circumstances that refugees often face have caused the word refugee to have a negative stigma attached to it.57 This stigma is attached to the belief that refugees are vulnerable and, to some degree, helpless. However, this stigma may be unrelatable to many refugees, as their experiences may not be as negative as many outsiders might assume. Consequently, in Gissi’s view, the stigma can be “disempowering” for refugees, and her work seeks to bring back refugees’ voices to the discussion of their identities and their futures.58 In research published in 2018, Gissi interviewed Syrian refugee women of various ages in Lebanon about what they think the word refugee means to them. Gissi consciously chose to interview women because of their perceived vulnerability, considering how “refugee women constitute an extreme form of the ‘other’ that is both vulnerable and an object of domination.”59 According to Gissi, these women articulated four meanings of the word refugee: “an overwhelming sense of loss, memories of the past and the difficulties of the present in exile, the relationships with the host communities in Lebanon, and the role of civil society organizations and governmental agencies in the Syrian humanitarian crisis.”60 In a sense, then, these women felt that the term refugee reminded them of burdens both within and outside their communities. The burdens were inside their communities in regard to tangible loss and self-stigma, and the burdens were outside their communities in regard to how 56. Gissi, “What Does Refugee Mean?”; Malkki, “Speechless Emissaries”; Rajaram, “Humanitarianism and Representations.” 57. Gissi, “What Does Refugee Mean?” 58. Ibid., 540–41. 59. Nusair, “Negotiating Identity,” 68. 6 0. Gissi, “What Does Refugee Mean?,” 547.

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they as people were negatively treated and viewed by their host countries (for instance, through alienating practices or the perception that Syrian refugees are inherently violent). The unavoidable loss created by displacement was exacerbated by external, negative forces, and this in turn generated self-stigma that psychologically traumatized these women.61 Ultimately, then, the word refugee exists as a somewhat “demeaning” term that does not help the mental recovery of these women.62 Given these results, Gissi recommends that humanitarian organizations strive to empower refugees and explicitly dismiss negative connotations behind the word refugee. This does not mean, of course, that humanitarian organizations should disregard the need for services to be provided for refugees. Rather, they must balance this need with the other need of acknowledging refugees’ agency. After all, they cannot be seen merely as passive objects, considering how much they have had to overcome in their displacement experiences.63 In addition, placing great value on the voices of refugees and their perspectives can help Refugee Studies scholars place mass displacement of peoples into greater historical context. Indeed, historical context is immensely important in understanding how and why refugees exist.64

M a pping R efuge e Tr en ds Refugee Studies scholars have identified common historical patterns in the mass displacement of peoples. The first is persecution, which can refer to harm committed on the basis of national, religious, racial, political, sexual, or social identity. Recently, from about the 1990s onward, this language has been supplanted with a human rights language that frames discrimination in the form of violations of fundamental human freedoms, although in the specific case of refugee law, the focus is on violations on the basis of personal and social identities. This shift coincided with the advancement of human rights discourse championed by the United Nations and its global diffusion. Thus, for instance, the UNHCR in 2012 updated the definition of a refugee to include possible discrimination of persons on the basis of their gender or sexual orientation. The UNHCR acknowledged that “LGBTI individuals are the targets of killings, sexual and gender-based violence, physical attacks, torture, arbitrary detention, 61. 62. 63. 6 4.

Ibid., 557–58. Ibid., 558. Ibid. Gatrell, “Refugees.”

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accusations of immoral or deviant behavior, denial of the rights to assembly, expression and information, and discrimination in employment, health and education in all regions around the world.”65 The second pattern is war. Globally today, UNHCR statistics make clear that the biggest factors producing forced displacement of persons are conflict, human rights abuses, and political instability.66 As previously mentioned, the largest national group of refugees at the end of the 2020s are from Syria, and they are fleeing from the Syrian Civil War. Prior to Syrian refugees being the greatest number of refugees globally, there were the Afghan and Iraqi refugees, who had also escaped wars in their countries from the 1980s to the 2000s. In fact, between 1981 and 2013, these two groups of people accounted for the greatest number of refugees. It was only in 2013 that Syrian refugees overtook the Afghan and Iraqi numbers.67 The third pattern is hunger. There are approximately twenty million Africans in the northern and eastern parts of the continent that are experiencing severe droughts that result in massive food shortages.68 Experts estimated that world hunger will double by the end of 2020 as a result. With the COVID-19 crisis of 2020, food shortages have already been exacerbated as farmers are unable to plant and harvest their crops in due season and in commercial quantities, and as ports are shut, rendering the import of food and food items impossible. To make matters worse, refugees are likely to experience the worst of the fallout.69 It is recorded that lockdowns further drained the money of refugees in Uganda and Ethiopia as well as limited the ways that food and aid from humanitarian organizations could be distributed in the Central African Republic.70 While the relevant refugee laws do not recognize hunger as a legitimate ground for seeking refugee status, this factor nevertheless remains key in causing forced displacement of people. Related to this trend is a fourth major trend: climate change and environmental disasters. It is estimated that thirteen million Americans in coastal regions of the United States, as well as hundreds of millions of people in coastal regions around the world, will by necessity leave their homes by 2100 due to rapidly rising sea levels brought about by increased global warming.71 Moreover, 6 5. Rueckert, “Why People Become Refugees.” 6 6. UNHCR, “Global Trends 2018 Report.” 67. Ibid. 68. Ibid. 69. Kluge et. al. “Refugee and Migrant Health.” 70. Dahir, “Instead of Coronavirus.” 71. McCarthy, “Climate Refugees”; Rueckert, “Why People Become Refugees.”

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in 2020, it is estimated that somewhere between 75 million and 250 million people around the world underwent the repercussions of worsening water and food shortages due to climate change. Unsurprisingly, the communities that are most devastated by these trends are those in poverty—which, of course, includes many refugees.72 Currently, the 1951 and 1967 UN Conventions do not consider climate change–induced natural disasters to be a legitimate, legal reason for a person to claim refugee status. In 2013, a Kiribati man sought asylum because climate change drove him from his home. In response, the New Zealand High Court rejected his asylum application. However, it is likely that when climate change intensifies, it will become a more widely recognized driver of claims for asylum and refugee status.73 Globally, Refugee Studies is more relevant than ever. As of year-end 2019, there were more displaced persons than there have been since World War II— almost eighty million people. This means that at this point in history, the world has seen the greatest number of refugees to date.74 More than two-thirds (68%) of these refugees come from only five countries in the developing world. From the greatest number of refugees to the least number of refugees, these countries were Syria (6.6 million people), Venezuela (3.7 million), Afghanistan (2.7 million people), South Sudan (2.2 million people), and Myanmar (1.1 million people).75 Most of the Syrian refugees reside in the Middle East, with Turkey hosting the most refugees (about 3.6 million).76 But the figure of 6.6 million people still does not take into account all of the devastation within Syria. The conflict in the country began in March 2011 with a civil war that has been raging ever since. About 500,000 people have died as a result, and the survivors who remain have been crippled economically and psychologically. Almost 100 percent of Syrians currently live without health care, about 75 percent of Syrians live without clean water, and nearly 50 percent of Syrian children are not in school. Besides the 5.6 million Syrians who are refugees, there are about 6.2 million Syrians who have evacuated their homes and moved to other places within the country. Additionally, there are about 12 million people who need humanitarian aid—about half of this number constitutes children. Meanwhile, about 70 percent of the country lives in grave poverty, living on less 7 2. Mercy Corps, “Facts”; UN Environment Programme, “Responding to Climate Change.” 73. Rueckert, “Why People Become Refugees.” 74. Ibid. 75. UNHCR, Forced Displacement in 2019. 76. Reid, “Forced to Flee.”

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than $1.90 a day. Indeed, this poverty and displacement crisis is considered to be the worst in a lifetime.77 Across the world, due to globalized media and instant communication, people see and feel the repercussions of mass migration. With a simple click of a television remote or a computer mouse, one can see refugees being attacked by the mafia or drowning.78 There is also much debate on how accommodating host countries—those who receive refugees—should be. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, US president Donald Trump announced that he planned to admit only 18,000 refugees into the United States during the 2020 fiscal year. This was 12,000 fewer refugees than in the 2019 fiscal year and is the lowest resettlement quota since the refugee resettlement program was created by Congress in 1980. In fact, throughout the entire Trump administration, the accepted refugee numbers in the United States were historically at their lowest. The United States currently accepts only about half the number of refugees that other developed countries accept on average. Between February 2017 and October 2019, the Trump administration allowed about 76,000 refugees to enter the country. During the last year of the Obama administration alone (2016), the United States admitted 85,000 refugees. Consequently, the United States no longer holds the title of the world’s primary destination for resettled refugees.79 President Trump’s rhetoric and policies about refugees were controversial and even considered Islamophobic.80 In November 2015, Trump mentioned refugees on Twitter for the first time since his announcement of his candidacy. He tweeted, “One of Paris terrorist [sic] came as a Syrian refugee. Donald Trump is right again. BOMB THEIR OIL—TAKE AWAY THEIR FUNDING.”81 That same month, Trump tweeted, “Refugees from Syria are now pouring into our great country. Who knows who they are—some could be ISIS.”82 In March 2019, after forty-nine Muslims in two mosques were killed in New Zealand, Trump tweeted an article from Breitbart, a far-right news platform that has referred to Muslim refugees as “rapefugees” and has claimed that terrorism is part of the majority of Islam’s belief system. After the public outcry, Trump deleted his tweet.83

7 7. Reid, “Syrian Refugee Crisis.” 78. Rueckert, “Why People Become Refugees.” 79. Krogstad, “Key Facts.” 80. Klaas, “Short History.” 81. National Immigration Law Center, “All Tweets”; emphasis in original. 82. Ibid. 83. Klaas, “Short History.”

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Additionally, Trump’s infamous Executive Orders 13769 and 13780 and his 2018 travel vetting proclamation came under great legal and public scrutiny. These actions, popularly known as Trump’s “Muslim travel ban,” first forbade the entry into the United States of all people from seven Muslim-majority countries for 90 days. This initial order (Executive Order 13769) also halted the resettlement of refugees for 120 days and permanently forbade the admission of Syrian refugees into the United States. According to Trump, this order was created so that terrorists would not enter the country. However, the order was later edited (Executive Order 13780) to say that people in those seven Muslimmajority countries who had previously been allowed entry into the United States could travel back to the United States. It has been speculated that this edit was made so that the order would more likely be approved by the Supreme Court. Indeed, the Supreme Court ultimately settled for “partial implementation [of the order] with respect to foreigners without a bona fide relationship with a U.S. individual or entity.”84 After the Supreme Court’s decision was declared, Trump issued a proclamation (not an executive order) with new edits to the travel ban. This time, the ban was restricted to those with visa issues from the seven Muslim-majority countries as well as three additional countries (two of which are not Muslimdominant). On June 26, 2018, the Supreme Court in a 5–4 decision upheld the travel ban, but Chief Justice Roberts emphasized how a president cannot simply declare that certain foreigners are dangerous without providing evidence. In this particular case, the majority of the justices believed that Trump’s evidentiary support was sufficient, but nevertheless Roberts rejected the idea that the president has total authority to ban any foreigner he or she wants with impunity.85 The Trump administration had another controversial legal win in 2019 when the Supreme Court approved the administration’s decision to reject requests for asylum at the United States southern border if the asylum seekers had traveled through another country and failed to request protection from there before requesting protection from the United States.86 In response to the Supreme Court’s decision, the US senior advocate for Refugees International, Yael Schacher, expressed great disapproval. This disapproval is significant, considering how Refugees International has some noteworthy political standing as an advocacy and research organization in the US, independent from the United 8 4. Chishti, Pierce, and Plata, “In Upholding Travel Ban.” 85. Ibid. 86. Barnes, “Supreme Court.”

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Nations, and studies humanitarian needs and crises across the globe as well as makes recommendations for future policy decisions.87 In Schacher’s official statement after the Supreme Court decision, she wrote, Today’s ruling by the Supreme Court is a blow to the desperate needs of asylum seekers at our southern border. We are gravely disappointed the nation’s highest court has lifted an injunction on a policy that—by barring asylum to anyone, including families and unaccompanied children, who passes through a third country—is contrary to long-established U.S. practice. This is yet another attempt by the Trump administration to bar people, especially from Central America, from seeking protection in the United States from violence and persecution. It is also another attempt by the administration to brazenly circumvent existing law. We hope this asylum ban will last only as long as the legal fight against it continues in the courts.88

The number of refugees and the locations from which refugees come have varied over the years for the United States. For instance, during the early to mid-1990s, the United States admitted about 116,000 refugees from the Soviet Union. But after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the United States admitted only about 27,000 refugees due to temporary suspensions. Soon afterward, though, refugees came back to the United States in great numbers—more than 67,000 each year between 2008 and 2017—until the Trump presidency. Between 2008 and 2017, more than half of these refugees came from Asia (which includes Iraq and Myanmar). Additionally, since the Trump presidency began, almost 80 percent of the refugees coming into the country have identified as Christian. This religious disparity is quite different from previous years. For instance, in 2016 during the Obama administration, 46 percent of the refugees were Muslim.89 Recently, debates on refugees have been contentious in the United States, particularly in the states that accept the most refugees (California, Texas, and New York). In May 2018, Pew Research reported that only 51 percent of Americans said they thought the country had a moral responsibility to admit refugees. Most of the opinions on refugees fall on political lines. About 75 percent of Democrats and left-leaning independents indicated in the same May 2018 survey that the United States should admit refugees, whereas only about 25 percent of Republicans and right-leaning independents indicated the same. 87. Refugees International, “What We Do.” 88. Schacher, “Statement.” 89. Krogstad, “Key Facts.”

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Conclusion This grounding chapter has surveyed the large body of work that today forms the important field of Refugee Studies, the debates in the field, and the trends that continue into the present. It provides a broad overview of the development of the field of refugee and forced migration studies in order to interrogate the labels and categories that define the field, identifying and delineating the subject of the field—refugees, asylum seekers, displaced persons, and (im)migrants—and mapping key trends and debates in its historical development. This discussion traces Refugee Studies (or refugee and forced migration studies) as it developed into a formal field and its entwined history with the developments in international human rights and refugee law since the end of World War II, when the European international refugee system emerged. By the early 1980s, academic programs in refugee and forced migration studies emerged in the United Kingdom and North America and gradually spread internationally. The current state of the interdisciplinary field centers much of the engagement in the Global North, which continues to produce a disproportionate amount of the Refugee Studies literature relative to studies at institutions in the Global South, including Africa. It is hoped that the present volume makes a significant contribution in this regard.

thr ee

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AFRICAN REFUGEE STUDIES

Introduction As the policies and practices of the international refugee regime became global, Africa emerged as an early and key epicenter for the advancement of international refugee law, with regional practices and policies and a gigantic refugee population relative to the rest of the world. This chapter aims to sample some of the key trends in the contemporary African refugee landscape. The chapter examines the emergent state of the study of African refugees over time and situates its development within the broader field of Refugee Studies. It analyzes some caveats for engaging the data and the literature; current patterns in the manifestation of conflict-induced displacement, the biggest cause of displacement on the continent; debates related to mixed migrations and their implications for African refugees; issues related to the treatment of LGBTQ+ refugees from Africa; mental health issues; and the future of the study of African refugees.

St u dy ing A fr ica n R efuge e s: Tr en ds a n d Sou rce s Studies of African refugees, sparse as they initially were, predated the development of the formal field of Refugee Studies and, even more importantly, provided significant impetus for the establishment and expansion of the field. It has already been established in preceding chapters that the entry of refugees from the Global South—Africa, Asia, and Latin America—dramatically changed the nature and responses of the global refugee protection regime. As refugees from Africa burgeoned in the postindependence era, the 1960s to the 1980s

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particularly, the international system was seriously changed. The 1969 OAU Convention, which initially threatened to make the European refugee regime obsolete, instead redefined the regime by radically altering the classifications for who counted as a refugee. The statutory role of the UNHCR expanded and transformed in response.1 More information about these refugees was needed to guide such work by governments and humanitarian agencies. In an early (1980) bibliography holding more than 900 entries, compiled in support of his advocacy for the establishment of the academic field, Barry Stein entered at least 127 materials pertaining to refugees in Africa.2 The oldest of such materials date as far back as 1962, indicating that the burgeoning of research was directly related to the context of African refugee situations that emerged around the period of independence, in the late 1950s and 1960s. This refugee situation was described at the time by UNESCO as a “dramatic problem” and an “African exodus.”3 These early reports on refugees in Africa came from humanitarian agencies, governments and government institutes, journalists, theses and dissertations, and other kinds of academic research, as well as a great diversity of other sources. African Refugee Studies emerged in the pivotal moment when the academic field was formalizing in the early 1980s. In an article that outlines a brief history of Refugee Studies, Barbara Harrell-Bond and Eftihia Voutira note studies of Angolan refugees in northwestern Zambia conducted by Art Hansen and Anita Spring, published in 1977 and 1979, respectively, as constituting some of the earliest field-based studies of Global South refugees in the nascent field.4 Considering that this came from the founder of the Oxford Refugee Studies Centre, Barbara Harrell-Bond, it can be inferred that such studies of African refugees, including her own pathbreaking research on humanitarian aid in the 1982 Ugandan refugee crisis in Sudan, were important for seeding Refugee Studies in institutional academic centers.5 1. For an important example of the African impetus for UNHCR expansion, see Ibhawoh, “Refugees, Evacuees, and Repatriates.” 2. Authors’ content analysis; Stein, “Documentary Note.” Stein has been noted in the preceding chapter as one of the earliest scholars to make a call for a modern field of Refugee Studies to be established, a call published in the same edition of the International Migration Review in which this bibliography is published. See also Stein and Tomasi, “Foreword,” 5–7. 3. UNHCR, “Moving 50,000 Congo Refugees,” 18–20; Wright, “African Exodus,” 14–19. 4. Harrell-Bond and Voutira, “In Search of ‘Invisible’ Actors”; Hansen, “Once the Running Stops”; Hansen, “Refugee Dynamics”; Spring, “Women and Men as Refugees.” 5. Harrell-Bond, Imposing Aid.

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That the academic study of African refugees has over time been largely conducted by scholars and institutions of the Global North, with few exceptions, can be partly attributed to global inequities in the distribution of knowledge, power, and resources, which meant that the field has revolved around the knowledge centers of the West. Some of the important studies of African refugees and displacement have been produced by scholars located in the West such as Barry Stein, Barbara Harrell-Bond, Robert Gorman, Howard Adelman, Jeff Crisp, Susan Forbes Martin, Liisa Malkki, Laura Hammond, Alexander Betts, James Milner, and a growing generation of younger researchers and practitioners.6 The few exceptions to this Western dominance in the field include the decades-long work of African scholars such as Gaim Kibreab, Aderanti Adepoju, and Loren Landau.7 Notable centers for the focused study of refugees and forced migration on the African continent include the Refugee Law Project at Makerere University, Uganda; the Africa Centre for Migration and Society at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa; the Refugee Studies Centre at Moi University in Kenya; and the Forced Migration and Refugee Studies Program at the American University of Cairo, among possibly other less visible centers. That said, there is a dire need for African studies of African refugees—that is, studies of African refugees by African scholars, especially African scholars located at universities, research centers, and policy institutions on the continent. It is clear that the dominance of researchers in the Global North has profoundly shaped how refugees from Africa are understood and framed; it has produced a “single story” marked by a lack of diversity in perspectives about refugees and has contributed to a prevalent attitude in the humanitarian community that permits the bare minimum of involvement for African refugees in 6. A multidisciplinary selection of studies by these scholars and others, many cited in parts of this book, include Hamrell, Refugee Problems in Africa; Stein, Refugees and Economic Activities; Harrell-Bond, Imposing Aid; Gorman, Africa’s Refugee Burden; Zolberg, Suhrke, and Aguayo, Escape from Violence; Adelman and Sorenson, African Refugees; Crisp, “Africa’s Refugees”; Martin, Refugee Women; Malkki, Purity and Exile; Hammond, This Place Will Become Home; Betts, Protection by Persuasion; Betts, Survival Migration; Milner, Refugees, State and Politics. 7. Kibreab, African Refugees; Kibreab, Refugees and Development in Africa; Kibreab, Ready, Willing, but Still Waiting; Adepoju, “Dimension of the Refugee Problem”; Adepoju, “Consequences of Influx”; Adepoju, “Internal and International Migration,” 26–45; Adepoju, Migration in Sub-Saharan Africa; Landau, Humanitarian Hangover; Landau and Pampalone, Go Home Forever. Others such as Mahmood Mamdani produced early work on African refugees but did not specialize further on the subject. See Mamdani, From Citizen to Refugee.

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decisions made about their own futures.8 Katy Long has elegantly explained this latter predilection: “Research has not so much changed who is sitting at the conference table, as altered the discourse around who should be at the table.”9 Scholars from the Global South have consistently critiqued global politics and Refugee Studies scholarship for the persistent tendency to overlook, homogenize, and “other-ize” refugees from the Global South and have sought by their own scholarship to push back against these trends.10 It is the purpose of this book to enhance the presence of African refugees and African scholars in Refugee Studies discourse and policy, contributing to a more dynamic and indigenous view of the continent and its politics. Data on African refugees and displaced persons are collected, analyzed, interpreted, and circulated for wider audiences by two broad categories of actors. On one hand, there is a vast repository of official data and information emanating from states/governments, various United Nations agencies (especially the UNHCR), intergovernmental organizations (including regional and subregional organizations), humanitarian agencies, and those working under the mandate of these official authorities who manage and oversee refugee lives and migration movements. On the other hand, there are many nongovernmental organizations, academics, journalists, independent researchers, human rights and refugee rights activists, community-level actors, refugees and migrants themselves, and others who work with, study, live with, or manage refugees in one way or another. It is necessary here to recognize that this dichotomy by no means implies that the latter category always exists in opposition to the former; on the contrary, these broad categories of researchers often work hand in hand, as in when NGOs and independent researchers or academic institutions are engaged by governments to collect data or when the former are donors to the latter, and so both may sometimes rely on each other’s work in shaping their own research. A classic example of how these two categories of research intersect is seen in Sadako Ogata’s 2005 memoir, The Turbulent Decade: Confronting the Refugee Crises of the 1990s, a contribution that combines 8 . The idea of a “single story” is from Adichie, “Danger of a Single Story.” 9. Long, “More Research and Fewer Experts,” 229. 10. Notable among these is the work of Indian refugee law scholar B. S. Chimni, including Chimni, “Geopolitics of Refugee Studies”; Chimni, “From Resettlement to Involuntary Repatriation”; Chimni, “Birth of a ‘Discipline.’” See also important work in this mold by Indian scholar of gender and borderlands in South Asia, Paula Banerjee: Banerjee, “Borders as Unsettled Markers”; Banerjee and Chaudhury, Women in Indian Borderlands; Banerjee, Borders, Histories, Existences; Banerjee, “Bengal Border Revisited”; Banerjee, “Response to Landau.”

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her official experiences as the UN High Commissioner for Refugees during the troubled 1990s with the insight and reflexivity of someone who was no longer serving in an official capacity.11 From this blended perspective, the book is a lucid analysis of how the conjunction of UNHCR, state, and nonstate actions both responded to and shaped dynamic and relatively unprecedented refugee situations in Iraq, the former Yugoslavia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, the Great Lakes region of Africa generally and Rwanda and Burundi specifically, and Afghanistan in the 1990s. Most studies of refugees in Africa utilize a multiplicity of sources in writing about refugee issues, but there is almost always a noticeable bent or, to put it more precisely, particular “framings” that the information user must be alert to and cognizant of when employing data and evidence from these varied sources. One major reason why official statistics are ubiquitous is due to their authoritativeness and the often near-total global, regional, or in-depth scope of coverage, which cannot be rivaled by data from smaller and less wealthy organizations and individual researchers. As such, data from the UNHCR, the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the European Union (EU), the African Union (AU), subregional bodies such as the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), UN agencies (such as the UNDP, UNICEF, and others), peacekeeping missions, governments and governmental agencies (such as the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre of the Norwegian Refugee Council, and others), are often deployed in the work of smaller organizations and individual researchers, including this book. A second reason for the importance of these official sources of information for researchers is that these are the data and analyses informing the policies applied every day to refugees, migrants, asylum seekers, and forcibly displaced persons within the territorial, legal, and operational jurisdiction of various governments and humanitarian agencies. Therefore, these official sources have direct and real impacts on refugee lives and futures and must be taken seriously. But in utilizing official sources of data on refugees and displaced persons, certain caveats should be considered.12 First, governments, the UN, and others produce data based on their official, usually politically-derived positions on issues, and so the data is shaped by their acceptable definitions, concepts, and jargon and by the allowable scope of the persons and issues being covered. Second, as with all migration statistics, the data is often incomplete. Sometimes 11. Ogata, Turbulent Decade. 12. Jeff Crisp discusses these issues extensively and with nuance in Crisp, “Who Has Counted the Refugees?”

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this is due to the impracticability of collecting data in active conflicts or rapidly evolving situations; or because of obstruction by governments or nonstate armed groups, which may deny access to theaters of their activities; or due to an insufficiency of human or material resources to reach all the spaces and people relevant to the issue at hand. As such, researchers must always pay attention to the fine print where the limitations of these data are stated by the data producers and use estimates as exactly what they are—estimates, and not always representative of a complete picture. Nonetheless, “these official sources can be used to evaluate the reliability of other sources; for policy-making on migration; as a basis for non-governmental or civil society action; to alert other researchers to issues previously unnoticed; and can help us discover the government’s or agency’s position or stance on an issue.”13 Nonofficial or noninstitutional sources of refugee data tend to be more case study focused, descriptive of particular situations and telling particular stories. Academics, journalists, and local advocacy groups, often using ethnographic approaches, oral histories, and limited surveys, are important links in providing vital pieces of the puzzle for understanding refugees on the continent. And so, as noted above, from the inception of this field of study, researchers at this level have produced knowledge about refugees in Africa, somewhat limited at first, but now quite a plethora has developed. One of the weaknesses of studies such as these is that they may miss the larger currents that a granular focus captures—that is, they may not see the forest for the trees. Or, as Ranabir Samaddar puts it, such case studies “may unknowingly leave out the broader perspective . . . the structure that not merely determines the events, but also the subjectivity of it.”14 Nevertheless, the existence of these studies is important for verifying and validating information produced by official sources. And some of these researchers are also inconspicuous and ingenious enough to elude official barricades to refugee and migrant situations and to produce cherished, if limited, data on situations that powerful states or groups would rather shield from the public gaze. Ultimately, it is considered best if refugees themselves are regarded as the authorities about their own lives and conditions. The refugee’s perspective in much of the literature is often obtained through interviews, participant observation, life histories, oral narratives, and other ethnographic and usually qualitative methods of collecting data. This particular source of refugee and 1 3. Yacob-Haliso, “Sources and Uses,” 117–121, 118. 14. Samaddar, Marginal Nation, 212.

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migration data better recognizes the agency of the disadvantaged populations that are the subjects of displacement studies. Besides, there is a veritable need to “go beyond numbers, beneath numbers”—particularly so when one is studying inherently difficult aspects of refugees’ and migrants’ experiences that the statistics alone can neither capture nor convey.15 Women’s issues, LGBTQ+ refugees, violence, and trafficking are some subjects that lend themselves better to a micro approach. Startlingly, though, the benefits of these sources of data are not agreed on. Tricia Hynes, in weighing the relative advantages, observes that while “obtaining data about refugees from official or authoritative sources is not always the optimum method . . . whether refugees are themselves the experts of the refugee experience is also a contested idea dependent upon ontological position. Researchers [must] negotiate these two sources of information.”16 For the study of African refugees, a population that remains subject to the colonial gaze that pervades Western-dominated African Studies more broadly as well as prejudices donor-led humanitarian intervention in the region, the lesson would be that the researcher using information about refugees must be alert to the dominant and even complex positionalities of the authors or producers of such studies.17 In spite of this, centering refugees in the study of refugees and displacement in Africa has important advantages. Julia Powles’s work considers the following possibilities (among others): centering refugees allows for the communication of refugees’ voices in a powerful and relatively direct way; it enables researchers to capture the particularity, complexity, and richness of an individual refugee’s experiences; such studies help restore, both to the teller and to the audience, a sense of the refugee’s own agency, however limited by events and external interventions; they highlight refugees’ most serious concerns and can challenge us to think creatively about ways to address them; they are a means to discover unexpected gaps in our knowledge of particular situations; this grounded approach tends to create a strong bond between the researcher and the subject, which can be empowering for vulnerable refugees; and they can help us understand the impact of trauma, and in some cases the process of recording may be cathartic for the refugee.18 15. Ibid. 16. Hynes, Issue of “Trust.” 17. In her article “Intersectionalities and Access in Fieldwork in Postconflict Liberia,” YacobHaliso dissects the complexities of how the researcher’s positionalities intersect with those of the refugees themselves to produce particular kinds of knowledge. 18. Powles, “Life History and Personal Narrative”; Yacob-Haliso, “Sources and Uses.”

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Now we turn our attention to the dominant patterns of refugee phenomena on the continent, first using official statistics to paint a broad picture and afterward turning to some of the micro-level phenomena that individual experiences call attention to that may be missed in macro studies.

Conflict-In duced Displ ace m ent Because of war alone, around 70,000 United Nations peacekeepers (which constitutes about 85 percent of the total number of UN peacekeepers globally) are stationed across Africa. Additionally, in response to the violence, the African Union has initiated the “Silencing the Guns in Africa by 2020” movement, focusing primarily on Libya, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and the Central African Republic, with the goal of halting the major causes of displacement. In Central Africa, particularly in the North and South Kivu and Ituri provinces in the DRC, the violence has escalated so much that about 250,000 people were forced to flee between January and May 2020. Meanwhile, in Burundi, 436,000 people were forced to leave their homes, and armed Muslim and Christian groups in the Central African Republic have displaced about 1.2 million people from their homes.19 While most of the major refugee movements over the last ten years have originated from the UNHCR’s Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, the second-largest group of refugees has come from sub-Saharan Africa. Between 2016 and 2017 alone, there was an increase of 4.3 million sub-Saharan Africans seeking asylum, bringing the total number of sub-Saharan Africans who have been forcibly displaced to about 18.4 million. In 2017, there were about 3 million more Middle Eastern and North African people forcibly displaced from their homes. Between 2015 and 2017, the number of sub-Saharan refugees increased by 42 percent, whereas between these same years, the number of MENA refugees decreased by 8 percent.20 The largest group of newly displaced refugees in the sub-Saharan region in 2018 were South Sudanese. In fact, not only do South Sudanese refugees constitute the largest displaced group from the continent, but the South Sudanese refugee situation is the third largest in the entire world.21 Even though South Sudan is the newest African country, created in 2011 as a result of a vicious 1 9. Adebajo, “Time Is Running Out.” 2 0. Connor and Krogstad, “Record Number.” 21. Welle, “Where Do African Refugees Go?”; Reid, “Forced to Flee”; UNHCR, “South Sudan Refugee Crisis Explained.”

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civil war in Sudan, internal armed conflict started up in 2013, resulting in a frail economy, food shortages, and health problems for the South Sudanese. This chaos has led about 2.3 million South Sudanese to leave their country and about 1.9 million South Sudanese to be internally displaced (as of 2018). About 80 percent of those leaving the country are women and children. Currently, most South Sudanese refugees are living in the DRC, Kenya, Uganda, Sudan, and Ethiopia.22 However, South Sudanese refugees are most likely to travel to Uganda. Among the approximately 2.3 million displaced South Sudanese people in 2018, about 1.04 million reside in Uganda. Other countries hosting major populations of South Sudanese refugees were Sudan (773,000 people), Ethiopia (422,000 people), Kenya (112,000 people), and the DRC (89,000 people).23 As mentioned earlier, the DRC also has a notable refugee population, and it currently has the most internally displaced persons (IDPs) in sub-Saharan Africa.24 Because of the country’s massive diversity, there are ethnic tensions that have repeatedly broken out into internal armed conflict, right from independence. This type of violence intensified in 1994 after the infamous Rwandan genocide, when Rwandan Hutu peoples fled en masse to the DRC. As a result, Tutsi and Hutu peoples in the eastern DRC began to fight one another, with the active connivance of the governments in both countries. More than twenty-five years later, armed conflict has only escalated in the country, while a weak government remains.25 Between 2016 and 2017, the number of IDPs in the DRC increased from 2.2 million to 4.4 million. Meanwhile, Ethiopia has the second-highest number of IDPs in the sub-Saharan region. Recently in the area, ethnic border clashes have pushed people out of their homes, with about one million people displaced from their homes in 2017.26 In 2018, about 815,000 people from the DRC left the country. As with the South Sudanese, most of the refugees from the DRC went to Uganda (242,000 people), followed by Rwanda (83,000 people), Tanzania (76,000 people), Burundi (65,000 people), and South Africa (59,000 people). The main reason for selecting these countries is geographic contiguity, as the DRC is nearby (except for South Africa).27 Geography has also been a major factor for refugees fleeing

2 2. UNHCR, “South Sudan Refugee Crisis Explained.” 23. Welle, “Where Do African Refugees Go?” 2 4. Connor and Krogstad, “Record Number.” 25. Global Conflict Tracker, “Violence.” 2 6. Connor and Krogstad, “Record Number.” 27. Ibid.

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Figure 3.1. Conflict is the major single cause of refugeehood in Africa, and geographical contiguity determines where refugees settle. In 2011, hundreds of Somali refugees (many of them women) braved wild animals and armed robbers to reach the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya, one of Africa’s largest and longestactive refugee camps. Oxfam East Africa, https://www.flickr.com/photos/46434833@N05/5935739781. Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Oxfam_East _Africa_-_Hundreds_of_families_are_arriving_in_Dadaab_camp_every_day.jpg.

from Somalia, who also have been fleeing from civil conflict. As of 2018, about 809,000 Somali who fled their country went to Kenya (284,000 people), Ethiopia (254,000 people), Uganda (37,000 people), South Africa (31,000 people), and Djibouti (13,000 people). The Dadaab refugee complex in Kenya, one of the largest refugee camps in the world, was the home of 217,511 registered refugees as of the end of March 2020.28 At Dadaab, shown in figure 3.1, refugees have stayed for decades since the first arrival there from Somalia in 1991, and they have started or continued families there. This has been part of the reason why refugee numbers there continue to increase and why children have been born with the status of refugees.29 Also worth noting are the recent refugees from the Central African Republic, Burundi, and Nigeria. In the Central African Republic in 2013, Muslim rebels 2 8. UNHCR, “Kenya, Dadaab Refugee Complex.” 29. Ibid.

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took power from the government but were pressured into abdicating that power in 2014. Ever since, religious fights have plagued the country. In 2018, 585,000 people were displaced from their homes. Of these, 254,000 refugees traveled to Cameroon, 182,000 to the DRC, 77,000 to Chad, 31,000 to Congo, and 2,000 to Sudan. Meanwhile, in Burundi, the Tutsi and Hutu have fought for many years. This conflict began when the country became independent in 1962 and intensified in 1994 when the civil war between the two ethnic groups erupted. Consequently, the country remains both ethnically divided and poor, and as of 2018, refugees from Burundi had traveled to Tanzania (276,000 people), Rwanda (88,000 people), the DRC (45,000 people), Uganda (41,000 people), and Kenya (13,000 people). Lastly, in Nigeria, about 14 million citizens in the northeast region have been under siege by Boko Haram and other Islamic terrorist groups, all of whom have caused many people to run for their lives. In 2018, 232,000 Nigerian refugees had been displaced. They fled to Niger (108,000), Cameroon (85,000), Chad (10,000), South Africa (9,000), and Senegal (400).30

M i x ed M igr ation It has become necessary for the major players in the international refugee regime to on the one hand concretize the legal categories and classifications of people on the move globally, but especially from developing countries to the more developed world, and at the same time to politicize the “mixed” nature of migrant movements. “Mixed migration” has become a means for states and refugee policy makers to inadvertently recognize the uselessness of the extant labels being used and the inevitability of human migration, which occurs for reasons that are not always clear or neatly extricable, and yet to insist that those categories frozen into their laws and national consciousnesses be maintained in order for them to apply grudging and minimal solutions to refugee problems. Scholars and human rights or refugee activists, on the other hand, began to use the term to stress the unrealistic nature of the legal and policy applications of straitjacketed distinctions between kinds of peoples on the move and to highlight the sore points of the impracticality of this approach. The term is traceable in UNHCR practice to the organization’s search from the 2000s onward for more effective refugee protection and durable solutions measures and has evolved through several of its policy documents.31 30. Ibid. 31. These include, specifically, UNHCR, “10-Point Plan of Action”; UNHCR, “10-Point Plan in Action”; UNHCR, “2016 Update.”

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The idea of mixed migration disrupts the carefully constructed and supposedly foundational dichotomy created by the differing roles of force, choice, and agency in defining refugees and other forced migrants or forcibly displaced persons.32 Conventionally, refugees are deemed to be persons who were compelled by extraneous danger to flee their places of habitual residence, having little to no choice, and crossing an international border in the process of seeking protection from malevolent state and nonstate forces. The causes of refugee flight are maintained for political reasons, including threats to life and individual freedoms. Refugees, in this conventional thinking, are defined in opposition to migrants, or persons who made conscious decisions to pursue better economic well-being in other locations by migrating there. Many scholars would not accept grouping refugees as a type of migrant because this would violate this neat separation. This is one of the reasons why, as we discussed in the preceding chapter, scholars like James Hathaway resist the merging of Refugee Studies with forced migration studies, because they observe that conflating the categories involves scholars in states’ “protection reducing efforts” such as states’ “migration management goals.”33 The reality is somewhat different, though, as studies in the last decade have increasingly foregrounded the interconnection between refugees and migrants, asylum and migration, or what has been called the “migration-asylum nexus.”34 At its most simplified, the concept of the “migration-asylum nexus,” expounded by Stephen Castles, refers to the blurring of the distinction between economic migration and forced migration, which can be found at all stages in the migration chain. First, the causes of forced migration, such as repressive political regimes and human rights abuses, as in many African situations, are also more and more the causes of economic migration as well, thereby simultaneously producing both refugees and economic migrants as well as persons with “mixed motivations.” Second, both groups of people tend to follow the same migration routes in seeking solutions to their plight. This fact was officially acknowledged in the UNHCR’s Agenda for Protection, which noted that refugees often move within broader migratory flows,—that is, refugees and other kinds of migrants often travel together.35 They rely similarly on personal networks to achieve their migratory goals. And, third, as destination countries employ harsher policies to keep out unwanted persons, refugees, and asylum seekers may be forced 3 2. Van Hear, Brubaker, and Bessa, Managing Mobility. 33. Hathaway, “Forced Migration Studies,” 355; Bloch, “Gaps in Protection.” 3 4. Castles, “Migration-Asylum Nexus.” 35. UNHCR, Agenda for Protection.

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to engage in similar survival tactics as unwanted economic migrants, thereby making it difficult to tell the difference.36 Consequently, one of the most useful ways to think about the similarities between refugees and other migrants, as described by Anthony Richmond, is as a continuum along which one or the other exercises more or less agency and choice at particular and changing points in the migration experience.37 Another useful framework for thinking about this complexity of refugee identity is the concept of “survival migration” posited by Alexander Betts, which he uses to analyze five specific African refugee situations: Zimbabweans in South Africa, Zimbabweans in Botswana, Congolese in Angola, South Kivu (Congolese) refugees in Tanzania, and Somalis in Kenya. This concept seeks to address the peculiar situation of persons who, though equally desperate as refugees fleeing persecution, may not get international protection because they fall outside the narrow legal definition of the refugee regime, and it interrogates the normative question of who should qualify for asylum.38 Betts argues that the current refugee regime does not pay attention to or protect increasingly large numbers of people who are fleeing their countries because those states have lost the capacity to provide them with basic human rights, because the states are either unable or unwilling to. Survival migrants are persons who “are outside their country of origin because of an existential threat to which they have no access to a domestic remedy or resolution. [They are] . . . deprived of equally fundamental human rights due to deprivations rather than violations, omissions rather than acts of states, and socioeconomic rather than simply civil and political reasons.”39 Essentially, this concept advocates that international protection be extended to individuals irrespective of whether they are refugees because the state targeted them in some particular way or whether the state simply did not protect or was incapable of protecting them from various harms. It seeks to enlarge the category of refugee from its weddedness to victimhood on the basis of political acts defined in essentially Eurocentric ways, to include socioeconomic circumstances that create similarly urgent conditions that impel people to move. Survival migration suggests that in both situations, the expected nurturing bond between state and citizen established by the theoretical social contract and expressed in the rights-duties reciprocity has been severed and requires international intervention on behalf of the endangered persons. 3 6. Castles, “Migration-Asylum Nexus.” 37. Richmond, Global Apartheid. 38. Betts, Survival Migration. 39. Ibid., 188; emphasis added.

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To return to the concept of mixed migration, it is evidently a conceptually omnibus term still subject to some variation in definition and meaning (as we can see from the above discussion), but it essentially encompasses two central ideas. First, it points to the complexity of international migration flows that see various groups of people in “mixed movements,” traveling together along the same routes, usually aided by the same people-smugglers and traffickers, and arriving at the same destinations in anticipation of states’ acceptance to varying degrees. Such mixed migrations may include people as varied as refugees and asylum seekers, IDPs, trafficked or smuggled persons, unaccompanied minors, so-called irregular migrants, and other legally recognized migrants such as students, professionals, economic migrants, temporary seasonal contract workers, traders, and so on. In this first sense, mixed migration is a phenomenon that transcends the individual refugee. In the second sense, though, mixed migration can refer to the “mixed motives” of individual migrants, who often have dual—political and economic—reasons for moving, who exercise varying degrees of agency at different points in the journey, or whose motives might shift between asylum-seeking and economic survival at various points in their migration. Various international organizations, humanitarian agencies, and intergovernmental organizations have tailored their responses to mixed migration along the lines of either one or the other or a mixture of these two motivations, often leaning in policy responses based on this. The implications for how refugees (and others in need of protection and assistance) are impacted by states’ and humanitarian organizations’ interpretations of mixed migration dimensions remain perplexing and complex. These dual dimensions of mixed migration are not mutually exclusive and are so intertwined that they may be inextricable from each other. And yet, policy makers and humanitarians are sometimes forced by legal-political mandates to seek to effect this extrication and to weaponize the perceived individual motives of migrants for political purposes. Based on this dichotomous nature of the meaning of mixed migration, with respect to its policy implications for refugee protection in international law, Marina Sharpe argues that the consideration of individual motivations—in terms of both how one individual may have mixed motivations for migrating and in terms of how one group of migrants may reflect multiple motivations for moving—adds no value and may in fact contribute to populist hostility about migration, and that the term should accordingly be understood solely as describing complex population flows involving more than one legal category of migrant. . . . Individual motivations should be irrelevant to the concept of mixed migration;

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including such motivations adds nothing and, moreover, may highlight migration drivers about which some members of the public are hostile.40

What is notable from this analysis is that, while the 1951 Refugee Convention clearly foregrounds personal motives in distilling an individual’s eligibility for refugee status, states’ obligations to protect migrants clearly precede refugee determination procedures. This is because of the cardinal principle of nonrefoulement, which must be applied first and which has its philosophical and moral groundings in human rights laws, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its enunciation of the principle of a human right to asylum.41 Nonetheless, states (more especially so in recent decades) have tended to view these considerations from restrictive political lenses and view the right of individuals to asylum as a right of states to either grant or not grant asylum, turning the principle on its head. The other fundamental problem arises from the fact that, of all the many kinds of migration that exist as people move across the globe in a timeless tendency, there is a fundamental lack of a fully developed international migration regime, a coherent set of laws, institutions, and norms framing this domain, of which only the international refugee regime, catering to one strictly defined type of forced migrant, is significantly defined, elaborated, and developed.42 As mixed migration has gradually gained sway as a way of thinking about and managing complex refugee situations, states, the UNHCR, and other humanitarian actors have gradually begun to develop institutionalized responses. Following the UNHCR 10-Point Plan of Action were a series of consultations at national, subregional, and regional levels that highlighted in particular the need to better gather data and share information in order to understand the phenomenon more precisely.43 Consequently, Mixed Migration Task Forces and Working Groups have been set up at various national and regional levels of action. These have necessitated other structures that have been established over the last decade: the Regional Mixed Migration Secretariat (RMMS) in the Horn of Africa and Yemen, the RMMS in West Africa, and the North Africa Mixed Migration Hub (MHub).44 The concentration of these efforts in Africa is certainly noteworthy.

4 0. Sharpe, “Mixed Up,” 121. 41. Ibid. 42. See Castles, “Migration-Asylum Nexus.” See also, Betts, Forced Migration. 43. UNHCR, Regional Conferences on Refugee Protection. 4 4. Moretti, “Addressing the Complexity.”

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African refugees are, more often than not, caught up in mixed migration movements, exemplifying many of the complexities that we have analyzed in this section. Across the continent, African refugees can be found in mixed migrations facing great danger, distress, and lack of protection as a result of being part of mixed migratory movements and facing states’ restrictive policies toward what they perceive as economic migrants. As part of the current global refugee crisis, refugees and mixed migration occur on two levels: in the external, outward movement of Africans through various northern African routes to reach Europe, or through the Gulf of Aden to reach Yemen and the Middle East; and in the internal circulation of Africans moving from one African country to another, fleeing conflict and in search of solutions to existential problems. While Western governments and Western media have focused on the AfricaEurope dimensions of the refugee issue, the real refugee crisis remains right here on the continent, as in other developing regions of the world. The UNHCR notes that more than 80 percent of the global refugee population are housed in the developing regions of the world, Africa included, and not in the Global North, as the latter would have us believe. In light of this political and epistemic tendency, disproportionate attention has been given to migration within and through North Africa in recent years. The fallout from the so-called Arab Spring of the early 2010s, which devastated several North African and Middle Eastern countries and created political upheaval that has still not subsided, produced large numbers of refugees and migration movements. Refugees from Yemen to Syria, Egypt, and Libya have become a political hot topic, the subject of many policies and debates, as well as ill-treatment. Additionally, there are vast numbers of Africans from West, Central, East, and some Southern African countries making perilous journeys across the Sahara Desert, across the Mediterranean, or around the Atlantic coast to try to reach European destinations, but many end up stranded in Libya or some of the other island territories that abut Africa and Europe. The horrible conditions that these mixed migrant populations have been subjected to by government officials, security agencies, human traffickers, people smugglers, modern bounty hunters, slavers, racist host communities, and various opportunist predators in both settled North African states and unsettled terrains such as Libya are well documented.45 In this landscape, refugees and asylum seekers are almost indistinguishable from migrants, trafficked persons, and even militia or terrorists. The unfortunate but common hostility of European 45. CNN, “People for Sale”; Baker, “As If We Weren’t Human”; Levenson, “Libyan Slave Trade.”

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countries to these persons arriving on their shores or at their land borders is also well documented.46 The UNHCR has entered into partnership with the Danish Refugee Council, the IOM, United Nations Fund for Children (UNICEF), Save the Children, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), and the Mixed Migration Centre in the MHub based in Cairo, North Africa. Born out of the North Africa Mixed Migration Task Force, the MHub “promotes a human rights-based approach to ensuring the protection of people moving in mixed and complex flows to, through and from North Africa. MHub produces knowledge on the human rights protection issues faced by people on the move in North Africa for use by policy makers agencies, donors, public and academia, with a view to inform advocacy, policy and program development. It fosters collaborative approaches among key stakeholders.”47 The focus of the hub is on migration to, through, and from Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Mali, Morocco, Niger, Sudan, Tunisia, Spain, Greece, and Italy, thus embracing origin, transit, and destination countries on the continent and the closest ones outside it.48 In the midst of the current coronavirus pandemic, the most remarkable feature of current responses to refugees and asylum seekers is greater restrictiveness of destination and transit countries, who have retained borders specifically closed to refugees and migrants, ostensibly because their territories are not safe from the virus.49 The Southern African region is another major hub for mixed migrations. As the economic giant of the region, and given its long and porous land borders, South Africa is the main migrant-receiving country in Southern Africa.50 In fact, migration to South Africa has been described as “a well-established household poverty reduction strategy” for persons from Southern African countries such as Lesotho, Mozambique, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, and others, and from other African subregions including Burundi, Somalia, Kenya, the DRC, and so on.51 This strategy has made it very difficult to ascertain who qualifies as refugees and asylum seekers under international and South African law and has exacerbated the state’s nonentry strategy in dealing with asylum seekers and other migrants. The UNHCR has identified the need to apply the concept 4 6. Mafu, “Libyan/Trans-Mediterranean Slave Trade.” 47. MHub, “About.” 4 8. MHub, “Mixed Migration Trend Bulletin.” 49. Ibid. The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on refugees are further discussed later in this chapter. 50. Bloch, “Gaps in Protection.” 51. Black et al., Migration and Development in Africa.

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of mixed migration to this case and defines it to include “refugees, asylum seekers, people who are leaving their own country in response to governance and development failures, those who are seeking economic, educational and family reunion opportunities, as well as some who regard the journey to South Africa as a first step toward more distant destinations such as Europe and North America.”52 However, the increase in mixed migration to South Africa is not a new trend. To take the case of Zimbabwean migrants, for example, it has been argued that from at least the early 1990s, in response to the crushing economic effects of failed structural adjustment programs and other economic policies, mixed migration to South Africa began to rise exponentially in three identifiable waves between then and now.53 This has resulted in South Africa enforcing some of the most restrictive refugee policies on the continent, including visa obstructions, expensive application processes, a terribly slowed-down asylum process, detention of undocumented migrants, and so on. Regular migration has been a part of life in East Africa and the Horn of Africa, with established nomadic and trade routes linking places such as Kenya, Ethiopia, and Somalia, increased labor migration to the Arabian Peninsula from the 1970s oil boom onward, and the establishment of a diaspora in Europe and North America from travel for education and other purposes since the colonial era. The region began to produce large numbers of refugees in the postcolonial era, particularly with the Ethiopian Revolution of 1974, which saw mass forced displacement of Ethiopians within the country and across the region, and the collapse of Somalia in the early 1990s.54 In this period, other countries in the region also produced large numbers of refugees—Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Eritrea, Djibouti, South Sudan, and Sudan—but the mixed nature of the migrations has also long been a feature of this region. Motivations for movement include those already discussed—namely, war, human rights abuses and political repression, environmental factors, economic collapse, and low human development indices—as well as what has been called a “culture of migration,” by which families send usually a young adult male to migrate elsewhere in order to get a job there and be able to send back money to his family.55 The mixed migration movements include asylum seekers, migrants, laborers, smugglers, trafficked persons, and other so-called irregular migrants. Tens of thousands of refugees and migrants yearly cross or attempt to cross the Gulf of 5 2. Crisp and Kiragu, “Refugee Protection,” 1. 53. Crush, Chikanda, and Tawodzera, Third Wave. 5 4. MHub, “Task Force Somalia.” 55. Marchand et al., Irregular Migration.

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Figure 3.2. Somali refugees and migrants are rescued when their boat capsizes in the Indian Ocean, trying to reach Yemen. The African refugee crisis features mixed migration movements such as this and extends far beyond the Mediterranean crossing, which media reports tend to rather focus on. US Department of Defense; Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia .org/wiki/File:Somali_refugee_boat.JPEG.

Aden into Yemen, like those in figure 3.2, while others find refuge in the region or elsewhere on the continent or attempt the crossing to Europe through various routes. To date, countries from East Africa and the Horn of Africa remain some of the largest refugee-producing nations on the UNHCR global tables, with human trafficking and smuggling of migrants a particularly problematic feature of mixed migrations there. The West African subregion, comprising the sixteen ECOWAS member states, is characterized by intense intraregional mobility as well as high levels of external migration toward Europe and North Africa. In fact, West Africa is both the region with the most mobile population globally and the African subregion with the highest rate of migration on the continent: “By some estimates, there are 214 million migrants in the world today; of these, 19.3 million are in Africa, and 8.4 million in West Africa alone, making it the sub-region with the largest migrant population. In terms of migratory movements, those that occur within the ECOWAS region are the most significant, with about 84% of flows internal to the area, which is seven times higher than to any other destination.”56 These West African migration statistics are astounding relative to other African regions. Thus, most migration of West Africans occurs within the region, with estimates such as the one above putting intraregional migration at 70–84 percent of all West African migration.57 Certainly, the ECOWAS 56. IOM Nigeria, Irregular Migration. 57. RMMS, Mixed Migration in West Africa.

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Free Movement Protocols makes intraregional migration easy and relatively cheap, producing predominantly circular patterns of migration among peoples of countries within the region. In addition, the close cultural affinity between the peoples that make up the region, bestriding largely artificial borders, makes circulation and movement part of the everyday living in this region. The proximity to trans-European routes also makes this an attractive area for migrating populations. The implication is that to varying proportions, all countries in the region are simultaneously migrant sending, receiving, and transit countries for various purposes at different times. Inevitably, mixed migration remains a major feature of this region, from precolonial migration for social, economic, and other reasons, to the colonial times when migration was from rural to urban, mostly coastal areas, to the postindependence period. In the postindependence period, economic factors motivated migration to three regional hubs (Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire, Senegal, and Nigeria), leading eventually to the changed dynamics of migration brought about by long civil wars in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Cote d’Ivoire and the hundreds of thousands of refugees produced from these in the 1990s, the vast majority of whom were hosted within the region. In the period since the 2000s, terrorism and the war on terrorism have produced millions of refugees and newly internally displaced persons in the region, while the major destabilization and instability this has caused in the Sahelian countries and regions have occasioned the collapse of market and economic systems, widespread insecurity and violence, food insecurity, and environmental devastation, all of which are equally drivers of displacement and migration. Intracontinental migration for West Africans was most strongly linked to North Africa and the advantages of possible passage to southern Europe. With increasingly restrictive entry policies by Italy and Spain and other European countries from the 1990s onward, and the eventual collapse of Libya in 2011, multiple illegal migration routes were formed between West Africa, North Africa, and the Mediterranean, which funneled mainly “irregular” migrants seeking to reach Europe.58

A fr ica n R efuge e s at US Bor der s The world is currently facing some of the greatest refugee crises in modern history,59 and the patterns and trends in the movement of refugees have changed somewhat. While the situation of African refugees at European borders has 58. Ibid. 59. United Nations, “Syria Conflict at 5 Years.”

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been discussed above under mixed migration and in various parts of this book, the presence of Africans at other Western borders is less often spotlighted. Often when one thinks of the immigrant chaos at the southern border of the United States, one thinks of South and Central American migrants struggling to claim asylum and gain United States citizenship. However, there are other stories about refugees at the border of the United States over the past few years that are worth telling—stories of asylum seekers arriving from across the Atlantic, from Africa. Indeed, it is becoming much more common for African migrants to come to the United States, fleeing violence and discrimination in their home countries. But they do not usually make a direct journey from Africa to the United States. Instead, they often fly to South or Central America and then travel to the United States’ southern border, sometimes waiting for weeks and months before being allowed to enter the country. This rather long journey has even been aided by migrant caravans sending in hundreds of African migrants at a time to the border.60 In 2018, Mexican authorities reported that there were three thousand undocumented African migrants present, which is about four times the number of undocumented African migrants from 2013.61 The sudden increase in African asylum seekers traveling through the Americas and into the United States has made various support organizations scramble for more supplies, temporary shelters, and translators. Usually the asylum seekers refuse to stay in Mexico because they do not speak Spanish.62 Yet, even with often strained circumstances, the recently arrived African refugees frequently express gratitude for their situation because they know it is ultimately better than the chaos from which they escaped in countries such as the DRC, Angola, and Libya.63 They also chose to take that difficult, roundabout journey because they know that Latin American countries do not often deport undocumented migrants due to the costs involved and the lack of repatriation agreements with countries overseas. Consequently, these African asylum seekers see their chances with this method as being better than if they had simply traveled directly to the United States, which would most likely deport them quickly.64 However, in 2019, President Trump demanded that Mexico increase its security so that African migrants cannot as easily cross through into the United States.65 6 0. Feinberg and Petrie, “African Migrants.” 61. Solomon, “U.S. Dream.” 62. Ibid. 63. Solomon, “U.S. Dream”; Feinberg and Petrie, “African Migrants.” 6 4. Solomon, “U.S. Dream.” 65. Feinberg and Petrie, “African Migrants.”

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LGBTQ+ R efuge e s While violence, war, and poverty are presented generally in the literature and mainstream media as the main reasons why African refugees leave their homes, it is important to recognize at this juncture that some Africans are forced out of their countries because of their sexual orientation. Indeed, thirty-three of the seventy countries globally that have criminalized homosexuality are on the African continent (table 3.1).66 There are many laws and social practices that discriminate against Africans in the LGBTQ+ community, much of this related to what has been referred to as “political homophobia”—that is, the instrumentalization of pervasive social and religious conservatism on gay rights for political advantage.67 In most African countries, the penalty for a person caught performing homosexual acts is a fine and/or six months to a life sentence in prison.68 But in four African countries, the penalty is expressly death: Mauritania (death by stoning), Nigeria (in areas under Sharia law, death by stoning), Sudan (death penalty), and Somalia (death penalty).69 For these reasons, LGBTQ+ Africans often leave their home countries to seek protection elsewhere. Ever since the Refugees Amendment Act of 2008 in South Africa, refugees have been qualified to seek asylum there based on sexual orientation persecution.70 Usually, African LGBTQ+ refugees choose to go to South Africa because, on the surface, the country is far more progressive than most in terms of LGBTQ+ legal protections. After apartheid ended, the government passed laws that made it illegal to discriminate against people based on their sex, gender, or sexual orientation.71 However, South African laws do not actually give LGBTQ+ individuals the freedom they may have initially expected. The country, from a social perspective, is still deeply conservative, and LGBTQ+ experience is often steeped in violence. According to Nigel Patel, an LGBTQ+ activist originally from Malawi who moved to South Africa, “the [anti-discrimination] law jumped miles ahead of society.” A South African LGBTQ+ activist organization known as Out recently found that, out of two thousand LGBTQ+ Africans in South Africa surveyed, “39 percent had been verbally insulted, 20 percent had been 6 6. Human Rights Watch, “South Africa.” 67. Thanks to Bonny Ibhawoh, who suggested this concept (private communication). 68. For a complete list, see table 3.1. 69. Human Dignity Trust, “Map of Countries.” 70. Human Rights Watch, “South Africa.” 71. Human Rights Watch, “South Africa”; de Greef, “Unfulfilled Promise.”

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Table 3.1. Punishment for LGBTQ+ offenses in African countries Country

Punishment (maximums)

Algeria Burundi Cameroon Chad Egypt Eritrea Eswatini Ethiopia Gambia, the Ghana Guinea Kenya Liberia Libya Malawi Mauritania Mauritius Morocco Namibia Nigeria Senegal Sierra Leone Somalia South Sudan Sudan Tanzania Togo Tunisia Uganda Zambia Zimbabwe

Three-year imprisonment + fine Two-year imprisonment + fine Five-year imprisonment + fine Two-year imprisonment + fine Three-year imprisonment + fine Seven-year imprisonment Imprisonment, unspecified sentence Fifteen-year imprisonment Life imprisonment Three-year imprisonment Three-year imprisonment + fine Fourteen-year imprisonment One-year imprisonment Five-year imprisonment Fourteen-year imprisonment + fine Death by stoning Five-year imprisonment Three-year imprisonment + fine Unspecified Death by stoning Five-year imprisonment + fine Life imprisonment Death penalty Ten-year imprisonment + fine Life imprisonment Life imprisonment Three-year imprisonment + fine Three-year imprisonment Life imprisonment Life imprisonment One-year imprisonment + fine

Source: Authors’ compilation; data from Human Rights Watch, “#Outlawed,” and Human Dignity Trust, “Map of Countries.”

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threatened with harm, 17 percent ‘chased or followed,’ and nearly 10 percent physically attacked.” The survey also found that half of the respondents who were Black had known an LGBTQ+ individual who was murdered specifically because of their identity. Additionally, across the country, “corrective rape”— the act of an LGBTQ+ individual being raped by someone of the opposite sex to whom they are not attracted—is fairly common practice. All of these issues are particularly heightened for LGBTQ+ refugees in the country because they face constant xenophobic behavior from others.72 Other concerns for LGBTQ+ refugees—and refugees in general—in South Africa are quite salient during the COVID-19 crisis of 2020. The South African government during the lockdown offered aid to South African citizens and people with social security numbers but neglected refugees. This inaction has had especially negative effects in the LGBTQ+ refugee community in South Africa because many of these individuals had previously relied on working at restaurants and bars, or in sex work, as their primary source of income. With the national lockdowns, these opportunities have been significantly reduced if not eliminated. This meant that LGBTQ+ refugees without sufficient funds lacked access to essential services such as medicine and food.73 For African LGBTQ+ refugees, therefore, there are multifaceted challenges to be overcome, and while expanded asylum opportunities to LGBTQ+ persons have commenced slowly, much more still needs to be done to protect this category of refugees.

M enta l H e a lth Issu e s With the circumstances that lead African refugees to flee their homes, as well as the experiences that result from forced migration, researchers have found that it is quite common for these individuals to develop either post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or complex PTSD (CPTSD).74 PTSD is recognized in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders V (DSM-5) as an anxiety condition whereby a person who either directly experienced or witnessed a traumatic event has extreme difficulty regaining normalcy and a sense of security.75 A person with PTSD may involuntarily experience memories or 7 2. de Greef, “Unfulfilled Promise.” 73. Human Rights Watch, “South Africa.” 74. Barbieri et al., “Complex Trauma.” 75. American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual; Leonard, “Complex PTSD.”

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dreams of the event, display extreme distress when triggered by memory of the event, develop a warped sense of reality or the self, and do whatever possible to avoid encountering memories of the event, among other symptoms.76 PTSD is similar to CPTSD in that CPTSD symptoms are like those of PTSD, but the difference to note here is that while PTSD is usually linked to one specific event, CPTSD is linked to multiple events or a prolonged single event.77 A. Barbieri and colleagues, for example, found that 68 percent of the African refugees they studied in Italy had some form of PTSD or CPTSD linked to their home and migration experiences. The most common circumstances that were likely to trigger mental health conditions for these individuals were torture, food and water scarcity, being imprisoned, assault, and homelessness. Other circumstances that could trigger these mental health conditions were witnessing a murder, near-death experiences, and separation from family.78 According to the David Lynch Foundation’s African PTSD Relief Project, it has been estimated that as many as one hundred million African refugees, past and present, have experienced PTSD in some form, which is understandable, considering how many African countries have undergone devastating wars.79 The mental health and general wellness of African refugees can potentially be better helped if they are provided with “culturally congruent” (an environment that provides cultural familiarity) social support. Some sense of familiarity in a new place is essential for African refugees, for they are likely to develop some confusion, culture shock, language barriers, stress, financial worry, and loneliness in their new host country.80 Social support interventions have been demonstrated to be successful for African refugees. For instance, Miriam Stewart and colleagues found that support groups and one-on-one discussions between recent Sudanese and Somali refugees in Canada and former Sudanese and Somali refugees benefited the new refugees’ acculturation process and mental well-being. The researchers contacted professionals to train a select group of former Sudanese and Somali refugees to be well versed in support group and one-on-one discussion strategies. Then, the researchers interviewed recent Sudanese and Somali refugees to assess what their preferences would be

7 6. American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. 77. Leonard, “Complex PTSD.” 78. Barbieri et al., “Complex Trauma,” 6, 11. 79. David Lynch Foundation, “African PTSD Relief.” 80. Ellis et al., “Discrimination and Mental Health”; Fozdar, “Golden Country”; Stewart et al., “Supporting African Refugees”; Drummond et al., “Barriers to Accessing Health Care”; Asgary and Segar, “Barriers to Health Care.”

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for support groups—what they most wanted help with, in terms of emotional and informational support, as well as how they wanted help to be delivered. Because of cultural preferences, the refugees’ support groups were divided by ethnicity and gender, and a former refugee would facilitate discussion, with the guidance and oversight of a professional.81 The researchers found that the recent refugees felt empowered through these support groups because they discovered that they were not alone in their problems and that they could rely on each other for practical advice. Support group facilitators would keep in contact with each recent refugee over the telephone to ensure all of their needs were met. Some discussions, of course, were also conducted one-on-one (between the former and recent refugees), based on the recent refugees’ wishes for privacy. All of these interventions helped solidify trust among the participants. Even some lasting friendships developed.82 It is worth emphasizing here that while developed countries, host communities, and refugee agencies often create programs that are meant to help refugees integrate into their new host country, “the provision of targeted services is not always sufficient; there must also be an inclusive process that addresses real or perceived barriers that impede migrant participation.”83 What mainly contributed to the success of the intervention from Stewart and colleagues was the intentional act of building the recent refugees’ trust with the intervention process, primarily by introducing former refugees into the equation. Indeed, any benefit to an integration program will be nonexistent if the potential participants are not willing or able to participate. This means that integration programs and the methods by which refugees are invited to participate in such programs must be culturally relevant. Developed countries that accept refugees attempt to include refugees into their health-care system in some way. This may be difficult to do with African refugees, however, if their own familiarity with a new health-care system is minimal. African refugees’ prior experiences of discrimination and various stressors may make them less willing to visit doctors in their host countries. Consequently, it is important for policy makers to create inclusive programs and for doctors to communicate in such a way that will validate African refugees’ experiences and systems of knowledge if they are to receive the mental and physical health benefits of their new country.84 According to Michael Jay 8 1. Stewart et al., “Supporting African Refugees.” 82. Ibid. 83. Polonsky et al., “Factors Leading to Health Care,” 306. 8 4. Polonsky et al., “Factors Leading to Health Care.”

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Polonsky and colleagues, policy makers who design programs to integrate African refugees into a health-care system should consider a “past behavior → knowledge → intention” method. Through this method, refugees’ past knowledge of health care (from home and host country) should be considered when creating a program that best suits the needs of the refugees and best addresses the concerns of the refugees.85 Polonsky and colleagues conducted research that further illustrates this point. They surveyed African migrants and refugees in Australia to determine their feelings toward donating blood in Australia and what possible concerns stand in their way. The choice to study blood donations was deliberate because blood giving within African groups is often seen as a communal event that directly improves others’ lives.86 Indeed, perhaps if African refugees donated blood to their host communities, they would feel better integrated into them and thereby more inclined to partake in a new health-care system. However, there is also evidence that Africans are more inclined to donate only to people that they know,87 which could imply a rejection of the potential to donate to an entirely foreign community. In addition, Dominique Grassineau and colleagues found that Cameroonian refugees in France mistrusted the country’s health-care system, and they also believed that Islamic law may actually forbid blood donations.88 In spite of these examples, though, Polonsky and colleagues contend that for the most part, Africans have positive attitudes toward donating blood (which is apparent in the literature and in their own 2018 study).89 Even so, all of these studies indicate that for African refugees and migrants to feel willing to donate blood (or be willing to accept health care), programs must first assess what burdens or misgivings the people may have so that they can be properly addressed. The point is cultural competence—understanding how best to understand and communicate with another group before this group can be integrated within a new one.

Conclusion: A fr ica n R efuge e St u di e s for th e Fu t u r e The statistics and research presented in this chapter lend themselves to a proposal for a future African Refugee Studies agenda, which is much needed in 85. Ibid., 318. 86. Grassineau et al., “Improving Minority Blood Donation.” 87. Tagny et al., “Blood Donor in Sub-Saharan Africa.” 88. Grassineau et al., “Improving Minority Blood Donation.” 89. Polonsky et al., “Factors Leading to Health Care.”

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the Refugee Studies field. To begin with, it is necessary to recenter refugees themselves in African Refugee Studies in order to better adapt the studies to changing realities and trends and to better understand their motivations, trajectories, and strategies. It is obvious that studies of African refugees by Africans themselves—what we may call “African studies of African refugees”—remain relatively few, compared to studies carried out by others from elsewhere. Even where African studies of refugees are being carried out, they are largely disconnected from the Global North–situated centers of knowledge production about refugees. Therefore, they are neither visible enough nor readily available to academics there to inform their analysis, nor to policy makers to shape policy that could make a difference to the lives of African refugees. More African scholars of African refugees are needed to produce knowledge that hopefully is more grounded in African realities and better attuned to finding African solutions that may work better than the blanket prescriptions currently being applied by the international refugee regime. Linking Refugee Studies with indigenous African knowledges also has potential to uniquely address the root causes of refugee flows, attenuate the conditions of refugees on the continent, and, in the long run, reduce and even eliminate refugee numbers. Although major intergovernmental organizations such as the UNHCR and Western governments and humanitarian organizations produce vast amounts of data and statistics about African refugees, African governments generally do not invest in research geared toward better understanding and better serving both refugees on their territories and their own nationals who are refugees elsewhere. This is an unfortunate missed opportunity to provide authoritative research and knowledge leadership that would be used for framing humanitarian programs and policies applicable to these refugees and to qualitatively advance their prospects in a global system that disadvantages them. While the move toward better understanding African mixed migrations is welcome in African Refugee Studies, it seems that the discourse requires further conceptual fine-tuning to better shape approaches to dealing with refugee issues, as can be seen from the competing frameworks surrounding “irregular” migration, the migration-asylum nexus, survival migration, and so on. This is an area of African Refugee Studies that would benefit from greater engagement by researchers, especially in the context of interest being given to this by policy makers, governments, and humanitarian agencies, who currently are leading in producing statistics on the phenomenon and in foregrounding its importance. African refugees (and other African migrants) need to be given the proper support to safely enter the host country, settle into it, be self-sufficient, and then either return to the origin country (if possible) or access other permanent

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solutions. Researchers, political leaders, and policy makers ought to communicate effectively with one another about these issues, one of the shortcomings of Refugee Studies today. More research on African refugee children is absolutely warranted, considering how CPTSD and PTSD are very real concerns for any refugee population. Particularly for children, whose bodies and minds are still developing, it is vital to protect them from and/or treat them for their mental health conditions so that they can become stable adults. LGBTQ+ African refugees also deserve more of a voice in the refugee literature. There is a need to further study this population, develop theoretical understanding and interpretation frameworks for their issues, and thereby inform policy makers and leaders of the best practices that will help eliminate xenophobia, transphobia, and homophobia in their societies. The mental health of African refugees and effective treatments also require further investigation. Specifically, researchers should continue to observe the effects of support groups and other current approaches employed for mitigation. Policy makers, leaders, and medical professionals are encouraged to access African refugee knowledge systems. By this method, culturally congruent interventions can be created that will give these refugees enough confidence and trust in the health-care system. In a similar vein, researchers can create and investigate effective culturally congruent programs that they could suggest to policy makers, leaders, and medical professionals.

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HUMAN RIGHTS INSTRUMENTS ON AFRICAN REFUGEES

Introduction The predicament of African refugees and displaced persons is symbolic of the persistent human rights derelictions by African states, but these persons are also entitled to international human rights protections. Although refugee crises are not a new development in history, the phenomenon has emerged as a prominent feature of the modern state due largely to the ceaseless occurrences of conflict, persecution, violence, and limited resources. Since the end of World War II, when the world population and boundaries began to be more integrated under the auspices of the United Nations, globalized international relations, and the modern configuration of states’ economic and political structures, this phenomenon has become a security and socioeconomic concern for many states. Unfortunately, the number of refugees and the burden of accepting and managing displaced persons has grown unabated on the continent.1 This is attributable to the increase in political instability caused by declining socioeconomic conditions, elections-related crises, authoritarian monopolization of political and economic power, violations of human rights, and ethnoreligious divides in Africa—all of which reflect poor governance and poor management of public affairs and state-society relations.2 In 1969, for instance, when the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) Convention Governing Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa was adopted

1. UNHCR, “Refugee Protection 2013–2014.” 2. Adedeji, Comprehending and Mastering; Kalu, Yacob-Haliso, and Falola, Africa’s Big Men.

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in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, by African sovereign states with the ultimate aim of stemming the tide of displacement, the refugee population in Africa was estimated to be around seven hundred thousand.3 By 1994 when the twentyfifth anniversary of the Convention was observed, the number had grown to about seven million, suggesting that at the time, about one-third of the global population of refugees were located in Africa alone. What is more, there were an estimated twenty million internally displaced persons (IDPs) across the continent at the same time.4 The 1980s witnessed a severe economic crisis and the simultaneous rise of authoritarian regimes across the continent, both of which contributed to the massive emigration of Africans to Europe, the United States, and other developed countries.5 Recognizing the dire refugee situation in Africa, various entities, symposiums, conventions, and declarations on refugee management in Africa since the 1969 OAU Convention have called for proactive measures in combating the sociopolitical causes of displacement.6 This rising concern cut across regions of the world as well.7 However, as these efforts to tackle the root causes of forced population displacement emerged in the discourse of international governance, it was apparent that what stakeholders—states, intergovernmental organizations, civil society organizations, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and agencies responsible for refugee management and protection, as well as the international community of donors—were dealing with was not just a refugee situation but several protracted refugee crises. By UNHCR definition, this implies that stakeholders were dealing with a situation in which refugees of the same nationality, region, and cultural background are staying for more than five years in the same host country where they were expected to take temporary shelter but have stayed longer due to the continued precarious situation in their home country and 3. The Addis Ababa Document on Refugees and Forced Population Displacements in Africa, adopted by the OAU/UNHCR Symposium on Refugees and Forced Population Displacements in Africa, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, September 8–10, 1994 (hereafter cited as “Addis Ababa Document”). 4. Ibid. 5. According to sources quoted by Yacob-Haliso, “By the end of 2003, there were 38 protracted refugee situations around the world, 22 of which were in Africa. By December 2017, two-thirds of all refugees worldwide were deemed by the UNHCR to be in protracted refugee situations. There were 40 of such situations around the world, 22 originating from African countries and 22 hosted on the continent, of which two African cases newly reached this threshold—Central African Republic refugees in the DRC, and South Sudanese Refugees in Ethiopia.” Yacob-Haliso, “Striving for Solutions,” 25; see also White, review of “Regional Law.” 6. Addis Ababa Document. 7. See, for example, Guterres, “Opening Remarks.”

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inability to access other durable solutions.8 This has not only caused diminished donor support and compassion fatigue; it has proved to be a practical strain on the feasibility and operationality of the various rights accorded refugees and asylum seekers around the world.9 These rights, as related to the African experience, are codified in three major instruments. These are: (1) the United Nations 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol; (2) the 1969 OAU Convention Governing Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa; and (3) the Kampala Declaration on Refugees, Returnees, and Internally Displaced Persons in Africa, along with the African Union Convention for the Protection and Assistance of Internally Displaced Persons in Africa (the Kampala Convention); the latter is discussed as an extension of the former (the Kampala Declaration). The human rights enshrined in these documents have been reaffirmed at various times with the development of several related human rights declarations, such as: the Recommendations of the Pan-African Conference on the Situation of Refugees in Africa (Arusha, Tanzania, May 7–17, 1979; the “Arusha Recommendations”), the First and Second International Conferences on Assistance to Refugees in Africa (ICARA I, 1981 and ICARA II, 1984), the Declaration Framework of Cooperation and Action Program of the Horn of Africa Summit on Humanitarian Issues (Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, April 1992), the Cairo Declaration on the Establishment within the OAU of a Mechanism for Conflict Prevention Management and Resolution (Cairo, June 1993), the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights of 1981, the African Humanitarian Initiative for Sustainable Development (1993), and the Tunis Declaration on the 1969 OAU Convention Governing Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa (Tunis, June 1994), to mention a few. In what follows, we examine the three major human rights instruments governing the affairs of refugees and displaced persons in Africa.

Th e 1951 U N R efuge e Con v ention on th e Stat us of R efuge e s a n d Its 1967 Protocol By virtue of the new global order heralded by the end of World War II, which brought nations of the world together under the auspices of the United Nations, 8 . UNHCR Executive Committee, “Protracted Refugee Situations.” 9. Adding to this is the effect of the end of the Cold War politics in which the largest donors (i.e., countries in the Global North and their various institutions) no longer had strategic interests in Africa and other parts of the world where this crisis was brewing after the recuperation of Europe from World War II. See, for example, Levitt, “Conflict Prevention, Management, and Resolution,” 157.

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regardless of their ideological differences and geographical composition, the natural rights of all humans—the rights accorded individuals by virtue of being alive, including the rights to life, choice, expression, association, movement, conscience, and others—were reiterated and encoded in a single extant legal document known today as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). This legal document, which came into effect in 1948, would later become the framework behind subsequent efforts to protect the rights of persons in peculiar circumstances by states and governments, the United Nations, and other recognized international human rights bodies. The legal documents protecting the rights of children, persons with disabilities, women, various vulnerable groups of people, including refugees, built on this. Specifically, the UDHR of 1948 gave birth to the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol, which together became the basis for the contemporary global refugee regime. Included in this system are the 1969 OAU Refugee Convention in Africa, the 1984 Cartagena Declaration in Latin America, and a common asylum system in the European Union. Among other relevant provisions, Article 14 (1) of the UDHR, by stating that “everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution,” identified and mandated the right of every person to gain asylum, a cornerstone provision for the development of refugee rights.10 The collective action of states was a product of a particular historical context in which the international community strove to rebuild states around the world, particularly those European states devastated by World War II. Since the refugee crises that informed this early iteration of the global refugee regime started with the experiences of both world wars, efforts to address the situation began earnestly in 1921 following the establishment of the League of Nations in 1919. It was in 1921, given the dire conditions of millions of persons displaced by the dissolution of European empires after the First World War, that NGOs presented a request for assistance to the League of Nations through the International Committee for the Red Cross. The governments of the League then created the first Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees and appointed the renowned Arctic explorer, Fridtjof Nansen, as the first High Commissioner for Refugees. This pioneering office was important as it produced the first identity document for refugees, called the Nansen Passport, and it also successfully managed and either repatriated or resettled millions of refugees in the aftermath of the First World War. Its scope and authority were severely limited, though, and the first Convention Relating to the International 10. United Nations, “Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”

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Status of Refugees (1933) and the subsequent Convention on the Status of Refugees Coming from Germany (1938) kept it closely tethered to particular national groups of refugees. Subsequent efforts, including the creation of several other refugee management agencies, did not change this pattern of engagement. These agencies included the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees (1938), the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (1944), the International Refugee Organization (1948), and the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (1949), before the UNHCR was established in 1950. These developments culminated in Resolution 429(V) of December 14, 1950, of the UN General Assembly. On this day, the Assembly concluded that a Conference of Plenipotentiaries would be convened in Geneva, Switzerland, for the completion of the drafting and collection of signatures on the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and a Protocol Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons.11 The conference later met at the European Office of the United Nations in Geneva in July 1951, when the Convention was formally adopted. About twenty-eight countries were represented, along with many NGOs and labor unions. Among the non-European countries present were Iran and Cuba, who attended as observers. The only African country present at the conference was Egypt, with European countries such as Italy, Germany, France, Switzerland, and many more dominating the proceedings. Others were from the Americas, including the United States and Venezuela, and from the Middle East, such as Israel and Iraq. Although adopted in 1951, the Convention did not come into force till 1954 upon the ratification of the required number of states.12 Since then, it has been subject to adjustment only once, leading to the 1967 Protocol, which amended it to meet the peculiar needs and geopolitical realities of regions of the world that were not represented at the original conference. The 1967 Protocol, which was introduced on the recommendation of the UNHCR Executive Committee to the United Nations General Assembly, came into effect on October 4, 1967.13 Particularly “grounded in Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948, which recognizes the right of persons to seek asylum from persecution in other countries,” the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and its 1967 Protocol remain the only global documents codifying the rights of refugees around 1 1. United Nations, “Final Act.” 12. United Nations, Convention. 13. Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, New York, January 31, 1967.

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the world.14 Given the context in which the 1951 Convention was drafted, its operationality and functionality were mainly premised on the consideration of those forcibly displaced from their homes in Europe before January 1, 1951. This way, what was established under a supposed global body and with global supervision was ab initio informed, designed, and driven by a European agenda; and this fact necessitated the expanded scope and intent of the 1967 Protocol. This cannot be divorced from the history of the Convention itself and the postwar and Cold War context of the time. Aside from the fact that the “relevant” states at this time were across the Atlantic from each other—in Europe and America—with others still largely under the domination of these countries, the Convention has its precedence in the “Arrangements of 1922, 1924, and 1926 with regard to Certificates of Identity to Russian, Armenian and other refugees; the Arrangements relating to the status of Russian and Armenian Refugees 1928; Convention relating to the International Status of Refugees 1933; Convention concerning the Status of Refugees Coming From Germany 1938. One characteristic common to all these conventions is that they were geared towards the European situation and their major concern was the prohibition of expulsion and non-refoulement of refugees.”15 Essentially, the 1967 Protocol removes the geographical and time limits within which the 1951 Convention was prepared and adopted.16 The UNHCR, one of the numerous agencies of the United Nations, was established by General Assembly Resolution 428 (v) of December 14, 1950. It is the only global body responsible for the management and protection of refugees and exists to further the global domestication of the Refugee Convention and its implementation. Thus, it ensures, as much as it can—because states still wield the biggest stick in the matter—that states act in accordance with the principles of refugee protection enshrined in these documents. This brings its role to that of an advisory, monitoring, and implementation body with the aim of bringing about global cooperation in the pursuit of global refugee protection. Both the Convention and its Protocol set the pace through which the concept and status of “refugee” were defined, characterized, and interpreted. Since it was recognized not to be enough to know what characterizes a refugee and to fulfill the obligations expressly, the documents outlined the legal protection, social rights, and all other forms of support that refugees are entitled to for the preservation of their dignity and personhood. Indeed, taking responsibility 14. United Nations, Convention. 15. Rwelamira, “Some Reflections,” 156. 16. UNHCR, “1951 Convention.”

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becomes an imperative task here, and the legal obligations of the 148 states that are signatory to either or both of these instruments toward the execution and protection of those rights as well as the role and obligations of refugees to their host countries were outlined in the documents. The principle of non-refoulement, which has since become part of customary international law related to refugee protection, is articulated in Article 33 of the Convention and is the core point of the Convention. Failing to keenly observe this fundamental right accorded to refugees for their safety and protection is, figuratively speaking, tantamount to the jackass capable of kicking down a barn carefully built by an expert within the twinkle of an eye. The effort of the refugee regime is brought to nothing when the right to non-refoulement is flouted. The non-refoulement provision guarantees the protection of refugees, as it stipulates that refugees should not be returned to a country or territory that has proved to be insecure for their existence due to situations that pose serious threats to their life, freedom, and survival.17 According to the instrument, the only circumstance in which this is not applicable to a refugee is when it is reasonably proven that the person constitutes a security threat or danger to their community or country as a wanted criminal—that is, wanted for nonpolitically-related prosecution and other forms of activities not supported by the United Nations Charter and as contained in Article 1 (f)(a-c) of the 1951 Convention. This speaks to one of the ways in which these documents are used to protect both the state and the refugee. Insofar as the host country is responsible for the socioeconomic and political protection of refugees within its territory, refugees are also responsible to the state in the form of their conduct within the laws of the land. They are bound by the laws of the host country and, as such, subject to responsible conduct that does not destabilize the host society. A person remains a refugee until any of the following three occurrences comes into play: repatriation, naturalization through integration into the host country, or resettlement in another secured country. In any of these cases, the refugee status of a person is revoked, considering that they are no longer in need of international protection. At this juncture, it will be best to take a look at who the 1951 Convention describes as a refugee. In Article 1A (2) of the treaty, a refugee is fundamentally perceived to be anyone displaced “as a result of events occurring before 1 January 1951 and owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to 17. UNHCR, “1951 Refugee Convention.”

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such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.”18 As earlier noted, the 1967 Protocol came into being to eliminate the dateline limitation of the 1951 Convention, with other parts of the document remaining intact. Simply put, a person becomes a refugee the moment it becomes clear that their government can no longer protect their fundamental human rights, and they are left with the only hope of seeking sanctuary in another country under the protection of international human rights instruments. The situation in the home country of the person under such protection could result from circumstances ostensibly beyond the control of the government, as in war and violence, or could be one in which the person is being particularly targeted for their political or social views. Exercising any right is seen as incompatible with either of the situations; hence, the international community provides these rights. States are encouraged, through this international obligation, to review cases of asylum seekers in light of the above, and they are required to have a designated body or authority working in concert with the UNHCR to evaluate cases of asylum seekers and manage the affairs of refugees in the state. The evaluation procedure is often encouraged through these instruments to give room for an appeal—that is, a second chance at evaluation for proper assessment and fair judgment. Since the non-refoulement of refugees is part of international customary law, all states are expected to be bound by this rule in their management of refugee situations, whether they are signatories to the Convention or the Protocol or not. Aside from this provision, the body of rights for the protection of refugees in these documents is built on two other principles: nonpenalization and nondiscrimination.19 Whereas the non-refoulement clause ensures their right to safety, through the instrumentality of nonpenalization refugees are given special treatment under illegal entry laws of a state. This way, they are expected to be insulated from the laws governing immigration into a country because their migration to another state is already accepted as necessarily irregular and abnormal, given the factors that pushed them there. Having considered their asylum claim, states are encouraged to document refugees through the issuance of passports or other acceptable means of identification. According to a UNHCR document, “Most States parties to the Convention issue this 1 8. Article 1A (2) of the 1951 Convention. 19. UNHCR, “Convention and Protocol.”

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document, which has become as widely accepted as the former ‘Nansen passport’, an identity document for refugees devised by the first Commissioner for Refugees, Fridtjof Nansen, in 1922.”20 While nonpenalization is necessary for the management and protection of refugees at the point of entry, the nondiscrimination clauses are sine qua non to their residence in the host country. Together, these two fundamental principles form the pillars upon which the international refugee regime is anchored. They ensure refugees’ safe passage to another territory and secure settlement upon entry, as well as freedom of movement, association, religion, and other social privileges. These principles are designed to give refugees a chance to take part in the decision-making process related to their condition, while the country office of the UNHCR acts as the global intermediary between the state and the refugee as well as the state and the international community. By virtue of being documented, refugees are entitled to the socioeconomic benefits enjoyed by the regular citizens and residents of the state, such as access to the law courts and legal provisions with respect to employment injury, occupational diseases, unemployment, maternity, sickness, disability, old age, death, and other forms of social security available in the host state. Further ensuring their right to work and make a living on their own, they are to be paid as everyone else is, on the scale of the host state’s minimum wage, remuneration, working hours, and other conditions of service that their temporary stay as a refugee does not impede (unlike pension savings). They are also to have access to health-care facilities and education and every benefit that revolves around this for the enhancement of their academic pursuits, such as scholarships and recognition of foreign certificates and degrees. Their civic responsibility and socioeconomic rights do not, however, extend to areas of elections or political mobilization on matters that are exclusively within the rights of host state citizens. In other words, they are to obey laws governing the sociopolitical and economic structures of the host state and, by consequence, enjoy the benefits under the protection of international refugee law, but they are not entitled to shape laws and institutions of host states. The exception could be in those areas that affect them particularly as refugees. With the advantage of the United Nations platform on which these rules are made, the 1951 UN Convention as well as its 1967 Protocol finds strength in the principle of international solidarity and burden sharing. This critical aspect of the global refugee regime is based on the realization that all states are not economically equal, and refugees cannot be physically distributed equally 2 0. Ibid.

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among states. Hence, the burden-sharing mechanism among states and other stakeholders is meant to lighten the burden of economically weak states who simultaneously are responsible for hosting the greatest number of refugees on their territories. In this arrangement, international solidarity and burden sharing are channeled through the donation of funds and relief materials by richer states, as well as requiring bilateral and multilateral relations between the host and the country of origin in the coordination of the refugees’ affairs. In its capacity, the UNHCR coordinates and manages global donations and mediates, when necessary, the multilateral and bilateral interactions among states involved. Besides cases of criminality and other grounds on which an asylum seeker might be denied refugee status, as well as in cases where the refugee status of a person could be revoked due to the (re)attainment of a national identity and protection, there are other peculiarities in the inclusion and exclusion of persons in the rules governing the refugee regime under this Convention and its Protocol. For instance, the Convention does not represent the interest of those protected under the instruments of other agencies of the United Nations. This is particularly the case with Palestinian refugees, whose affairs are regulated through the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). Also, the refusal of a refugee to avail themselves of the protection of their home country after it has been ascertained that the situation leading to the forceful displacement from the home country has been resolved strips the person of the refugee status and the accruable rights and protection. However, states usually consider, with utmost interest, their national security in approving the refugee status of an asylum seeker and in keeping a refugee within their territory. Being an instrument made with the view of preserving the human dignity and fundamental human rights of refugees regardless of their disadvantaged status, the 1951 Convention ensures the unity of refugee families and the protection of children with special reference to guardianship and adoption. The privilege this accords refugees is that they retain the right to stay together with their family for emotional support and burden sharing insofar as all necessary documentations are established. And for minors without family members, according them the right to be adopted ensures that they are well guided to achieving their life possibilities and development. As mentioned in the introduction of this chapter, states as well as international donors began to grow tired of the protracted refugee crises during the 1990s, leading to donor and support fatigue. Consequently, in 2001, the United Nations saw the need to reconvene member states for the purpose of reiterating their commitment to the 1951 Convention and its Protocol. This

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effort materialized into a gathering of states in Geneva in December of 2001. There, member states recommitted themselves to the refugee regime despite the growing number of refugee crises and state lethargy and pledged to continue to abide by the non-refoulement clause as a customary model of managing refugee issues in international law.21 In all, the conference expressed, among other things, “the hope that the Convention relating to the Status of Refugees will have value as an example exceeding its contractual scope and that all nations will be guided by it in granting so far as possible to persons in their territory as refugees and who would not be covered by the terms of the Convention, the treatment for which it provides.”22 According to the 1951 Convention, states could express this through their adoption of either the 1951 scope of the document, which accorded the rights of refugees only to persons displaced or affected by events in Europe before January 1951, or take the other option which expands this definition to events after 1951 in Europe and other places. It also gives room for states to adjust their preference between the two. Nevertheless, with the increasing adoption of the 1967 Protocol by states, this sort of limitation does not hold much weight in the current refugee regime. By the same measure, in either of the cases, states are allowed to register their reservations against any provision in the documents.23 This way, inasmuch as the fundamental principles of the Convention and its Protocol are not jeopardized, states are at liberty to tint their rules to fit into their national interests and existing constitutional framework. Giving states this privilege recognizes their status as the frontline actors in implementing the letters of the documents, ensuring that what is agreed to is truly binding and that none of this leads to friction between and among states as well as other stakeholders.

Th e 1969 OAU Con v ention Gov er ning Specific A spects of R efuge e Probl e ms in A fr ica According to the literature and international practice, refugee crises in the twentieth century emerged with the consequences of World War I, which displaced millions of Europeans from their homes, land, and livelihoods and 2 1. UNHCR, “Declaration of States Parties.” 22. United Nations Conference of Plenipotentiaries on the Status of Refugees and Stateless Persons, Convention and Protocol, 9. 23. See, for example, “Declarations and Reservations” (unless otherwise indicated, the declarations and reservations were made upon ratification, accession, or succession), Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, 6–20; “Declarations and Reservations,” Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, 3–6.

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devastated many European national capitals, cities, and towns; furthermore, the global refugee situation was exacerbated by the tsunamic effects of World War II. While this is true, it distorts historical facts. Contrary to this assumption, the first refugees in the twentieth century were victims of the European domination of foreign lands for colonial exploitation and profit perpetrated through excessive capitalism, which was and still is in tension with everything humane, dignifying, and worthy about humanity. The prevalent view in the literature on the history of the refugee crisis in the last century is understandable in that the part of history noted above was not recognized by the imperial powers in Europe and their American counterpart, all of whom sat, with imperial power, at the meetings and conferences that led to the emergence of the United Nations and its agency responsible for refugee management. All were largely seen from the European and American lens, and as such, the refugee regime was designed for their world. By the time the system was created, not many African states had gained independence from their colonial overlords who made these rules, let alone were members of the nascent international body. By 1960, more than twenty of these African states had gained their independence (politically at least), and by 1963, about thirty of them were ready to establish a common body of African states. This gave rise to the establishment of the OAU. Regardless of the divisive debate and diplomatic rigmarole that heralded the formation of the organization at the onset, members were united by their common history and geopolitical configuration and bounded by a common future, then enshrined in the Pan-African ideal.24 This produced a counternarrative to those enshrined in the scholarship of Europe and the United States and centered the regional politics and development of Africa. That the refugee situation in the region was historically problematic was not lost on African states, and, unlike the United Nations, they quickly recognized the role of colonization and their peculiar experiences in the production and trajectory of refugees in Africa. To be sure, by the opening of the twentieth century, up to the end of World War I, Africa had witnessed serious demographic changes, which began in the nineteenth century and were exacerbated by the imperial desperation for new colonial lands.25 In the settler-colonial economies of Southern Africa, people were displaced from their homes and ancestral lands so that Europeans could claim and cultivate their lands. Some stayed to work as laborers on lands they had been dispossessed of, while others fled with the hope of escaping the humiliating 2 4. See, for instance, Mkandawire, “Shifting Commitments,” 35; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, “My Life.” 25. Ajayi, General History of Africa.

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situation and finding a better future elsewhere. In the colonies of West Africa, people fled their homes due to the wars of conquest. In the northern part of Nigeria, for instance, ulamas (Islamic scholars) and other Muslim populations in the area were forced to flee their homes since they refused to be dominated by those they considered infidels. By the end of World War II, many were again displaced due to the wars of independence fought by several African states such as Algeria, Mozambique, Northern and Southern Rhodesia, Congo, Angola, and others. All of these constitute the peculiar nature of the refugee situation in Africa that postindependence states wanted to account for. These experiences informed the framing of the African refugee regime that emerged from the OAU. The UN failed to recognize non-European refugee crises in the 1951 Convention and would not recognize them until the 1967 Protocol, when it was noted that “the 1967 Protocol expanded its scope as the problem of displacement spread around the world.”26 At the time, being a refugee depended on being a citizen of a sovereign entity; hence, the 1951 Convention was drawn and meant for the protection of Europeans who were forcibly displaced from their country. As free African states joined the league of independent states, the Western governments, encouraged by UNHCR, attempted to amend this in the 1967 Protocol. They did this because the organization, which provided technical assistance to the OAU in drafting the regional convention, witnessed the efforts of the Africans to create their own refugee regime. This the UNHCR and its European overlords feared would overshadow the parochial UN refugee regime and possibly replace it at the regional level.27 Indeed, at various times during the process of drafting the Convention and before the creation of the 1967 Protocol, the OAU had urged its member states to not ratify the 1951 Convention because of the dateline limitation. This accounts for the speedy creation and signing of the 1967 Protocol. However, African states would ultimately produce their own version of refugee law. Philip E. Chartrand, writing in 1975, noted that there are two general types of refugees in Africa, each posing a major problem for which solutions have been sought in part through the OAU. It appears that more than 99 percent of African refugees are villagers from rural areas in independent African states. . . . The remainder are educated or semi-educated persons. . . . and who left their homes for political reasons or 2 6. UN 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and Its 1967 Protocol, 1. 27. For more detail on this process, see, for example, Holborn, Chartrand, and Chartrand, Refugees.

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to seek employment or education abroad . . . only a limited number of these individuals coming within the purview of UNHCR. With reference to the educated and semi-educated refugees, the OAU aim has been mainly to facilitate their movement to and absorption within African states which can make use of their skills and training. With reference to rural refugees from independent African states . . . , the OAU action has sought to reduce the political tension inevitably generated between countries of refugee origin and countries of asylum.28

Therefore, in 1969, when the African refugee regime took its legal form in the OAU Convention Governing Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa, it not only redefined the concept of refugee and the character of a refugee but also made pronouncements that speak to the peculiar configuration of Africa. Regardless of the shortcomings of the 1951 Convention, the 1969 OAU Convention was eventually not established to replace or supersede the former or its 1967 amendment which had addressed some of the concerns of African states. Rather, in the manner in which the OAU Convention encodes the rights and status of refugees, it serves as the regional supplement to the 1951 UN Convention and its 1967 Protocol. The concerns of African states regarding refugee situations on the continent emerged immediately upon gaining their independence, and the issue quickly became a contentious affair. Efforts at resolving this began earnestly even before the creation of the OAU.29 With the emergence of the continental body, this process accelerated and was well coordinated through established structures and mechanisms that enhanced communication among states.30 Leading up to the 1969 Convention was the 1964 Resolution for the creation of a ten-man ad hoc commission by the OAU Council of Ministers in its Second Ordinary Session held in Lagos. The commission, which later became an integral organ of the OAU structure on the refugee regime in Africa, consisted of ambassadors from ten sovereign African countries and was tasked with the responsibility of assessing the refugee situation in Africa and making appropriate recommendations for addressing the crises to the OAU Council of Ministers. Represented 2 8. Chartrand, “Organization of African Unity,” 267. 29. Countries such as Tanzania, Senegal, Botswana, and a few others then independent already operated a refugee regime guided by the domestic legislature, while the likes of Burundi, Rwanda, and Zaire already had in place a tripartite agreement called the Goma Declaration of 1967, among other bilateral and multilateral agreements between and among states at the time for this purpose. See, for instance, Rwelamira, “Some Reflections,” 167. 30. Chartrand, “Organization of African Unity,” 268.

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on the commission were ambassadors from Nigeria, Ghana, Tanganyika, Burundi, Rwanda, Sudan, Senegal, Cameroon, Uganda, and Congo-Leopoldville. In the same year, 1964, the report of the ad hoc commission was submitted to the OAU Council at its Third Ordinary Session, held in Cairo.31 Therein emerged what later became known as the Kampala Draft following the mandate given to the commission by the Council for it to develop a draft document from its report, which would become the OAU instrument on refugee matters. However, for about five years after, the mandate of the commission did not materialize, as there were technical concerns raised by the UNHCR, who asserted that the draft, if transformed into the African version of the United Nations instrument, would even be less representative of African refugees than the 1951 Convention that it hoped to replace.32 Among the major concerns was that even though the draft was a replica of the 1951 Convention in its exact form, with the exception of the dateline and geographical limitation, it was much less liberal in protecting and defining the humanitarian character of refugees. Rejected by the Assembly of Heads of States and Governments on the advice of the Council of Ministers and the OAU Secretariat, the draft went through three other reviews before being adopted. This was in the Leo Draft, the Addis Ababa Draft, and finally, the OAU Co-sponsored Conference on the Legal, Economic and Social Aspects of African Refugee Problems, held in Addis Ababa in October 1967. Throughout this process, the membership of the drafting commission shifted from ambassadors to lawyers and highly respected legal luminaries in the ten states represented for adequate human rights representation. This became the first international conference in the region entirely devoted to the consolidation of ideas regarding refugee problems in Africa.33 The resolution of the conference became the 1969 OAU Convention on Refugees in Africa. Adopted in 1969, the Convention came into force in 1974 after one-third of the member states of the OAU deposited the instruments of ratification with the secretary-general of the OAU.34 Unlike the United Nations, 3 1. Sharpe, “African Union Refugee Definition.” 32. According to Article 31 of the draft, when transformed into the African Convention on Refugees, the Convention shall supersede all preceding bilateral and multilateral agreements relating to refugees, and apparently, this included the 1951 Convention. UNHCR memo dated April 29, 1965, UNHCR archives, fonds 1/5/11/1, quoted in Sharpe, “Organization of African Unity,” 60. 33. Chartrand, “Organization of African Unity,” 268. See also Yacob-Haliso, “Identities, Conflict.” 3 4. This date would later come to be adopted by the OAU as African Refugee Day and by the United Nations as World Refugee Day.

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which established the UNHCR as the body responsible for the implementation of the 1951 Convention, the OAU left this responsibility to a number of bodies, thereby creating no central body in charge of refugee management and protection. These bodies included the Commission of Ten on Refugee Problems in Africa, which was retained by the Council of Ministers as an established body of the OAU after the submission of its report in 1964. The Commission was later expanded to include more representatives from other African states, thereby changing its designation from the Commission of Ten to the Commission of Fifteen and later Twenty. By the twilight of the OAU, the Commission was expanded to representatives from all member states. Other bodies included the Bureau for the Placement and Education of African Refugees (BPEAR or the Bureau) and the Coordinating Committee on Assistance to Refugees (CCAR). However, with the transformation of the OAU to the AU (African Union) and the attendant restructuring of the organization, these bodies were also affected.35 While some of them were retained under new names, others were newly introduced to fit into the purpose of the AU. For instance, the Commission of Ten/Fifteen/Twenty (and all its member states) was transmuted into the Permanent Representatives Committee’s Subcommittee on Refugees, Returnees and Internally Displaced Persons, while the Bureau for the Placement and Education of African Refugees became the Bureau for Refugees, Displaced Persons and Humanitarian Assistance. Others under the AU include the Coordinating Committee on Assistance and Protection to Refugees, Returnees, and Internally Displaced Persons, which was formerly CCAR under the OAU; and the Department of Political Affairs’ Division of Humanitarian Affairs, Refugees and Displaced Persons, which was newly introduced. Meanwhile, the tone of the report of the Committee of Ten that sought to create a parallel refugee regime to that of the United Nations, which would eventually render the UNHCR redundant and the core of the 1951 Convention useless in Africa, had motivated the UNHCR to initiate the process leading to the amendment of the 1951 Convention in 1964—the same year the ad hoc commission’s report was submitted to the OAU Council of Ministers. The 1967 Protocol resulting from this restored the 1951 Convention but with a broader acceptance, thereby limiting what later became the 1969 OAU Convention to those areas of refugee concern peculiar to Africa in order to avoid redundancy. According to Marina Sharpe, “Until around the time the 1967 Protocol was adopted, work on the 1969 Convention was directed at 35. See, for example, Dersso, “Quest.”

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making the 1951 Convention applicable in Africa; only later would addressing refugee issues particular to Africa become an explicit objective.”36 If the amendment of the 1951 Convention had taken longer to materialize, the 1969 Convention, which had commenced before the 1967 Protocol, would have taken a different form, probably more elaborate than the succinct eightpage document that did emerge. Nonetheless, it stands as the first regional amendment to the 1951 Convention and its 1967 Protocol, the model of which has been applauded globally and adopted in other regions. The adoption of the Cartagena Declaration by Latin American countries in 1984 is a noteworthy example of regional refugee protection advancements inspired by the 1969 OAU Convention. Aside from providing the same definition of a refugee following the description of the 1967 Protocol, which had expunged the dateline and harmonized the geographical bias of the 1951 Convention to make the United Nations refugee regime more universal, the eight-page document containing fifteen articles described refugees as “every person who, owing to external aggression, occupation, foreign domination or events seriously disturbing public order in either part or the whole of his country of origin or nationality, is compelled to leave his place of habitual residence in order to seek refuge in another place outside his country of origin or nationality.”37 As such, scholars of the African refugee regime have established a link between the liberation and decolonization mission of the OAU and the refugee regime it adopted. In this respect, Bahame Tom Mukirya Nyanduga noted that “it is thus inevitable that historically, refugee outflow in Africa cannot be divorced from the struggle against oppression, both foreign and internal,”38 a situation that was central to the mandate of the OAU. Insofar as other parts of the instrument speak to the larger body of rights and status granted to refugees in the 1951 Convention and the 1967 Protocol, Article 8 (2) notes that “the present document shall be the effective regional complement in Africa of the 1951 United Nations Convention on the Status of Refugees.” This way, rights related to the residence of a refugee in another country, as expressed in the 1951 Convention, are applicable to the OAU instrument on refugees in Africa. These include the issuing of passports and identity documents to refugees upon admission by a host state, ensuring the freedom of refugees in all aspects as guaranteed by the UDHR and nondiscrimination against their person, opportunity 3 6. Sharpe, “Organization of African Unity,” 58; emphasis in original. 37. Convention Governing the Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa, article 1(2), Addis Ababa, September 10, 1969. 38. Nyanduga, “Refugee Protection.”

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to work, right to education, and several other provisions. As Olajumoke YacobHaliso concluded, the 1969 Convention supported “peaceful, safe, and voluntary repatriation and reintegration of refugees; settlement of refugees far from borders for security reasons; definition of the term ‘refugee’ based on societal conditions forcing them to exit their countries of origin; the friendly and nonpolitical nature of asylum on the part of refugee host states; and responsibility of refugee producing states to seek durable solutions for their citizens through bilateral and multilateral cooperation.”39 To use the humanitarian approach to promote a peaceful refugee regime among member states and reduce tensions that could arise from accepting displaced persons into a state between a host state and a home country, a “distinction between a refugee who seeks a peaceful and normal life and a person fleeing his country for the sole purpose of fomenting subversion from the outside” must be determined before granting asylum requests.40 In light of this, refugees are not to use their refuge in another country to launch attacks on their home country but must remain peaceful and law abiding during their stay. This gesture is to be reciprocated by the country of origin, which is prohibited from attacking the host state in any way, be it in the media or by resort to arms. In lieu of aggressiveness, both the host and origin countries are to cooperate in the management and protection of refugees in a burden-sharing arrangement. States struggling to grant asylum to displaced persons can appeal directly to other member states for help. Member states with the means, in the spirit of African solidarity and international cooperation, are encouraged to take appropriate steps toward alleviating the burden of the requesting state. The 1969 Convention also promotes voluntary repatriation in Article 5, with details on the safe return and reintegration of refugees in their countries of origin. In a situation where this process eventually leads to tension between states, it is to be settled on the invitation of either of the parties by the Commission for Mediation, Conciliation and Arbitration of the OAU. While neither the 1969 Convention nor subsequent attempts to improve it resulted in a central body through which the African refugee regime was to be coordinated, Article 7 encourages member states to provide the secretary-general of the OAU, through the Secretariat, with information on the condition of refugees, the implementation of the Convention, and “laws, regulations and decrees which are, or may hereafter be, in force relating to refugees” with the view of communicating trends in the refugee regime in the region to other competent organs 3 9. Yacob-Haliso, “Striving for Solutions,” 16. 4 0. 1969Convention, Preamble, no. 4.

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of the organization. This is to promote coordination between states tasked with managing the refugee regime in Africa. Building on the spirit of the 1969 Convention, many other instruments have been put in place in Africa that also protect the rights of refugees. Essential among these instruments are the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, which serves as the African version of the UDHR; the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child; and the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa (Maputo Protocol).

K a m pa l a Decl a r ation on R efuge e s, R et u r ne e s a n d Inter na lly Displ aced Per sons in A fr ica (K a m pa l a Decl a r ation) a n d th e A fr ica n U nion Con v ention for th e Protection a n d A ssista nce of Inter na lly Displ aced Per sons (K a m pa l a Con v ention) While the number of externally displaced people has declined in Africa, internal displacement has been on a sharp increase.41 Since independence, African states have changed dramatically, being shaped by pressing issues of policy dimensions at the national, subregional, and regional levels. In terms of governance, African states have vacillated between democracy and autocracy. Quite revealingly, both have produced dictators and autocrats, a situation that fuels all manner of predicaments leading to displacement crises in the region. Globally, from the end of the Cold War, democratic governance has been touted as the beginning of development, good governance, and moral standing of a legitimate government—all due to the efforts and logic of the international donor community and lending system.42 Ironically, relatively new security challenges such as terrorism (e.g., Boko Haram and Al Shabaab), militancy (e.g., the herdsmen-farmers’ crisis and Niger Delta insurgency in Nigeria), increased ethno-religious conflicts, and other myriads of human-made causes of displacement have since emerged in this so-called era of democratization. In addition to these are the threats posed by climate change, which has produced floods, famines, wildfires, desertification, and pest infestations.43 These have compounded the security challenges in the region and contributed to election crises, civil wars, military putsches, and social instability, with many of these occurring more frequently in recent times. 41. Maru, Kampala Convention, 4. 42. See, for example, Talbott, “New Geopolitics,” 7. 43. See, for example, United Nations, “Climate Change.”

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Ethno-religious crises have also increased as a result of contending interests in democracies, compounded by weak institutions. These have sowed seeds of division among ethnic and religious groups, creating, in the end, an illusion of power and development for members of these imaginary formations. Until the late 1990s and early 2000s, few African states held elections or operated a multiparty system, so the human rights record of states in this region was abysmal. The consequence of these developments is that, while events prior to the transition of the OAU to AU displaced people beyond their borders, recent events displaced them more within their territories. On average, Africa is home to about 25 percent of global refugees but over 50 percent of IDPs. For 6.3 million refugees in Africa, there are about 17.7 million IDPs.44 For instance, the number of IDPs in Nigeria has increased primarily due to circumstances in the Lake Chad region, such as terrorism, desertification, and floods that affect not only Nigeria but its neighboring countries as well. Those displaced by herdsmen raids in the Benue-Plateau and southern regions of the country or by bandits in other parts of northern Nigeria largely stayed within the borders of Nigeria with or without government protection because they feel safe remaining close to their homes and property, where they hope to go back to. This is because these crises are not perceived as government persecution (at least in the direct form), hence the hope of the government’s quick and immediate intervention. In other words, a conflict-induced displacement crisis trend is changing from a mainly refugee-producing one to an asymmetric one that leaves room for recuperation within the same territory, with greater numbers being internally displaced instead. Furthermore, the geopolitical reality of the entire West African region, as with other African subregions, with each state struggling with its own internal pressures, does not leave anyone with the illusion of better protection outside of their home territory. A question then arises: Who is a refugee, and what makes an IDP? While a refugee situation relates to external displacement, the case of an IDP speaks to displacement within the same country. Both, however, are instances of forced displacement (as opposed to voluntary migration), and both require special protection and international solidarity. If anything, in many African situations, neither the host country nor the country of origin has the capacity to address the needs of displaced persons. Such circumstances, more often than not, lead to the violation of the rights of displaced persons or inability to protect such

4 4. UNHCR Executive Committee, “Regional Update—Africa.”

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rights as outlined in the UDHR.45 However, no global consensus exists with regard to IDPs. This imbalance is related to the displacement trend that the world as a whole was used to and largely grappling with before the early 1990s.46 With the changing dimensions in the migration and settlement of displaced persons from this period onward, “the UN Commission on Human Rights in 1992 entrusted an independent expert, the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on IDPs, Francis Deng, to examine existing international standards of human rights, humanitarian and refugee law, and their application to the protection of internally displaced persons.”47 The result of this effort was the submission of the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement by Deng and his team of experts to the UN Commission in 1998. Unfortunately, this did not materialize into a binding document, as in the case of the 1951 Convention and the 1969 OAU Convention.48 As the data presented above has shown, Africa became particularly affected with an increase in the number of IDPs compared with other regions of the world, necessitating a shift in the focus of the African Union.49 Through the move of its Department of Political Affairs, the AU Executive Council, just three years into its operation in 2004, concluded that there was an urgent need to draft a treaty focused explicitly on the condition, management, and protection of IDPs on the continent. After much deliberation, the draft was brought forward to AU member states at a Special Summit of the AU held in Kampala, Uganda, on October 23, 2009, for them to register their positions concerning the proposal.50 The Convention, which came into force on December 6, 2012, after it was ratified by fifteen African states,51 was built on the Guiding Principles on 45. This explains why adequate coordination at the national level, among relevant government ministries and agencies, as well as at the global level in the form of international solidarity and burden-sharing mechanisms, reflects the pillars of all initiatives meant to address the issue of displacement. See, for instance, Betts, “Development Assistance and Refugees.” 4 6. See, for example, Essoungou, “Africa’s Displaced People.” 47. Giustiniani, “New Hopes and Challenges,” 348. 48. See, for example, Dieng, “Protecting Internally Displaced Persons”; Cohen, Human Rights Protection. 49. According to Chaloka Beyani, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Internally Displaced Persons, “Internal displacement is at an unprecedent global peak. At the end of 2016, 40 million people were internally displaced by conflict and violence; Africa is home to nearly a third of them.” International Committee for the Red Cross, Translating the Kampala Convention, 4. 50. African Union, “Convention.” Quoted in Giustiniani, “New Hopes and Challenges,” 350. 51. This number has since increased to twenty-nine ratifications with forty signatures from the fifty-five member states as of 2019. See African Union, “List of Countries.”

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Internal Displacement, the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, and the Great Lakes Protocol.52 It was broadly based on the review of existing international humanitarian laws, human rights law, and refugee law and their applications to the specific needs and conditions of IDPs. Signifying the changing focus of the regional body and the member states to general issues of displacement beyond that of the refugee, and with implications for the creation of a specific convention on IDPs, who have hitherto been neglected in previous efforts, African heads of state noted that the actions taken by the special summit were in “deploring that large numbers of people within our Continent are displaced, either as refugees or internally displaced and some are even stateless as a result of conflicts, natural disasters, and increasingly, climate change and other causes of forced displacement in Africa.”53 In a descriptive rather than a legal interpretation, the Kampala Convention defined IDPs as “persons or groups of persons who have been forced or obliged to flee or leave their homes or places of habitual residence, in particular as a result of or in order to avoid the effects of armed conflict, situations of generalized violence, violations of human rights or natural or human-made disasters, and who have not crossed an internationally recognized State border”; and internal displacement as the involuntary or forced movement, evacuation, or relocation of persons or groups of persons internally within state borders.54 Owing to the diverse causes of forced displacement within and without states, including conflict, human-made disasters, development, and natural disasters, many scholars and experts have concluded that the number of IDPs will continue to rise in the coming years. Indeed, the trend so far has not betrayed this.55 As such, preventing the causes, managing the outbreak, and designing ways of resettling those affected by all these forms of displacement became the focus of African states. Most affected by this crisis are the countries in the Great Lakes region of the continent, with countries such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Sudan, and Uganda having the highest number of IDPs. This first attempt within Africa, from which the Kampala Convention took its form, was based on the subregional initiative taken by states in the Great Lakes region 5 2. International Conference on the Great Lakes Region, “Protocol.” 53. African Union, “Kampala Declaration.” 5 4. Article 1 (K and I), “African Union Convention.” 55. The Executive Committee of the High Commissioner’s Programme noted, “By the end of 2018, the number of persons of concern to UNHCR in Africa had reached 26.4 million, up from 24.2 million the year before . . . The rise in number was expected to continue as conflicts and other causes of displacement endured.” UNHCR Executive Committee, “Regional Update—Africa.”

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in 2006 to address the situation that was turning their region into a place where the majority of the displaced population was internally displaced. In a conference of states in this region, two key agreements were signed, committing the governments of the subregion to a standard of conduct and management of IDPs. This was enshrined in the Great Lakes Protocol (to the Pact on Security, Stability and Development in the Great Lakes Region) on the Protection and Assistance to Internally Displaced Persons, and the Protocol on the Property Rights of Returning Persons.56 Whereas the former speaks to the human-rights-based approach to the management of IDPs while a lasting solution to change their status and cushion their peculiar vulnerability is underway, the latter suggests the commitment of the states to see to this lasting solution. By the time the Kampala Declaration was announced, it had become clear to African Union member states that the key to addressing forced displacement was to focus on the push factors—that is, the root causes of displacement in Africa. Hence, African heads of state agreed at the convention to address the issues of conflict, underdevelopment, and employment, thereby extending the reach of the agreement signed by the Great Lakes states in 2006. Consequently, the Kampala Convention was widely applauded as the first regional initiative toward the management and protection of IDPs and as a model.57 Both the Convention and the Declaration agreed to the need for good governance to prevent the floodgates of displacement currently ravaging the continent. In this way, attention is to be paid to the issue of elections, handling of development projects, arms proliferation, the use of mercenaries, and climate change and other natural disasters that could cause environmental challenges, among other events and phenomena that propel forced displacement.58 Through these documents, the socioeconomic and political rights of displaced persons are guaranteed, with attention to their access to education, justice, health care, and social welfare services; ability to work and earn a decent living with equal remuneration with other members of society; residence in a safe and secure location; and freedom of movement, association, speech, and many more as enjoyed by others in the state. Given the circumstances, states are to respect the human rights of IDPs, and in the cases of both refugees 56. See, for example, “International Conference on the Great Lakes Region, Protocol on the Property Rights of Returning Persons,” November 30, 2006. 57. See, for example, International Committee for the Red Cross, Translating the Kampala Convention. 58. See African Union, “Kampala Declaration”; African Union, “Convention.”

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and IDPs, all forms of discrimination are prohibited in managing their affairs and according them the legally established protection they are to enjoy. IDPs should be free to move around and settle in any part of the country they deem better for their condition without any form of resistance from the state. States are to extend special protections to women and those considered the most vulnerable members of the displaced population (e.g., children, the elderly, and persons with disabilities) from all kinds of threats such as rape, forced labor, trafficking, and kidnapping. In the same breath, states are to ensure that the displaced population does not disturb the peace of society through subversive or criminal conduct such as terrorism and theft. This way, they are to be treated equally with other members of society. Regarding their safe residence, nonrefoulement, voluntary repatriation, and reintegration, item 17 of the Kampala Declaration, under the theme “On Reconstruction of Communities Emerging from Conflicts and Natural Disasters,” noted, “We commit ourselves to Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration (DDR) following the settlement of an armed conflict as well as mine clearance and other unexploded ordinances. We undertake to also raise awareness as an integral part of the effort to address the impact of armed conflict and ensure safety and sustainability of return.”59 In all, the management of IDP affairs is anchored on state and international cooperation. Both documents speak to the need for states to consult with civil society organizations, the African Union, and other international and subregional bodies, including NGOs responsible for different aspects of the management and protection of displaced persons. Through this coalition, it is expected that the burden on the state caused by displacement is lightened, and an effective monitoring scheme is in place for tangible results. Principally, considering the provisions of these documents, the African Union has laid a foundation for the management and protection of displaced persons beyond the refugee question, which, as variously noted above and as the body has realized, has been overtaken by internal displacement.

Conclusion As the former secretary-general of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, once expressed, the reality of forced displacement remains “one of the great tragedies of our time.”60 The range of rights and the status of refugees designed in the

5 9. Ibid. 6 0. Kofi Annan, quoted in Essoungou, “Africa’s Displaced People.”

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documents discussed in this chapter provide those forcibly displaced and removed from their homes, lands, means of livelihood, loved ones, national protection, and identity the widest possible exercise of those fundamental rights and freedoms as embedded in the 1948 UDHR. Whether with reference to the global refugee regime managed and protected by the 1951 Convention and its 1967 Protocol or the regional supplement in Africa under the 1969 OAU Convention and the 2009 Kampala Declaration and Convention, these instruments produced, at different times, the realization of the need to revise, extend in scope, and consolidate previous bilateral and multilateral agreements related to fundamental human rights and the status of displaced persons. The underlying factor for this development is to ensure that every human, irrespective of their condition, must be legally protected while they retain their fundamental human rights, and that while in this pursuit, in the peculiar circumstance of forcibly displaced persons, friction does not ensue between states who are the main anchors of these rights. As such, these instruments encourage states to see and treat refugee cases as a social and humanitarian problem that requires collective action, as no state is insulated from this situation. Moreover, “it is widely recognized that the restoration and protection of refugee rights is a prerequisite if the promotion of self-reliance is to lead to the meaningful economic and human development of refugee populations.”61 Going by the depth of their scope, these documents represent both status- and rights-based instruments with fundamental principles that are meant to govern displaced persons’ space in the international community. This becomes imperative for states in light of the umbilical cord between forced displacement of persons and development. The aim of these instruments, therefore, is principally to frame the legal basis on which states are expected to develop their national policies and legal instruments in response to the displacement crisis. The collective recognition of these efforts led to the designation of 2019 by the African Union as the Year of Refugees, Returnees and Internally Displaced Persons in Africa.62

6 1. Kaiser, “Participating in Development?,” 355. 62. This was officially launched during the thirty-second ordinary session of the assembly held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on February 10–11, 2019, by the heads of state and government of the AU, following the declaration at the thirty-first ordinary session of the organization held in Nouakchott, Mauritania, in July 2018, where the Assembly of the African Union declared 2019 the “Year of Refugees, Returnees and Internally Displaced Persons: Towards Durable Solutions to Forced Displacement in Africa.” ADS, “Concept Note.”

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STATES AND POLICY FRAMEWORKS

Introduction This chapter examines issues surrounding policies put in place by African states and the international community to address displacement and care of refugees. The policies around refugees are based on two contrasting dimensions of politics: considerations of the ethical, fundamental, and international human rights obligations that nations are subject to, and the tensions generated among local populations by the presence of refugees within states. The historical documentation of various policies on refugee issues in Africa indicates a persistent concern of African countries as well as international organizations to find a lasting solution to the problem of refugees on the African continent. Of paramount importance in the African contexts are the 1969 OAU Convention and the 2013 Kampala Convention, but there are many more human rights instruments and frameworks that guarantee to refugees various rights, responsibilities, and privileges. This chapter analyzes these policies and their protections, as well as the interface between human rights principles and instruments on the one hand, and states’ incorporation, interpretation, and implementation of them in a policy and political milieu on the other.

Protecting R efuge e s on Pa per : Str ategi e s a n d Polici e s Shortly after the formation of the United Nations, the international community introduced policies that would offer protection to refugees around the world. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which

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has been the subject of extensive study, was intended to form the foundation for various international human rights regulations and policies. However, the UDHR, being generalist, did not provide specific details on what constitutes appropriate protection for refugees and asylum seekers.1 This oversight paved the way for the design and implementation of subsequent refugee conventions. The 1951 UN Convention, its 1967 Protocol, and the 1969 OAU Convention remain the major international human rights instruments for refugee rights protection in Africa.2 These instruments are known as the guarantors of refugee rights, which should include the right to housing, education, and work as well as freedom of movement within the host territory and access to legal frameworks. Protecting refugee rights should form an integral part of the foreign policies of governments as a means of fulfilling the basic needs of refugees in their respective regions. States around the world are obliged to protect these rights since they are intended to be universally applicable.3 Antonio Guterres, former UNHCR chief and current UN secretary-general, outlines some of the core ways by which states ensure refugee protection: “Preserving humanitarian space, granting asylum, strengthening legal and institutional frameworks and achieving durable solutions with a holistic perspective of refugees’ human rights and humanitarian protection combined underscores the critical importance of international organisations, governments and civil society.”4 In sum, the protection of refugee rights is a basic obligation of any nation. Countries are obligated to protect the rights of refugees based on two important conditions: domestic policies established in synchronization with international standards for the provision of basic protection of refugees, and international human rights laws incorporated into such domestic policies and laws. In other words, for effective establishment and implementation of refugee rights policies, countries must comply with the international standards for refugee rights protection. All African countries that were parties to these Conventions are enjoined to incorporate human rights and international standards in policies and programs in line with Article 1 of the United Nations Charter of 1945. For this to be possible, countries must set up agencies that ensure compliance as well as the efficient management of refugee situations. Unfortunately, there is often a disconnect between the stated aim of international laws and their 1 . Goodwin-Gill, “Politics of Refugee Protection,” 8–23. 2. d’Orsi, “Strengths and Weaknesses.” 3. Albert II of Monaco, “Monaco Apologizes.” 4. Guterres, “From the Cartagena Declaration,” 12.

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implementation in domestic policies, as laws may be impeded or manipulated by domestic policy makers to serve other purposes.5 International policies and principles relating to refugee rights should be the backbone of national refugee laws throughout Africa. However, this is often not the case, as situations continue to reveal the lost ground of national refugee policies to uncertain politics of (im)migration.6 The treatment of refugees in African countries reflects widespread views of them as having low worth and deserving minimal rights, despite the intentions of these international standards. While being victims of circumstances, refugees should not be subjected to further victimization that worsens their situation.7 There have been times when the UN Security Council (UNSC) had to decisively intervene in specific conflict situations in Africa by making use of its diplomatic powers to mandate the protection of refugees. An example was in 2008, when the UNSC renewed the mandate of the peacekeeping operation in the Chad Basin because of the continued effects of terrorism in the region on refugees, internally displaced persons (IDPs), and other civilians.8 At other times, the UNSC has mandated African countries to guarantee the safe return of refugees to their respective origin countries, especially for vulnerable persons. The 1951 UN Refugee Convention (and its 1967 Protocol) remains a key human rights tool for the protection of refugees under international law. The Convention focused on the fundamental aspects of refugee sustenance and obliged countries to adopt policies that would ensure the provision of fair living conditions by host countries. The Convention also provides refugees with access to work and social security.9 Article 31 empowers the UNHCR to act in supervisory roles in facilitating adherence to the Convention. It made the provision of international protection for refugees the focal point and core objective of the UNHCR. The African Charter on Human and People’s Rights, also referred to as the Banjul Charter, was a result of a lacuna in the OAU Charter, as there was no requirement for regional and national obligations for the enforcement of human rights. After a thorny process as some states resisted regional oversight of what were deemed national or domestic concerns, the Banjul Charter was finally adopted by the OAU on June 28, 1981, and came into force on October 21, 5 . Slaughter and Burke-White, “Future of International Law.” 6. Goodwin-Gill, “Politics of Refugee Protection.” 7. Goodwin-Gill, “Dynamic of International Refugee Law.” 8. UNSC, “Situation in Chad.” 9. International Refugee Organization, “Communication,” 35–37.

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1986. By 1999, it had been ratified by all the member states of the OAU. Article 12 of the African Charter maintains that a persecuted person shall have the right to seek and obtain asylum in other African countries in accordance with the laws of that particular country and applicable international conventions. However, there are challenges in the implementation of the Charter. The clause “in accordance with the laws of that particular country” is ambiguous and can be exploited to the disadvantage of the person seeking refuge. For instance, Mindrea Godwin Buwa noted that the 2006 Refugees Act of Uganda grants the home government the discretion to accept or reject any refugee application.10 This definitely restricts the rights of refugees to asylum. The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which has been signed by all sub-Saharan African countries, guarantees refugees the right to fair conditions for work and adequate standards of living. Informed refugees may claim the conditions guaranteed in the Covenant to access better protections for themselves.11 From its founding in 1950, the UNHCR has consistently given operational direction to the humanitarian aspects of refugee protection by issuing Executive Committee (ExCom) Conclusions to guide responses to specific issues. Although they have been developed by the UNHCR and usually adopted by member nations as normative guidelines, ExCom Conclusions are nonbinding in practice.12 Suffice to note that the Conclusions on the International Protection of Refugees address a wide range of policies, from the provision of identification documents for refugees to the concept of non-refoulement. What the Conclusions represent can be described as consensus resolutions that provide guidance for the establishment and implementation of vital protection policies by member nations. The mandate for the adoption of these Conclusions rests on Article 35 of the 1951 Convention, which empowers the UNHCR to retrieve documented explanation from member states regarding the treatment of refugees in the event that such treatment does not conform to international standards. However, in practice, the UNHCR often goes beyond the prescriptive nature of ExCom Conclusions by treating them as binding.13 Nonetheless, as mentioned, the ExCom Conclusions are infused with normative prescriptions that have contributed to the development of international refugee law and practice. These stipulations refer to certain legal 10. Buwa, Critique of the Refugees Act, 15. 11. Asylum Access, “No Place Called Home.” 12. Corkery, “Contribution,” 106. 13. Lewis, “UNHCR’s Contribution,” 77.

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tools that provide interpretation for the consequences of certain practices, such as refoulement and expulsion. They form the parts of the Conclusions that highlight detailed directives on the practical application of the Conclusions on a needs-arising basis. This means that the Conclusions are justifiable and equitable interpretations of the 1951 Convention as well as the 1967 Protocol. While many African countries provide camps for refugees to reside in, others prefer to offer them self-settlement. In countries where neither are provided, refugees may choose to exist instead under alien status in the host country, along with other migrants. Asylum Access embarked on a survey in 2010 to examine the practical aspects of protecting refugees in Africa. The survey revealed that most refugees not staying in refugee camps do not enjoy legal status in host countries. The reason for this, they found, is that refugees prefer to remain in alien status rather than be categorized as refugees and sent to camps. In essence, some forced migrants prefer to reside as (undocumented) aliens rather than be documented as refugees in African countries. Some take this approach to avoid the despondency, lack of opportunities, and dependency associated with many refugee camps in Africa. This de facto approach of refugees blending into host communities is not ideal, as it confers on such refugees neither protection nor assistance.14 A major setback of this is that such persons face several challenges and lack access to basic protection. Some African countries have also adopted measures and policies that are aimed at reducing the number of refugees they host. These measures often force repatriation and impose strict border closures. Some African countries also impose stringent requirements before granting refugee status to migrants based on certain criteria, such as proof of self-sufficiency, employment, and capability of paying rent.15 These actions counter the spirit of most extant refugee conventions and principles of protection.

Con v entions a n d Polic y Fr a m e wor k s: A na lysis a n d A pplications OAU Convention of 1969

The 1969 OAU Convention was drafted, signed, and ratified more than fifty years ago, but it remains to be seen whether the contents are still relevant 1 4. Kagan, “Legal Refugee Recognition.” 15. Bernstein and Okello, “Urban Refugees in Kampala.”

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enough to apply to the present refugee situations in Africa.16 Our intent in analyzing the content is to achieve two main objectives: the first is to look at the strength of the provisions as demonstrated by the contents, while the second is to ascertain the degree of its compatibility with the modern challenges of African refugee situations. This is borne out of the affirmation contained therein that the 1969 Convention’s stipulations should be perceived as the cornerstone of refugee protection and solutions within Africa. On this note, there is a need to understand how much the provisions take care of African refugees in the present prevailing conditions in Africa. The dissection of this convention will shed some light on whether or not the praise ascribed to the 1969 OAU Convention is merited and in what manner it needs to be revised to factor in emerging challenges of refugee situations in Africa. Definition of a Refugee

Article 1 of the 1969 Convention defined a refugee in accordance with the 1951 Geneva Convention but further declared that a refugee shall be any person who, as a result of external aggression, foreign domination, occupation, or events that disrupt the public order, is compelled to leave their country of origin for another place outside the control of their country of origin. This is considered a more expansive definition of a refugee than that delineated in the 1951 Convention, as the latter did not capture the full reality of particular refugee situations as applicable to Africa. This means that the legal scope of the 1951 description of a refugee did not apply to the new situations that were being witnessed in African countries. It should be noted that the OAU Convention further addressed two lacunae: the issue of subversive activities of refugees and the dateline contained in Article 1A of the 1951 Convention. An inherent component of the 1969 OAU Convention was the issue of how to respond to subversive actions by refugees. The 1969 Convention outlined a clear distinction between ordinary refugees fleeing their country of origin against the backdrop of a variety of hostile situations and individuals who are engaged as freedom fighters. The initial drafters of the Convention affirmed the view that freedom fighters do not qualify as refugees, thereby allowing member states to use their discretion in deciding whether to grant such individuals refugee status. While African nations, in the spirit of solidarity, generally were disposed to assisting freedom fighters fighting liberation causes against colonial rule, the issue had become contentious

16. Sharpe, “Organisation of African Unity.”

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in light of the increasing use of refugee status for subversive activities against states in the same region. The positive effect of the expanded definition of refugees in the African context is that it covered situations that were absent from the 1951 Convention and extended the timeline that the latter covers. While the 1951 Convention never provided any legal accommodation for refugees seeking safety from oppressive colonial governments, the 1969 OAU Convention ensured the protection of such individuals. Today, with independence having been granted to all African countries, especially the Portuguese territories (which were the last to get their independence), coupled with the end of apartheid in South Africa, the concept of freedom fighters fitting into refugee status is no longer applicable. The 1969 OAU definition sought to depoliticize the definition of a refugee by taking into account the particular conditions prevailing in Africa. Given that there are no longer freedom fighters fighting against colonial rule, it looks like a new expanded definition should be considered. There is a need to upgrade the definition to fit the emerging reasons that propel people to flee various African countries to seek refuge in other countries. This new definition should align more with the Latin American Cartagena Declaration, which highlights internal aggression and domestic human rights violations as emergent reasons for the increased refugee situations in Africa. The new expanded definition must expand the paradigm from civil strife and violence to explicitly recognize various other threats to life, safety, and freedom in contemporary Africa. The new definition should be improved to concentrate on exposure to various dangers, threats to lives, human rights violations and increasing loss of state capacity to protect its citizens as the main essence of refugee protection in Africa’s postcolonial states. Prohibition of Refoulement

The concept of refoulement describes acts of forced repatriation of refugees to their respective countries of origin. Under the 1969 OAU Convention, the prohibition of refoulement empowers African nations to give temporary protection to individuals fleeing their home countries until such individuals are granted official refugee status. This provision as contained in Article 2(3) of the 1969 OAU Convention is in line with the international standard contained in the 1951 Convention that makes it clear that returning a fleeing individual to the origin country is forbidden. However, the 1969 OAU Convention provided a better grounding than its international counterpart and has been commended in particular for extending

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the right to non-refoulement.17 Article 33(1) of the UN Refugee Convention only prohibits the refoulement of refugees that are already in the host country’s territory. In contrast, the 1969 OAU Convention extended protection to individuals at the frontier who have yet to cross over to the host country’s territory but who intend to. It also does not have a national security exception as contained in the 1951 law, and it identifies a broader range of harms that individuals need to be protected against before refoulement can occur. The 1969 OAU Convention thereby protects a wider category of individuals from refoulement than the international standard provided by the 1951 Convention. In practice, however, the prohibition of refoulement in Africa is not effective. The reality of this can be perceived in the forced repatriation of Rwandese and Burundian refugees by the Tanzanian government in 1995. This act was justified through the exploitation of the 1967 Declaration on Territorial Asylum (DTA), which empowers countries to compulsorily return refugees based on overriding reasons of national security or attempts to safeguard the population of the host country when faced with incidences of a mass influx of persons who constitute a clear security threat.18 Prohibiting Subversive Activities

Before the creation of the OAU as a Pan-African organization, newly independent African countries already faced questions surrounding subversion and refugees. However, the establishment of the OAU was based on the cardinal principle of noninterference in the internal affairs of member countries. The 1969 OAU Convention resolved that refugees living in any member nation’s territory should be prevented from carrying out harmful and dangerous activities that are inimical to the interests of other member nations. It also enjoined member nations to avoid, as much as possible, refugee situations becoming a source of dispute among them. The adoption of the 1969 OAU Convention provided clear details on what subversive activities are. These were included in Article 3 of the Convention, which outlines: • Refugees are duty-bound to the country providing refuge and should conform to the laws and legislations that would ensure adaptation to public order as well as abstinence from subversive activities against any other member state of the OAU. 1 7. Sharpe, “African Union Refugee Definition.” 18. See Articles 1(2) and 3(2), UN General Assembly, Declaration on Territorial Asylum.

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• Member nations must ensure that they take measures that prohibit refugees in their territory from engaging in attacks on other member nations of the OAU as well as check activities that are likely to cause hostilities between member nations through violence or pronouncements. Subversion is also alluded to in other provisions. One such provision is Article 1(5)(c), which allows for the exclusion of persons that have committed acts that are at variance with the purposes and principles of the OAU. Article 2(6) also obligated member states to situate refugees as far as possible from the frontiers of their countries of origin for reasons of security, to reduce their capacity for subversive actions across the borders. The contents of the 1969 OAU Convention relating to subversive actions by refugees and the obligations of host nations are perfectly in line with what is applicable by international standards. A look at the contents of the DTA that was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1967 will affirm this. In practice, however, it is not always easy to effect this prohibition from subversive activities to the letter. There are also aspects of this section that look difficult to implement. It prohibits “any activity likely to cause tension” (article 2[3]) between member states, for instance. While political refugees may wish to exercise their freedom of speech to make pronouncements that are likely to cause complaints from their countries of origin, the host country may not subscribe to it. Thus, refugees forced to seek refuge outside their country of origin as a result of wanting freedom of expression may not get the much-sought freedom if this clause is not modified. Voluntary Repatriation

The 1969 OAU Convention also contained stipulations that support the voluntary repatriation of refugees and places this as the most effective solution to refugee problems in Africa. It is also the first convention to emphasize the voluntariness of repatriation. This provision is contained in Article 5 of the Convention, which outlines the following principles: • Respect for refugees by not repatriating them against their will • Ensuring adequate arrangements for the safe return of such refugees • Facilitation of reintegration by refugees’ country of origin and reinstatement of full rights to such repatriated refugees • Ensuring no voluntarily repatriated refugee faces penalty or punishment for initially leaving

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• Respect for refugees’ right to voluntarily make the repatriation decision Certain issues, however, were not still fully elaborated, such as modalities for the implementation of voluntary repatriation, the right to return in the case of mixed marriages, and the refugees’ right to return to their countries of origin with their property and savings. Furthermore, it becomes a bit difficult to confirm what constitutes voluntary repatriation, as there is abundant evidence of coercive sociopolitical pressures being mounted on refugees to repatriate, even under duress. A close analysis of the Article points to the fact that voluntary repatriation in the context of the 1969 OAU Convention dealt with only organized repatriations that have been prenegotiated by both the asylum and origin governments, under the supervision of international organizations—in particular, the UNHCR. It does not offer protection to refugees that voluntarily and individually decide to return to their home countries without any form of prenegotiation or assistance. In light of this, it is glaring that the 1969 OAU Convention positions African refugees as subjects of repatriation arrangements to which they have no input in their planning and implementation. There is a need for the 1969 OAU Convention to provide for input from refugees themselves as architects of their destiny and not mere beneficiaries of repatriation arrangements. Lastly, there are gray areas that the 1969 OAU Convention fails to highlight. One such area is in evaluating the conditions of repatriation to ascertain whether they are optimal. Repatriation, as contained in the 1969 OAU Convention, is designed to provide manageable opportunities for refugees involved in voluntary repatriation movements. The conditions of such arrangements are often not in line with expected standards, as voluntary repatriation in Africa is designed as part of postconflict reconstruction and peacebuilding programs rather than standalone individual arrangements. Lack of Provision for Internally Displaced Persons

A major criticism leveled against the 1969 OAU Convention is that it fails to provide a clear scope for IDPs’ protection. The Convention may be excused on the pretext that it was signed and ratified at a time when the phenomenon of IDPs was not yet prevalent in African countries. However, the similarities between both groups and the thin line that differentiates a refugee from an IDP in practice demand a reconsideration of the protections covered in the OAU Convention. Becoming an IDP is often a first step in becoming a refugee, and this fact suggests a need to reconceptualize how these groups are protected.

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The similarities between these two categories of displaced people should make it possible for provisions to treat IDPs as potential refugees, and as such, the same laws should govern their protection. However, nothing in the 1969 OAU Convention explicitly factored in the issue of IDPs as a key concern. As this has become a major challenge on the continent, with IDP numbers far outstripping those of refugees, the adoption of the Kampala Convention on IDPs in 2009 speaks to this gap in the 1969 OAU Refugee Convention. Kampala Convention of 2009

The Kampala Convention, adopted October 23, 2009, but which entered into force on December 6, 2012, was ratified from inception by fifteen African nations, with a further fourteen nations ratifying by October 2019, bringing the number of ratifications to twenty-nine; a total of forty African countries have signed it.19 The Kampala Convention has been hailed globally as the first legally binding international treaty that addresses the problems of IDPs, owing to the growing incidence of such issues in Africa. The Kampala Convention is centered on the protection and provision of assistance for IDPs in Africa. Being the only regional instrument of its kind globally, the Convention has tremendous promise for improving the conditions of IDPs on the continent, as outlined in specific ways below. Adoption

The Kampala Convention is not just a recommendation or resolution. It is a legally binding treaty to be embedded into the domestic laws of any signatory country. However, this has resulted in the reluctance of a significant number of African countries to sign and ratify it. Also, many African countries that have signed it (a mostly symbolic gesture) have not enacted legislation that would give the necessary legal backing to the stipulations contained in the Convention. Article 3(2)(a) mandates signatory countries to incorporate their obligations into their respective domestic legislation through enactments and amendments of existing legislation relating to the protection of IDPs to conform to the Convention. However, aspects of the provisions of the Kampala Convention that deal with criminal responsibility may not be enforceable under various domestic laws. This has resulted in minimal prosecutions relating to crimes under the Kampala Convention. As good as the Kampala 19. African Union, “List of Countries.”

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Convention might appear, it is being hindered by the absence of domestic regulations that would support the full implementation of the treaty across African countries. Prevention of Internal Displacement

Article 3(1)(a) and (b) of the Convention, in treating the prevention of occurrences of internal displacement, states that signatories shall “refrain from, prohibit and prevent arbitrary displacement of populations; prevent political, social, cultural and economic exclusion and marginalization that are likely to cause displacement of populations or persons by virtue of their social identity, religion or political opinion.”20 This section of the treaty obligates countries to ensure that there are no incidences of state-sponsored acts that are likely to lead to the emergence of IDPs. In practice, this is not always easy. The emergence of terrorism and counteroffensives by the security forces of legitimate governments to defeat such insurrections have contributed significantly to the number of IDPs in Africa. Many African governments do not take proactive measures to prevent the occurrence of internal displacement when planning offensives against terrorists and insurrectionists. For example, according to the UNHCR, the Boko Haram counterinsurgency has led to “over 3.3 million people . . . displaced, including over 2.5 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) in north-eastern Nigeria, over 550,000 IDPs in Cameroon, Chad and Niger, and 240,000 refugees in the four countries.”21 Article 7(4) states that members of armed groups shall be held criminally responsible for acts that result in the creation of IDPs. However, many Boko Haram terrorists that have been captured by security forces have yet to face such prosecutions for their involvement in acts that led to increased numbers of IDPs in Nigeria. IDP Protection and Assistance

The obligation of countries regarding the protection of IDPs is contained in Article 5(1), which states that signatories shall be responsible for protecting IDPs within their territory without any form of discrimination whatsoever. This is to ensure that the state-designated agencies have the requisite mandate to mobilize funds and equipment to function effectively in protecting IDPs. In light of this, the Arusha Peace and Reconciliation Agreement for Burundi,

2 0. African Union, “Convention,” 5. 21. UNHCR, “Nigeria Emergency.”

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for example, is laced with provisions that relate to the protection and assistance of IDPs. This includes providing humanitarian aid as well as security for IDPs. Thus, the protection of IDPs should be a paramount issue as required by the Kampala Convention, but not many African governments have been able to do this. Owing to various challenges such as the lack of accurate data on IDPs, delays in appointing personnel into agencies, the lack of funds, and IDP protection committees not reflecting the demographics of the displaced communities, protecting and providing assistance for IDPs have become matters to be politicized. Article 9(1)(d) states that state parties shall protect the rights of IDPs by refraining from and preventing, among other violations, sexual and genderbased violence in any form, especially rape and enforced prostitution, forced labor, human trafficking, and smuggling. This is to protect women, girls, boys, and men from harm. In reality, many African countries are complicit in genderrelated crimes against IDPs. There have been reports by Human Rights Watch of Nigerian officials sexually molesting women and girls in IDP camps in the northeastern part of the country.22 Soldiers and others that were meant to protect IDP camps were engaged in gender-based violence, such as rape of females in camps hosting displaced persons from the Boko Haram conflict in Nigeria. Suffice it to say that during armed conflicts, IDPs are often vulnerable to certain abuses, especially gender-based violence, that underscore the major essence of setting up protected IDP camps.

Cu r r ent Sit uation of R efuge e Protection in A fr ica The two African Conventions discussed above demonstrate the fact that the OAU/AU has been aware of the threats and challenges that African refugees face. The two documents contain recommendations that, if adopted and implemented, could improve the lives of individuals forced from their homes. Unfortunately, member nations are often reluctant to adopt the laws, while others that adopted them fail to devise a plan for implementation. It would have been necessary to mandate member nations through some form of threats of sanction or reward to sign, adopt, and ratify the conventions and set up mechanisms to tackle this situation. But the OAU/AU has consistently failed to do this and rarely imposes sanctions for violations of treaty commitments, including those

22. Human Rights Watch, “Nigeria.”

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pertaining to refugees, because of a persistent historical hesitancy to violate the sovereignty of member states—the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of states. Ultimately, the frameworks are treated as mere guidelines and not as binding legislation. The Kampala Convention remains the only framework on IDPs that is legally binding on signatory members, and progress is being made with respect to its ratification, adoption, and implementation. The Kampala Convention addresses an emerging problem that, while similar, is distinct from the refugee situation. Be that as it may, it is expected that more member nations will continue to ratify the Kampala Convention and that implementation processes will be designed, since governments see IDPs as not an external concern but an internal one. Aside from these two frameworks, the European Union (EU) in conjunction with the AU has also made certain declarations that are ostensibly aimed at improving forced migration situations that are affecting Africa as a continent, though this can be seen as consolidating its overreaching efforts in migration management as it affects Europe. The Joint Africa-EU Declaration on Migration and Development of 2006, for example, that was adopted in Tripoli was drafted to ensure that all parties to refugee situations—countries of origin, transit, and destination—work in partnership to ensure the development of a comprehensive and holistic framework of shared responsibilities and cooperation. The major areas that such frameworks are expected to cover include peace and security, concern for human rights and well-being of forced migrants, protection of refugees, migration management challenges, regular migration opportunities, and sharing best practices, among others. Because there are no legal ramifications and no consequences for nonadoption and nonimplementation, these conventions and agreements have never been fully enforced by any country. While the AU continues to put in place comprehensive frameworks with constructive ideas for implementation, the limitations are obvious. Monitoring to check whether these frameworks are adhered to is weak, and there is no follow-up to ensure that the legal ramification of implementing such frameworks is designed. This means that the frameworks remain mostly as ideal standards, not realized policies. The problem does not end with implementation alone. Any implementation embarked on without application of the rules to the letter will never be effective. The AU Assembly has published thirty-six declarations on various refugee and migrant issues since 2002, and the AU Executive Council has issued another three declarations within the same time frame.23 Unfortunately, the majority of them have not been implemented at all.

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Probl e ms in Pr actice There are several reasons that refugee situations in Africa have become problematic for both host countries and refugees alike. While some of these problems can be easily managed through the establishment and implementation of policies, others require the proper orientation of the individuals seeking refugee status and of host communities. Increasing Incidence of Xenophobia

Formulating effective policies for refugees in Africa is hindered by the everchanging attitudes of the citizens of host countries toward the refugees. During the independence era, there was a continent-wide sympathetic stance toward refugees in many countries in Africa. The reasons for this are not far-fetched: the majority of refugees during this period were from the southern part of the continent and were known to be fleeing from racist and apartheid regimes. This situation made them readily accepted into various African countries as a form of solidarity with their cause. The racist colonial domination of Africa by the Western world was a common ground to assist one another. It should be noted that during this period, refugees were not perceived as neutral actors; rather, they were perceived as individuals fighting for the freedom of their people and who, in the face of superior power, had no option but to flee. For example, the Tanzanians referred to refugees from South Africa as wapigania uhuru, the Swahili term for freedom fighters. The perception of asylum seekers in the 1960s and early 1970s was more political than humanitarian. Various African countries were economically prosperous and expanding, thereby making the integration of refugees less cumbersome. The government programs for the citizens were not in any way impeded by the presence of relatively small numbers of refugees. However, the economic decline of African countries, aided by overdependence on foreign loans to administer governance and provide basic amenities to the local citizenry, has forced citizens of various African countries to perceive the presence of refugees as competition for scarce resources. Even when some African governments try to implement policies to integrate refugees into the system, such moves are met with vehement resistance by the citizens, as they find it difficult to rationalize the reason for assisting refugees when they themselves as citizens are not enjoying any assistance from their 23. Okumu, “African Union.”

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governments. Even in African countries with a high level of tolerance such as The Gambia, there are still incidents of reported xenophobic attacks on refugees.24 Inadequate Funding

While solidarity with neighboring countries facing crises often leads to the establishment of refugee policies, the problem of funding often acts as a deal breaker for such initiatives. With little or no financial intervention from the international community, refugee policies are not easily implementable. According to the dictates of the 1969 OAU Convention, it is expected that countries hosting refugees in Africa should be ably assisted financially by other governments both within and outside Africa. While this was the situation in the past, the refugee crises of the 1990s brought a change in the status quo, with the dwindling of funding and other resources for sustaining the escalating numbers of refugees in host countries. A former Tanzanian minister of foreign affairs affirmed the failure of the international community in providing assistance to African countries that were otherwise eager to accept refugees. This came at a time when the Tanzanian government appealed for funds from the international community to sustain the influx of refugees from Rwanda and Burundi. While progress was made initially, it was not sustained as funds dwindled over time. This was one of the reasons that led the Tanzanian government to close its borders with both countries and bar the entry of refugees. At the time, there was a lack of cooperation from the international community in providing Tanzania with the necessary funds to manage the situation, a fact affirmed by the UNHCR representative resident in Tanzania. Internal Security

The formulation of policy for refugee protection in Africa is often influenced by the need to prioritize internal security over humanitarian efforts. Policy makers often perceive refugees as harbingers of insecurity and crime. These perspectives are made worse by the persistent reinforcement of such claims by the media of host countries. The Daily Nation (Kenya), in 2006, claimed that the Kenyan government’s open-door policy gave rival Somali gangs an avenue to settle their scores on Kenyatta Avenue.25 Other articles described how these 2 4. Hultin, “Voter Registration Cards.” 25. Human Rights Watch, “You Are All Terrorists.”

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same Somali gangs pushed the Kenyan police out of Eastleigh in Nairobi. The Tanzanian government, in 1995, is reported to have forcibly repatriated refugees to their homelands as soon as the refugees got into the country, based on the perceived increase in insecurity in the country.26 For refugees that are driven from countries involved in violent crises, it is a norm in Africa to see pockets of such refugees moving to host countries with arms and weapons, which are subsequently used to perpetrate crimes in the host countries. For instance, there were many complaints of an increase in crime shortly after refugees from countries in conflict were allowed into countries in the Horn of Africa in the 1990s.27 A now-infamous example of this occurred following the 1994 influx of Rwandese refugees into the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Tanzania, which sparked and sustained conflict in the DRC in particular. This is one of the main reasons many African countries prefer to operate strict camp policies for refugees, in order to contain their movement and capabilities to foment trouble. Reluctance to Continue Hosting Refugees

The problems associated with refugee policies in Africa also include the reluctance of host countries to provide refugees with the necessary opportunities for integration and accommodation. Many African countries, unlike in the past, have established policies aimed at repatriating refugees as soon as possible. This attitude was evident when the Plan of Action for Voluntary Repatriation of Refugees was drafted in the African Great Lakes region in 1995. This was immediately followed by the forced repatriation of Rwandese refugees by the Tanzanian government in 1996. In the eastern and southern parts of the continent, refoulement in the guise of repatriation has become a preferred way of dealing with refugees due to the problems of xenophobia, insecurity, and funding. The South African government, for example, in 1997 drew up the Green Paper on International Migration, recommending mandatory repatriation of refugees. Kenyan authorities also violated the principle of non-refoulement when they sealed the border shared with Somalia.28 This points to the notion that African countries perceive refoulement as a likely way of handling their refugee problems.

2 6. Rwegasira, “Keynote Address,” 16–19. 27. Campbell, Kakusu, and Musyemi, “Congolese Refugee.” 2 8. ACHPR, “Report of Intersession Activities,” 3.

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Refugee Accommodation and Integration Problems in Africa

African refugees are subjected to residency issues in most countries where they seek refuge. The reason for this is multidimensional but hinges on two contrasting options: camp or self-settlement status. The difference between these two residence statuses has continued to court controversy in the study of African refugee policies. The UNHCR states that up to 78.5 percent of Africa’s 6.3 million refugees live in camps and similar settlements.29 Camps are planned, usually rural settlements, for hosting persons documented as refugees in a country. This is often the default residence available for African refugees. This forms the least assistance a country can offer refugees. The refugee camps that exist in many African countries are no better than detention centers seen in Western countries. Some African nations such as Uganda offer self-settlement options for refugees. By opting for self-settlement, African refugees avoid the harsh living conditions in the camps, which are often no better than prisons in some countries, as camps usually restrict refugees’ movements and ability to engage in economic activities. The policy of refugee residency in Africa also exists on two planes, depending on one’s residency status: camp residency indicates segregation, while selfsettlement indicates some level of integration. Refugee camps are established in a manner that segregates the refugees from the host population, with multilayered issues, including overcrowding, restriction of free movement, violence, and lack of privacy. Refugees experience a sense of dependency, accompanied by a feeling of being controlled, in such arrangements. Refugee accommodations can thus be categorized as either planned settlements or camps depending on the degree of certain parameters, which include the following:30 • Movement: the greater the level of restriction placed on movement, the more refugees feel they are staying not in a settlement but in a camp. While this perception may not be easily validated, the instance of Rwandese refugees protesting against the stiff restriction of their movements in Tanzania comes to mind. The Rwandese refugees argued that they were not staying in settlements because they were not allowed free and unrestricted movement.31

2 9. UNHCR, “Global Report 2018.” 30. Jacobsen, “Refugees’ Environmental Impact.” 31. Malkki, Purity and Exile, 42.

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• Population density: the UNHCR has highlighted varying degrees of problems relating to the number of refugees in African refugee settlements. The tendency to cram too many refugees into one settlement often turns such settlements into camps or transit centers.32 For instance, the influx of refugees into Tanzania in the 1990s led to proposed refugee settlements being reduced in area and turned into camps to accommodate a larger number of refugees. • Living standards and governance: it is easy to delineate a settlement from a camp by examining the kinds of economic aid being handed out to the population living within such territories. Settlements and camps differ by the mechanism of power wielded on the settlers.33 In camps, refugees are subjected to restricted economic activities, the majority being unable to leave the campground to seek income-generating endeavors. In the case of settlements, some level of freedom is given to settlers to move out of the settlement into the immediate environment to seek economic engagements. With the continued existence of different modes of refugee accommodations permitted by African governments, understanding the causes and effects of the residency patterns is important. There is a general belief that the policies relating to which settlement pattern a particular country chooses to implement depends on arguments for and against the prevailing settlement patterns. Criticisms against the camps (or similar controlled settlements) emphasize issues relating to the socioeconomic development of refugees and the rights they should be accorded. Restrictions on socioeconomic freedoms of refugees are fully exhibited in camp and controlled settlement policies. The critiques against camps for African refugees focus on the accompanying human rights breaches that follow such encampment policies. The conclusion mostly follows that camps undermine the rights of refugees as human beings. In essence, encampment policies prevent the integration of refugees into the host populations, ensuring that their dependence on relief and government food rations are perpetual, as well as limiting their capacities. The defenders of encampment policies highlight the advantages of controlled settlements, which include attracting international assistance as a result of the visibility and ascertainment of refugee populations that camp settlements offer 32. Black, Refugees, Environment and Development, 27. 33. Chambers, “Rural Refugees in Africa.”

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host countries. Camps also allow the host country to monitor the refugees, making it easy to contact them in case of emergencies and to distribute aid and relief. As some proponents of encampment have noted, a significant number of Western countries adopt controlled settlement policies for particular reasons of national politics. The point of this discussion is that policy makers in various governments have contrasting opinions on the desirability of settlement policies. Accordingly, African countries have established refugee settlement policies based on the feasibility of implementation. The debate relating to refugee settlement solutions often ends in a common agreement that the camp approach is undesirable for refugees, while the self-settlement option is not favorable to host governments. The determinants of refugee policies and how they should be implemented by host governments and international organizations hinge on intrinsic and extrinsic factors that shape the situation. In Africa, the balance between proponents of self-settlement and those of controlled camps can be traced to certain landmark conferences. Credit should be given to the 1969 OAU Convention, which highlighted the economic and social aspects of African refugee problems concerning the integration approach and assistance. This assertion is based on the final recommendations, which stipulated that member countries should perceive refugee assistance as part of the development needs of each country. However, this remains a problem for African countries. Infusing external challenges into the framework for the development of African countries looks like asking for too much. The idea of adding refugee relief policies to the socioeconomic dynamics of African countries indeed has its drawbacks.

Conclusion: Th e Fu t u r e of Polici e s From this examination of the 1969 OAU Convention and the 2013 Kampala Convention, it is clear that frameworks have been put in place to ensure that the protection and assistance of African refugees and IDPs, as well as their subsequent integration, are planned and implemented. The 1969 OAU Convention may have been drafted more than fifty years ago, but the contents, while not treating contemporary issues relating to African refugee situations, can be applauded as a design of novel concept, the effects of which have been registered since its development. Although it is not out of place to affirm the stagnation of some of the legal aspects of the 1969 Convention, coupled with the reluctance of member nations to follow it to the letter, it continues to be a pillar for the implementation of refugee protection and integration policies across

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various African countries. The continued existence of the 1969 Convention by itself offers some hope for the sustenance of a home-grown instrument that is dedicated to tackling refugee problems in Africa. Similarly, the comprehensive legal framework of the Kampala Convention gives room for feasible improvements on issues relating to IDPs across Africa. By addressing the needs and assistance that should be accorded to IDPs, African countries can prevent and reduce such displacements through the implementation of the Convention’s provisions. It also allows African countries to ensure the provision of assistance and protection to IDPs whenever such situations occur. The Kampala Convention has resulted in a strong motivation for African countries to recognize and uphold their obligations and responsibilities to IDPs. However, the full potentials of the Kampala Convention can be achieved only when all African countries have not only ratified it but also adopted necessary measures to fully implement it at national levels. Some gaps require urgent attention for the necessary enhancement of refugee protection in Africa. One such gap is the fact that many African countries sign and ratify these frameworks relating to refugee protection on paper only. When it comes to the implementation of refugee protection policies, many practices are not consistent with the position of international refugee laws and principles. Some African governments are also quick to relegate international human rights standards to the background in favor of draconian domestic legislations. The need for lasting solutions to the issue of ensuring the implementation of effective refugee protection policies that will guarantee their fundamental human rights is obvious. Refugee protection in any context has its challenges— xenophobia, security concerns, and lack of resources. However, the effective implementation of refugee protection policies by African governments will not only secure them against these challenges but also ensure that they become self-reliant while preserving their respective cultural identities. Facilitating peaceful coexistence between refugees and their respective host communities through the drafting and implementation of effective integration policies remains a veritable solution to refugee protection issues in Africa. This is one way out of the present quagmire, as the possibility of voluntary repatriation becomes eroded in protracted conflict situations. Local integration policies remain the key to effectively securing refugees as well as stabilizing their relationships with their host communities and, by extension, the host countries. Furthermore, the future of refugee situations in Africa still borders on the same challenges and problems that are prevailing at present. The African

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continent has jumped the first hurdle of putting in place comprehensive frameworks that detail the path to more effective refugee management in Africa. Nevertheless, without moving toward legitimizing the frameworks through the design of regional enforcement mechanisms and laws that will legally bind countries to adopt and implement the frameworks, no reasonable progress can be made. For all the strength of the frameworks, the legality remains patchy. This is made worse by the changing nature of refugee problems in Africa. Change creates uncertainties that may lead policy makers and politicians to favor clinging to the status quo. However, for the sake of refugees, there is a need to move away from merely providing frameworks that only look good on paper to ensuring that such frameworks are backed up by other international and domestic legislation that would guarantee the implementation of protections for refugees across Africa. Building political will is key to this endeavor.

Part II

MAKING REFUGEES

six

k

COLONIALISM AND THE MAKING OF REFUGEES IN AFRICA

Introduction Research around refugees and their implications for global politics, economies, and international relationships has increased considerably in the last few decades, producing works that amplify different narratives, many of which are critical of the responses to the phenomenon. What is surprising, however, is that this interest, when interrogated, often has an undertone that apportions blame to refugees for their emigrational attitude and for the behaviors in their various destinations. This tendency enshrines and entrenches a superior-inferior dichotomy of one race or one nationality over the other into the subconscious of policy makers and society more generally. While the power of these intellectual works to condition the attitudes of people against refugees cannot be downplayed, it sadly also has the capacity to obscure important dialectics about the phenomenon. Migration is seen as natural when the reasons are ecological changes or environmental realities; however, forced migration is most often seen as the consequence of human action. This chapter traces the origins of this latter kind of migration phenomenon in Africa. This chapter argues that colonialism is central to understanding the political, economic, social, and cultural transformations that created the current crisis of refugees on the African continent. Many scholars have noted that the manner of state creation in Africa, patterns of colonial state-building, and the nature of colonial administration produced specific forms of politics and postcolonial realities that have persisted into the present.1 African states were 1. Ekeh, Colonialism and Social Structure; Osterhammel, Colonialism; Young, Postcolonial State.

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arbitrarily created, resulting in multiethnic states and multistate nations, ripe foundations for the instability and civil strife that would haunt the continent. State-building, according to Constance G. Anthony, followed one of three models: radical separation, creation of a governing class, or complete paternalism, all with implications for the nature of the ruling elite and of politics after the colonialists departed.2 While some territories were favorable to settler colonialism, some were not, and this became an important predictor of the extent of violence and apartheid that specific colonies experienced. The implementation of direct rule, indirect rule, or an inconsistent—even irrational—mixture of both administrative policies in different colonies shaped the character of the African state, and with it, the creation of refugees on the continent. The chapter makes the case that research that does not consider these foundational experiences and events will continue to neutralize efforts intended to curb the problems of displaced people. In other words, this chapter considers refugee dialectics as reactions to history. Many scholars have produced literature around these subjects, but the one-sided nature of research on the foundations of the phenomenon, the noticeable overtones of racial superiority or inferiority, and the incompleteness of the narrative compel the present effort.3

Befor e th e Coloni a l Er a To qualitatively contribute to the narrative around the colonial foundations for the refugee phenomenon in postcolonial Africa, it is necessary to point out that the literature on refugees in Africa says little about refugees on the continent prior to the colonial incursion. While some of the migration literature points to African traditions of migration for economic, social, familial, conflict, and other reasons,4 that literature is rarely in conversation with the Refugee Studies literature, casting refugees as a phenomenon that emerged in the decolonization era. A number of factors are responsible for these academic omissions of the precolonial patterns of refugee production in Africa. Because the concept of refugees in international relations throughout the twentieth century was so closely tied to the conception of the Westphalian European state, refugees captured international attention based only on events in Europe in that period, 2 . Anthony, “Africa’s Refugee Crisis.” 3. Flahaux and Haas, “African Migration”; Milner, Refugees, State and Politics; Crisp, “Africa’s Refugees”; Afolayan, “Dynamics of Refugee Flows.” 4. Adepoju, “Internal and International Migration.”

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as already discussed in the preceding chapters. This erasure of non-European history may also be because European accounts of Africa often dismissed the existence of any civilization or rationality in precolonial eras.5 Indeed, many European scholars of colonialism explicitly averred that Africa did not have any history, or one worthy of academic interrogation, before the white man came. With reference to refugees, this also leaves the impression that the “sophistication” of thought that it takes to flee mortal danger and seek asylum must have been lacking in a territory supposedly marked by primal “tribal” wars and tellingly labeled as the heart of darkness. Contrary to European perceptions and reports, states existed in the precolonial African past, and a longue durée view of African history attests to the sophistication of African political and social organization, as well as the advancements in technology, innovation, philosophy, and knowledge. These advancements made the formation and expansion of vast and powerful empires possible, including the Aksum, Benin, Bornu, Carthage, Ghana, Kongo, Kush, Lunda, Mali, Nubian, Sennar, Songhai, and Zimbabwe empires, among others. Early nationalist historians of Africa have long debated how much credence histories written by colonial authorities should be given in consideration of the history of Africa and African peoples, given that Africans were not in abeyance prior to the imposition of Western-style institutions and governance.6 These scholars asserted that Africans had a history and existed in history before Western incursion sought to elide this past. As liberation leader and philosopher Amílcar Cabral succinctly articulated, “The colonialists have a habit of telling us that when they arrived, they put us into history. You are well aware that it is the opposite. When they arrived, they took us out of our own history.”7 For African historians in this school of thought, then, colonialism was but an episode in the long history of Africa when set against the rise and fall of empires, the creation and dissolution of states, and the rising and waning of African civilizations over millennia. In this context of precolonial African states, forced migration could not have been absent, and indeed it is documented in historical studies of the period, despite the tendency to overlook this when analyzing a particular, contemporary African refugee situation. 5 . Yacob-Haliso, “Striving for Solutions.” 6. Important works in this regard are Ajayi, “Place of African History”; Ajayi, Christian Missions in Nigeria; Dike, Trade and Politics; Falola, Colonialism and Violence in Nigeria; Falola, Power of African Cultures. 7. Cabral, quoted in Chiwome and Gambahaya, Culture and Development, 99; see also Reynolds and Cousins, Lwaano Lwanyika; Africa Information Service, Return to the Source.

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This manner of study ought not to have been so, as Black Africa has a long and variegated history. Before the Europeans burst in on this world, there were many other conquerors and agents of change both from within and from beyond the continent. . . . It is significant, however, that the African viewed this past as remarkably stable and continuous. . . . There were stories of migrations and wars, of the origins and extinction of peoples, of the founding and breaking up of cities and states. But migrations, change, and renewal were regarded as part of the continuous flow of history. There was a past, a present, and a future, but they were linked inextricably together.8

The relative invisibility of refugees of this period in Refugee Studies may well exist because the number of individuals fleeing tyranny and oppression of various forms was so low as to be insignificant compared with the mass movements of war-affected people visible in contemporary African landscapes. So, in various parts of Africa, small groups of people were indeed displaced by local and familial disputes, land pressures, external invasion, drought, pestilence, and diseases, and they moved to establish new communities wherever they settled. Even when these groups were large, the relatively quick settlement and absorption of such refugees meant that humongous numbers of forcibly displaced people did not stick out like a sore thumb on African landscapes as they do currently. Additionally, people who moved often found settlement among kith and kin elsewhere and did not actually become “refugees.” So, if we take refugees to encompass persons who historically fled their communities and states as political exiles or to seek safety from wars and upheavals, there is evidence that forced migration predated the colonial states. Nonetheless, the massive production of forced displacement in Africa remains inextricably linked to foreign incursions into the continent. Thus, the most well-known instance of forced migration in the precolonial period is the trans-Saharan, transatlantic, and Indian Ocean trade in African slaves. The slave trade forcibly displaced Africans not only to lands far beyond the continent but within the continent too. The trans-Saharan trade, which started many centuries earlier than the transatlantic slave trade, saw people moved from West African empires to North Africa and parts of the Middle East. Not less than eleven to twelve million Africans were moved out of the continent in the four hundred years of the transatlantic slave trade alone, creating large African diasporas in the Americas and Europe. Slave-raiding kingdoms in western, central, and southern Africa also caused the displacement 8. Ajayi and Alagoa, “Black Africa,” 125.

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of countless other millions of people from their ancestral homes who were forced to flee elsewhere on the continent. And when slavery was abolished by the Western nations, there was return migration as emancipated former slaves from the Americas and elsewhere resettled in colonies on the western coast of Africa, notably in present-day Liberia and Sierra Leone.9 Another significant cause of large-scale population displacement that overlapped with the latter part of this period of transcontinental slave trade was the Mfecane in early nineteenth-century Southern Africa. The Mfecane was the scattering of clans and ethnicities as Shaka’s Zulu kingdom pursued an aggressive expansionist policy, creating entire ethnic groups as refugees of this period.10 The important factor that distinguishes that period from the present one is the widely differing degrees of cordiality extended to such persons, the previous manner of which is referred to even today as Africa’s “tradition of hospitality” toward refugees, which admittedly has all but disappeared in contemporary refugee practice.11 This so-called tradition of hospitality, however, maintains an important continuity with the present in that the attitudes toward refugees on the continent remain determined significantly by states’ and communities’ perceptions of the strategic advantages and disadvantages that such hospitality would bring and shape policies accordingly.

Coloni a l Pa rtitioning a n d Fr agm entation The cross-continental challenge of displacement and refugees originated from the expansionist Europeans who imposed their economic and political domination over the inhabitants of Africa. The continent was inhabited by peoples with diverse cultural, ethnic, and religious philosophies who were not particularly susceptible to unending emigrational voyages and had few reasons to flee. Generally, peace reigned, and their existence was not dominated by intermittent struggles and strife as first introduced by the brutality of the transatlantic slave trade and that continued into the colonial era and persisted in the postcolonial environment.12 Diverse in culture as they were, solid political philosophy was

  9. Fresia, “Forced Migration in West Africa.” 10. Crush and Chikanda. “Forced Migration in Southern Africa.” 11. Caution must be taken, however, not to romanticize or overgeneralize about the favorable treatment of refugees, exiles, and others in the precolonial period. Some exiles and groups of refugees of the period also engaged in struggles to make a place for their settlement. See, for instance, Ajayi, Unfinished Business. 12. Falola, African Diaspora.

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not alien to them, as they were well organized to conduct their internal business peacefully and without rancor. It bears repeating that, except in cases of natural disasters, Africa did not have massive, forced migrations or protracted displacement in its history. This fact underscores the role of the colonial powers in laying the foundations for the culture of forced displacement in Africa.13 Africa was caught in a web of self-interested invaders who encroached upon her available resources without compunction. The very idea of colonialism is that of a relationship in which an entire society is robbed of its historical line of development, externally manipulated, and transformed according to the needs and interests of the colonial rulers.14 For the European expansionists to be successful, they found it necessary to separate the people along divisive lines so as to allow their domination to succeed and last longer. Hence, a divide-and-rule agenda was adopted, ignoring important historical factors in the creation of new identities. Africans were partitioned to weaken identity and sow disunity in order to make the domination of these explorers easier. By dividing the people into different geographical entities, Europeans perfected the art of colonialism, and this left Africans to struggle unsuccessfully to combat the invaders. This set the stage for the destruction of the people’s values, as they began to experience unusual encounters that not only challenged their survival but also threatened their entire existence. The fragmentation of the continent, however helpful it was for the actualization of the colonial agenda, laid the foundation for the migrant and refugee culture in the contemporary world. Even though it is now obvious that the partitioning of the continent by the Europeans was for their selfish interests, the retention and persistence of the status quo continue to protect the refugee production culture. The deliberate lack of consideration given to existing cultural and linguistic identities escalated the challenge of refugee making that circumscribed the postcolonial African world. The fragmentation of these settlements is therefore a factor that cannot be disconnected from the current situation, as it automatically entrusted the political power of the new nation-state systems to some select groups above the others.15 Virtually all African countries today face the challenge of multiple cultures subsumed under the same geographical

13. Odhiambo-Abuya, “Past Reflections, Future Insights”; Afolayan, “Dynamics of Refugee Flows.” 14. Osterhammel, Colonialism. 15. Falola, Nigerian Political Modernity.

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identity, and this continues to enhance the lopsided administration of power.16 As noted by Anthony Asiwaju, the creation of boundaries generated certain internal reactions among the colonized: (1) the initial indifference to the other group identities because of their ignorance of the reason behind such creation or its political implications, (2) irritation of the other group(s) because of the awareness of their growth and development, and (3) rejection of the created boundaries because of the apparent differences in political and religious concern.17 Thus, the arbitrary creation of several African countries occasioned mutual suspicion and conflict among the multiple groups and nationalities that became bound by the new state borders.18 For example, the unity of Nigeria has been the basis for internal unrest because the way boundaries were drawn by Europeans prepared the ground for mutual animosity between the peoples of Nigeria. Fragmentation has reconfigured the existence of the people who are divided by borders and become dual citizens because they are usually neglected by the political powers at the center. The Yoruba people who are entrapped in the Dahomey (Benin) identity consider the Yorubaland in Nigeria as their paternal legacy, and the people therein are seen as their kith and kin whom they show their cultural commitment to despite the obvious geographical or spatial separation initiated by European partitioning. These individuals migrate very easily across the cultural spectrum, as they believe they have a shared history of genetic relationships. The celebration of intergroup and interethnic networks of alliance that predated colonial fragmentation confirms the improbability of refugee making strictly defined. It is natural that when disturbed humans are encouraged to seek the psychological relief of clan members with a common identity. As such, geographical borders are often observed only on the formal front. People are still able to perform their cultural rituals with kin across borders. For this very reason, contemporary African society is unable to disallow migrations within and across its boundaries, creating some perplexity for states wishing to control specific migrations, including refugee movements. The geographic delineations that Europeans instigated in Africa also caused a unique relationship between state formation and colonial interests. In considering the partitioning of Eritrea and Ethiopia, serious external influence 16. Young, African Colonial State; Reader, Africa; Ranger, “Nature of Ethnicity”; Otite, Ethnic Pluralism; Ekeh, Colonialism and Social Structure; Osaghae, “Managing Multiple Minority Problems”; Horowitz, Ethnic Groups; Nnoli, Ethnic Politics in Nigeria. 17. Asiwaju, Partitioned Africans. 18. Kalu, Yacob-Haliso, and Falola, Africa’s Big Men.

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contributed to the escalation of the conflict, which had tremendous consequences on the political condition of the countries. The politics of fragmentation prepared the ground for the tensions that have taken a longer period to overcome in Ethiopia and Eritrea. After protracted conflict or tensions between African countries that have citizens who share common ancestral legacies, a fractured environment was created that made refugees inevitable. The Ethiopians and the Eritreans are not alone; similar experiences with other fragmented African identities that were partitioned by Europeans can be found throughout the continent. Apart from the fact that the colonialists prepared the political climate that would enhance and solidify migrations of people facing the reality of their new identities, the colonialists’ continuous meddling in African affairs created additional confusions for the people and thus deepened mutual suspicion. The tensions that gave rise to this intracontinental conflict rested on aspirations and discontentment over territory, which was an attempt to conceal the actual reason that created the animosity. What remains surprising is that neighboring countries such as Ethiopia and Eritrea have ethnic groups that share similar cultural and ideological legacies. Their divergent colonial identities notwithstanding, they are increasingly susceptible to migrations and mobility from one place to another. This again reinforces the argument that ethnic and identity fragmentation is a strong component of refugee formation. For emigration that occurred in this type of environment, as in Ethiopia, various other factors existed internally that echoed the colonial legacy. Since partitioning of people was necessary for domination, fragmentation was therefore instrumental in the depletion of their natural resources, and this would be detrimental to the future development of the people. Creating nation-states with crude insensitivity to various factors such as language, culture, and religion has produced refugees from those states. In essence, partitioned Africans always have reasons to establish connections with people whom they believe belong to similar cultural, linguistic, and religious groups. By paying minimal attention to these factors rooted in the colonial era, researchers make nonexistent projections and conclude hurriedly that Africans’ incapacity to organize themselves is at the root of the growth in the numbers of refugees. This conclusion, however, seeks to validate or at least reinforce the Western bias that has a long-standing history in Orientalism, marginalization, and denigration of African cultures, as noted by Edward Said.19 19. Said, Orientalism.

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Coloni a l Econom y A large body of research has established the economic connection that existed between European expansionism and their “civilizing mission” in Africa.20 Slavery preceded colonialism, and the history of trading in humans spanned centuries. At the central position of the slavers’ interest was the plan to widen their economic growth in the Americas and their European countries. For the enhancement of this agenda, they supplied enslaved Africans to the Global North for an economic revolution in their countries in the eighteenth century. Before the exportation of enslaved Africans was outlawed, the slave trade had recorded maximum economic value for the perpetrators and therefore laid a foundation for the making of refugees. In other words, another vital condition for the making of refugees is the economic system that Europeans pursued at all costs. As colonization took root in Africa, there was a sudden increase in the commodity export of Africans, and this forced the continent onto a different trajectory of economic development.21 Infrastructure that would enhance the sustenance of the colonial economy, such as roads, was constructed so that the imperialists could derive maximum economic impact from their colonies. In essence, African economies were captured and converted for European ends, solidifying a process of externalization begun by the trade in human beings, continued in the designation of Africa as the perpetual producer of raw materials for European industries, and evident today in the consignment of Africa to the peripheries of global trade and development.22 Facilitated by the British pronouncements about the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, the introduction of “legitimate trade” was a careful process for the restoration of economic transactions existing between their African allies and themselves.23 There was an unprecedented increase in production of cash crops from African countries, which were exchanged for relatively low-worth European goods. For the economic growth to be sustained, the Europeans needed to have more than financial power; they needed political power to reinforce their control. Therefore, they intervened in the politics of African people and then began making important political decisions for Africans. To consolidate these 2 0. Amin, “Underdevelopment and Dependence”; Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa; Davidson, Black Man’s Burden; Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson. “Colonial Origins of Comparative Development.” 21. Ikwuyatum, “Changing Face of Migration.” 22. Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa; Wallerstein, Capitalist World Economy; Heldring and Robinson, Colonialism and Economic Development. 23. Austin, “Cash Crops and Freedom.”

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economic gains, the European countries involved in colonization harnessed their influence and partitioned the African continent in ways that would be favorable to their agenda. As the European colonizers expanded their interests, they became more dictatorial to Africans on the forms of economic productions that they made. It is important to recognize that different African countries of today received varying treatment from their different colonial masters. The nature of colonial domination varied significantly based on colonial administrative philosophies and whether a settler economy was founded or not. Settler colonies such as Zimbabwe, South Africa, and Kenya experienced perhaps the most hostile relationships with the European imperialists.24 This hostility manifested in their enforced land-grabbing policies that dislocated African owners. Culturally, Africans attach much value to their land and see their possession of it as the spiritual fulfillment of their social and cultural identity. The Mau Mau fighters, for example, were dedicated Africans who considered their dispossession of these properties as an affront to their being. It is surprising that there are still narratives permeating the intellectual market today that give minimal attention to these explanatory factors. Since then, there have been altercations and increased mutual suspicion between white (former) settlers and Africans in areas such as South Africa (see figure 6.1), as well as political strife, as there has been the understanding that the ones who control the political power hold the key to economic domination. The origins of European domination of Africans has its pedigree in the racist white supremacist thought of Europe, by which Africans were constructed as racially inferior and African culture “had no redeeming value; only a wholly new African might be worthy of the colonial order, tailored from imported cloth.”25 As was clearly noted by G. N. Uzoigwe in his UNESCO essay “European Partition and Conquest of Africa,” the Europeans were motivated by Charles Darwin’s 1859 theory of evolution that gives credence to the survival of stronger species. He notes, “The Darwinians, therefore, were elated to be able to justify the conquest of what they called ‘subject races’ or ‘backward races’ by the ‘master race’ as the inevitable process of ‘natural selection’ by which the stronger dominates the weaker in the struggle for existence. They preached, therefore, that might was right. The partition of Africa was consequently seen by them as part of this inevitable, natural process. The interesting aspect of this 2 4. Good, “Settler Colonialism”; Ochieng and Maxon, Economic History of Kenya; Cavanagh and Veracini, Routledge Handbook. 25. Crawford Young, African Colonial State, 280.

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Figure 6.1. Refugees from the Second Anglo-Boer War in South Africa, 1899–1902, the result of contention between two colonizing sett ler groups with lasting impact for the indigenous Black population. UK Imperial War Museums, htt ps://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object /205022078. Wikimedia Commons, htt ps://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File: The_Second_Anglo_-_Boer_War,_South_Africa_1899_-_1902_Q 72378.jpg.

flagrant racial jingoism which has been described appropriately as ‘Albinism’ is its affi rmation of imperial responsibility.”26 Since this brings about economic partition, it accentuates the argument that colonial business sets another historical trajectory for the creation of the refugee. The overconcentration on agricultural produce created tensions that were difficult to untangle in the subsequent era. Since the Europeans were more concerned with the production of cash crops, it altered agriculture as people engaged mostly in cash crop farming, and in some places (such as in the plantations of central Africa), the cultivation of cash crops was enforced. Others in the colonies avoided other kinds of commercial enterprise that would have provided similar or better fi nancial outcomes for themselves. The economy of the colonial powers enforced new thinking in the minds of Africans, who were not aware of the economic value that could be generated from developing a similar mindset in the running of their internal activities. Th is experience essentializes the place of money, capitalism especially, in an unprecedented way. Th rough the subordination of African efforts and the 26. Uzoigwe, “European Partition and Conquest.”

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exploitation of them, Africans themselves were already being introduced to a scheme where they could successfully take economic power from the people and therefore subject them to oppressive labor in the quest for survival. This led to the foundation of capitalist philosophy with its lopsided consequences for the smooth administration of social affairs. As Africans were making advancements in the production of cotton and other cash crops, they were internalizing the knowledge of subjugation and repression. All these circumstances created the eventual basis for the relationship between the ruling class and the ones at the lowest rungs of the ladder in the society. The trend continued unchallenged, quietly being introduced into African politics, in distinct contrast to traditional communalism and socialism, popular before the commencement of the European imperialist economy. If our conclusion is that the interest of the Europeans on the African continent was driven by economic domination, it would provide us the basis for understanding the interconnection of events. For example, when countries within Africa have been involved in bitter struggles, different European countries have jostled to interfere and register their influence, most of which have negative consequences or set the precedent for the creation of situations that make the production of refugees inevitable. So long as internal conflicts were not domestically resolved or managed politically, they often called for the attention of external countries that interfered in one form or another. Examples abound in so many countries across Africa where intractable conflicts resulted from these external interventions. One occasion was the Ethiopia-Somalia conflict of 1977–78, which sparked interest from external parties such as the United States and Saudi Arabia among others because of their proximity to the coastal boundary and the economic advantages to be derived from this.27 Another significant example of such detrimental interference is the conflict and political instability in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, one of Africa’s most richly and naturally endowed countries, where conflict started in the 1960s with the meddling of the exiting colonial masters, and is still ongoing today. In this way, therefore, the colonial economy sought to continue very actively in the affairs of their erstwhile colonies and conspired to create conditions that made refugee creation unavoidable. In the Ethiopia-Somalia case, it was apparent that the relationship between Somalia and these external collaborators existed on an economic basis, where the producers of support expected collateral benefits. Ethiopia fought Somalia to attract the attention of the Soviet Union, who believed they could penetrate 27. Ibid.

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Africa if they offered their assistance to Ethiopia against the interests of powerful countries such as the US who had shown interest in Somalia. This is how African countries became proxy battlefields particularly during and after the Cold War. The political dimension to this highlights the position of global politics and the perversion of capitalist ideology in contemporary politics. The US believed that the proximity of Somalia to the coastline would provide them the opportunity to ground their military base in preparation for swift action against nonallied Middle Eastern countries. Both the Soviet Union and the US supplied munitions to their allies, fanning the embers of division and hostility. It is important to note that precolonial African societies never experienced the production of sophisticated ammunitions capable of mass destruction for the escalation of interethnic or intergroup rivalry. Even though their past was not free of internal conflicts, they never engaged in genocidal violence. Although it may be possible to restore a precolonial identity, it would be difficult to erase the mutual suspicion that the creation of boundaries and multinational states has necessitated. Violence against people with whom they share the same geographical, cultural, and ethnic identity has been the most reliable way to divide people and rule them. It is therefore paradoxical that the civilizing mission that Europeans claimed to have brought to Africa was dashed by the ideologically opposing events that transpired. Selling arms to Africans automatically created potential reasons for migration of any sort. Meanwhile, the colonial strategy was the enforcement of mono-product economic production that would limit or control the economic growth of the African people, except for areas where white settlers dominated, as in South Africa and Southern Rhodesia. Most of the African countries where the colonial economy was prevalent encouraged excessive production of cotton, minerals, and precious metal mining, and this created a continental diversion of attention, especially in areas where people concentrated on the production of these capitalist resources. The political motivation behind this was not entirely alien. Europeans understood that Africans had the tenacity to pursue their goals provided they had the right frame of reference, which would be determined by a couple of factors. One, if Africans were not engrossed in servicing the capitalist philosophy that conditioned many to take interest in agricultural activities, they would direct their energy and attention to the development of more important aspects of their existence, such as emancipation from the Europeans. Two, if they were not facing the economic challenges that forced them to participate in these capitalist exchanges, their collective and communal togetherness would have fast-tracked their development in other spheres. If one observed that the

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Industrial Revolution of the European and American societies coincided with periods when Africans were devoting a larger part of their time to agricultural products, one would get an inkling as to why the colonial economy was another medium for the creation of situations that made refugee making inevitable. The story of West Africa is illustrative. The white colonizers, after the agreements of the Berlin Conference in 1884–85, had established their presence on the African continent, each in a contest to register themselves as official occupants of any settlement they came across—the doctrine of “effective occupation.” The reason for this contest was the clause in the Berlin agreement that stipulated “that any European country that would lay claim to any part of Africa, would only be recognized if it was effectively occupied.”28 The clause in this treaty was the reason behind the use of force or whatever means necessary by the colonialists to demonstrate effective occupation. This deployment of brute force to quell resistance was euphemistically referred to as “pacification.” The British, for example, in their annexation of some West African territories, used excessive force that culminated in elongated wars and strife. The attempt to establish the colonial economy set most of these countries on a downward spiral. In Ghana, for example, the conquest of the Ashante people cost the people a period of one hundred years, starting from 1805. The Ashante king, Prempeh, had defied the authority of the British imperialists and was not ready to submit to their demands. As a potential threat to the implementation of their economic agenda, he was exiled and then subjected to further humiliation.29 These incidences found similarities in what happened in other parts of West Africa. For example, the king of Dahomey at about the same time experienced the imposition of European presence in his country. King Jaja of Opobo in the Niger Delta region also confronted the British. He warned the British that they should desist from further trade with his people and territory to avoid attracting his wrath. He made an official treaty with the British with the arrangement that “after April 2, 1873, the King of Opobo shall allow no trade established or hulk in or off Opobo Town, or any trading vessels to come higher up the river than the Whiteman’s beach opposite Hippopotamus Creek. If any trading ship or steamer proceeds further up the river than the creek above mentioned, after having been fully warned to the contrary, the said trading ship or steamer may be seized by King Jaja and detained until a fine of 100 puncheon [of palm oil] be paid by the owners to King Jaja.”30 Although the British defaulted on this 2 8. Nwando, “Colonial Rule in West Africa.” 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid.

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warning and proceeded with force to overturn the arrangement, such defiance was a background for the formation of the eventual social conflict that would create refugees. Similar resistance by Sultan Muhammadu Attahiru of the Sokoto Caliphate and Nana Olomu of the Itsekiri kingdom led to their being exiled. These are some of the various ways by which the forceful imposition of colonial economies fueled the dynamics of refugee creation in Africa. While the economic product here is unlike the cash crops that the colonial government desired, colonial economies were, and still are, another strong basis for migration. The structural disarticulations that were founded and entrenched from the colonial kidnapping of African economies, as well as the deployment of force to maintain the Europeans’ grip on their stolen wealth, were to have reverberating consequences for postcolonial African politics that eventually produced the mass forced displacement now characteristic of the African continent.

R eligious I dentiti e s Nearly all African countries experienced a paradigm of extant religious philosophies and ideologies that contributed to laying the foundation for division or factions, with the inception of the expansionist Europeans. It is pertinent to the execution of the expansionist agenda that Africa was divided using every conceivable means, as that would facilitate easy access to the people, for they would have been stratified across various lines by the time the activities of the colonialists were to fully commence. A close observation of the European tactics reveals how broad their plan of arresting the continent for their economic and political expansion was, as they deployed various methods and approaches for the execution of their plans.31 Thus, when one sees Africans in the postcolonial era being primed to function within a particular identity— ethnic, religious, political, or economic—it is almost certainly a product of the divisionary tools set in motion by the Europeans, which still function even in a contemporary state. The introduction of external religious identities and philosophies must also be seen as one of the tactics that fractured the continent into different parts and dimensions. The dimension that religious identities brought to the continent varied according to the individuals bringing them. In eastern and northern Africa, 31. Bulhan, “Stages of Colonialism in Africa”; Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs; Mignolo, Darker Side of the Renaissance.

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the religious philosophies of the Arabs took strong root because of the history of the slave trade that had existed for centuries between the inhabitants of those areas and the Arabs. In the case of Sudan, for example, there are those Sudanese of today known as Sudanese Arabs, who are mostly Sunni Muslims, while on the other side of the divide are the Sudanese Christians. The reason why the European imperialists exerted much influence on places like this is the clause in the Berlin Conference agreement that stipulated that colonizers must demonstrate total capturing of potential colonies— effective occupation—before they would be officially recognized as the possessor of a given area. This motivated Europeans to recolonize areas that were once victims of Arab colonization. Hence, all the places where Arab colonial influence had spread experienced a new wave of colonization at the coming of the Europeans. There are historical relationships between Arabs and the Africans who are indigenous to the Sudan, the Nubian people, but the eventual colonization of the place by the Arabs laid the foundation for its European occupation. Despite the sweeping influence of Islam in this country, the religious identities became additionally complicated when Christianity was again introduced. Sudan had been largely Coptic Christian from the second century, but this identity was displaced by Islam from about the sixteenth century onward. The introduction of yet another alien religion, Christianity, by the British in the nineteenth century severed the ties among the people and created another dimension to internal rivalry. In all these changes, the African residents in the area experienced the problem of identity repression, and that would eventually serve as another basis for the creation of human dislocation and displacement because of the attending challenges they faced in an environment in which they had become the minority. Therefore, the religious identities introduced to that part of the continent also set the precedent for the making of refugees, as over the decades, prolonged conflict on the basis of rival religious identities became endemic to the country. The religious rivalries that engulfed the country confirm the assertion that religion forms another basis for divisions among the African people. In several other countries, religious philosophies were weaponized by the colonialists to divide the people for the enhancement of their colonial agenda. Changing the structure of society always comes with unpredictable consequences. History has demonstrated that it is politically necessary that those who have the numerical strength overrun the affairs of a place, through either dialogue or coercion, and the minority are inevitably expected to bear the burden. Several works have noted, however, how the religious impulse of the colonialists provided

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impetus for the growth of religious countermovements that resisted the Western missionary imposition.32 Nascent religious identities are also traceable to other parts of the continent. In West Africa, the infusion of external religious practices became another foundation for fragmentation.33 The Nigerian case is an example of this reality. This heterogeneous country is the domicile for peoples of different religious persuasions and dissimilar moral and ethical philosophies as a result. While the European imperialists took the southern route to introduce Christianity to the country, the Arabs had penetrated the colony by the northern route. This happened before the peoples of the southern and northern British protectorates were merged together as a single political entity. The coming together of these two religiously and culturally different groups has often pushed the country to the precipice. The relationship between the two poles has been determined by mutual suspicion and characterized by mutual fear. The establishment of these unequal religions provides the atmosphere for competition for the resource or leadership control of the country by either of the two groups. Even though they are governed by the same constitution, they are prone to repeated episodes of internal strife. Situations like this reveal a disturbing reality about the introduction of Western religion and the identity strictures. The Nigerian core north, where Islam has a solid foundation, has experienced various religious wars since the colonial invasion. The area is filled with a people who tend to be ideologically antagonistic to Western ideas and values and demonstrate no restraint when issues that border on their religion come up for debate. Just as the other occupants of places overtaken by external religious identities face the threat of marginalization, contemporary Muslims in northern Nigeria have dominated the space and therefore sent the minority, the original occupants of the region, to untimely political oblivion. A similar situation spreads across the southern part of the country, where Christianity ceaselessly threatens the traditional religious believers with hell for failure to abandon their inherited religious practices. These indigenous religious institutions suffered from the belligerent attitudes of these external religions transported to the country by the colonialists, as, for example, when traditional shrines were hacked down in the wake of Christianity and Islam’s entry into the country. 32. Peel, Aladura; Comaroff and Comaroff, “Christianity and Colonialism”; Ranger, “Connexions”; Ranger, “Religious Movements and Politics”; Balandier, Sociologie Actuelle; Balandier, “Messianism and Nationalism”; Balandier, Sens et Puissance; Lanternari, Religions of the Oppressed. 33. Ajayi, Christian Missions in Nigeria; Ayandele, Impact of Christian Missions.

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It is important to note that missionary activities in the eastern part of the continent reflect similar conditions of hostilities at their foundation. These activities began with the emergence of alien religions that rendered the region religiously plural. Each country in the region has a colonial experience that is both peculiar and also representative of the contemporary realities. As an example, the missionary activities in Kenya waged an epistemic war against the Kikuyu traditional religion, condemning in its entirety the religious practices and philosophies that have guided the people for thousands of years. In the country, unlike in many countries where the indigenous practitioners were explicitly receptive of the European religions, the locals resisted because they were not going to allow their religious institutions to be disrespected by the Europeans, who they believed had minimal understanding about their practices. The missionaries used repression to frustrate their competitors, and the Kenyans challenged and extensively mobilized against this. This created fear among some people, and they gave in to the pressures mounted by the missionaries. Since the Arabic colonization of the continent preceded that of the Europeans, the missionaries also had contenders in the minority Muslims that dwelled on the coast of Kenya.34 Inspired by the need to correct the established anomaly that came with the installation of Christianity and Islam in Kenya, the Kikuyu traditional believers became more agitated and decided to challenge the power of the colonialists. This led to the staging of the anticolonial rebellion of 1952, which pitched the locals of the country against their European imperialists. Although this would be met with a more forceful counterinsurgence war by the British colonial authority in Kenya,35 the lesson learned was that the religious philosophies that were imported to the country tilled the ground for this European agenda and the imposition of their alien ideas. The emergence of hostility has historical antecedents. Like the insurgent groups in parts of the continent, the religious dimension here is tied to the surfacing of the external religious crusaders who came to Africa to expand their religious horizons. Human minds are fertile grounds for the expansion of ideologies, and Europeans intended to control the minds of Africans to aid their control in other spheres such as politics, the economy, and education and thus proceeded with their “civilizing mission.” By not considering what created the conditions for refugees to emerge, scholars ignore information that could aid the understanding of the phenomenon.

3 4. Muller, South African Music, 191–92. 35. Ibid.

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A similar narrative reverberates through the stories of other places in Africa. The situation in Uganda is somewhat different. Missionaries had laid the foundation for colonial activities because they had converted a large number of the citizens to the Christian belief, and these people therefore were susceptible to colonization. Ugandans who were believers in their traditional religion, under the Kabaka, had been the subjects of controversy with Muslim converts who wrestled leadership from them in the 1880s.36 Most Muslims and Christians in this period were united in their intention to dislodge the Kabaka from their seat of power, and this became another fertile ground for the implementation of European hegemonic agenda. Meanwhile, the missionary religion crawled its way into the southern divide of the continent with different characteristics. The activities of Christianity took a different dimension there because some factors inhibited its flow, unlike the relatively easy access they had in other places. The place that would later be called South Africa received its European explorers in the mid-eighteenth century, in the person of Georg Schmidt, a Christian missionary, in 1737.37 Schmidt eventually did something that provoked the European imperialists to relieve him of his position. He went ahead to baptize a few of his converts, and that was in outright contravention of the European rules that negated redemption through baptism of the African people, as that would disqualify the latter from being used as slaves. This controversy therefore led to his removal, and this saw to the abolition of missionary activities for five decades. The South African experience was thus somewhat different because it ensured the replacement of the indigenous religions and culture with the Christian belief. Therefore, internal religious conflicts arising from that part of the continent were not as persistent as found elsewhere, especially in the northern and the western part of the continent. In essence, the introduction of European and Arabic religions is underlined by their intention to dislodge the people from their religious identities, for easy access and for the smooth overrunning of their political affairs. Although the exogenous religions are entrenched in the African people’s identity and minds in the contemporary world, their basis and beginning were to advance colonial interests and to hinder the unity of the people until today. When the oneness in their identity is challenged, they become demarcated along various lines, making it very difficult to arrive at a common voice. In the areas where religious conflicts existed, they continue to challenge the continent to win the 36. Ibid. 37. South African History Online, “Georg Schmidt.”

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war against being the powerhouse of the production of refugees. Clashes of ideas sometimes resulted in controversy and were transformed into enlarged tensions that gave room for displacement and terror. The marginalized indigenous religions and their practitioners were confined to silence or could be forced to embrace a more severe outcome. In situations where they accepted minority status, they became unpredictable in their social reactions when the situations became unbearable. It is difficult to disconnect the different roles of colonialism in the shaping and making of contemporary African society. While these colonial activities set the precedent for the creation of migrant Africans, the persistence of the colonial culture contributed largely to its contemporary relevance.

M u ddl ed Nationa liti e s Civilization had different meanings for Europeans, Arabs, and then their African colonies. Each African nation-state internalized its definition of civilization built along the lines of the nationalist agenda. For this reason, precolonial African nations and their custodians submitted themselves to the struggles or dreams of their nations. Irrespective of their differences in dialect or language in some cases, they celebrated a common identity because they had an appreciable sense of belonging to their communities and nations. Therefore, the differences they had did not bear the marks of ethnic variations. Even when they needed to challenge a common enemy, they struck strategic alliances to combat the overindulging structures that proved notorious and insurmountable. These precolonial Africans were organized into different relatively homogeneous communities and nation-states and had minimal internal tensions. In other words, they had leaders who were genuinely dedicated to the advancement of their people, as seen in the example of the Ashante king. In fact, his case was the norm rather than the exception. A similar nationalist spirit was demonstrated by the historical King Jaja of Opobo, who was unrestrained by the threats and fearful narratives of the colonialists. One of the decisive incidents of this history was the muddling of nationalities by the colonialists, who were deliberate in their unmaking of existing structures built by indigenous Africans, as colonialism was essentially “an ideological formation.”38 The effectiveness of this method is even seen in the appropriation of it by the neocolonialist Africans, though that does not fall within the scope of this chapter. The European distortion of identities and 38. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 15.

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nationalities abounds everywhere in Africa, and one can spot the usefulness of unnatural nationalist boundaries for the enhancement of colonial politics and their easy administration of African politics. All the countries created by the Europeans in Africa were formed without cognizance of their precolonial national boundaries. As such, the new nation-states were rendered potential sites for explosive impacts of insurgencies, reprisal attacks, internal struggles, and conflicts of unimaginable proportions. This was inevitable because the factors of nationhood that were ignored by the European powers were still present. The invaders considered the African continent as a forest reserve where the sport of game hunting was seen as the norm. This misguided thinking informed the treatment that Africans were subjected to when they came in contact with the European imperialists. Conditions like this created the possibility for controversy because people whose natural identity has been clipped bear the bitterness continuously. As colonial boundaries were arbitrarily drawn in faraway Berlin without the participation of a single African, these boundaries disregarded the realities of African social and political organization and inevitably disrupted these ancient indigenous systems. The inherent contradictions and unsuitability of colonialism transformed the African indigenous landscape, producing both altered and radically different social structures and forms of organization.39 After African indigenous nationalities had been disrupted both by design and by carelessness, new identities emerged from the colonial situation to serve the ends of the colonizers—and eventually of the nationalist elites too.40 “Fictional tribes and tribal fictions”41 were the foundation for the formation of many African ethnic groups during the colonial era, groups that were to serve the colonial interests of fragmentation, disarticulation, and reordering for new allegiances to the European master. Thus, contemporary African ethnic groups are neither “natural” nor ancient; they have been found to be relatively recent social formations linked to and constructed by the colonial situation. Additionally, in the precolonial African society, tribal, communal, ethnic, clan, and other identities were relatively fluid, situational, and interlocking, not the rigid classifications that European colonial administrators imposed uniformly across the continent based on their image of a tribal “dark continent.”42 From the 39. Ekeh, Colonialism and Social Structure. 4 0. For a discussion of the constructivist and instrumentalist perspectives on ethnicity, see Campbell, Western Primitivism; Lake and Rothchild, International Spread of Ethnic Conflict. 41. Owolabi, Fictional Tribes and Tribal Fictions. 42. Thomson, Introduction to African Politics; Southall, “Illusion of Tribe”; Ranger, “Invention of Tradition.”

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Maasai and Kikuyu of Kenya to the Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa of colonial RuandaUrundi, ethnic classification and characterization emerged coterminously with colonialism.43 And to be sure, the mere fact of ethnic pluralism, the existence of multiple ethnic groups in the same space, by itself does not create friction, rivalry, or conflict. Rather, it is the struggle for power and resources in a system with skewed and inequitable power-sharing and resource allocation that makes ethnic competition and the consolidation of ethnic boundaries a political necessity.44 To illustrate further, we should consider the case in Nigeria, where different ethnicities and ideologies were merged together by the British rulers, specifically by Lord Lugard in 1914, in the race to carry out the pronouncement made at the Berlin Conference. Europeans were not actually interested in safeguarding or developing the continent, as alleged by many Eurocentric historians and scholars. By cutting off the Chadian Fulani from the country that would later be identified as Nigeria and thereby merging them with different peoples in the culturally and linguistically diverse south of the country, European imperialists laid the foundation for fundamental division and hostility. The Europeans were not unaware of the danger inherent in merging ideologically contrastive entities together, but they ignored this sensitive factor, as their objectives were always less than noble. It was therefore natural that these entities that found themselves under new identities would ceaselessly contest for political power. The answer to any challenge to this argument would be to ask if there is any African country of today with true nationalist spirit—even just one example. None exists. Humans naturally absorb ideas, even subconsciously. Many Nigerian leaders who later emerged in the country’s political system eventually understood the art of ethnic politics as enthroned by the European imperialists, then instrumentalized it, and perfected the system. The eventual creation of states for the first time in Nigeria, in the immediate aftermath of the civil war that occurred between 1966 and 1970, points to this. The blatant disregard of nationalism and pre-European allegiances complicated rather than complemented the efforts of these colonial powers. Different nationalities were brought together indiscriminately, subsumed unethically, and merged disproportionately to produce the geographical result that is called Nigeria today. These multination states were new to the national identity imposed on them by their enslavers or colonizers and therefore faced the challenge of showing loyalty to a country they felt no sense of attachment to. Indeed, many of the “founding fathers” of the new state 4 3. Yacob-Haliso, Ntiwunka, and Iyanda, “Colonial Imprint on Ethnicity.” 4 4. Otite, Ethnic Pluralism.

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at the time expressed their doubt about the actuality of the union, even with the ontological existence of the state. For instance, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, premier of the then Western Region, famously referred to the Nigerian entity as a “mere geographic expression.” A keen observation of the events will also reveal how the economic policies recorded in the country have noticeable ethnic coloration. It is not difficult to see the loyalty of the founding fathers of the country to their ethnic constituencies and how this shaped their politics.45 Another example of the muddled nationalities can be found in the creation of South Sudan and was part of Sudan itself. According to the World Factbook, the ethnic extractions in South Sudan can be represented as “Dinka (Jieng) 35.8%, Nuer (Naath) 15.6%, Shilluk (Chollo), Azande, Bari, Kakwa, Kuku, Murle, Mandari, Didinga, Ndogo, Bviri, Lndi, Anuak, Bongo, Lango, Dungotona, Acholi, Baka, Fertit” (2011 figures).46 These statistics present an overview of the multiple ethnic extractions that were merged together by the European imperialists. The reality that some of these ethnic groups would have been captured wrongly in their new identities reinforces the argument that colonial business was the very foundation for the making of refugees, as Sudan and South Sudan have become the foremost producers of refugees. There are raging problems of internal suspicion among these ethnic groups, especially those considered minorities. For those minority cultural identities that were trapped in the identity of either Sudan or South Sudan, they are bound to feel nostalgia and therefore seek a mutual relationship with those they considered part of their group. Irredentism therefore becomes inevitable, an experience exemplified by the long Sudanese civil wars, the Nigeria-Biafra war and its resurgent bitterness, the constant restiveness in the eastern regions of the DRC, the persistent agitations of the Casamance in Senegal, and so on. The argument that colonial business sets the precedent for the enhancement of fratricidal nation-states rests on the foundation that Europeans were deliberately insensitive to internal factors that were important in determining the success of these new national relationships. When the arrangements that had governed societal management of precolonial people were altered, making the society hostile toward growth and development was practically inevitable. The action of reconstructing African societies by changing their social arrangements and by elevating groups that would consolidate the business of the Europeans was deliberate and predetermined. The events during the colonial period and after pointed to the direction of this conclusion. Groups that hitherto 45. Ikime, In Search of Nigerians. 4 6. CIA, World Factbook.

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had enjoyed solid social relationships began to exhibit their colonial masters’ oppressive tendencies, especially against their immediate neighbors and kith in the newly created states. This immediately and perpetually pitched them against one another and equally enabled the white colonizers to sail smoothly on in achieving their mission. It was therefore imperative that the Hutu and the Tutsi have their relationship reconfigured in the colonial period, and this left a lasting impact on their unity. In the country today known as Rwanda, these kinsmen had a long history of mutual respect and a healthy relationship, as this formed the basis of their political and economic progression. The argument that internal colonization was existent is untenable. They had successfully managed their differences for a long time before new dynamics of colonial politics were introduced. The coming of the West therefore brought an entirely new political and economic trajectory into the polity. Africans had their understanding of money and material possessions redefined to help the West achieve their own agenda. Hutu people who had been perhaps blind to the economic hegemony of their neighbors spontaneously became suspicious and belligerent, now against people with whom they had had a history of good relationships. Aided by the conscious efforts of the Europeans who handed political power to one and disfavored the other, the stage for enduring malice was set by these white collaborators. In fact, the situation of Mali appears interesting too. The population of about twenty million people have thirteen national languages. Theirs is a country that is given to muddled nationalities because of their colonial experience. Even though they were colonized by the French, they still have sizeable numbers of the Berber family, whose language is Tuareg. While the colonizers had created the physical boundaries to make their expansionist business easier, they had, in the process, laid a foundation for the promotion of migration among the people and therefore are not entirely innocent in the crises of forced migration that pervade the area. The disposition to engage in intergroup conflicts is not peculiar to the examples discussed; it shares similarities with what obtains among the Igbo, Hausa, and Yoruba people of Nigeria who found themselves in the imposed nationality of the country. It existed among the Sudanese, leading to its separation into its north and south components. It exists in Burundi, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Mali, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Zimbabwe, and so on. It reverberates through all of Africa.

U r ba n-Ru r a l Inequ iti e s Many African metropolises predated European colonialism, from Ashanti to Timbuktu to Cairo. Nonetheless, colonizers created new economic and

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political capitals as part of their African enterprise. Finding themselves in a culturally and geographically different area, European imperialists needed to create a suitable environment for themselves, a simulation of their own cultural and geographical habitat. This imposition necessitated a change in the way Africans were spatially organized. These new social configurations would provoke new dynamics in relation to how Africans organized themselves. Colonialism brought a new trajectory into the polity of Africans, and this legacy seems to have been sustained. The ways and patterns in which Africans of the contemporary world organize their activities represent the values they inherited from the colonialists. This is unavoidable given the long-standing integration of colonial values into African life. The enduring relationship rendered the African mind almost impotent, for it became an extension of Eurocentrism, shutting out the possibility of appropriating African solutions to African challenges. For the administration of colonial politics, the colonizers found strategic locations from where they would administer their political affairs. These places were then given meticulous attention for rapid social and infrastructural development and transformation. The concentration of these colonizers on building up certain geographical spaces at the expense of others created what is today recognized as urbanization of settlements. For us to put into perspective those areas where colonialists invested much of their attention, we would simplify the activity by first understanding their ecological preference. The Europeans are alien to the hot and tropical conditions found in many African countries. Therefore, places with hot and humid temperatures were considered unsuitable and commanded less of their attention for settlement. This limited their choices to mostly coastal communities along the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, for a few strategic reasons. One, it neutralized the heat, and two, it enabled them to travel back to their countries in the case of emergencies. A third economic reason was that the cities on the coast, which were based on precolonial footholds that facilitated entry and effective occupation, also became the hubs for the evacuation of raw materials from the colonial hinterland to Europe. For their administration of landlocked places such as Zambia and Zimbabwe, Europeans occupied areas that are disposed to cooler weather. By establishing these realities, we can explain what led the European imperialists to engage very intensely in the project of urbanization. In this process, towns were upgraded to cities, and ultramodern cities developed spontaneously and became the cynosure of all eyes. This sudden societal transformation attracted many people from outside these locations. The fact that migrants from rural areas surge into African cities today is connected to this humble beginning. While the colonizers thought that they were creating comfortable settlements for themselves, they were unconsciously mandating the people from remote

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settlements to rethink their existences in those rural spaces. European urban business resulted in the consolidation and migration of African people who were determined to have their own share of the economic boom. The development of urban areas changed the manner of migration as people began to consider the economic benefits of their upward mobility. In Nigeria alone, cities became the melting pot of economic development, and then places such as Lagos, Ibadan, Sokoto, Enugu, Zaria, and Kano increased their populations because of the unprecedented numbers of migrants.47 In southwestern Nigeria, neighbors from Ibadan, Oyo, and Ondo fled their environment for Lagos, the large coastal city. This sudden movement was precipitated by the evidence of economic development and success that inhabitants of these locations could lay claims to. These centers were preferred locations for the colonial administration, and the fact that they were developed differently necessitated the exodus of people into those spaces. Such situations therefore displaced people from their historical environments because their determination to pursue economic prosperity overrode the urge to remain in their ancestral homes. This period coincided with major colonial infrastructural projects that needed additional human labor for their completion. The promise of jobs and economic stability was enough to provoke migration. It is necessary to pause and clarify the considerations in putting forward this particular historical factor in explaining African refugees. While the narrative seems to reference rural to urban migration as a singularly economic migrant activity, the history is more complicated than that and mirrors similarly complicated dynamics in investigations of contemporary migrations, especially from Africa to more developed countries. In reality, it is futile to seek to create neat, mutually exclusive categories of reasons for refugee creation that would clearly disentangle the political refugee from the economic one. The focus of the colonial economy was on cash crops and exploitative extraction. Not enough has been written in other refugee literature about how this dynamic profoundly disarticulated rural economies and markets and, in the widespread use of forced labor and mandatory taxation, produced widespread violence and unrest in some of the famous examples of African resistance to colonialism in places from southeastern Nigeria to northern Mozambique. Given the fluidity of African boundaries and nationalities in precolonial and colonial times, many rural people began to move across these boundaries to cities both far and near to protect themselves from the violence and harsh economic effects of the

47. Ibid.

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merciless colonial economic policies. To the extent that such movements were often not by choice, that they were propelled by a need to access rights and dignity, and that these persons sought to escape a violent colonial state that could not guarantee them these protections, these migrants in the colonial period were in a full sense also refugees, although not recognized as such before now. They often took refuge in cities to maximize the possibility that the legal and social protections available there would replace those lost to the cruel production tactics that had destabilized their traditional societies and rendered their former ways of life unsustainable. Thus, this phenomenon contributed to the refugee problem in Africa in two distinct ways: first, initial migration to cities was of a heterodox nature in terms of destinations and reasons, and it created a new category of refugees; second, the effect of these migrations produced new social dynamics in cities and even rural areas that formed fresh conditions for the emergence of Africa’s contemporary refugees. A couple of cases exemplify the first strand of reasoning. The city of Kano experienced an influx of migrants in search of a better living environment and economic opportunities. An estimated thirty thousand people from neighboring countries who specifically were Tuaregs from Niger Republic moved into Kano between 1914 and 1918, a period when the colonial power undertook extensive urbanization projects.48 This intracontinental migration was activated by the transformation of the society from semi-rural to urban. This transnational movement was not peculiar to Kano. Godwin Ikwuyatum references the nature of migration that happened in the colonial era, asserting that between 1900 and January 1902, approximately 6,500 laborers left Lagos to work on the Sekondi-Tarkwa rail line and in the gold mines of the Gold Coast, where wages were higher than in Lagos. In Dahomey, many of the Nigerian emigrants took to trading after the completion of the railway, while many of them left for Ivory Coast after the World War 1. Many of the emigrants from Nigeria were attracted by evidence of success displayed by returnees; by the belief that wealth was easier to acquire while away from home; and over time, wives or new brides joined their husbands.49

Thus, the secondary migration of people from Nigeria to Ghana was enhanced by the promise of economic stability and personal prosperity. What is characteristic of these examples is that people under the colonial administration were scrambling for livelihoods and economic improvement, 4 8. Abba, “Niger Factor.” 49. Ikwuyatum, “Changing Face of Migration.”

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and the understanding that they would perhaps have access to better financial situations in new destinations was a driver of their ambition. What is constant, however, is that Africans were stuck with mobility as a factor that would determine their economic stability and often their security and safety. The failure to enthrone a system of equitable development drove people to new survival tactics that would reinforce their financial freedom, as it was necessary that they sustain their economic growth in the new environment. It is apparent that this system persists in modern times, but manifests in different dimensions. The creation of refugees in Africa has a relatable beginning, as the activities of the colonialists contributed immensely to the making of these demographics. The urbanization agenda increased, among other things, employment opportunities and the economic buoyancy that propelled the people to transport their agricultural products to the city and created new dynamics in the nature of migration in Africa. Within the same region, as seen in these examples, the urge to attain stronger financial solutions to the problem of colonial impoverishment drove the inhabitants of the new settlements to consider the idea of migrating both locally and transnationally. The eastern part of the continent witnessed similar experiences of internal migration during the colonial period. The territory of Kenya came under British ownership in 1920. They chose Nairobi as the place that they decided to transform to their colonial taste. Thus, Kenyans who had survived for years in their rural areas began a mass exodus to the new environment because they were scavenging for jobs. The situation was similar to the patterns of people that migrated to Kano, Lagos and other areas that the Europeans developed during the colonial period. Rural-urban migration to Nairobi became more pronounced as the city promised opportunities for labor and modernity. Such inequity in the development of African societies by the colonialists was a solid motivation for migration. Nairobi attracted individuals from across Kenyan territory and beyond.50 There was the assumption that migrating from their local environment into the city would provide a better life. What is primary to this form of migration is that development attached to the city played a major role. In Zimbabwe, a similar record of urban transformation is attributable to the European colonialists. Cities such as Fort Salisbury (Harare), Bulawayo, Umtali (Mutare), and Fort Victoria (Masvingo) were established and developed in ways that again changed the course of African migration history. Even though migration would later take a different dimension when the colonizers 50. Adepoju, “South-North Migration.”

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ended their political control of these colonies, their actions provided the background for the creation of the refugees whose narratives have heretofore been configured to satisfy racist opinions. Concentration on only some parts of the country meant that the political, social, and economic progression of the place was centered on those parts. Among other things, the city life demanded products of the rural life for survival; therefore, those who were engaged in farming or other agricultural activities had reasons to explore the cities after the transportation of their goods. Invariably, others were compelled to accept city life as their new developmental necessity. From whatever angle this is viewed, this experience led to massive migration and displacements of people, Africans, from rural settlements to the city. This, however, provoked an interesting revelation about urban inequities that emerged, the second refugee-producing strand in this discussion. The culture of rural-urban inequities came with devastating consequences for the newly developed settlements. The materials of development put in place by the colonialists were meant to serve a specific population and interest, which would serve the society and the inhabitants alone. The increase in the populations of these cities had negative effects of unimaginable severity. The influx of people into the urban settlements thus led to another parameter for internal displacement and conflicts. For example, the mass exodus of people from Kano environs to the city became a potential threat to the peace of the city. Two major things are bound to happen in cities when they experience a population surge of this magnitude: first, overpopulation, and second, an increase in social vices as a result of limited employment opportunities and lost traditional mores and norms. The project of urbanization came with unbearable cost when sustainable plans were not consolidated or executed. Since these cities became the cynosure of all eyes, people from different geographical backgrounds trudged in with the hope of getting paying jobs that could sustain their families. When these goals were not met, it created unstable conditions ripe for making refugees or displaced persons. During this time, there were no stringent regulations to check the influx of people from different geographical territories into the cities. This partly explains why it was easy for the Tuaregs to move from the northern part of the continent to Kano (and other emerging northern cities). In situations where their targets were unmet, the incoming population became increasingly difficult to manage or became threatening to the entire population. It was the statutory duty of the government to provide safety for the citizens, but the limited resources became insufficient to cater for the masses of people. The migrants therefore continued in their search for greener pastures when

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their goals were not realizable in the cities. Those who migrated from Nigeria to Ghana during the agricultural boom in the country would find alternative means to survive when economic situations were becoming unbearable. Humans struggling for survival often defy moral standards in precarious situations and therefore are liable to undertake morally reprehensible routes for their continued existence. There is always a correlation between the influx of people into the city and the increase in social vices. The people who were living decently and desired to increase their chances of a better living found themselves in the urban environment becoming of no financial significance to themselves or society. Therefore, the phenomena of homeless people and urban street crime sprang up amid other decadence that could threaten the peaceful condition of the environment. The peace of the urban becomes unstable and provokes additional displacement of those who are vulnerable to the emerging trends. Unmet expectations of the migrants who fled their homes for better working conditions were another driver of migration that researchers tend to overlook. This is related to the reality that Africa is conceived as incapable of organizing the political activities of its countries, and its people are therefore seen as largely displaced in the contemporary world. By not acknowledging the roles that the foundation of the colonialists has played, researchers ignore important factors in the making of refugees.

Coloni a l A dm inistr ati v e S yste ms One condition that is closely linked to urbanization is the administrative systems that were introduced by the colonialists. Colonizers believed that Africans were incapable of organizing themselves into political entities or conducting their internal affairs accordingly. While scholars have faulted this assumption, it enshrined colonial governance systems into the politics of African countries. It is therefore important that the world, especially Africans, understand the relationship between colonial administration and the contemporary migrant situations, because it contextualizes the challenges facing the continent and how to proffer solutions to them. In most of the precolonial African political systems, there was a strong political culture and structure that allowed for checks and balances as a way to control the activities of the rulers and the ruled in order to prevent the society from plunging into anomie. Regrettably, the imposition of the European systems undermined these structures and dislodged them for good. Each colonial power—that is, the British, French, Portuguese, Germans, Italians, Spanish, and Belgians—had unique political views and philosophies

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that they introduced to their colonies, not minding preexisting political structures. Although these expansionist principles varied in nomenclature, they achieved similar results. The British imperialists introduced indirect rule, the Portuguese and French imposed a policy of assimilation and direct rule, the Dutch used segregation, and the Germans imposed settler colonialism.51 All these were meant to ambiguate African political structures and invalidate their essence. The colonialists were introducing a legacy that would not only enhance the achievement of their agenda but also consolidate that agenda after the termination of the colonial relationship and its attendant imperial capitalist business in Africa. In all these places where these patterns of administration were introduced, the people felt the devastating influence, and this prepared the ground for displacement and conflicts. As we argue time and again in this book, the beginning of a challenge is traceable, and the result of an investment cannot be disconnected from the efforts and plans that birthed it. Africa’s current challenge of displacement can also be traced to the European imperialists in the type of administration they introduced. The proponents of indirect rule sought to administer the politics of their colonies through existing representatives. Therefore, the conferment of political authority on members of the society who were heretofore unknown or not qualified to occupy the appointed political roles changed the political structure of Africa negatively. These newly appointed figures discharged their statutory assignment with emotions rather than fairness. Their previous marginalization by the existing social structures provoked hard feelings and made them extremely committed to the white man’s cause, and not that of the communities they came from. In places where the policy of assimilation was introduced too, the colonial power was formidable. Their influence was total. African leaders were compelled to internalize colonial politics and values and use them to govern their colonies. The gruesome effect of this system was culturally numbing. The success of such policies depended on a number of factors, chief of which was the adoption of colonial language, culture, and religion for the enhancement of their domineering agenda. All these introduced structures had significant effects on the people generally, because they transformed the existing systems and structures for those Europeans to rule. It is important, however, to understand the political systems available in Africa prior to colonization. Many African precolonial nation-states employed good political systems that enthroned the culture of checks and balances for the purpose of clarity, accountable, and purposeful leadership. Governing a 51. Nigerian Scholars, “Policy of Association.”

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people requires an appropriate political philosophy; otherwise, the complexity of human nature would outweigh the burden of leadership. It would therefore be wrong to conclude that precolonial Africa was devoid of remarkable political philosophy given its many years of internal tranquility and social evolution. The crux of this argument is that the nexus between the organization of this period and the relative success stability from it cannot be ignored. Political administration of the precolonial society was culturally and socially beneficial to the people to the extent that their individual essence was valued. Their policing system was highly effectual. The justice system was aimed at providing equitable justice and peaceful coexistence of the people. The social network was governed by strong social norms, values, and policies that were inclusive and progress inclined. In other words, all aspects of the precolonial African social structure were interwoven with one another and clinically managed. Precolonial African societies neither understood nor spoke the languages of these European imperialists, which means that they needed to understand these languages before any successful transaction could emerge. Therefore, some indigenes were trained to serve as the link to the people, either as interpreters or as law enforcers. This started the process of institutionalizing the oppressive regime or representatives into the polity of Africans. Those who were selected by the Europeans considered it an opportunity to improve their social status and undertake actions that would satisfy their parochial agenda. Many of these local intermediaries had no cultural or political authority in the previous arrangement of the society and in one way or another had been isolated by the traditional systems. In places where the existing people in authority were to consolidate the business of the Europeans, colonialism, the consequence was that loyalty was forced by these colonialists as they used different methods to frustrate African leaders that showed resistance to their rule. Among other things, they deposed kings, as seen in the example of King Asante of Ghana, and exiled leaders committed to African causes—namely, King Jaja of Opobo, among others. As expected, one of the consequences was the installation of otherwise weak people to positions of power. These were people who lacked the cultural understanding of their society and the political principles of their environment and who were too mentally weak to provide intellectual judgment or evaluation of their society. In other words, they had a warped definition of progress as conceived by the leaders who were before then piloting the affairs of the different nation-states. In every society of the world, the conception of progress is the primary preserve of the leaders, who understand what they intend to mold out of their given society. These leaders are often at various levels, including

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councils and committees who debate and formulate ideas and policies for the common progress of society. If people without this training, background, and legitimacy, and who do not share the visions for the progress of society, are suddenly given the opportunity to rule their countries or represent them in positions of leadership, they are bound to produce the kind of abysmal governance records commonly found in African countries in the present. In such cases, their own conception of development runs counter to their forebears’ vision, where all the parts of society were adequately catered for, and not just a select few. The centralization of power today is an allusion to the colonial legacy, where power was concentrated in the colonial administration so that they could have easy and near-total control of their colonies. This introduced a paradigmatic shift from the previous order. A single leader was chosen to oversee the affairs of larger social components, against their capacity or their willpower. Before this time, settlements had been ruled by collectively chosen leaders and by collectives whose power was not extended beyond the geographical space or regulated by other groups. The new governance structures precluded checks and balances and again forestalled the probability of accountability. There were instances when interpreters or proxy governments heightened demands made by the colonialists for their own personal agenda. It was not possible to hold them accountable because they were answerable only to their European collaborators. Even if the colonial powers were interested in transparency, they lacked the human resources to enforce discipline on their representatives. They therefore could not risk their stooges turning against them, as they also did not have the tenacity to retrain other sets of individuals who would serve as intermediaries between them and their colonies. The reinforcement of authoritarian representatives gave platforms for the enthronement of force and coercion in the wake of independence. The restoration of precolonial systems continues to be difficult because successive African political administration structures were built on the inherited legacy of authoritarianism. It is therefore hard to separate these obvious philosophical disparities between the old and the new order, and this again contributes to the mountainous challenge of migration and refugee creation that engulfs the continent. In the case of the southern and northern protectorates in Nigeria before its amalgamation in 1914, these two political entities had distinct structures with which they managed their affairs. Characteristic of colonies where indirect rule was used, two options were presented for the African leaders who were approached by the colonialists: they would either accept the colonialists’ offers or be deposed through active connivance of willing collaborators. Most

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embraced the former option, as that would help them consolidate the authority they commanded over the territory and in the process increase their influence. Others who felt uncomfortable with this arrangement, such as the kings referenced above, were forced to abdicate their titles, or killed. In a more relatable way, the South African experience of imperialism reveals the influence of the administrative strategy on Africans. South Africa experienced parallel government, where the political design for the white settlers was ideologically different from that produced for Black people. This country had parallel legal and political systems that were carved from racial prejudices of the colonialists. This meant that the European imperialists were governed by their established laws, while their colonized subjects were subjected to a more dehumanizing structure. Even when bound by a necessity to recognize local rulers as their proxy representatives, the British imperialists dictated the activities of these leaders through their white magistrates chosen exclusively by them. In essence, indirect rule was poisonous to the growth of the African people, and it broadly inhibited them from reaching their full capacity for development. There was no doubt that the annexation of structure provided the opportunity for the promulgation of European imperialist cultures, which would overshadow African structures and undermine their identity. It was taken to the extreme in South Africa, but there were instances of similar prejudices in other African countries where indirect rule was applied. The occupation of West African countries by France offers another impression about colonial foundations for migration and refugee creation. The French, unlike the British, imposed a policy of assimilation, which came with a system of compulsory eradication of indigenous cultures. The obliteration of African values was intended to enthrone French cultural and political principles and philosophies that would consolidate the business of colonization and speedily enhance it. The French, just like every other colonial power, believed that Africans were barbaric and their cultures primitive and saw themselves on a civilizing mission. They demonstrated this arrogance not only in attitudes but also by making derogatory references to African practices. If Africans were truly primitive, it justified their colonization and validated their erroneous opinions. Hence, they projected the narrative that Africans were ideologically weak and susceptible to failure. The prescribed solution for this was to efface their beliefs, practices, and customs and then install French practices. In Senegal, for example, where the policy was effectively administered, colonizers imposed the adoption of the French language and culture for the enhancement of their own agenda. The system laid the foundation for the abuse of office because of the concentration of power at the center. The European rulers reigned supreme.

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The effect of this across French West Africa was the introduction of internal ruptures and conflict that led to mass displacement in later years. History reveals how complex methods were introduced by these colonialists. When people showed resistance, they simply amended these institutional structures again to consolidate their gains, not to enhance the progress of the African people. It was on this note that the French employed the policies of both assimilation and association. The former was introduced at the inception of colonial rule, while the latter was installed when the former was proving ambiguous. However, similar focus ran through the two systems. The policy of association was to create an impression that the agency of Africa was going to be recognized in the developmental project of the continent. The structures eventually put in place, however, faulted this assumption. There is proof that their shortchanged policy aimed at the same goal. The French supported active collaborators by providing them the authority needed to sustain their legacies. This way, colonial power installed chiefs through which they ruled authoritatively. The system enabled them to bypass the legitimate administrators who were versed in the native culture and system of governance. As such, customary laws were eliminated for the creation of advisory councils that were tasked with assisting European imperialists’ domination by proxy. These practices bequeathed very unstable modern-day politics in the former French colonies, from Guinea to Mali to Togo, producing waves of forced migrants daily. In these and many other ways, colonial administration set the stage for the creation of refugees in postcolonial Africa.

Conclusion This chapter has argued that forced migration and the creation of refugees has roots in European colonialism and its ideology of hegemonic imperialism. The legacy of European ideologies precipitated the refugee situations of today and reveals the connection between poor beginnings and modern realities of the African people. Indeed, Newton’s third law of motion can be invoked here: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Precolonial Africa was generally peaceful, calm, and organized, contrary to what Western historians would have us believe. The current condition of constant displacement was triggered by the capitalist exploration of the continent by European empires. For the enhancement of their colonial agenda, it was necessary and expedient to partition Africa into different nation-states so that they would encounter minimal challenges in ruling over their affairs. Thus, the strategy of divide and

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conquer became operational because of the assurance of its potency in aiding the expansionist assignment. The colonial economy provided a basis for the instigation of refugee struggles in Africa. The colonialists had come with the intention of making economic prosperity in Africa solely for themselves. They needed to create an economic base on the continent that would enhance the success of their agenda. African lands were rich and capable of meeting their expectations; moreover, they contained massive natural resources, which were the targets of the colonialists. Therefore, it was inevitable that they encouraged locals to engage in farming for their basic agricultural products as cash crops. Africans who otherwise had engaged in various subsistence farming activities suddenly saw a need to concentrate on growing those products that were in high demand by the Europeans. This trend continued unchallenged and institutionalized the colonial economy. This became a significant point in the history of African internal development because attention was fixated on the supply of the goods needed by the colonialists, which meant that all the other aspects of their existence were abandoned or poorly managed thereafter. This economic strategy produced lasting social, economic, and political disarticulations. It is important to state unequivocally that all the activities of the colonialists, including those that served as the prelude to full-blown colonialism such as missionary activities, were related and served the same interest. The missionaries were seemingly the research wings of colonialism in their provision of useful information that would guide the conduct of the colonial business. The slave traders were the mind engineers who needed to reduce the minds of Africans to debasement in preparation for another round of human desecration that was realized in colonialism. Formidable relationships existed between European religions and colonization because they were founded on the same structure that Africans did not have religions and were too mentally weak to organize themselves. The introduction of the European religions, including those brought from other countries, created another basis for migration. African minds were displaced and abused severely, a fact that initially necessitated psychological migration and morphed into the subsequent physical movements. Having religions that were insensitive to their indigenous sense of spirituality set up the probability for conflict, and the enforcement of their own religions became another potent reason for division. Many converts were persuaded to distance themselves from their indigenous values, and this again formed a basis for social conflict and refugee creation. Colonizers created muddled nationalities for Africans in their bid to divide them. This tactic was devastating. In forcing artificial boundaries on their

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colonies, the European imperialists were unconcerned by factors of homogeneity, which would enhance relative peace even if their creation of nationalities was inevitable. For the enhancement of their domineering agenda, confusion of unimaginable proportion must be set in motion on the continent. Therefore, people of similar linguistic identity were disjointed and entirely disconnected from their linguistic family tree, and this created minorities whose voices were meant to be repressed. As a result, people were left to accept new identities, regardless of the consequences it had on their mental health, economic development, and social interactions with others. This action would eventually generate a wave of irredentist protest and separatist wars. People who were trapped in the new nation-states, to which they felt they did not belong, became very distant from the overall activities of their new environment. It was uncontrollably difficult for them to be persuaded to accept the new structure and system, and this created a severe problem for them and the new environment. Today, there are people who belong to a particular political identity but are disconnected in every sense from it. In addition to this, the colonial powers ensured that they institutionalized uneven development that saw to the sudden and uneven increase in urbanization. This sudden development meant that economic activities would be concentrated in particular environments. Accordingly, it marked another beginning for the business of migration because interests were generated from rural dwellers who were convinced of economic prosperity in the city, although this would again create another round of challenges for city life as overpopulation became a problem for human survival. Hence, moral decadence and social vices peaked concurrently. The promise of economic stability in the city led to the mass exodus from the rural life to the city center. This is seen in the exodus of people into cities such as Lagos in Nigeria, Accra in Ghana, and Nairobi in Kenya, all in the colonial period. The problem of migration is particularly compounded by the form of political administration introduced by the colonialists. African affairs were previously run modestly with a great level of transparency, accountability, and justice in their precolonial environment. However, the restoration of this order remains difficult because the nature of political philosophy brought by the Europeans was not contextually fitting for the affairs of the continent. The fact is that the colonial input cannot be disconnected from the contemporary situation in Africa. Their activities shaped the realities that have engulfed the continent today. Their involvement has necessitated that Africans react and find appropriate means of survival and has made migration unavoidable, either intracontinentally or transcontinentally. The human mind

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is primarily concerned with survival, and the process of it is a secondary decision that is largely dependent on factors around its instincts to survive. Africans found themselves in this condition because European imperialists laid the foundations for conflict, human rights abuses, and impoverishment, and thus, their forced migration is precipitated by the historical experience of colonialism.

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POSTCOLONIAL POLITICS, WARS, AND AFRICAN REFUGEE PROBLEMS

Introduction As a consequence of the anticolonial struggles of African nationalists, which accelerated in the wake of the 1950s, most African countries gained independence from their colonizers between the late 1950s and the 1960s. These nationalist heroes, in cases like Ghana and Nigeria, were very strategic in avoiding war with the European imperialists because the nature of colonial administration facilitated negotiation, and they also understood that taking violent routes to freedom could prolong the process. In some other areas, however, especially the settler colonies, the situation was starkly different, and there was no choice but an armed struggle for liberation. By the 1960s, Africa was in another phase of history where the actions of its emergent political leaders would define the steps toward development. And still, years after independence, the activities of the colonialists continued to threaten and impede African growth. Challenges surfaced that dragged the continent backward and fueled the erroneous opinion in certain Western circles that African countries were not philosophically mature enough to handle their political affairs. This narrative was popular partly because of the lack of research that could inform Africans about the connection between the past colonial activities and the current realities of their societies. It was not generally understood that pillaging the commonwealth of any society, repressing the people’s voices and freedom for centuries (including the period of the European slave trade), denying them the opportunity to contribute to issues of development concerning the continent, or absolutely refusing to see Africans as partners in nation-building processes had destructive effects on the people and their systems generally,

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and that was the reality that postindependence or postcolonial Africa faced. However, connecting the reality of the continent to the history of colonialism on the continent is not an effort to continue the blame game by the victims of colonization; rather, it is an attempt to establish the relationship that is intertwined with actions of the colonizers and the colonized and the eventual results generated. The experience of colonization built the foundation of contemporary African realities, especially the ones that generated the creation of refugees. Politics in postcolonial Africa has been characterized by wars, repression, feudalism, and authoritarianism, all of which have impeded the progress of nations. Africa has experienced a troubled postindependence because of the alien political systems inherited from the colonizers that were not only antagonistic to growth generally but also capable of derailing development for the people. In other words, wars and strife that pervaded the postindependence period disrupted and distracted people from their own developmental trajectories. This bears a relationship with this study because it reveals colonization as the connection that brought about the turbulence, wars, and strife that led to refugee politics. In recent African history, the surge in the number of refugees points to the negative consequences of the unwholesome and directionless leadership that survived the colonialists. In recent decades, Africa has witnessed an unprecedented increase in the number of refugees and displaced persons,1 and this again confirms our assertion that refugees and population displacements within the continent relay important information about the nature of African postcolonial leadership.

Wa r s From the emergence of Africa’s unending refugee crises in the middle of the last century to the current period, wars and political instability have been the foremost immediate cause of ballooning refugee populations across the continent. The creation of modern nation-states from the remnants of colonial states was a process accompanied by violence in many parts of the continent. Most authors are agreed that the beginning of Africa’s refugee situation in the modern era is traceable to the anticolonial wars and wars of liberation, beginning with refugees from the Algerian War of Independence and continuing with those created by anticolonial movements against settler colonialists in eastern and Southern Africa, up to the more protracted struggles of people in Portuguese colonies 1. Black, “Fifty Years of Refugee Studies”; Onoma, Anti-refugee Violence; Boano, Zetter, and Morris, “Environmentally Displaced People.”

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Table 7.1. Taxonomy of generations of African conflicts, 1950s–2010s Generation Type First

Second

Subtype

Liberation and Wars for decolonization wars decolonization from European powers

Postindependence and wars of state failure

Wars of resistance to African colonial powers Wars of failed independence

Separatist and secessionist wars

Third

Post-1989 conflicts and proliferation of civil wars

Examples Algerian war, 1954–1962; Kenya’s MauMau war, 1952–1960; Guinea-Bissau, 1963–1974; Angola, 1961–1974; Mozambique, 1964–1975 Western Sahara / Morocco, 1970–present; Eritrea/ Ethiopia, 1961–1991; Namibia, 1966–1990 Angola, 1975–2002; Chad, 1966–2002; Democratic Republic of the Congo, 1960–1965 Biafra/Nigeria, 1967–1970; Sudan / South Sudan, 1983–2005; Ethiopia/ Eritrea, 1961–1991 Uganda, 1973–1986

“Reform” insurgencies Wars of sundry Liberia, 1989–2003; South objectives Sudan, 2011–present

Source: Adapted and updated from Yacob-Haliso and Iyanda, “Pentecostals, Conflict and Peace.”

and the even longer struggle against the apartheid government in Southern Africa. As political independence was achieved across the continent, the artificial states began to give way under the tremendous burdens of governance, creating another set of problems, including wars of secession and state collapse. Table 7.1 summarizes the nature and categories of war in postcolonial Africa that are covered in this exploration of war and displacement on the continent.2 2. Yacob-Haliso and Iyanda, “Pentecostals, Conflict and Peace.” The table partially draws on the categorization in Young, Postcolonial State; and Reno, Warfare in Independent Africa. An excellent resource for understanding the broad and specific context, causes, and courses of the wars discussed in this chapter is the three-volume text by Stapleton, Military History of Africa.

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In using this typology of war as a template for mapping refugee creation trends on the continent, it is important to note that these types and episodes of war do not represent mutually exclusive causes of refugee situations. In other words, these different kinds and periods of conflict often overlapped and intertwined in the colonial and postcolonial history of African refugee production. The nature of anticolonial resistance often determined conditions in the period immediately following independence, as was evident in the former Portuguese colonies such as Angola, to mention one of the most obvious examples of such a continuity. Additionally, as discussed above, external forces and international politics remained just as potent causes of refugee flows in the postcolonial period as in the colonial period, the latter already explicated in the preceding chapter.3 The independence of African nations, occurring as it did in the politically charged environment of the Cold War, did not cease the implication of external forces in creating the immediate conditions forcing massive human displacement; if anything, independence intensified this involvement across all of the continent. This chapter interrogates the political roots of Africa’s refugee problems by first turning to the beginnings of struggles for independence. Anticolonial Struggles and Wars of National Liberation

European imperialism spurred people to resist the draconian systems of administration imposed on them in their bid to attain independence. In existing studies on refugees in Africa, the era of anticolonial struggles and wars of national liberation is flagged as the first major epoch in the continent’s recent history of refugees, as large numbers of people were displaced in the nascent states emerging from colonial domination. According to Aderanti Adepoju, by the 1970s, 57 percent of an estimated one million African refugees emanated from the Portuguese colonies of Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique, which were embroiled in long wars of independence.4 Since the beginning of colonialism, European expansionism reached its peak with the intention of the invaders to control everything that is associated with African lifestyles, natural resources, human resources, and culture, among other things. However, African people understood the inherent damages of colonization, and they decided to resist external domination of their territories. The continent, apart from the warring exchanges of the period that began in the wake of colonization, countered European imperialists right from the beginning of the twentieth

3 . See for example, Gibney, “US Foreign Policy.” 4. Adepoju, “Dimension of the Refugee Problem,” 22.

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century through to the 1950s and 1960s, the period of independence for many African states. The Algerian War of Independence is significant in any study of refugees in Africa because it saw for the first time the extension of the novel European postwar refugee regime to a non-European context.5 Within the highly charged political context of the Cold War and of decolonization, the armed struggle against French colonialism in Algeria began in earnest in November 1954, and the human toll on both sides of the war was devastating. French official sources indicate that more than two million Algerians were held in “regroupment camps,” described by the resistance as no better than concentration camps, and over three hundred thousand Algerians became refugees in neighboring Tunisia and Morocco.6 Of these refugees, 75 percent were women, children, and the elderly.7 Since these newly independent refugee host-nations themselves lacked the capacity to provide assistance for the refugees, Tunisia appealed to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in May 1957 to come to the aid of the Algerian refugees. This created difficulties arising from the political nature of the war that produced the refugees as well as from the extremely restrictive legal and institutional framework for refugee protection of the time. To understand the politics of the time and the restrictive refugee frameworks, several facts are pertinent. It must be noted that France, a permanent member of the UN Security Council, was adamant that the Algerian war was an internal affair that did not require external interference. This put other major powers in the United Nations and the UNHCR in a difficult position, as they could not explicitly authorize humanitarian action without seeming to publicly rebuke France. There was also the vital fact that both the 1951 UN Refugee Convention and the 1950 Statute of the UNHCR did not extend protection to refugees outside Europe or to situations outside Europe occurring before the Convention. It was essentially a European convention designed to deal with the problems of post-War Europe. Furthermore, even if the UN Refugee Convention were to be borrowed for this case, these refugees could not be individually screened to ascertain their eligibility for refugee status on the basis of persecution by the state, as they had arrived in large groups. As such, their claim to refugee status could not be conventionally determined. Additionally, national wars of liberation, or any wars for that matter, were not directly 5. Ruthström-Ruin, Beyond Europe; Loescher, UNHCR and World Politics. 6. Kellou, “Independence for Algeria.” 7. UNHCR, “UNHCR Archive Gallery.”

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recognized under the extant regime as primary reasons for granting asylum to fleeing people. The UN Convention, which was a product of Western consensus mainly, could not have contained at the same time any recognition of events, such as anticolonial wars, that would overthrow Western power in the colonies. Moreover, the UNHCR at this time was severely limited operationally in resources and staff. The agency did not have any staff from Africa or Asia, nor offices or operational partners in Africa, and as such, did not have the expertise or experience to deal with the Algerian refugee crisis.8 What the UNHCR had, though, was the ambition of the high commissioner of the time, Auguste Lindt, to expand the functions and reach of the organization, and under him, the organization’s determination to enlarge and universalize the scope of the refugee regime created by its Statute and the 1951 Convention and make it a global regime. Thus, the UNHCR eventually came to be involved in providing assistance and protection to the Algerian refugees in Tunisia by insisting on the purely humanitarian and social character of the intervention, partnering with the League of Red Cross Societies (which was working in the country), and avoiding direct or public contradictions of the French position while relying on the tacit support of France’s allies, mainly Great Britain and the United States. The first United Nations General Assembly Resolution on Algerian Refugees came in December 1958, in response to, this time, Morocco’s request for UNHCR assistance for Algerian refugees on her territory. This provided a formal opportunity for the organization to approve the Tunisian operation that was already underway without official UN recognition.9 Another compelling instance of anticolonial struggle that precipitated a refugee crisis can be found in Tunisia’s struggle for independence. The French had wanted to consolidate their control of the colony and therefore ensured that efforts of nationalists toward the process of freedom were systematically and diplomatically frustrated. Tunisia’s history of anticolonialism began decades before its final materialization in the 1950s with the transition of their nationalist movement from Destour in 1920 to Neo-Destour in 1934 with the installation of a new leader, Habib Bourguiba.10 Bourguiba, alongside his group, became a potential threat to the continuation of French domination of the country. Therefore, he became the target of harsh treatment from the colonialists in an effort to minimize his influence on the Tunisian agenda for freedom. Having 8 . Elie and Hanhimäki, “UNHCR and Decolonization.” 9. Elie and Hanhimäki, “UNHCR and Decolonization”; Loescher, UNHCR and World Politics; Ruthström-Ruin, Beyond Europe. 10. Britannica, “Protectorate (1881–1956).”

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spent a considerable number of years imprisoned by the colonialists, he was then exiled to France. During his brief absence from the struggles for independence in the country, another global event brought a more urgent distraction from the independence struggle. France, being one of the European countries enmeshed in the Second World War, was incapable of providing safety for their inmates, and that necessitated the transfer of Bourguiba to Rome by the French regime. Eventually, he found his way back to Tunisia in the postwar events and almost immediately began the plot to end French colonial rule in his country. The consequences of Bourguiba’s return were felt in the increased motivation and fighting spirit that came to those fighting for Tunisia’s independence. The enforced relationship between France and Tunisia produced some aggressive threats that materialized in the bombing of some parts of the country. The “French bombing raid on the Tunisian village of Sakiet Sidi Youssef (Sāqiyat Sīdī Yūsuf) in 1958, during which France claimed the right to pursue Algerian rebels across the border,”11 created a very difficult political situation for the people because it left the victims no option but migration and displacement. Thus, this anticolonial struggle is related to the increase of refugees because the process was replete with civil unrest and protests, producing internally displaced persons (IDPs) and refugees. A similar situation erupted in Guinea-Bissau in the prelude to its independence. It was the nightmare of every colonial power to witness the rising influence of African nationalists who organized their people for independence, and the Portuguese in particular held on more tightly to their African colonies long after the British and the French had relinquished colonial government in most places. The situation of Portuguese imperialists was different in character and ideology. Despite the transition toward independence in colonies controlled by the British, French, and Germans, the Portuguese were not persuaded. They suppressed agitation in their colonies as they believed that Africans were unprepared for independence. At the time, Portugal was a relatively small, economically and politically weak European power with grandiose visions of its imperial importance in world affairs. In particular, the dictatorial and fascist government of Antonio de Oliveira Salazar (succeeded and maintained by Marcello Caetano) “subscribed to a tripartite policy of colonialism, authoritarianism, and nationalism” and considered its colonial holdings an important factor in national revival at a time that the transcontinental, centuries-old Portuguese influence had significantly declined.12 As such, the Salazar regime 11. Ibid. 12. Henriksen, “Portugal in Africa,” 409.

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declared its African territories an extension of the metropole and not colonies. By this doctrine, Portugal was not an “empire” but a “pluricontinental nation,” and the African territories were considered “overseas provinces” of Portugal, a claim that the United Nations rejected.13 This doctrine of “lusotropicalism” resulted in the inability of Portugal to envision a future without its African territories; it therefore stubbornly held on till it became completely untenable to do so.14 Guinea-Bissau had been under the control of the Portuguese, whose occupation of African territories had contributed to the depletion of the latter’s economy. The emergence of the liberation struggle led by Amílcar Cabral in 1956 was a threat to the continuous occupation of the country by the Portuguese imperialists, who sought to show that they would consolidate their possession of the country through whatever means that promised to benefit them. The nationalists organized themselves into a political voice and tagged their union the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde, PAIGC), and their mandate initially was to achieve independence through peaceful protests.15 However, this was considered an affront by the colonial power, and they responded aggressively to the African nationalists, ultimately resulting in a more radical independence movement.16 In response to the PAIGC’s first major action, which was a labor strike by dockworkers in August 1959, the Portuguese colonialists unleashed violence that resulted in the deaths of at least fifty Guineans in what became known as the Pijiguiti massacre. In turn, the PAIGC reconsidered its intentions for peaceful negotiation of a transition to self-rule and prepared for armed revolution. The liberation war in Guinea-Bissau, which lasted for about eleven and a half years (1963–1974), was ably led by the PAIGC guerillas, who received logistic and other support from neighboring countries, especially Guinea-Conakry and Senegal, as well as Cuba and the Soviet Union. In the heat of the war, many Guineans took refuge in neighboring countries to escape the violence. The PAIGC unilaterally declared independence from Portugal in 1973. With the successful overthrow of the Salazar-Caetano Estado Novo (“new state”) regime in Portugal during the so-called Carnation Revolution spurred by the Lisbon coup of April 25, 1974, Portugal’s new government recognized the independence 1 3. MacQueen, “Belated Decolonization and UN Politics.” 14. MacQueen, “Portuguese Colonial Rule.” 15. Penney, “Guinea-Bissau.” 16. Ibid.

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of Guinea-Bissau in 1974. Fatefully, the Portuguese colonialists had adopted a policy of Africanization of its military forces, which saw a massive recruitment of Guineans that ultimately overshadowed the number of actual Portuguese in the fighting forces. The unfortunate post-independence implication of this was the divisions that this created in the new nation between the PAIGC and its supporters on one hand, and thousands of their fellow nationals who had fought on the side of the Portuguese, on the other. Thousands of these Guinean fighters were reportedly executed by the PAIGC in the years immediately following independence, causing fear, more displacement, and refugees.17 The first of three “waves”18 of Angolan refugees was the direct result of its war of independence against the Portuguese, referred to in Angola as the Armed Struggle of National Liberation (Luta Armada de Libertação Nacional).19 The Portuguese relationship with Angola spanned centuries, and their political activities in this country also share similar characteristics with other colonies they controlled. Portugal officially converted their slave-trade-based master-subordinate relationship from the nineteenth century onward into a colonial-imperial relationship in which the colonizers controlled the political affairs of their colonies. In what would be seen manifesting in radical resistance from the Angolans, the forceful suppression of their nationalist fighters set the structure in motion.20 The counterinsurgency war fought by Portugal in Angola was even more important to the metropole than those of its other African colonies because Angola was the richest of these colonies and because Angola had “the deepest symbolic significance for Portugal’s imperial identity.”21 In colonial Angola, there arose different resistance groups that began the anticolonial struggles in the late 1950s and the early 1960s, including the Marxist People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola [MPLA]), led by Agostinho Neto; the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (Frente Nacional de Libertação de Angola [FNLA]), formerly known as the United Peoples of Angola (Uniao das Populacões de Angola [UPA]), led by Holden Roberto; and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola [UNITA]), led by Jonas Savimbi.22 As in many other African countries, 1 7. Ibid. 18. Schultheis, “Refugees in Africa.” 19. Jornal de Angola, “11 de Novembro.” 2 0. Heywood, “Angola and the Violent.” 21. Minter, Apartheid’s Contras, 12. 22. Toft, Securing the Peace.

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these nationalist liberation movements had clear ethnic affiliations, which consequently affected the dispersal and settlement of refugees. The Angolan liberation movements began their attacks against the colonialists with three events, mostly planned differently by the different groups. The first was the uprising against the forced cultivation of cotton in 1961 in the region of Baixa de Cassange; the second, attacks on Portuguese installations in Luanda; and the third, the brutal uprising in the north spearheaded by the mostly Bakongo UPA.23 These marked the beginning of a long period of conflict that led to mass displacement of people. Portuguese soldiers brutally retaliated against the nationalists and became more brutal as time passed. The different factions in the war also unleashed varying levels of violence against civilians24 that kept the population starved, impoverished, sick, and forcibly displaced, not only during the war of independence but into the long civil war that continued after independence. By one estimate, more than three hundred thousand Angolans became refugees between 1950 and 1978,25 and others enumerate up to four hundred thousand Angolan refugees residing in Zaire alone by the end of the war in 1974.26 Indeed, most Angolan refugees were displaced in rural areas of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo [DRC]) and Zambia, often settling among ethnic kin in areas contiguous to Angola, thereby making it more difficult to correctly estimate the actual number of displaced. Additionally, many of the refugees were actually part of the fighting forces or joined the fighting forces after fleeing their villages. For example, the Bakongo people of northwestern Angola, from which the FNLA leaders emanated and from which the group drew its major support, migrated across the border to settle among their Kongo ethnic kin in what was then Zaire. As the FNLA was actively supported by the government of Mobutu Sese Seko, the latter’s government encouraged the refugees to move away from the border and settle further inland. As such, many of these refugees settled in sparsely populated regions, forming villages and towns of their own and integrating into the Congolese population in the Bas-Congo and Kwango River areas of Zaire.27 UNITA supporters, who were mainly drawn from the Ovimbundu people of central and southeastern Angola, were mainly found as refugees in Zambia at this time.28 A smaller number of refugees from at least five other different ethnic groups—namely, 2 3. Henriksen, “People’s War in Angola.” 2 4. Thaler, “Ideology and Violence.” 25. Schulthies, “Refugees in Africa,” 20. 2 6. Minter, Apartheid’s Contras. 27. Schulthies, “Refugees in Africa.” 2 8. Ibid.

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the Hambukushu, the Mokwangadi, the Monyemba, the Moxereku, and the Kwenga—found their way to Botswana.29 In Mozambique, the patterns of domination and repression by the Portuguese colonialists were similar to those highlighted above. The resistance began with a group of Mozambican exiles and dissidents in Tanzania, led by the father of the liberation movement, Eduardo Chivambo Mondlane, founder and first president of the Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (Mozambique Liberation Front [FRELIMO]). FRELIMO was formed in 1962 from a merger of at least three other nationalist organizations that had existed before it,30 artfully coalesced into a more formidable resistance force under the leadership of Mondlane. Indeed, Portuguese repression of dissent in the colony had made it extremely difficult for dissent to exist, forcing the exit of many nationalists to nearby Tanzania under the leadership of Julius Nyerere, which was welcoming and supportive of the struggle for liberation. Other neighboring countries with recently independent African leaders also provided support for the emerging movement. In a true sense, these political exiles were the first refugees from the Mozambican liberation struggle, if the classic definition of political persecution as a cause of refugee flight is employed. The armed struggle formally began in response to the reported massacre of over five hundred Mozambicans in Mueda by the Portuguese in an attempt to crush the growing dissent within the territory. Whereas FRELIMO began as an organization committed to peacefully negotiating independence for the nation, it was at this juncture that the nationalists realized that the only route to freedom was through armed resistance, as the Portuguese had demonstrated their unwillingness to let go of what they perceived as their possession and their determination to mete violence in this regard.31 Thus, coordinated guerilla attacks against Portuguese posts were launched on September 25, 1964. The Portuguese responded with violence, of which the civilian population ultimately bore the brunt through either displacement or death. Their livelihoods were crushed, and mass murders of civilians instigated forced migration as these altercations had no sign of being mitigated. One of the historical markers of the guerilla warfare in Mozambique was the visible recruitment of women and girls into the FRELIMO forces, particularly into the special squad called the (de)stacamento feminino (meaning Women’s/ 29. Potten, “Etsha.” 30. These included the National Democratic Union of Mozambique, the Mozambican African National Union, and the National African Union of Independent Mozambique. 31. Mondlane, Struggle for Mozambique; Funada-Classen, Origins of War.

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Female Detachment), formed in 1967.32 They were given political and military training in Tanzania and served various functions in the war, including gathering intelligence, reconnaissance, protection of civilians in liberated zones, food gathering, porterage, domestic duties, and involvement in armed combat. Women’s involvement in the war in this way was also part of the revolutionary ideology that FRELIMO espoused, as they asserted that the liberation of the people would not be complete without the liberation of women, hence the seriousness given to the concomitant political education of the female fighters. Scholars therefore assert that women’s involvement in all the liberation movements across the continent has led to the destabilization of traditional gender categories in the theater of war such that combatant/noncombatant, woman/ girl, and private/public have been redefined.33 Others further posit that the decolonization of Africa cannot be considered complete without restoring to history the contributions of women in this period and their fundamental and lasting import.34 By 1967, as the Portuguese imperialists began to lose territory, in some parts of Mozambique they implemented a policy of relocating and forcibly resettling people into fortified villages called aldeamentos to better defend the territory and isolate the civilians from FRELIMO as it advanced, thereby causing massive internal displacement.35 They also began ambitious economic investment in development projects (such as the contentious Cahora Bassa Dam) intended to produce a settler-dominated economy as in Angola, South Africa, and Rhodesia.36 Nonetheless, with the overthrow of the dictatorial regime in Lisbon in 1974, Mozambique also gained independence alongside other Portuguese African colonies. By this time, thousands of Mozambican refugees who had fled (or sought to avoid) the violence of the liberation struggle mostly relocated to Malawi, southern Tanzania, and Zambia.37 These examples demonstrate that the first generation of African refugees in the immediate postindependence era, the 1960s and 1970s, emanated from the anticolonial struggles of Africans. Other cases not discussed here, such as Kenya and Zimbabwe, further lend credence to this and showed patterns of generating forced displacement. It was also in this period that official attitudes toward African refugees in neighboring countries were informed by the political 3 2. West, “Girls with Guns.” 33. Magadla, “Theorizing African Women and Girls.” 3 4. Bouka, “Women, Colonial Resistance, and Decolonization.” 35. Judanian, “Resettlement Programs”; Thaler, Ideology and Violence. 36. Derluguian, “Social Origins.” 37. Rutinwa, “Asylum and Refugee Policies,” 1–10.

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and strategic calculations of those countries. For instance, whereas refugees were often generously received by ethnic kin across the border, governments’ treatment of refugees depended on whether they were supportive of the regime in the sending country or of the rebels fighting it. Thus, Ian Smith’s Rhodesia and white-minority-ruled South Africa supported the Portuguese colonialists and sought to sabotage the nationalists’ efforts even as friendly governments in Tanzania, Zambia, and elsewhere provided support to the liberation fighters. Refugees were often seen as bearing political significations in this milieu, and this dictated not only the locations where displaced persons sought refuge but also the nature of the hospitality that was rendered to them. This era soon gave way to another in which, unfortunately, wars of various causes were to greatly multiply on the continent, causing further refugee production in the decades to follow. Wars of Secession

Secessionist movement or separatism refers to an advocacy of separation, usually from a larger political group, for self-determination purposes. In Africa, secessionist political movements have sought to break away from identities that were imposed by the colonial regimes. Secessionist ideologues are convinced that their political separation from countries they belong to would enhance their freedom to decide their future by and for themselves. Ethnic, linguistic, and cultural factors are usually the driving forces for separatism because secessionist groups usually emerge from experiences of marginalization and repression related to their imposed identities. The colonial national identities imposed on Africans were insensitive to cultural and ethnic differences and in many cases arbitrarily allocated power to minority groups, who maintained the inherited structures and systems that colonialism left behind. This therefore produced reactions from groups that were not comfortable with the arrangement in such states and ignited their demand for separation. The cases of secession in postindependence Africa persist because there are numerous groups that desire self-determination. Their quest endures in contemporary times owing to the perversion of justice and the absence of transparency that surround their postcolonial political life. Among the most displaced persons in postcolonial Africa are the Sudanese, and the magnitude of their displacement is directly related to a multiplicity of interlocking factors, but in particular the long wars that ultimately resulted in the secession of South Sudan. Africa’s youngest state, South Sudan became the fifty-fourth sovereign nation in Africa on July 9, 2011. But the road

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to independence was paved by one of the longest periods of civil war on the continent38 as well as one of the highest civilian casualties of war since the Second World War. Although the first period of civil war, from 1955 to 1972, did not have secession as an explicit goal, the struggle from the start was the agitation for recognition and protection of the Southern Sudanese peoples’ cultural and political autonomy and better accommodation within the governance and development structures of the Sudanese state—the failures of which prolonged the conflict into a second phase, 1983 to 2005, and made secession inevitable. The split between South Sudan and Sudan was the first successful secession on the continent since independence, the “first crack in Africa’s map.”39 Sudan exemplifies well Constance G. Anthony’s first model of colonial state-building, “radical separation,” which had direct implications for the production of refugees in Africa.40 As established in the preceding chapter, the British policy of indirect rule was implicated in providing and reinforcing the historical foundations that made the Sudanese war of secession inevitable. The North and South of Sudan were areas of distinct historical, cultural, and linguistic differences with a further acrimonious common memory of unequal privilege and of long-running Arab slavery of Southern (Black) Sudanese. The long precolonial history of the territory had already peripheralized and marginalized the South, burdening it with lasting legacies of disadvantage, and its people were treated, in the words of Alex de Waal, as “at best second-class citizens, and at worst as commodities.”41 Nonetheless, they found themselves lumped together in the same country, Sudan, under the colonial government of Great Britain. In a policy of “radical separation,” the British “established a dramatically bifurcated colonial administration, distributed resources in a highly in-equalitarian fashion, and then championed the interests of one ethnic constituency during the process of decolonization.”42 The favored group was the mostly Muslim Arab Northern Sudanese, whose region was afforded all the advantages of colonial rule, including schools, hospitals, roads, railways, and other infrastructure, as well as handed the reins of power. For the mostly traditional Black African and Christian Southern Sudanese, there was virtually 38. The First Sudanese Civil War was fought from 1955 to 1972, and the Second Sudanese Civil War from 1983 to 2005. 39. These were the words of Muammar Gadaffi, the erstwhile Libyan ruler, addressing the Arab-Africa Summit on October 10, 2010, in Sirte, Libya. See Sudan Tribune, “Libyan Leader”; McNamee, “First Crack in Africa’s Map?” 4 0. Anthony, “Africa’s Refugee Crisis.” 41. De Waal, “When Kleptocracy Becomes Insolvent,” 350. 42. Anthony, “Africa’s Refugee Crisis,” 576.

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no representation in government and the economy even as the region was left far more backward developmentally. According to some sources, by 1960, only three secondary schools existed in the entire Southern Sudan region, and only sixty students from there attended Khartoum University.43 While the First Sudanese Civil War resulted in greater autonomy for the South, enshrined in the peace accords of 1972, the Second Sudanese Civil War erupted in 1983 following the reneging of the Khartoum government on various aspects of the peace accords, including the loss of autonomy promised for the South and attempts to impose an Arab and Islamic identity on the mostly traditional and Christian South. The discovery of significant crude oil fields in southern areas certainly became a complicating factor as the North plotted how to control and benefit from the anticipated wealth.44 The insurgency was spearheaded by the Sudanese Peoples Liberation Movement (SPLM), with the military wing as the Sudanese Peoples Liberation Army (SPLA). The movement was led by John Garang until his death in 2005, upon which he was succeeded by Salva Kiir, who led the movement to statehood in 2011. By the end of the First Sudanese Civil War in 1972, up to a quarter of the population of Southern Sudan had been forcibly displaced as a result of the devastating war.45 The UNHCR officially registered 194,000 South Sudanese refugees in countries including the Central African Republic, Ethiopia, Uganda, and Zaire.46 Beyond the registered numbers, thousands more displaced persons found refuge in friendly communities wherever they ended up. But the irony is that even as Sudan displaced its nationals into the surrounding countries, it was also receiving massive numbers of refugees from the neighboring troubled countries—namely, Uganda, Rwanda, Zaire, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Chad. By 1979, over four hundred thousand refugees of other nationalities were being hosted in various parts of Sudan. What was then an emerging trend on the landscape for African refugees has now become quite an established contradictory norm, as African states are often simultaneously refugee-hosting and refugee-producing countries. Figure 7.1 is one example of how these two realities coincide in the same space. Since the Sudanese peace did not last with the collapse of the Addis Ababa Agreement that ended the First Civil War, the resumption of open hostilities 43. Young, Postcolonial State, 241. 4 4. The relationship between natural resources and civil war in Africa has been extensively studied, but Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler theorize the link between natural resources and secession specifically. See Collier and Hoeffler, “Political Economy of Secession.” 45. Adepoju, “Dimension of the Refugee Problem,” 34. 4 6. Ibid.

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Figure 7.1. Yida refugee camp in South Sudan, with remains of an Antonov military transport plane, the likes from which bombs were reportedly dropped by the Sudanese government on the Nuba Mountain people of Sudan, just twenty kilometers across the border. Marco Gualazzini; Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki /File:Playing_in_the_Nuba_mountains.jpg.

from 1983, which lasted for another twenty-two long years, had grave consequences for the civilian population. In particular, Sudan entered the 2000s as Africa’s leading producer of displaced persons, with the vast majority of displaced on the continent from any one country being from Southern Sudan. By 2000, approximately 464,000 Sudanese were either refugees or asylum seekers in countries in the region, including in Uganda, Ethiopia, the DRC, Kenya, the Central African Republic, Chad, and Egypt. This is apart from perhaps hundreds of thousands of other exiles who fled to Egypt without seeking asylum or claiming refugee status there and others who made their way to Europe in search of asylum.47 By the formal end of the war in 2005, the Sudan Relief and Rehabilitation Commission of the SPLM/A estimated that over five hundred thousand Southern Sudanese were refugees in need of repatriation.48 Over four 4 7. US Committee for Refugees, “USCR Country Report Sudan.” 4 8. UNHCR, Return and Reintegration.

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million Sudanese were internally displaced by the end of the first decade of the 2000s, the largest number in the world at this time,49 setting yet another record and pattern that has persisted in African displacement trends ever since. It is now the norm for the number of IDPs on the continent to exceed the number of refugees. Another distressing trend exacerbating displacement and civilian casualties was the opening up of simultaneous warfare on the same territory when the Darfur war began in 2003 and caused further forced displacement of persons. In the western part of the continent, in Nigeria, there was another case of secessionist agitation. Like many of the countries that emerged from colonialism in the late 1950s and 1960s, Nigeria was an amalgam of factions and identities emanating from the country’s heterogeneous composition. This caused constant dissent as groups suspected one another for reasons related to the histories of interethnic strife sparked by indirect rule under Britain. This internal suspicion was reinforced by the interest of the colonialists, who preferred and favored northern Nigeria for certain reasons, including a groomed, conservative, and Western-favoring elite there. The departing British also considered the northern Nigerian elite as potential facilitators of neocolonialism. It may also simply be a continuation of their divide-and-rule strategy by which they sought to create further discord among the ethnic groups that would later be merged under a common national identity. In the colonial period, the British had deliberately restricted their interference in the northern region, a province that contained people who were already largely converted and committed to the Islamic ideology and culture. In contrast, the colonial overlords instituted Western culture, including the establishment of Western colonial education and Christianity, in southern Nigeria. This disparity was therefore predetermined, as it was theoretically difficult for the northerners to integrate easily with the southern peoples, who had divergent worldviews. This set the stage for when the British decided to favor the north in the transfer of administrative duties and political power. This favoritism and divide-and-rule strategy became the background for secessionist agitation in the (south)eastern region in the early days of Nigeria’s independence. The group had connected its marginalized status with the imposing frame of the northern regions and therefore felt ill at ease with the identity of Nigeria. Also important was, as with Sudan, the discovery of oil in the south, and the prospects of this cannot be extricated from the motivations for the bid for secession. Hardly had the country secured its independence 49. US Committee for Refugees, “USCR Country Report Sudan.”

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from the British than the region launched a bid for an independent state, directly in response to unfolding events related to the fear of northern political, economic, and cultural domination. The eastern region named its envisioned country “Biafra,” and the armed secessionist struggle lasted for thirty months, between July 6, 1967, and January 15, 1970. The war disrupted the country and left members of Biafra, the imagined country, to massive loss of lives, unprecedented hunger, and economic devastation. The federal side of Nigeria also sustained economic losses and loss of lives of its troops in the war. The offensive attacks of the Nigerian government soldiers and the secessionist army wrought severe damage to the country’s resources and their collective psychology. The starvation and misery especially on the Biafran side that came about because of the blockade imposed by the Nigerian government provoked “a global media event . . . [resulting] in what has been described as the ‘postcolonial politics of pity.’”50 Estimates of the displaced vary widely, from a few hundred thousand to up to ten million.51 This secessionist movement has not died; rather, it has reincarnated in various forms even today, persisting as most other secessionist movements on the continent tend to do. While their quest for self-determination may be quelled by official concessions to their demands, the majority of which are political, there is no indication that they have any intention of burying their interest in self-rule. The devastating consequences of this for the population manifest in the troubled situation resulting from each violent flaring of agitation. This has produced both internal displacement and international migration, which have led to the increase of people from this region in the population density of other urban areas, such as Lagos, Abuja, Zaria, Port Harcourt, and Kano, among others, as well as dispersal beyond Nigeria. Another prominent separatist conflict that has contributed to the rise of refugee politics in Africa is the Western Sahara peoples’ struggle, the result of discord between Morocco and the people of the self-declared Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR), a discord complicated by regional interests. Western Sahara is a desert settlement in North Africa, located between Morocco and Mauritania. The territory was colonized by the Spanish in the nineteenth century, and their occupation of it was terminated in 1975. However, the indigenous people of the place, the Sahrawis, became the victims of several invasive tensions between the two neighboring countries, Morocco 5 0. Ibhawoh, “Refugees, Evacuees, and Repatriates.” 51. See Goetz, “Humanitarian Issues,” on the one hand, and Ibeanu, “Exiles in Their Own Home,” on the other.

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and Mauritania. The Sahrawis have a genetic link with the Berbers and longstanding social connections with both Arabs and Berbers, making them AraboBerbers; their economic mainstay was nomadic herding, as is common in many northern African countries. The people resisted the domination of the internal imperialists and organized a separatist movement called the Polisario Front,52 which proclaimed the indigenous SADR as an independent country in Western Sahara in 1975–76. Morocco, however, refused to relinquish its claim to the territory and occupied the land, refusing to withdraw at the end of Spanish colonization and the declaration of the SADR. War erupted between these groups in 1975 and lasted till 1991 with a UN-brokered truce that has failed to settle the question of the territory’s status, as Morocco maintains its claim and its occupation today. Meanwhile, Algeria remains the major country in the region giving support to the demands of the Polisario Front. Even though the struggles appear to have subsided, their embers continue to be fanned by the political manipulations of the two countries. After the ceasefire, Morocco became the legal custodian of the territory it had annexed, even though there were underlying political motivations that eventually revealed the fractious nature of the peace treaty. The territory was divided into western and eastern parts; the former was controlled by Morocco and the latter by the Polisario Front, the government of the SADR. Underlying tensions were heightened by the erection of a wall in the 1980s by the Moroccan government that demarcated the Sahrawi refugees from their immediate neighbors, annexing the western part to Morocco and the largely uninhabited eastern part to the Polisario Front. The wall further institutionalized tensions that made peaceful resolution of the conflict more difficult. As a result, more refugees were produced from this region, making people more susceptible to danger and vulnerable to attacks. The protracted tensions and unresolved nature of the territory have produced Africa’s longest-standing refugee situation, with Saharawi refugees having fled to camps in western Algeria since 1975, where they have lived since then without imminent prospects of returning. An estimated 174,000 Sahrawi refugees still lived in five camps in the remote Tindouf province of Algeria in 2017, but due to the political sensitivity of the matter, these figures have been historically difficult to verify, are merely estimates, and do not include the number of out-of-camp refugees.53 Additionally, one unique feature of the SADR example is the prominent roles that Sahrawi women have played all through the period as leaders in the refugee camps, prompting a 5 2. Ibeanu, “Exiles in Their Own Home,” 90–97. 53. ACAPS, “Algeria.”

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global image of Sahrawi camps as “ideal” camps in terms of gender equality and their women as “leaders in the desert.”54 It is clear from this discussion that secessionist agitations have produced some of the longest, most enduring, and most peculiar refugee situations on the continent in the postcolonial period—including long wars, extremely protracted displacement, regional involvement in the refugee situations, and the dual role of refugee-producing and refugee-hosting nations.

State Fa i lu r e a n d State Coll a pse The African continent has the second-highest number of displaced persons in the world today, and state collapse or state failure is one of the key reasons.55 The endgame of state formation is to protect the interests of a people and satisfy their needs. However, events and activities of a country are liable to be sabotaged when states are pushed to strictures or become fragmented on account of serious internal struggles. The effects are felt by the vulnerable groups within the society, who instinctively flee for safety. In their quest for safety, they become displaced and open to further difficulties, which wreak devastating results. In other words, when states cease to function well because of internal strife, the most vulnerable people in society are displaced and exposed to the dangerous conditions of forced migration. State failure and state collapse in the African context are obvious causes of the refugee crisis. Nonetheless, theories of the origin of states abound precisely because there are several historical trajectories that state formation has taken in different contexts. In a basic Weberian sense, the state is a product of force, and this fact is borne out in the history of many Western states as well as non-Western ones, making the unstable situation of African countries not particularly unique. State formation in modern times, globally, has been accompanied by great upheaval, maximal use of force, and the uprooting and mass displacement of people. Or, as Charles Tilly has elegantly framed the process, “war makes states.”56 The recent history of the emergence of states after World War I in Europe is instructive here and has been referenced in this book regarding the emergence of the transnational problem of refugees in Europe. Similarly, the violence of colonialism directly produced the modern states of Africa, perhaps except Ethiopia, which did not experience it. It would seem also 5 4. Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, “‘Ideal’ Refugee Women”; Higgs and Ryan, “Leaders in the Desert.” 55. UNECA, “Refugees, Returnees, and Internally Displaced.” 56. Tilly, “War-Making.”

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from this examination of history that state formation is often produced out of the ashes of state collapse and a process of remaking or reconstruction of states. A society that lacks the capacity to protect its citizens and make and enforce laws to guide the conduct of the people runs the risk of being referred to as a collapsed state. Thus, when Ali Mazrui refers to the African state as “a political refugee,” he is in particular highlighting the institutional failures manifested in the incapacity of the state in Africa to provide public goods and services, signaling regime or state collapse, which then made population displacement inevitable.57 A more robust conceptualization of the phenomenon of state failure and state collapse is one that consciously includes an evaluation of both institutional and functional capacity of a state to enable security, representation, and welfare, in determining its characterization as either failed or collapsed.58 Whereas state failure is symbolized in varying degrees of a state’s inability to provide these goods for its citizens, state collapse is signaled by the seeming complete disintegration of the state apparatus, institutions, and capacity to perform its functions. Several African states have indeed passed from one phase of these processes to the other in the recent past, in particular, the DRC, Liberia, Angola, and Somalia. Perhaps the most pertinent explanation for the failure of the African postcolonial state in the context of this discussion is, still, its colonial origin. At independence, most African nationalist leaders retained the Western model of the nation-state that was handed over to them, rather than seek to revert to the multiplicity and heterogeneity of political forms that preceded colonialism.59 It would seem then that it was not simply the African state that was failing in the turbulent context of postcolonial politics, but in addition, it was the failure of the state model that was inherited and the failure to deliver its promise in situ.60 The colonial state itself never manifested all the features that are now considered foundational to a modern state, including a monopoly on the use of force and the effective control of territory. It was therefore difficult for the newly independent African successors to these colonial quasi-states to achieve these characteristics.61 The Cold War context was suitable for maintaining these inherited quasi-states and their boundaries, thereby cementing the artificialness 5 7. See Mazrui, “African State.” 58. Milliken and Krause, “State Failure, State Collapse.” 59. Herbst, “Responding to State Failure.” See also Davidson, Black Man’s Burden; Jackson, Quasi-States. 6 0. Doornbos, Failing States or Failing Models. 61. Herbst, “Responding to State Failure.”

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of the African states. Or, as Mazrui so poignantly lamented in the middle of the turbulent 1990s, “The question that has arisen lately, however, is whether real decolonization is not the winning of formal independence, not the changing of the guard on independence day, the raising of new flags, or the singing of new national anthems, but the collapse of the colonial state itself, the cruel and bloody disintegration of colonial structures. Liberation and decolonization can no longer be equated.”62 In other words, state failure and state collapse in Africa were being posited as possibly painful and bloody stages in the march toward full and authentic decolonization in Africa, affirming again the colonial foundations of the current crisis. Additionally, the very concepts of state failure and state collapse have been called into question as obscuring the global political economy dimensions of the African crisis and portraying the crisis as entirely endogenous, which it is not.63 Various examples explored in this chapter bear witness to the complex dimensions of state crises in Africa. The situation in the DRC paints an illuminating picture of state collapse. The UN Refugee Agency reports that “by August 2018, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) hosted more than 536,000 refugees. 4.5 million people were also displaced inside the country.”64 This is one African country that is economically insufficient and has problems serving its people, whereas a state should be preoccupied with the goal of enhancing formidable social and economic structures that would help build a solid foundation for the economic livelihoods of the people. In the ongoing aftermath of the crisis after crisis that the country has endured literally since independence, the precarity of lives and livelihoods has compelled massive human displacement. Before the occupation of the DRC by colonial powers, the area that contains what is politically known as the DRC today did not approximate the description of a state or nation, as different peoples with their distinct characteristics occupied the area. These different ethnic groups managed their own internal affairs for a very long period before being occupied by Belgian expansionists.65 The historical figure that loomed largest in this period of Congolese history was the Belgian king, Leopold II, who declared a personal kingdom there, the Congo Free State, and ruled the locals with an iron fist from 1885 onward. The horrors, atrocities, gross 6 2. Mazrui, “Blood of Experience,” 28. 63. Jones, “Global Political Economy;” Hagmann and Hoehne, “Failures of the State Failure Debate”; Matthews and Hussein, “Challenges of State Collapse.” 6 4. UNHCR, “Democratic Republic of Congo.” 65. Mthembu-Salter, “Democratic Republic of Congo.”

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human rights abuses, and extreme economic exploitation of Leopold’s Congo were so great that the Belgian government took over the territory from the monarchy in 1906 and began to administer it as the Belgian Congo. However, the people within the geographical area began to agitate for freedom from colonial rule, and this intensified by the 1950s and actively began to frustrate their presence with intimidating pressure. The political situation in the country formerly known as the Belgian Congo is somewhat unique because the new nation’s independence was difficult to sustain under the circumstances that surrounded its creation. The Belgians had expected to keep the Congo for many more years and did not make any preparations for handing over the reins of power—simply because they wanted to retain their overlordship of the territory and keep independence entirely nominal. Indeed, the role of Belgium in the Congo after independence was one of the bitter issues that divided the nationalists, along with the politics of ethnicity, regional divisions, and power sharing in the heterogenous nation. Tensions between the white people and the black nationals resulted in widespread riots beginning in January 1960, leading to a Roundtable Conference called by Belgium for negotiations with the nationalists and culminating quite quickly in independence on June 30, 1960. Joseph Kasavubu became the first president of the new nation and Patrice Lumumba its first prime minister. As intended by the colonialists, in spite of the declaration of independence, the white people retained virtually all their positions, privileges, jobs, and status in the Congolese army, civil service, and economy. Within five days of flag independence, on July 5, 1960, Congolese army men mutinied in response to the continued lordship of white army officials, and the rebellion spread rapidly across the country, descending into widespread racial violence. Thus began the period referred to as the Congo Crisis, which was to last until 1965, featuring escalating violence and the secession of two of the richest provinces (Katanga and South Kasai) and expanding into the first full-blown proxy war of the Cold War rivals, the US and USSR, in Africa. As a rift developed and grew between Kasavubu and Lumumba in the handling of the crisis, the situation became complicated by the United States’ fear of what it called a “classic communist takeover” of the Congo, expressed to the US administration by its CIA head in the Congo at the time.66 Thus, while Lumumba was forced to turn to the Soviet Union for military assistance after being rebuffed by the West, the US began to plot with his adversaries to remove 6 6. US Department of State, “Congo, Decolonization and Cold War.”

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him and even to assassinate him.67 The United Nations’ response to pleas for intervention in the escalating crisis was to deploy its very first peacekeeping mission with a mandate to employ force, the United Nations Operation in the Congo (the Organisations des Nations Unies au Congo). By September 1960, the president dismissed the prime minister from his position, and the latter, refusing to heed him, retaliated by announcing the dismissal of the president. At this point, on September 14, 1960, Joseph-Desire Mobutu, who was later to become known as Mobutu Sese Seko, at the time the deputy army chief, executed a palace coup, dissolved the government, and created a new body to govern till elections. After a four-year rule by Kasavubu in which Mobutu’s political influence grew, Mobutu executed a second palace coup in November 1965 and instituted an authoritarian, kleptocratic state that ruled the DRC till 1997. Between 1960 and 1965, and from the tail end of Mobutu’s rule in the mid-1990s to now, in 2020, the history of postindependence DRC, according to William Reno, includes experiences ranging from state collapse to absolutism, to state failure: several more major Congo wars (1996–1997, 1998–2003, and the Kivu conflict from 2004 in several episodes till the present), unending instability, secessionist attempts, political deadlock, and massive plundering of the Congo’s vast and rich natural resources.68 It was with the serious crisis following independence celebrations that the DRC began to produce its first “refugees” in the postindependence era. Given the racial violence that ensued following the army mutiny of July 1960, white people began to flee the country en masse, both from the violence directed at both races and from anticipation of such violence as imminent. Belgium, Italy, France, Portugal, and the Netherlands quickly set airlifts to transport Europeans out of the country, while thousands of others fled into neighboring countries. Those living in Leopoldville found it convenient to cross the Congo River to neighboring Brazzaville. Those closer to Thysville fled to the neighboring Portuguese Angola. Those in the eastern provinces ended up mostly in Uganda, Rwanda, or Burundi. Many of those in the region of Katanga traveled to Northern Rhodesia. Some even crossed several countries, ending up in further-away places such as Tanzania and South Africa.69 Congolese people became forcibly displaced in great numbers as events wore on over the decades, forming one of the largest displaced populations on the continent. In addition to those who fled for basic protection from fighting and 6 7. US Department of State, “Congo, Decolonization and Cold War.” 68. Reno, “Congo: State Collapse.” 69. Passemiers, “South Africa.”

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the many human rights abuses that the Congolese wars have become known for, there are also the “refugee-warriors,” a significant subset of refugees who have impacted relations in the region beyond central to eastern and southern Africa. Refugee-warriors are “people who fled their home countries to organize military structures in order to force their return by overthrowing an existing regime or founding a separate state.”70 As the Congolese wars have become protracted and more complex in terms of the actors involved and the development of a massive “war economy,” professional refugee-warriors now exist between the Congo, Rwanda, Uganda, the Central African Republic, Angola, Sudan, and other nearby countries.71 There are important consequences of the Congolese situation for refugees and refugee management in the sub-region and on the continent. This conflict has significantly impacted the perception and treatment of refugees in those sub-regions, as they are seen by states more as security problems than as populations in need of protection. This perception has also directly shaped the development and contents of refugee law on a continental level. The breakdown of law and order in Liberia could be seen from a different yet familiar dimension. For 133 years after the establishment of the republic in 1847, the country experienced authoritarian leadership that halted democracy and faulted the nature of the administrative system. The gradual degeneration of the country into dictatorship even under the toga of democracy worsened the living conditions of the Liberians. Overwhelmed by the violent struggles for power by rival factions and ongoing dictatorial leadership, they were forced to flee for safety wherever it seemed available. A failed state remains a system where the government functions only on paper and with no available structures to enhance the development of the country. Additionally, when the polity has lost administrative control of its territory, it has unavoidably lost claims to statehood. The long-standing ruling elite, which had paid no attention to the basic yearnings of the citizens, was aggressively toppled and replaced by successive authoritarian regimes that were no better than the previous governments, leading to crisis and war. The rupture of the Liberian political system was rooted in external factors that predated the postcolonial period in Africa. The country’s downward 7 0. Stapleton, “Refugee-Warriors,” 241. 71. A “war economy” is a “system of producing, mobilizing and allocating resources to sustain the violence” of conflict, as has been seen in places such as Cote d’Ivoire, the DRC, Sierra Leone, Angola, Liberia, and so on. De Koning, “Big Men Commanding Conflict Resources”; Le Billon, “Political Ecology of War.”

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political trajectory had begun long before the dramatic events of the latter part of the twentieth century heralded by the coup d’état of 1980. Liberia is a state founded on the imposition of the rule of a minority over a majority by a small group of resettled former American slaves (called the Americo-Liberians, or Congoes), who refused to acknowledge the joint ownership of the territory with the indigenous African population that had occupied that space for centuries before the former’s arrival. The minority Americo-Liberians designed the state apparatus in their own image and determinedly and systematically excluded the majority indigenous people from the political, economic, and social life of the newly founded state for over a hundred years. These divisions became the foundation for the implosion of the country in the 1970s and 1980s, following increased restiveness and resistance of the indigenous Liberians against their marginalization and exclusion from politics and the economy, against the backdrop of their growing impoverishment and diminished livelihood opportunities. A series of protests in the 1970s severely weakened the government of President William R. Tolbert, whose various efforts at reforming the state to provide more opportunities for the indigenous majority basically failed. On April 12, 1980, Master Sergeant Samuel Doe of the Armed Forces of Liberia, an indigenous Liberian, forcefully overthrew the Americo-Liberian president, William Tolbert of the True Whig Party,72 in a coup d’état, a crucial overtaking that would eventually determine the political climate of disintegration that subsequently arrested the country. Doe went on to rule without concern for the rule of law, and his administration therefore was soon overrun by ethnic marginalization, economic depravity, and financial indiscipline, all of which ultimately damaged the fabric of the country’s political system. After a failed coup against Doe in 1985, tyranny was further reinforced in an unprecedented pattern after he succeeded himself as a civilian president following the 1985 elections. Doe prohibited every political activity such as rallies and stakeholders’ meetings, based on his suspicion that ideas about toppling a government could be planted and shared at such gatherings. Therefore, the country was ruled with uncommon totalitarian ideology disposed to denying the common people their democratic freedom. The fact that this style of governing prevailed exacerbated the condition of the country as political and economic collapse became imminent. Meanwhile, a counter-rebellion was being planned by Charles Taylor and his rebel group, the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL). On Christmas Eve in 1989, they marched into Liberia through Nimba County from their camp in 72. Bayart, State in Africa.

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Cote d’Ivoire, in an attempt to overthrow the government. The NPFL readily mobilized support from the Gio and Mano ethnic groups in Nimba County, who had borne the brunt of President Doe’s ethnic ire that had marginalized them and favored his own group, the Krahn. Between Doe’s Armed Forces of Liberia and Taylor’s NPFL, a full-blown civil war ignited and continued unabated from that day in 1989 and throughout the early 1990s till a cease-fire allowed elections in 1997. Taylor appeared to be very powerful and had a strong army of soldiers in his camp, but he did not succeed in entering Monrovia and toppling the government. A rival faction in contention for the government, Prince Yormie Johnson’s Independent National Patriotic Front of Liberia, succeeded in capturing and killing Samuel Doe in September 1990, thereby ending his reign as president of Liberia. However, having been unsuccessful since 1989 in extending his rule over the entire territory, Taylor had formed a parallel government where he declared himself as the de facto leader of what he called “Greater Liberia” in that period. The Liberian population was soon engulfed and overwhelmed by the emerging dynamics of state collapse in their country. Although the civil unrest between Taylor and his contenders attracted the attention of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the latter’s intervention was merely palliative rather than decisive. Taylor had demarcated the country along the lines that favored his personal agenda and created boundaries that he guarded with heavy military presence. With the help of ECOWAS, an interim government had been installed at the center to manage the affairs of the country, pending the time that peace would be finally restored. Thus, the Interim Government of National Unity was established under the leadership of Amos Sawyer, but their activities were strictly limited to the capital city of Monrovia, whose protection was guarded by the ECOWAS Monitoring Group. The conflict continued in spite of these efforts and even beyond an election that made Taylor president in 1997. By the early 2000s, the conflict had degenerated into something like a “war of all against all,” with several rebel armies, up to fourteen at one point, competing for power and control. These conditions created an atmosphere that made displacement and migration inevitable, as many were displaced and became refugees in the process. It is estimated that approximately three-quarters of the Liberian population of about three million became either refugees or internally displaced in the fourteen-year period of civil war and political instability from that fateful day in 1989 till the final ECOWAS-brokered truce in August 2003.73 73. Republic of Liberia, Final Report.

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In the description of failed states or state collapse, Libya is an important landmark where its recent history of civil war suggests the complexities of international and local politics. Western countries, and the United States in particular, had not been on good terms with the government of Muammar Ghaddafi in Libya since the 1970s, and there had been episodes of tensions, fueled by Ghaddafi’s alleged funding of so-called terrorist organizations to attack the US and the Lockerbie bombing that was blamed on the Libyan regime. Of course, there was also the economic politics of oil, as Libya was the African country with the largest oil reserves, as well as Ghaddafi’s ambitious Pan-Africanist positions that threatened the power and influence of the West in Africa, if realized. The Obama administration and its allies in Europe and the region, including the UN, took the opportunity of the Arab Spring to intervene in Libya’s internal affairs militarily, allegedly to prevent the country’s leader, Muammar Ghaddafi, from perpetrating “widespread and systematic attacks against civilian populations.”74 Thus, on this pretext of the “responsibility to protect,” military intervention was approved by the United Nations Security Council. Subsequently, a no-fly zone was imposed, NATO forces gave support to rebel offensives against the Ghaddafi regime, and eventually Libya’s ruler of forty-two years was toppled in 2011. Initially, the US and NATO were triumphant in this momentary victory, hailing the “model intervention” and the quick achievement of the objectives of the intervention.75 However, Libya in the post-Ghaddafi era has descended rapidly from Arab Spring protests to all-out, fratricidal civil war and state collapse. Ghaddafi had allowed moderate or liberal Islamist strains, the Sufis, to participate in the activities of the country and had consciously restricted the activities of con­ servative Islam for reasons that are attached to the nation’s security and safety. This displeased international actors, some of which included Turkey and Qatar, who immediately came to the support of the politically inclined Islamists after the death of Ghaddafi. Indeed, the country had never really been integrated internally, with fundamental divisions in society and between the eastern and western parts of the territory, and Ghaddafi’s style of rule had not allowed national institutions to develop and consolidate. In the long run, the country became divided along different lines of interests who were in competition to control the financial affairs of the country.76 In this process, Libya has therefore witnessed a series of warring activities between regional groups and factions 7 4. United Nations, Security Council Resolution 1973. 75. Vandewalle, “After Qaddafı”; Kuperman, “Obama’s Libya Debacle.” 76. United Nations Support Mission in Libya, “Remarks of SRSG Ghassan Salamé.”

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who each have external countries backing them. Warring in Libya poses a threat to Egypt, being their geographical neighbor and with the capacity to make connections with the rebel groups there. In the ensuing struggles that engulfed the country, with the participation of the United States, Egypt, Russia, and NATO, among others, the post-Ghaddafi period has institutionalized terrorism, confirming a fractured state that empowers different factional groups. Even when peace was momentarily restored to the country, the decision to allow free party association and movement was again counteracted by tensions that came about because of the inability of the transitional government to effectively rule. The persecution of the Sufi Brotherhood members amid other pressures led to the escalation of tensions that continued to threaten the peace of the country, thereby leading to widespread exodus.77 In the context of this situation, therefore, internal unrest has generated thousands of refugees from the country. The situation in Libya has also had a spillover effect on the neighboring countries. Complicating this is the fact that the ungoverned space produced by the civil war opened up Libya to become the primary chosen route for all categories of migrants from sub-Saharan Africa attempting to cross the Mediterranean to reach Europe. In essence, then, apart from the displacement of Libyans occasioned by the war, the country in disarray also became a hub for people smugglers and human traffickers whose business in trading human cargo from around the African continent, or in moving would-be asylum seekers to the shores of Europe, have made Libya one of the most precarious places in the world to be a refugee, IDP, or asylum seeker.

Econom ic Cr ise s In the postcolonial environment, one consistent reason for the migration of people is their economic condition. Many people who migrate do so to improve their economic status, which is often precarious. However, this subject has been at the center of major debates both in refugee studies and in the policy-making arena. The question is whether economic reasons and so-called “economic migrants” should be accorded recognition given that the definition of refugee utilized by states and humanitarian organizations is conceptualized in strict political terms. States in the Global North that seek to keep out refugees from Africa, Asia, and other parts of the Global South take pleasure in asserting that the majority of asylum seekers that arrive on their shores are merely economic migrants seeking greener pastures and are not in danger of life and security 77. Ibid.

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threatened by the state, as the category of refugees in need of protection would warrant. For these actors, such asylum seekers were never “forced to flee” and merely took a calculated decision to migrate, and they also do not have the “well-founded fear” of persecution stipulated by the UN Refugee Convention. Nonetheless, our consideration in this chapter is necessary for several important reasons already captured in the extensive discussion of mixed migration in Africa earlier in this book. Primarily, it is difficult to extricate economic factors from other refugee-producing factors because economic factors coexist with other (political) factors propelling human displacement in Africa. Economic crises have been an omnipresent feature of African societies that are also at the same time undergoing political upheaval, instability, war, and widespread human rights abuses. Furthermore, they are a sure collateral consequence of the other factors that create refugees as, everywhere, from Mozambique to Liberia to the DRC, war and instability occasioned by state failure have coincided with economic decline and collapse. It is especially difficult to describe the postcolonial conditions of African states that produce refugees without accounting for economic crises. Our position is that economic crises are almost inextricable from the more traditionally accepted, more “political” refugeeproducing factors and that it is arbitrary to seek to exclude them entirely from the discussion when they are a real displacement-inducing factor. Thus, the political reasons propelling forced migration or asylum seeking should not be considered in isolation from the economic factors underlying these movements. The tendency of the powerful states to pick and choose which refugees are worthy of entering their modern fortresses is ahistorical, ignoring a long historical tendency of human beings to move to spaces and places that will facilitate their self-development, assure their livelihood, and provide peace of mind. Certainly, these states do not reject persons deemed to be “economic migrants” because they have any concern for the sanctity of the legal definitions in refugee law; rather, as we have discussed in other chapters, the refugee politics of the dominant states in the international refugee regime has been most often dictated by self-interest, xenophobia, nationalist politics, and other prejudiced and subjective factors. Similarly, the question of the presence of agency associated with a person’s decision to flee as a disqualifying factor for granting asylum also ignores the fact that for many refugees fleeing the economic consequences of intractable conflict, prolonged bad governance, and state mismanagement, there is virtually no choice, and they flee because they perceive that their security and survival depend on reaching a place of both social stability and economic sustainability. Where an entire nation or a significant part of it might be facing economic challenges, the power to control these conditions is beyond

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the capacity of individual citizens. Therefore, a vulnerable group ultimately seeks survival in other areas where they are quite certain of leading a moderate economic life—the concept of survival migration put forward by Alexander Betts.78 Under this component of refugee-making, no country is totally immune to such unbearable circumstances, and history complements this argument in showing us great countries that have witnessed economic meltdowns followed by human displacement. Europe has experienced economic recessions on a number of occasions: the post-Napoleonic depression of 1812, the Great Depression of 1930, and the coronavirus recession of 2020. The fact that the United States of America has also experienced this form of economic challenge is a testament to the argument that nation-wide economic challenges are beyond the control of a single individual. In all these cases, however, the citizens of the state are always under the risk of migration in their quest for survival. It is instinctive to seek solutions elsewhere when they appear impossible in one’s home environment. For all practical purposes, it has become difficult to separate motives and means of migration when states and humanitarian actors are increasingly dealing with mixed migration movements as more and more refugees travel with and use the same routes as other kinds of migrants. This fact is increasingly evident in the expanding conceptualization, data and statistics, and structures and institutions being created around the mixed migration regime by major humanitarian actors such as the UNHCR, the International Organization for Migration, the European Union, governments of states in both the Global North and South, and others. These increasingly demonstrate the futility of the traditional approach to refugee status determination. There are a variety of economic conditions that produce refugees in Africa. One factor, which links the preceding section on state collapse with this one on economic crises, is the structural adjustment programs (SAPs) that were imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, reflecting the so-called Washington Consensus,79 on African and other 78. Betts, Survival Migration. 79. John Williamson coined the term “Washington Consensus” to refer to ten prescriptions reflecting his interpretation of economic policies agreed among US and international economic institutions based in Washington, DC, in the 1980s and early 1990s for propelling economic development in less developed states. These ten policies were (1) fiscal discipline; (2) redirect public expenditure; (3) tax reform; (4) financial liberalization; (5) adopt a single, competitive exchange rate; (6) trade liberalization; (7) eliminate barriers to foreign direct investment; (8) privatize state-owned enterprises; (9) deregulate market entry and competition; and (10) ensure secure property rights. See Williamson, Latin American Adjustment. Summary by Naim, “Fads and Fashion.”

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developing nations beginning in the 1980s. As the euphoria of independence gradually gave way to the reality of widespread breakdown of the inherited colonial political order, authoritarianism produced mismanagement of national resources, and state bureaucracies rapidly shed pretenses to any Western conception of rationality and professionalism in national economic management. The proliferation of conflicts and political instability led African nations into dire situations, and, in spite of the oil boom in the mid-1970s, which briefly benefited countries such as Nigeria, Angola, and Libya, they soon all needed rescue. Here entered the World Bank and IMF propositions for this to happen. These institutions waved attractively huge financial assistance, loans, and aid before African nations, except that these came with strings attached— conditionalities, as they came to be known. These poor nations that were already on their knees were sold neoliberal economic packages that mandated massive divestment from social services and welfare, devaluation of their currency, and removal of barriers to imports. The strong African state of postindependence was required to retreat and rationalize its processes and procedures and open up its fragile economies to the nasty competition of international trade, which from the beginning was a system rigged against the African nations at the extreme periphery of global economic relations. The huge loans given by the IMF led to a debt trap that saw ever-deepening cycles of borrowing and bankruptcy with no prospects of countries of all economic sizes from Liberia to Nigeria ever being able to repay, and thus a deadly dependency was established in many states. The outcome was devastating across the continent. In fact, none of the SAP economies in Africa have recovered since then, and the IMF itself has since been prompted to admit that this was a failed policy. But the damage was already done: the economic hardship that descended on African citizens across the board was monumental as dumping of goods led to cheap imports killing off local manufacturing and producing massive unemployment. This was coupled with massive retrenchment of workers in the public sector and withdrawal of state support for education, health, services, agriculture, and so on. Countries such as Zimbabwe, which had been one of the jewels of the region in the 1980s due to the high quality of its educational system and wealth, by the mid-1990s began to send out waves of refugees and migrants in search of better opportunities, who were also simultaneously fleeing increasing political repression. Indeed, many authors have made the explicit link between the gruesome genocide of Rwanda in the 1990s and the economic pressures that came from a

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failing economy in the most densely populated area of Africa.80 The economic hardships imposed by the collapse in coffee prices in the international market in the late 1980s and early 1990s were severely exacerbated by the adoption of IMF–World Bank structural adjustment reforms, which further impoverished a small nation already laboring under the stress of decades of civil war. All these in turn were complicated by the extant identity-based political rivalries and intensified the absolute desperation that permeated the political events of the period, producing a genocide that shocked the world. Thus, the hundreds of thousands of Rwandan refugees that flowed into the Great Lakes region in the mid-1990s were ultimately a consequence of this more structural and complex collapse. Today, there are several other economic factors that propel displacement and migration. There is the category of people who face the challenge of unemployment after getting education or acquiring relevant work skills. People in this group are exposed to unending risks due to their inability to provide the basic services for themselves and therefore usually strive to enhance their sustainability. If the economic situation is dire, the affected people usually resort to seeking alternative financial means or income in other locations. In this case, rural-urban migration can increase, as that is often seen as a reliable alternative that lessens their immediate challenges by providing menial jobs to alleviate their economic woes. If the situation is felt nationally, however, the affected groups usually resort to making longer journeys to external destinations expected to provide the needed economic safety for all. In this case, intracontinental or intercontinental journeys are not improbable. The economic development of the continent has also been decelerated by poor economic conditions produced by a concatenation of political, social, and environmental deterioration. Groups facing sudden economic challenges as a result of natural disasters such as drought, floods, pest infestations on their agricultural products, and effects of climate change often face the risk of forced displacement too. For those so affected, migration is spontaneous and yet inevitable. Natural disasters are beyond human control to a reasonable degree, and thus it would be difficult to preempt their damaging occurrence. When ecological disasters strike hard, people are compelled to consider survival in 80. For example, Chossudovsky, “Economic Genocide in Rwanda”; Rothe, Mullins, and Sandstrom, “Rwandan Genocide”; Yacob-Haliso, “Identities, Conflict.” For a critique of the relative impact of economic factors on the Rwandan state and its actions, see Storey, “Structural Adjustment.”

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another way and another place. This kind of situation needs urgent containment strategies and coping mechanisms. For these people, the situation can be tough and inconvenient because they usually belong to the lower rungs of power in society with little or no ability to react effectively and immediately to such unanticipated challenges. Therefore, such conditions generate the possibility of people seeking aggressive solutions with immediate results, manifesting in taking extreme measures in some cases or, in the alternative, resulting in depression. In the first possibility, the affected groups are forced to migrate to another environment, even when they are restricted by government policies of their desired destinations. In the second possibility, however, they add to the numbers of victims of circumstances in their society. The agricultural development of the continent has been impaired by the limited amount of rainfall, which has contributed to restricted production by the people. It is generally accepted that the tropicality of this environment is beneficial to humans, but in some cases, it has undesirable consequences for the germination of plants and other agricultural produce. The climatic conditions experienced by the continent in the 1970s were unfavorable to agricultural businesses because they not only impeded their growth but also restricted their ability to reach their fullest potential. The economic impact is the obvious deterioration of harvests and failure of livestock businesses.81 Drought has had powerful and disastrous consequences as African populations have concomitantly increased. However, the relationship between the increase in numbers and their eventual economic prosperity is neither forthcoming nor clear. In fact, the opposite has been the case. Rapid population increase usually comes with undesirable consequences, especially when the conditions for generating income are sabotaged by nature. When rainfall is minimal, the population naturally becomes a burden, which increases the chance for human migration. This therefore creates a complex situation where everything becomes muddled. For example, internal displacement causes another internal destination to experience a population explosion, and the effects of this on their own economic status can be dehumanizing. In another instance, when people leave their habitat because of economic necessities, they create an economic vacuum that cannot be managed appropriately from their evaded habitat. Rapid population increase becomes a burden because people are forced to leave their drought-ridden environment to concentrate heavily in another area, a pattern that has its negative downsides. 81. Overseas Development Institute, “Africa’s Economic Crisis.”

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This crisis is compounded by government economic policies that make the challenge of forced displacement more immediate. In the wake of colonization, many Africans became co-opted into the European-imposed style of farming, which was centered on the production of cash crops. This triggered massive competition as farmers became actively interested in those new crops because of their capacity to produce fast financial results, to the detriment of food crops. This also concentrated farming onto fewer farms and exhausted land and soil. The government was complicit because the 1970s in Africa witnessed increased policy attention from governments to commercialized agriculture. Naturally, this revised the prior attention of the government, which was nothing short of indifference to activities of that nature. Getting this interest meant different things for farmers and the products they gave their attention to. The commitment of large resources to the agricultural sector suffered a backlash in underutilization by the beneficiaries, who were either overwhelmed by the structural change or were ignorant of making sufficient use of it. Therefore, land use received harsher treatment that manifested in the farmers’ inability to rapidly mechanize farming to enhance productivity.82 This also increased the cost of production. Despite these conditions, however, it became obvious that the 1970s were unfavorable to the farmer. The fact that the principal export crops stagnated in the global market led to a fall in prices because the next targets for their consumption were the urban demographics, and they had to be attracted by reduced prices to purchase these products. This, however, was not considering the cost of transportation in a not-well-connected intracountry infrastructure. Government policies on agricultural products around this time remained unfavorable for the majority of farmers, who were rural-bound, and they became increasingly impoverished and susceptible to migration because of the unfavorable economic climate. Since the export of goods stagnated, it was unavoidable that they saw a shift in their agricultural engagement. This dreadful situation created barriers to the survival of farmers. Scarce resources and their lack of options became potent reasons for migration. In the course of the commercialization of their products, many relocated to the city. This not only led to overpopulation; it also became a factor for further displacement. Eventually, the increase in crude oil prices had a substantial influence on the economic crisis beleaguering the continent in this period. During the 1970s, global prices in oil escalated, and there was a sharp increase in the exportation of oil by oil-producing countries such as Angola and Nigeria, each recording 82. Ibid.

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exponential growth in their exports of oil.83 However, the paradox was that while these countries were experiencing an unprecedented boom in that regard, they regrettably were finding it difficult to cope with the price reduction that gripped export-oriented crops. The price acceleration in the oil industry meant that the cost of importation was also skyrocketing. Consequently, it was difficult to import fertilizers for the primary users, which in turn had its devastating impact on agricultural production. Therefore, the relationship between the oil boom and the suppression of farm production is bidirectional. Coupled with the existing ecological challenges, drought became inhibitive to the sustainability of farmers. Many Africans have become victims of forced displacement because of delayed rainfall, especially in the eastern and southern regions of the continent. About 2.3 million people have been displaced in Angola, 8.3 million in Ethiopia, 2.5 million in Kenya, 1.3 million in Madagascar, and approximately 640,000 in Lesotho.84 Although some of these places experienced heavy rains recently, the lateness of the rainfall made it difficult to effectively offset the problems caused by its absence. The figures presented here do not represent what many other countries in that region experienced in terms of drought, floods, and other ecological challenges that threaten the survival of people; however, they provide a picture of what people pass through daily and the inevitability of migration. When unplanned events overtake the activities of farmers or rural dwellers, they are instantaneously confronted with the option of migration because, as already implied, survival is cardinal to human existence, and people will therefore seek it no matter the requirements. The number of displaced persons affected by these harsh environmental conditions in African countries is estimated to be around 14 million in 2019 alone.85 In the case of the surge of refugees in Ethiopia, late rainfall was a factor because their food production was affected, making it particularly difficult for them to remain in one place. For these affected Ethiopians, the need for emergency aid cannot be overstated. In the case of Kenya, for example, the year 2019 was especially damaging. The country experienced a more than 100 percent increase in the number of IDPs, from 1.1 million to 2.5 million, people who were seriously hit by unstable climatic conditions.86 They had been confronted with severe drought for a long time, and late rainfall did little and was more palliative than 83. Ibid. 8 4. Anyadike, “Drought in Africa.” 85. Ibid. 86. Ibid.

Figure 7.2. Somali refugee women and children fleeing famine and conflict, waiting to enter a refugee camp in Kenya. Oxfam East Africa; Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki /File:Oxfam_Horn_of_Africa_famine_refugee.jpg.

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corrective of the situation. And for several East African countries in 2019–2020, this situation was compounded by a severe locust invasion, which not only destroyed crops, devastating the region, but also put the next planting and harvesting seasons, as well as food security in the region, in jeopardy. A similar story reverberates in Madagascar, Malawi, Somalia, South Sudan, and a host of other nations facing challenges of food insecurity, drought, and other climate-related disasters. Figure 7.2 shows some of the women and child victims of famine and conflict in Somalia who fled to Kenya for refuge. Given the massive outflow of human and natural resources from these countries, it is necessary to understand that migration was helplessly inevitable. The refugees’ displacement experience is further exacerbated by the stringent conditions of refugee policies in their host countries. It is tragic that they hardly attract international attention to provide the needed conditions for the improvement of their situation. In places where they face the harsh conditions of food shortage, they stand the risk of starvation and even death. Given the difficulties of survival, they may resort to various strategies that pose challenges to their hosts, who see their large and growing population as threatening. Furthermore, scarce resources mean that they will conform to difficult rules in those countries with the available arrangements, which in most cases are unfavorable.

Control of Nat u r a l R e sou rce s It is incontestable that Africa is rich in many natural resources. The continent’s resources have been the primary driver of external interest and incursion—by European explorers and colonizers, Arabic expansionists, and, recently, Chinese and Russian prospectors. It is no surprise, then, that the intractability and protraction of conflicts in the region are associated with the continuous competition for the control of rich natural resources, which has contradictorily led to lack of development—the so-called “resource curse” thesis. Even when those internal struggles have the coloration of religious or ethnic rivalry, the underlying or real reason for the escalation of interethnic strife may be the control of natural resources. Thus, to understand the underlying dynamics of war-ridden African states that incessantly produce refugees, one needs to interrogate the historical antecedents of the struggle for natural resource control. Take, for example, the trajectory of several countries in Central Africa, exemplified in the DRC case. The DRC’s experiences with the failure of independence, postcolonial instability and conflict, and state failure have already been discussed above, but we seek here to explain the problem of natural resource control beginning more directly with the DRC, which has unfortunately

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become the classic case in this category. Almost every valuable natural resource over the centuries has been found in this region: diamonds, gold, oil, uranium, coal, tin, coltan, rubber, copper, cobalt, bauxite, and so on, including the mighty Congo River itself. The exploitation of the vast resources of the DRC was a principal factor in the imposition of Leopold II’s colonial occupation of the area. Prior to this, the Portuguese explorers who “discovered” the Congo immediately saw its vast potential and milked the country of not less than four million slaves at the height of the Atlantic slave trade. The Belgian colonizers succeeded in their imposition of brutal authoritarian rule, which allowed them to fully appropriate Congolese natural resources without benefit to the citizens. The pattern continued through colonial rule to the postcolonial reality where the leaders exploited these resources in a similar fashion to that employed by the colonialists. The unequal distribution of income and wealth over time also contributed to the conflicts among various oppositional groups.87 In the Congo Crisis of the immediate postindependence period, the secession of Katanga and Kasai, two of the most mineral-rich regions of the country, lent urgency to the crisis and necessitated the involvement of the Congolese army, which eventually paved the way for Mobutu’s coup d’état of 1965. Ironically, the cessation of full-out war in the Congo during the larger part of Mobutu’s rule, from 1965 till about 1995, was replaced by the rapacious greed of an elite created, cultivated, and led by Mobutu himself, and the massive stealing of state resources was no less consequential for the nation and its peoples. By the onset of the First Congo War in 1997, also referred to as Africa’s First World War because of the large number of states involved, Mobutu had lost his long-standing support of Western governments, as they no longer needed him as a strategic ally against Soviet influence in the region once the Cold War had ended. The First Congo War was provoked by events following the Rwandan genocide of 1994, including the influx of over a million Hutu refugees and armed militias to the Kivu region in eastern DRC, who, with Mobutu’s support, began incursions and attacks from Congolese soil against Rwanda. By 1996, Rwanda was fed up and, joined by Uganda and Angola, fought alongside a consolidated group of rebels under the leadership of Laurent Desire Kabila, who succeeded in finally ousting Mobutu. The Second Congo War, fought from 1998 to 2003, was provoked by Kabila’s attempt to turn around and restrict Rwanda’s influence on the Congo. It ultimately involved fourteen foreign armies, three main rebel groups, and countless armed militias.88 8 7. Gourou, “Democratic Republic of Congo,” 349. 88. Autesserre, “Responsibility to Protect in Congo.”

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Importantly, while there were grievances carried over from the previous conflicts and more recent developments, all the fighting involving so many international and local actors was perceived mainly as a struggle to capture and control the resources of mineral-rich regions and the country itself.89 What exacerbates the situation is that these resources then finance war and keep it going interminably. Indeed, as Paul Collier and his colleagues have pointed out, “Natural resources are never the sole source of conflict, and they do not make conflict inevitable. But the presence of abundant primary commodities, especially in low-income countries, exacerbates the risks of conflict and, if conflict does break out, tends to prolong it and makes it harder to resolve.”90 This has been borne out in the DRC as the conflict in the eastern DRC, in North and South Kivu, continues. Different armed groups and warlords jostle for control, each considering themselves the legal custodian of the resources. In North and South Kivu, Orientale, Maniema, and Katanga, internal struggles and conflicts continue to overtake their activities, fostering more distrust and mutual suspicion that make dialogue a difficult task.91 In all these places, local and external militia groups engage in continuous struggles that challenge the peace of the country. Therefore, the political instability and financial devastation that face the country cannot but then be viewed analytically. Despite its vast resources, the country hosts a whopping 4.49 million IDPs as of December 2017, the highest number on the continent, as well as hundreds of thousands of refugees who suffer repeated displacement.92 A less cited example of violent conflict sustained by the presence of natural resources is that of the Central African Republic (CAR). This country is also richly endowed with mineral deposits including uranium, diamond, gold, crude oil, and cobalt, as well as resources such as cattle, timber, coffee, and hydropower, and yet, as is typical of so-called resource curses, the CAR remains one of the poorest nations in the world. Conflict here is sometimes subsumed under religious rivalry, but the underlying challenge is one of natural resource control. The CAR has seen a series of coups and army mutinies since independence from France in 1960, instituting authoritarian governments, all of which were usually motivated by the need to control resources. The first president, David Dacko, was ousted in a coup in 1965 by Jean-Bédel Bokassa, who went 8 9. Mathys, “Bringing History Back.” 9 0. Bannon and Collier, Natural Resources and Violent Conflict, ix. See also Collier et al., Breaking the Conflict Trap; Collier and Hoeffler, “Political Economy of Secession.” 91. United Nations, “Final Report.” 92. Relief Web, “Democratic Republic of Congo.”

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on to crown himself emperor and ruled by repression and oppression until he was overthrown by France in 1979 and Dacko returned to power. But Dacko was not to last in office, as he was again overthrown in another coup in 1981 by General André-Dieudonné Kolingba, while Ange-Félix Patasse came to power via much-delayed elections in 1993. Patasse was in turn toppled from power in a coup by François Bozizé in 2003, sparking what is referred to as the Bush War, which lasted from 2004 to 2007. Nonetheless, the Seleka, a coalition of rebel groups from the north (mainly Muslims), rallied and began to fight again in 2012, starting a civil war that is still ongoing. The Seleka rebel leader, Michel Djotodia, overthrew the government of Bozizé in 2013, but the fighting continued with the rise of a new militia, the anti-Balaka, allegedly a mostly Christian group, which challenged the Seleka. The Seleka also lost cohesion and was disbanded, but certain elements reconvened as the ex-Seleka group and continued to fight. Based on a peace treaty, a transition government headed by Catherine Samba-Panza was formed, which saw a new government inaugurated after elections in 2016 headed by Faustin-Archange Touadéra.93 This complicated history of constant violence has rendered the country almost entirely prostrate, and there is yet no solution in sight. It is reported that as of December 2019, not less than 70 percent of the territory still remained under the control of various armed groups and militia.94 The fighting has intensified with the development of a war economy that seems to be sustaining continued fighting, ultimately making it difficult to reach a viable peace agreement. Says a recent report by the US Institute of Peace, “Though the conflict began as an ideological struggle, armed groups soon engaged in predatory economic activities, taxing and extorting local populations to support their own economic interests and exerting control over territory. . . . The profits to be made from the conflict economy are a major disincentive for peace efforts such as disarmament and demobilization.”95 In Bangui, for example, the Seleka militia group overtook the territory and began an expansive exploitation of natural resources including timber exploitation, ivory poaching, and diamond mining, with mindless concern for the ecological, economic, and social consequences to the people.96 To understand the level at which the struggle for resource control has deepened the outrageous relationship existing among groups in the country, it is important to put into perspective the rise of sectional politics 9 3. See Isaacs-Martin, “Political and Ethnic Identity.” 94. Mangan, Acko, and Taha, “Green Diamond.” 95. Ibid, 6. 96. Global Conflict Tracker, “Violence.”

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and interests under the control of various group leaders. In 2017, for example, the CAR government made a peace agreement with thirteen different militia groups to embrace peace and suspend their infractions.97 This means that thirteen aggressive groups were engaged in this unrelenting conflict, increasingly complicated by the intervention of external actors such as Russia, a nation also interested in the CAR’s natural resources. In the midst of this conflict, the country’s 4.7 million citizens have been displaced internally and externally, a reality occasioned by destitution and human rights abuses that have accompanied the decades of political instability and that have intensified with more recent acts already classified as potential war crimes and crimes against humanity. As of December 31, 2019, up to 592,000 persons had been internally displaced specifically by the conflict and violence in the CAR, while 626,838 CAR refugees are recorded as living in Cameroon, Sudan, South Sudan, Chad, Congo, and the DRC as of October 2020.98 Unfortunately, displacement is still ongoing at this time. The implications of having such a large percentage (26 percent) of the national population displaced are likely to reverberate for generations, well beyond the end of the conflict. A UN peacekeeping mission, the UN Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in the Central African Republic, now has the task of providing protection to civilians who have been most brutalized by the conflict.99

Neocoloni a l Econom y One issue that often reminds Africans of colonialists’ parasitic relationship with them is the depletion of their natural and human resources. This relationship has had a one-sided result that favored the expansionists at one end and severely affected Africans at the other. Different European countries with the same goal employed dissimilar approaches for their imperialist agenda. While some were less despotic, others, in relation to their actions and attitudes, were extremely imposing and mindlessly dictatorial. For example, the British imperialists embraced dialogue in some of the places where they took over their political affairs, and this accounted for their establishing an indirect rule system that enabled them to rule their colonies by proxy. Even though it had inherent shortcomings, this system did allow their subjects to preserve most of 9 7. Ibid. 98. Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, “Central African Republic”; UNHCR Operational Portal, “Regional Response.” 9 9. Ibid.

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their culture and converse in their language with little fear for secrecy, which may manifest in revolutionary actions or planning of reprisal attacks against them. However, the French were not persuaded by this strategy; they decided to be totalitarian. As such, under the policies of direct rule and assimilation (which itself was unevenly applied), French subjects in Africa had to drop their indigenous languages and their cultures, which meant they also gave up their identities.100 Understanding the ideological basis for French colonization is important to make sense of the eventual economic struggles that linger on in their ex-colonies. Compared with other powers, the French colonialists showed greater aggression toward their subjects and were more suspicious of their actions. Under French colonization, their subjects suffered humiliation and identity damage in addition to brutal repression whose traces can still be felt today. For example, Guinea-Conakry was especially punished by France in 1958 when Sékou Touré decided to break away from the controlling power of France and voted for independence, becoming the first French colony in Africa to become independent. The colonizers retaliated against the perceived rejection and humiliation by embarking on mass destruction of public properties, including institutions that were established to serve the interest of the people.101 In a very aggressive response, France ordered the repatriation of three thousand French professionals and civil servants from Guinea and followed this with the removal of all transportable assets, carting away cars, books, medicine, research institute instruments, and tractors, thereby destroying schools, hospitals, and other public buildings in their attempt to sabotage the efforts of the revolutionaries. Explanations such as this offer context against which we can better understand how the neocolonialist capitalist economies serve as another basis for the generation of refugees and forced migration. The retaliatory aggression of the French could be sustained only by a culture of scapegoating and repressing potential revolutionaries. Their intention of making an example of Guinea in this way was to relay a message to other French-controlled African colonies and to silence intending freedom fighters and agitations for independence in other French colonial territories. Even if the nationalists had radical or revolutionary inclinations, the thought that their actions would endanger the lives and properties of their people and country was enough to greatly moderate 100. Mahmood Mamdani analyzes this fundamental difference and the implications of the policies of indirect and direct rule in European colonies in Africa. Mamdani, Citizen and Subject. 101. Gerits, “Postcolonial Cultural Transaction”; Koutonin, “France/Afrique.”

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their demands and agitations. Having won the war of repressing their colonial subjects psychologically, the French had set the stage for the enhancement of their colonial agenda, to lay those foundations that would help consolidate their imperialism even after the time of formal colonization was gone. When Sylvanus Olympio, the first Togolese president, decided to align with other Western countries and shun French control, he immediately became the target of France’s aggression and belligerent retaliation. He took the brave step to abandon the French colonial monetary system, FCFA (the franc for French African colonies), and issue the country its own currency. Barely three days after this rejection, on January 13, 1963, a coup led by Etienne Gnassingbe Eyadema and directly sponsored by the French colonialists took Olympio’s life in the first instance of a French-backed military takeover on the continent.102 A similar fate befell all African leaders of French ex-colonies who had the same intention of liberating their people from the financial colonization and economic tyranny of the French government. In a familiar fashion, they were all overthrown by their African brothers who had been sponsored by the French government and who in some cases were heavily remunerated for the action. From Modibo Keita, the first president of the Republic of Mali; to David Dacko, the first president of the Central African Republic; to Maurice Yaméogo, the first president of Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso); to Hubert Maga, the first president of the Republic of Benin; and Thomas Sankara of Upper Volta/Burkina Faso, they were all either overthrown or assassinated by different French-backed coup leaders.103 All these presidents had variously planned to break free from the economic strangulation of the colonizers so that they could establish for their nations a stronger foundation for financial independence. However, France did not have the same plan for them, as they were still interested in exploiting them after the abolition of colonization. The fact that they paid coup leaders that assisted in killing many of these Afrocentric revolutionaries underscores their intention to retain their economic power over these colonies. In this way, France constantly intervened directly in many former colonies by removing the governments not favorable to their neocolonial policy. The fact that Francophone African countries, despite their numbers, had the highest number of military takeovers (coups d’état) on the continent seems to 102. Ibid. For lists of the fates of African leaders in this era, see Powell and Chacha, “Closing the Book.” The explanation for this Togolese coup d’état, which was the very first on the African continent, featuring the very first assassination of an African leader, is not settled. See a discussion of this in Skinner, “West Africa’s First Coup.” 103. Koutonin, “France/Afrique.”

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confirm this assertion. France was ready to consolidate their economic control of their ex-colonies, without which their financial hegemony that is flaunted today would perhaps have been impossible. Not surprisingly, it is reported that some past and present French presidents have alluded to this fact. In 2008, a former president of France, Jacques Chirac, allegedly said, “Without Africa, France will slide down into the rank of a third [world] power.”104 To corroborate this position, François Mitterand, an erstwhile French president, reportedly stated, “Without Africa, France will have no history in the 21st century.”105 It is no coincidence, then, that the contemporary Francophone African countries are eternally tied to the economic apron strings of their colonizer. The long-standing poverty that ravaged those countries is connected to the fact that their financial basis has been crushed by the Europeans and their cronies, and this continues to threaten their survival in the twenty-first century. While an academic debate has raged concerning the relative benefits and harms of colonization in economic terms for colonizer and colonized, Elise Huillery concludes after careful empirical analysis of colonial financial and official records that “colonial public finances imposed a far larger black man’s burden than any white man’s burden”; that is, the colonized were by far the biggest losers economically in the colonial situation—and still are today.106 Recent research that contrasts the economic development of former British and French African colonies provides a particularly clear picture of the lingering disparity and relative disadvantage of the former French colonies. Andreas Bergh and Guenther Fink present quantitative evidence of what they term the “French curse,” the divergent economic indices that portray this reality from their study of thirty African countries, which included thirteen former British and thirteen former French colonies, among others. They report that: In terms of their income per capita, French and British colonies did not differ much before colonies became independent in the 1960s. . . . This changed in the early 1970s, when average income per capita started to increase more rapidly in British colonies. . . . Starting around the mid-1990s British colonies experienced relatively stable growth rates around 3–5% per year, while the French colonies continued to grow at rates below 2% per year on average. Overall, average income per capita more than doubled in British colonies between 1970 and 2015 [>200%], while average income per capita grew by less than 25% in French colonies over the entire 45-year period.107 104. Ibid. 105. Ibid. 106. Huillery, “Black Man’s Burden,” 6. 107. Bergh and Fink. “French Curse,” 4.

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This is not to imply that there were no deleterious effects of British colonial rule—far from it. Indeed there were, and these have been given extensive treatment in this chapter and the preceding one. But the effort here is to demonstrate the stark effects of the strategy of one of the colonial powers, France, to lend weight to the argument that colonial and neocolonial economies remain foundational to understanding the internal politics of African states as causes of refugee flows in Africa. How did the disparity described above come about? It was mainly due to the parasitic relationship instituted by France upon their supposed exit, which continues to affect the currency and economic growth of their former colonies. When it appeared that the steam of colonization was dying down in the late 1950s and early 1960s, France produced and signed comprehensive bilateral military, political, fiscal, economic, and cultural agreements with its colonies that were designed to keep the colonies perpetually tied to the metropole. A careful scrutiny of these agreements reveals that colonization was never fully abolished in the French colonies. It was rather redefined, establishing a neocolonial order.108 The maintenance of the CFA zone, by which France controls the monetary and fiscal policies of Francophone African countries by holding their currency reserves in the French central bank and anchoring the CFA to the euro, is the most blatant evidence and the starkest example of this neocolonial fiscal control.109 In this neocolonial order, African elites perpetuate the dependency on France as long as they privately benefit from the arrangement, while the majority of the population suffers in poverty. Considering the effects of this neocolonial relationship, it is no wonder that these countries see large waves of emigration of young people toward Europe in search of better lives, since the opportunities for betterment at home have collapsed.

X enophobic Attack s In recent years, another factor that continues to facilitate profound growth in the number of refugees is xenophobic prejudice. More studies are needed to understand the recent rise in xenophobic attacks on the continent, especially considering the waves it makes in those areas where the phenomenon occurs. It is commonplace in contemporary Africa to find instances of economic migrants who seek better financial opportunities in their destinations. For this reason, we find increasing numbers of migrants trooping into South Africa, 108. Harshe, “French Neo-colonialism”; Staniland, “Francophone Africa.” 109. Taylor, “France à Fric.”

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given the relative stability and buoyance of its economy. Apparently, the country is a preferred destination for people who have been victims of different circumstances including ecological problems, internal violence, and political issues. In this country, internal struggles exist that intensify the problem of refugees, particularly xenophobia. Thus, the situation can be troubling as refugees are forced into a reality that compounds their challenges rather than abates them. Rather than finding economic succor, migrants become the targets of xenophobic attacks, which invariably convert them to refugees as they flee this violence and seek protection. Sometimes the xenophobic attacks are targeted at identified refugees and asylum seekers specifically. In Durban, a large city in South Africa, the recent history of migrant presence can be traced back to the 1990s, when displaced people from neighboring countries such as Mozambique, Somalia, Uganda, Tanzania, Malawi, Zimbabwe, and a host of others arrived looking for greener pastures.110 Driven by economic crises and widespread unemployment in their home countries, they sought economic prosperity and financial independence in South Africa, settling in Durban city. During this period, however, their legitimacy as refugees was not accepted.111 On the government front, it was difficult because South Africa’s asylum and immigration system was rooted in its racist past and makes it incredibly difficult for asylum seekers to claim refugee status, often leaving them no choice but to survive on the fringes of society, without protection. On the societal front, the influx of migrants triggered reactions as the host country’s citizens viewed them unfavorably. It is instructive and helpful to understand the roles played by the media in fostering xenophobic thinking, as they usually portray these refugees as aliens and job grabbers who would in the long run displace the indigenes from their economic mainstay. This narrative was sometimes compounded by the migrants’ inability to maintain a peaceful existence with their hosts in their quest for survival. In the early 1990s, the South African police reported that 14 percent of the major crimes in Durban involved immigrants, and this, regrettably, fueled the xenophobic thinking that the immigrants were on a mission to overtake and exploit the country.112 Nursing this thinking formed the basis for planning aggressive attacks against the migrants, regardless of the eventual consequences. The nature of refugees allows them to take menial jobs and opportunities as long as it guarantees their economic development. Their survival strategy was effective as they defied 1 10. Maharaj, “Migrants and Urban Rights.” 111. Ibid. 112. Ibid.

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some difficult circumstances to establish themselves. As they prospered economically, they attracted further hostile attention from the locals, who were already under strain from local and national politics of marginalization. Some of the hubs of the recent xenophobic attacks, such as Kwa-Zulu Natal, had also been the hot spots for violence between rival black nationalist groups Inkatha and the African National Congress. In 2008, there was an outbreak of violence in the township of Alexandra in Johannesburg where locals clashed with migrants.113 This altercation led to loss of lives and properties for the two sides. It was estimated that about one hundred thousand people became internally displaced by this episode, scrambling for safety from the violence and killing. Also, in Durban, hundreds of thousands of refugees have been secondarily displaced, most of whom have sought refuge in churches and other places where opportunities presented themselves. A haunted refugee from Burundi named Nadine Nkurukiye recounted her ordeal in xenophobia-beleaguered South Africa. She concluded, “There is no help, there is no-one who can show you the way to go. What I’m only asking is for the UNHCR to help us, to give us a place where we can be safe. Where they can accept us like human beings because South Africa doesn’t treat us like human beings.”114 It is apparent that the occurrence of further attacks in South Africa increased the challenges facing immigrants. When this happens, it increases the number of displaced people and compels further displacement. As was seen in reports from various media outlets, the locals’ suspicion was premised on a history of suffering that South Africans have endured under their apartheid rules and structures. The Black South Africans were coming from segregation policies enthroned by white settlers of the country, and these xenophobic attacks were therefore a psychological response to every probability of taking away what was meant to provide them economic development and sustenance. The tensions were therefore an expression of their discontentment with the national order. Also, it appears that the policy formulation of the country played a role in further displacing the already-displaced migrants. This culminated in the relationship created by the locals with the refugees, as some of their actions were dictated by emotional displeasure felt against refugees or outsiders. In some situations, the migrants were denied the opportunity to own land or engage in businesses that would make them contend with those initiated by the indigenous South Africans. What is important is that refugees face violence in South Africa manifesting in deliberate persecution and the 113. Ibid. 114. Mkhise, “Refuge in South Africa.”

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denial of access to economic survival. All these circumstances lead to resource scarcity for the refugees, and it is another reason for further migration. In essence, xenophobic attacks contribute greatly to the displacement of people in contemporary Southern Africa.

Conclusion So far, we have attempted to place within the proper context the postcolonial reasons for refugee creation within Africa. The exponential surge in the number of refugees in Africa since independence has its foundational structures, many of which have been discussed in this chapter. Africa’s current reality has a strong connection to the experience of the past, which included its colonial relationship with the European imperialists. During this period, the fate of contemporary African life was partly sealed by the actions of the colonizers as the postcolonial environment continued to establish a strong nexus between contemporary African reality and their history with colonizers. This confirms the argument that colonialism and postcoloniality are difficult to separate. We have demonstrated that bad leadership could be the result of some of the debilitations inherited by the political leaders as well as a lack of positive leadership role modeling. Humans are social engines capable of being influenced by their experiences. The fact that some Africans cling unendingly to power, even when they are bereft of ideas, and that people indulge in severe infractions can only reveal them as victims of their past and their limited experience and worldviews. This is complicated by interference by external forces, compounding the lives of ordinary citizens. Unfortunately, refugees and displaced persons are left without protection and solutions due to these failures, both at home and abroad.

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INTERNAL DISPL ACEMENT IN AFRICA

Introduction Historically, the international community has given far more attention to population movements that cross national borders and continents than to migrations within the borders of a nation. By thinking that such internal displacements are natural or that their occurrence should be the exclusive preserve of a nation-state, the world misses opportunities to curb challenges before they grow larger and more difficult. In postcolonial Africa, the explosion of internal struggles and conflicts has caused many people to seek refuge in new environments that promise peace and opportunity. These movements, however, are dependent on which places these individuals can afford to travel to. They also choose where to go based on the exigencies of their situation. War-affected persons ordinarily seek refuge where there is relative peace and stability. This same reasoning applies to people whose reasons for migration are not political. In the Horn of Africa and parts of East Africa that are confronted with droughts or floods, people may not immediately consider migrating to the neighboring country because their neighbors often face the same challenges they are fleeing from. If displaced persons can find relative stability within the same country, thus, they will often relocate to these places without having to cross a national border. The fact that they remain within the same country does not invalidate the reality that forced their displacement. For example, the Nigerian citizens who became victims of violence from terrorist groups in the northern part of the country and found themselves displaced to places such as Abuja, the capital city of Nigeria, probably faced similar problems as people who crossed the border from their towns in northeastern Nigeria into

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Chad or Cameroon. The only difference may be that their choice of destination was determined by factors such as the proximity to the border or other locations, their ability to finance longer or shorter journeys, the presence of family or other kin networks, language affinities, personal considerations, and sometimes the perceived receptive atmosphere of those projected destinations. In most cases, internally displaced persons (IDPs) are individuals who would easily be considered refugees if they crossed an international border. A survey of forcibly displaced persons in Africa shows that the majority are IDPs. Globally, the number of IDPs in the year 2020 was double that of refugees at 55 million, with 48 million as a result of conflict and 7 million as a result of disasters.1 Africa has the largest number of IDPs with over 17 million, about one-third of the global figure. Today, IDPs outnumber refugees five to one.2 They face similar challenges as refugees who have fled across borders to other countries. Although there are some variations in their circumstances based on the nature of and responsibility for solutions needed, the challenges facing their survival are constant.

Locating I DPs in A fr ica The complexity of internal displacement is a course of history from the recent past. Virtually all African countries have instances of internal displacement inspired by similar factors, albeit with dissimilar consequences. In the case of some countries, the explosion in the number of IDPs has caused the fragile unity binding them to be severely threatened, making room for the institutionalization of prejudices that are capable of bringing lasting division or separation. Responses have varied, and less attention has been given to these situations mainly because of the tendency to defer to state sovereignty over issues that are considered domestic national matters. Even within national borders, the responses to IDPs vary from place to place. For example, in countries where terrorism and other violent crimes are the ignition for displacement, citizens in other parts of the country may raise alarm at any influx of displaced people from the affected parts, and they may show hostility due to suspicion that the displaced persons are also terrorists, as we have seen happen in Kenya, Nigeria, and Somalia, for example. However, even in such cases, when IDPs find themselves among ethnic kin, the possibility of more receptive accommodation is higher. 1 . Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), “Global Report.” 2. Adepoju, “Migration Dynamics.”

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In Nigeria, for example, more than three million people were estimated to be displaced internally as of 2019.3 Multiple reasons are responsible for this displacement. Within Nigeria, for example, the northern part of the country is the most ravaged and is perpetually confronted with the challenge of displacement caused by insecurity, social instability, ecological challenges, and more. This makes the population prone to migration and internal mobility. The combined states of Adamawa, Bauchi, Borno, Gombe, Taraba, and Yobe have the greater number of those who have left their drought-ridden, war-torn, and crime-prone environment for a better place within Nigeria. The Displacement Tracking Matrix (DTM) estimates the number of displaced persons in these states at around 1,918,508, with each state having their unique conditions.4 In places such as Adamawa, Bauchi, and Gombe, the number of IDPs has continued to rise since 2014. For example, the cumulative numbers of IDPs in the region reflect about 10 to 29 percent located in Adamawa alone. Similar trends can be seen in Yobe, Taraba, and Borno States, and their statistics of displacement are reflective of the people’s activities and circumstances that led to the escalation of displacement. The DTM reports that Borno had zero record of IDPs prior to 2014, and their sudden appearance and increase in numbers point to the presence of an important displacementcausing factor—the transformation in the intensity and involvement of the Boko Haram conflict. What remains constant across this northeastern region of Nigeria, however, is that the change in the status quo forced people to leave their states for neighboring states where the reign of terror was minimal and where their safety could be guaranteed.5 Studying the demographic composition of the IDP population reveals that the vulnerable ages are children and the elderly, who may not have the energy to embark on migrations to distant destinations. Although the cases found in northern Nigeria do not entirely represent the data on IDPs within the country, other areas of the country are also susceptible to internal displacement, owing to similar reasons of terrorism, conflict, and environmental disaster. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), however, there is remarkable consistency in the large scale of internal displacement in the country. This country recorded a whopping number of above five million IDPs as of 2019.6 People who are internally displaced reached an unprecedented number 3. IDMC, “Nigeria.” 4. Ibid. 5. Relief Web, “Nigeria.” 6. IDMC, “Democratic Republic of the Congo.”

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in the North and South Kivu regions, and the causes of their displacement are similar to those in other parts of the continent: long-standing conflict and violence. Internal displacement continues to remain on a sharp increase in the DRC as of 2020. The provinces experiencing upheavals are those most affected. In the conflict-ridden regions of Haut-Katanga, Ituri, Lualaba, Maï-ndombe, Maniema, Tanganyika, and Tshopo, there are greater numbers of IDPs because of the instability and violence there. These IDPs remain within a given country often because of a lack of resources to do otherwise. This accentuates the argument that internal displacement can be as complex and complicated as cross-border movements. In 2019, people were displaced from North Kivu to South Kivu, itself a region in unrest, thereby displaying some of the characteristic patterns of internal displacement. According to the DTM, “In Kalehe territory, South Kivu, about 15,000 people were displaced from villages in the Haut Plateaux to the Moyens Plateaux due to offensives against armed groups that were launched on the 26th of November.”7 A number of people were also displaced that year into Loda, in Djugu territory in the Ituri province. It is equally important to connect internal displacement to cross-border movements because similar events serve as the drivers of people’s mobility. Many IDPs also hope that the issue that led to their migration will be solved quickly and that they will soon be able to return to their homes when the situation is under control. For those who flee their environment because of sudden floods and other natural disasters, their confidence is reposed in the cycles of nature, believing that such occurrences are seasonal and will be contained. IDPs often return to their homes and communities when they estimate that the crisis has abated, but in the case of long-standing conflicts, they usually find themselves spending long periods in IDP camps or wherever they found shelter. In Sudan, it is not surprising that the number of IDPs is equally large. For more than three decades, the country has recorded constant displacement of persons from its various conflicts in several states. IDPs experience hostile conditions due to the activities of militia groups and therefore find themselves constantly on the run. Researchers have studied the patterns of internal displacement in Sudan and located patterns of the phenomenon in the country. For example, in central, eastern, and both southern and northern Darfur, the number of IDPs paints a picture of the country’s internal struggles that have compelled the people to look for settlement elsewhere. Displacement does not

7. Ibid.

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happen in these places alone; it extends to western Darfur and to West and South Kordofan also.8 With the appropriate response to the internal conflicts, however, Sudan sometimes also records high numbers of IDP returns. But the number of IDPs in Sudan remains far above two million in different locations within at least seven states, according to the DTM.9 Sudan is ridden with genocidal violence that continues to disrupt the people’s social lives and economic activities and to challenge their safety. Apart from this, the Sudanese people are additionally displaced by factors relating to poor environmental conditions triggered by erosion, flooding, and other ecological challenges. In Darfur, there has been a long-standing conflict among armed groups protesting the unfavorable politics that keeps them marginalized. Under the leadership of Omar al-Bashir, wrong governmental policies and the brutal armed response of the government have exacerbated quality-of-life issues, and the eventual results are the displacement of people from one location and region within the country to another. Some IDPs were the result of interethnic or intergroup rivalry that existed between the Nuba and Beni Amer. Equally, there were clashes between Fallata and Rizeigat cattle herders that led to the displacement of more people. Instances of herders’ attacks continued to increase, giving rise to the numbers of IDPs who have lost touch with their places of habitual residence. Somalia has also been recognized as one African country that is continuously going through the ravaging experience of displacement. All over the country, internal struggles have regional and countrywide complexities, and the escalation of those conflicts and displacement are the twin problems confronting the nation since the 1990s. What is particular in the pattern of displacement in this country is that displacement is usually triggered by terrorismrelated attacks as the country is home to Al-Shabaab, a violent terrorist group that has held the country to ransom for decades. While violent attacks from the terrorist group threaten the survival of the country, this is compounded by natural disasters of flooding and drought. The combination of all these issues makes it inevitable for large numbers of people to be internally displaced. Even when there are periods of momentary relief from the ecological challenges, the violent activities of armed groups continue to weaken their environmental structures and social stability. In 2019 alone, more than two hundred thousand Somalis, predominantly from Al-Shabaab-dominated areas, were forced to flee

8. IDMC, “Sudan.” 9. Ibid.

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Figure 8.1. IDPs affected by floods and conflict in Jowhar, Somalia, seeking help at an AMISOM military camp, 2013. AMISOM; Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2013 _11_12_ Jowhar_Flood_D.jpg_(10823527285).jpg.

in search of safety. The root of this terrorist group connects very deeply, as they have relationships with al-Qaeda in the Middle East.10 The DTM reports that more than 246,000 Somalis were forcibly displaced in 2019. This statistic represents persons who were internally displaced by violence alone; the additional figures of displacement from natural disasters are even greater. The number of people forced to flee their residence ranged from 400,000 to 500,000 just in 2019. In Badbaado, Salama, Daryel, Kulmiye, and Xeeb settlements in Cadaado, about 15,000 were forced to suddenly relocate from their community as a result of a powerful windstorm. Indeed, the frequency of ecological disasters affecting people is alarming. It seems the country’s location on the edge of the Indian Ocean contributes to this unsettled nature. In the same vein, about 240,000 people were victims of the Shabelle River bursting its boundaries in Belet Weyne and its environs. The staggering frequency of disastrous natural occurrences does not present the victims the

10. IDMC, “Somalia.”

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opportunity to relocate far away for survival. Rather, many simply seek refuge in nearby locations, as those in figure 8.1 depict. It is difficult to adequately cover in one place all the incidences of internal displacement in Africa. Quite a large number of African countries have experienced and continue to experience internal displacement not only over violence and security challenges but also as a consequence of natural and human-made disasters. Many countries have concurrently witnessed significant internal migration because of economic necessity as the possibility of financial stability is diminished in their homes. The causes of displacement establish the intricate dynamics of the phenomenon as well as the connections that exist between internal and international forced migration. Distinguishing among the explanations for increased numbers of IDPs in different countries helps the appropriate authorities determine the best ways to consider the phenomenon of internal displacement and proffer solutions to the challenges that confront them.

Cause s of Inter na l Displ ace m ent An appropriate starting point for this discussion would be the provisions of the Guiding Principles for Internal Displacement, first released in 1998 by the Office of the Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Internal Displacement, Mr. Francis M. Deng. The Guiding Principles became necessary in response to the yawning gap between the increasing numbers of IDPs globally and the minimal policy recognition of this category of persons. The document states, “For the purposes of these Principles, internally displaced persons are persons or groups of persons who have been forced or obliged to flee or to leave their homes or places of habitual residence, in particular as a result of, or in order to avoid the effects of armed conflict, situations of generalized violence, violations of human rights or natural or human made disasters, and who have not crossed an internationally recognized State border.”11 This definition is replicated verbatim in the African Union’s Kampala Convention for IDPs in its Article 1(k). In this definition are three fundamental causes of internal displacement—namely, conflict and violence, natural disasters, and humanmade disasters. These causes are not mutually exclusive, as we will see in the following discussion. It is obvious by now that internal displacement of persons in Africa is triggered by different factors, as people do not just decide to escape their homes, 11. Introduction, para. 2, in United Nations, Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement; see also the Kampala Convention, Article 1(k) and (l).

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regions, or country for no reason. Even in cases where individuals voluntarily decide to relocate or explore new places, they are triggered by one “push” or “pull” factor or another that has encouraged them to leave their usual residence temporarily. Forced displacement remains an impediment to the development of Africa because the factors that trigger it are not ones inspired by the need to explore personal development opportunities; rather, people are forced to flee their environment for exigent and emergency reasons. We now place internal displacement within the context of current global and continental emergencies and therefore establish the connection between the internal challenges of a country and the surge in their IDP levels. Although the discussion provided is not exhaustive of the causes of IDP increase in Africa, the description below helps place within the appropriate context the political, social, environmental, economic, and psychological necessity that propels displacement. From Cote d’Ivoire in West Africa to Libya in North Africa, to Ethiopia in the Horn of Africa and Zambia in Southern Africa, the reasons for internal displacement are similar and are explored in turn in what follows.12 Conflict and Violence

As African wars and conflicts increased in the postindependence period, so did the forced and involuntary displacement of persons. The vast majority of the situations discussed in the section above on locations of IDPs on the continent coincide with the locations of conflict, wars, human rights abuses, and social and political violence on the continent. From the DRC to Libya and South Sudan, the large numbers of IDPs in Africa coincide with persistent wars and unresolved conflicts. In defining the concept of internal displacement, the Guiding Principles and the Kampala Convention have privileged this particular cause of displacement by giving at least three possible manifestations of conflict and violence: it could take the form of war and active armed conflict, other situations of generalized violence affecting society, and personal or widespread experiences of human rights violations and abuses. As refugees are similarly created by various factors causing war, violence, and human rights abuses, so are IDPs created from these same situations. In Africa, the colonial and postcolonial factors that made refugees a ubiquitous presence on the continent have created far more IDPs. As noted in the chapter on colonial causes of refugeehood, colonial administrative policies provoked great forced migrations across territories, both within

12. Bundervoet, Internal Migration in Ethiopia.

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and without the newly emerging African state boundaries. This process saw the partitioning and fragmentation of families, communities, and ethno-national and linguistic groups and necessitated the movement of people seeking to either align with the new administrative realities or evade them. Colonial economic policies created new and glittering urban areas that did not exist before and that were mainly founded to facilitate the extraction of raw materials and natural resources from the colonies. By focusing on this and on the production of cash crops, the rural and indigenous economy was destroyed, mandating the migration of large numbers of people to the urban areas in search of new kinds of work and survival. In particular, the violent nature of colonialism should be spotlighted in our examination of the causes of internal displacement. The extractive intentions of the colonialists necessitated the use of coercion, often in the form of forced labor, seizure of land, and enforced relocations to enforce colonial production quotas and make way for plantations, cultivation of cash crops, and the extraction and exploitation of natural resources. Many Africans fled these conditions to other locations in search of more peaceful lives. In the difficult period of nationalist politics, anticolonial resistance, and liberation wars, large numbers of Africans fled their places of habitual residence to escape the brutal repression of the colonial authorities. Many of these did not cross any international border, relocating instead within their colonial state boundaries to places and communities that were willing to take them and that supported their resistance to the colonial administrations. Because of the grossly imperfect nature of the political independence accorded African nations, the formal end of colonialism from the 1950s to the 1970s did not bring peace and stability but rather saw an escalation of violence and repression across the land. Disparate groups that had been forced to coexist within multination African states by the creation of colonial boundaries began intense agitation for secession in places such as Nigeria/Biafra, while others fought the new postcolonial governments for control of the state, as in Zaire and Sudan. The state fought back with immeasurable violence against its own people, and internal displacement rose astronomically, laying the foundation for the continuation of the phenomenon in the twenty-first century. It is not possible to discuss the emergence of internal displacement in relation to violence from politics without considering the ways in which economic factors were entangled in these political upheavals. The internal dissention and strife were compounded by the economic crises that beset many African nations from the 1970s onward, partly as a result of the ineptitude of the postindependence leadership and partly as a result of the structural disequilibrium

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bequeathed by the colonial period. Economic collapse coincided with state collapse in many places as the state rapidly lost its capacity to perform the functions of security and welfare in territory after territory across the continent. Africans were forced to embark on various migrations in order to make ends meet and to simply survive. The contradictory fact was also that as state collapse proceeded apace, so too did the postcolonial state increasingly exhibit the violent character inherited from its colonial predecessor by shutting down dissent, persecuting its own people, limiting the political and social rights of its citizens, and causing massive displacement, sometimes of entire groups and communities in a bid to assert its control over the few remaining resources available to it. The extreme example of the state intentionally causing internal displacement is that of the apartheid government in South Africa, which, as a matter of state policy, relocated whole black communities to “bantustans,” socalled homelands, usually the most barren areas of land, as part of land grabs by the minority white population as well as a racist attempt to reduce the political power of the majority black population. As the causes of African conflict and violence have shifted but not disappeared over time, internal displacement has never abated. The 1990s saw the emergence of warlords on the continent whose sole aim was destroying the state to plunder it in their blatant grab for state resources. As rebel groups advanced in both Liberia and Sierra Leone, their preference for particular ethnic groups for support and legitimacy usually provoked the hurried flight of others not so favored, who relocated to places within the country or abroad where they had ethnic kin. With the explosion of violent Islamic terrorism in the 2010s in Chad, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, and other Sahel countries, millions of citizens have been forcibly displaced to other parts of the country. Conflict and violence have instigated major internal displacement while also being the product of other kinds of disasters, as we will see below. Natural Disasters: Drought and Desertification

Drought, a prolonged period of abnormally low rainfall leading to a shortage of water, and desertification, or the loss of arable land, are serious antagonists to human stability, especially for Africans. A sizeable number of African peoples rely exclusively on agricultural activity for their economic mainstay. Africans are faced with the existential challenge of desertification, which is caused by different factors, including drought, an absence of water, overwhelming floods, and hurricanes, among other natural disasters that have the capacity to reduce the endowment of the soil. Desertification, we must understand, has

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inelastic capacity to wreak untold havoc on humanity, just like other kinds of violence that confront humanity. Among the causes of internal displacement, environmentally inspired challenges are usually considered strong ones. The reason for this is obvious. Floods, wildfires, mudslides, pest infestations, hurricanes, cyclones, and so on occur often unexpectedly with staggering capacity for destruction. Although these environmental challenges are considered “natural” disasters, their naturalness can be sometimes difficult to measure. In other words, how natural can they be? Recently, climatologists have connected industrialization to pervasive environmental changes, and most of the known causes of climate change are traceable to human activity. However, the effects cannot be downplayed in understanding the causes of internal displacement. In the Sahel of Africa, unpredictable weather has challenged the region for more than half a century. By some estimates, the Sahara Desert is encroaching southward at about 5 percent per annum, drying up lakes and rivers, while reduction in rain or unpredictable rainfall patterns have together normalized drought. The occupants of this region have faced the resultant effects of these unfavorable climatic conditions that seriously disrupt their agricultural activities. Although, historically, all of the Sahel regions face the problem of artificial boundaries that were instigated by the colonial powers, there is a pattern of cross-boundary migrations among people who are ethnically, culturally, or linguistically similar, especially when some part of the group is ravaged by the effects of excessive desertification. The intensification of these environmental challenges is an impediment to food security, and people flee their usual domicile to cope with this insecurity. In areas where there is extensive desertification, the unreliability of the weather conditions makes it difficult for inhabitants to remain in those areas. The arid West African areas have a history of soil infertility as a result of inadequate rainfall, stunted nutrient distribution, and a host of other factors inhibiting plant growth. Despite these challenges, the farmers in the region have increased their farming capacity but, for many of them, rural-urban migration remains inevitable.13 It is therefore not surprising that farmers migrate in the Sahel to any environment where their agricultural activities have the potential to achieve maximum success. In the 1980s, people within the Sahel region were displaced in large numbers because of the trailing drought and migrated for the promise of better ecological stability.14 The floods of 2012 in the Sahel affected 18.7 million people 1 3. Pearson and Niaufre, “Desertification and Drought.” 14. Black et al., “Migration and Pro-poor Policy.”

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within this region, in addition to about 10 million people who were affected by similar experience in 2010.15 The predominant economic engagements of Sahel people are in the agricultural sector, usually the most challenged in the time of environmental problems. These farmers are forced to make hard decisions when they are confronted with acute problems related to weather—they may sell their livestock for temporary relief or adopt other coping mechanisms for the ensuing desertification challenge. Compounding the challenges facing the Sahel are the problems of excessive land cultivation and overgrazing. In Burkina Faso, for example, land cultivation reduced their savannas from 93,113 km2 to 83,801 km2 between 1992 and 2001.16 Overgrazing occurs when there is an increased concentration of animals grazing on relatively small land areas, and this has devastating effects on soil nutrients, thereby contributing to desertification. In Mali and Burkina Faso, desertification is compounded by the drought brought on by the absence of rainfall or its erratic supply predominantly between May and September. The lack of rain signals high temperatures that are unconducive to agricultural products. This has also led to food shortages. Burkina Faso, for instance, recorded about 2.2 million permanent internal migrants in 2006.17 These environmental challenges lead to human displacement, and in the end, many of the displaced are unable to return to their previous homes on account of the persistent nature of these ecological challenges. An example of this is the Fulani herdsmen in Nigeria. There are numerous groups of herders whose migration to comparatively better ecological conditions has not been reversed. Some Fulani herdsmen have traveled from the northern regions and resettled for decades in Oyo State in southwestern Nigeria, herding their livestock there. This has also been found in other parts of the country. Drought, flood, overgrazing, and fluctuating climatic conditions contribute largely to the internal displacement of Sahel people. In Somaliland, people face similar conditions of desertification and drought. Their environment is devoid of rainfall in equitable distribution, and this continues to challenge their food security and safety. The primary causative agents of desertification in Somalia include overgrazing, soil erosion, mismanagement of land, and deforestation. Confronted with these problems, the people are under the threat of moving away from their natural environment to seek safety. Given that Somalis have always been victims of drought, the physical 1 5. Aljazeera, “Burkina Faso’s Sahel.” 16. Cambrezy and Sangali, “Les Effects Geographiques.” 17. Ibid.

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manifestation of the devastation is felt in the undernutrition of children, stunted growth, and dead livestock. In their recent history, the region of Somaliland witnessed a three-year drought, and its results are immediately seen in the cases of malnourished children and families that occupy their environment. Families have been displaced in greater proportion as a result. Most Somalis are livestock farmers, and the steady reduction in the size of their herds has added to the woes confronting the people. A three-year drought cannot yield positive results for people whose farm produce relies on large quantities of water for their survival. The environmental challenges that face Somaliland worsened when their economic allies severed their business relationship, especially during the time when their ecological conditions were dealing a great blow to their economic mainstay—livestock.18 People in this environment have developed a sense of survival, and that includes their ability to be mobile as a way to react to the emerging challenges. The drought that extended to 2016 weakened their economic foundations and increased their vulnerability to displacement. A large percentage of the population thus suffers from food insecurity and inadequate nutritional food. Natural disaster and poverty therefore combine their forces on the Somalis to weaken their political and economic structures, making internal and outward migration inevitable. There seems to be a close connection between poverty and population increase. Despite the challenging economic and environmental conditions, the Somali population keeps increasing, creating more problems for them and thus complicating their struggles for survival. In their effort to salvage their poor economic status, some engage in charcoal making, which in turn contributes to desertification, thereby compounding existing challenges. Their proximity to the Gulf countries influences their involvement mainly in businesses that are in demand in those places, regardless of the environmental consequences of these activities. In this pattern, it is not uncommon to find Somalis migrating internally because their poor environmental conditions are a threat to their survival. In other parts of Africa, the story remains the same. People are confronted with the challenge of depreciation of their land resulting from frequent floods, the erosion of soil nutrients, drought of any kind, and so on, as all of these lead to soil depletion. When faced with this problem, the possibility of destitution is predictably high because it deprives people of a persistent source of agricultural income. Angola is dependent on farm produce such as grain crops and root crops, livestock, and a variety of other agricultural products. All these, however, are sustainable only in fair weather conditions. The recent experience of soil 18. Ibid.

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infertility in the country has threatened the growth of these crops, and that in itself has severe consequences for the economic and psychological conditions of the people. Angola has three subdivisions of agricultural products: the east of the country, understood as the root crop producers, is the place where cassava, for example, is grown in large proportion; the center, which is suitable for cereal, deals essentially in produce such as maize; while the south has the capacity for millet and sorghum production. Even though Angola’s population is overwhelmingly dependent on agriculture, only about 10 percent of the land is fertile for growing these crops as a result of pervasive desertification that compounds their environmental challenges. Methods of irrigation have been employed to assist the areas of land that have insufficient nutrients, and fertilizers are also required for crop production to reach sufficient levels. Desertification has even necessitated the government to sometimes impose forced migration for farmers in an attempt to ease the harsh economic conditions. The political dimension of the challenge confronting Angolans is that IDPs are sometimes products of the land grabs by white settlers during the colonial period, and this further affects the social relationship among the citizens.19 The fact that some Angolans are constrained to particular areas leads to land overuse, and this again brings about desertification. By exhausting the fertility of the land and not replenishing it with the appropriate fertilization and rotational cropping, Angolans lose their land. The estimation of soil erosion in Angola is alarming. The Ministry of Agriculture in Angola says that “soil erosion in Angola causes a total soil loss of about 20 million tons per year, equivalent to loss of the capacity to feed 50,000 people annually,” and this is despite their rise in population and the increased demand for agricultural products for survival.20 Annually, the country loses a considerable portion of their forest. Despite these challenges, Angola also has herders who feast their livestock on the little available fertile land. Therefore, overgrazing becomes another threat to their land. The increase in the population of Angola means that they require more land areas for grazing and the production of other farm products because of the inherent demand for more food. In this context, forced migration becomes the recourse for many Angolans and, more broadly, Africans in similar situations.

1 9. United Nations Development Programme, “Sustainable Land Management.” 2 0. Ibid.

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Climate Change Effects

A related and more overarching factor that drives internal displacement in Africa is climate change.21 Climate change poses an imminent existential threat to people’s livelihoods and demands urgent action from individuals, corporations, and countries. The growing change in climatic conditions is a particular threat to African agricultural production. When livestock farmers and herders are especially hit by the effects of the sudden change in the climate, they often resort to internal migration. The Fulani, otherwise known as the Fulbe, are nomadic because of the nature of their business, an enterprise passed down through generations. They are found across Africa, from the Sahel region up all the way to the Sahara. Their ubiquity is due to the nature of their business, which demands that they find good grazing environments for their livestock. Their stay in western and central Africa stretching from Senegal to Ethiopia and from the Sahel to the Sudan zone and today even in the forest areas is determined by their quest for economic survival. This group is usually propelled to migrate longer distances because of an increasingly unpredictable weather pattern occasioned by climate change. In Nigeria, for example, a large number of cattle herders depend on nomadic grazing to feed their livestock, relying on the green environment for the survival of their livestock. The gradual change in climate, therefore, has displaced them, along with their agricultural products. Many people in the cattle-herder business are now resettled in southern parts of the country such as in Oyo, Eyenkorin, Igbeti, Igboho, Ilorin, Kishi, and Shaki, which shows their displacement from their usual residence in the northern parts of the country, especially because of climate change and resultant conditions in their habitat. The most reliable adaptation strategy for the cattle herders is to move from locations where the weather has become entirely unfavorable for the protection of their livestock to areas where it is less climatically adverse. Many resort to extreme measures such as reducing their water intake in their desire to enhance conditions for their livestock, as this is considered an act of austerity to ease their challenges. Many of the herders move long distances to get access to water and other needs that can be used to help sustain their livestock business. However, the migration of these herders itself is another source of conflict and further cause of displacement because the grazing system has negative effects on the cash crop industry, as the livestock invade farmers’ plantations and damage their produce. When people are threatened economically, there is an increased 21. Podesta, “The Climate Crisis and Migration.”

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chance of migration. The fact that many Fulani herdsmen are found almost everywhere in the country reaffirms the notion that climate change is another cause of internal migration in Africa. In Mali, the problem of climate change takes on an entirely different dimension to the issue of migration in the country. Nearly all of the northern territory is now covered by the Sahara Desert, which has encroached steadily over the years and accelerated desertification, making the region vulnerable to prolonged drought and therefore affecting most of the economic activities of the people.22 The country has a large population of people who are impoverished, and their condition is further exacerbated by desertification. While this persists in the north, southern Mali is faced with the regular challenge of flooding, which wreaks havoc on the people’s businesses. The amount of rainfall generated in Mali is low, and this can negatively impact their economic activities. The unstable nature of their weather has led to the internal displacement of many Malians, who are also confronted with the problems of poverty and population increase. Between the 1950s and 1980s, there was a rapid decline in rainfall totals, which reconfigured the economic activities of Mali to a large extent and negatively affected the country’s general development.23 These fluctuating climatic conditions were a major part of their economic challenges and a contributor to internal displacement. A large portion of the Malian labor force depends on agriculture, notwithstanding the fact that the unstable weather conditions remain a threat to their survival. When the weather is bad, there is the additional problem of getting adequate financial gain from their pastoral activities, and the consequence has been the displacement of people from their homes searching for better conditions. With so high a percentage of the population engaged in farming, their survival is dependent on adequate rainfall. When rain is not forthcoming, the consequences are disastrous for the citizens. The country is fighting against climate-change-induced challenges by making several efforts to rebuild the damaged economic sector caused by the combination of climate change, desertification, and terrorism.24 However, the rain-fed agricultural products in southern Mali have been severely affected by an unstable ecology, and internal migration becomes necessary in the process. Rising temperatures are another climate-related problem facing agricultural communities in Africa. Increased temperatures reduce the chances of livestock 2 2. USAID, “Climate Risk Profile.” 23. Ibid. 2 4. Ibid.

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survival and bring untold hardships to the owners. Dryness of the land invites pests that could greatly affect the growth of livestock. The farmers are then liable to find themselves in a more threatening situation because pests destroy crops as well. Experts have concluded that rising temperatures could adversely affect a variety of livestock animals. For instance, “wetter climate may expand the range of Rift Valley fever in some areas (with particularly adverse effects on sheep) and increase transmission risk for African swine fever. A hotter and drier climate, however, may lead to increased poultry losses as a result of more frequent outbreaks of Newcastle disease and increased risk of avian flu, as well as higher exposure to anthrax as reduced water availability drives larger numbers of livestock to graze in dry flood zones or contaminated watering ponds.”25 Similarly, internal displacement has been instigated by the effects of climate change in Burkina Faso. The population of Burkina Faso, like many other African people, depends on agricultural products such as livestock, millet, and maize. Agricultural production continues to dwindle in the country, taking away jobs and exposing people to severe economic problems. This condition became normalized with the increase in climate challenges that devalued soil nutrients and rendered it infertile for the production of crops and vegetables. Desertification and drought have worsened the condition of the soil and made it more vulnerable to poor production. Soil degradation is a threat to the production of crops and other products, and it poses equal challenges for the sustenance of other agricultural engagements such as livestock. Land overuse worsens the situation, as there is poor maintenance of the soil, which demands that fertilization be prioritized for the land to become productive again. Although the country used to record enough rainfall to meet their ecological demands, climate change has challenged every settlement, and this has led to the abrupt end of the minimum agricultural growth in the country. The environmental hardships that face farmers necessitate that they change their environment often. The FAO reports that conditions in Burkina Faso are at risk of further declining, mainly resulting from the poor climatic conditions and unstable weather. However, this does not uniquely affect Burkina Faso. The whole of the Sahel region is under this risk of a depleted economy. The workforce is largely engaged in a pastoral economy, and the fact that their basis for employment is threatened by increased extreme weather justifies the steady exodus of people from their environment. Forced displacement and prolonged migratory movements are the usual consequences of the unfriendly and (un)natural conditions. People react differently, but in Burkina Faso, the south and the north frequently 25. Ibid.

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witness the migration of people in large numbers. Food insecurity increases with the challenge of climate change, and this is a potential ground for further displacement because farmers who are affected by these ecological problems become vulnerable to poverty. Their response to this manifests in migration. It is expected that the atmospheric conditions and the oceanic temperature will change significantly across the world because of climate change. In this regard, as with direct colonial oppression, wealthier countries once again cause the suffering of poorer countries, as the former produce over 90 percent of the carbon emissions, accelerating climate change while the latter suffer over 90 percent of the impact. What happens in the Sahel of Africa seems to have similar social impact on parts of Southern Africa, taking Zimbabwe for example. Although the economic system of this country is different from the Sahel region, their agricultural industry is still vulnerable to changing ecological conditions. Historically, Zimbabwe has “one of the most variable rainfall patterns in the world in terms of distribution across time and space, although dry spells and droughts are part of a normal cycle,”26 according to Anna Brazier. Whereas the problems of drought and desertification confront the countries in the Sahel region, Zimbabwe has the problem of overflowing rainfall as its own climate challenge. Zimbabwe experiences tropical cyclones that have the capacity to cause intense rainfall in some parts of the country.27 When rainfall occurs in excess, the influence on land and environment can equally be devastating, as it erodes soil nutrients and is capable of turning fertile land into infertile land. Conversely, when the country experiences drought, which also happens often, the effects on the people and country are equally adverse. No country of the world can avoid the consequences of climate change. For over thirty years now, it has been recorded that Zimbabwe experienced six years of the warmest temperatures ever, which has brought intense weather conditions in an unprecedented pattern. Amid this, several drought and desertification problems also plague the country. This has forced people to migrate in search of better climatic conditions. The spillover effect of these climatic disruptions is felt in areas such as power generation that normally depend on water supply. Some of the lakes that served as the foundation for generating power have been severely affected by the unpredictable weather conditions, deepening the complicated nature of climate change problems. In Zimbabwe, farming activities and agricultural products in places such as Mpudzi and Burma Valley were severely affected as banana plantations became the victims 2 6. Brazier, Climate Change in Zimbabwe. 27. Chakwana, “Effects of Climate Change.”

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of inadequate water flow, and people were therefore forced to migrate from their usual environment. According to one report, “Chimanimani, Vumba and Nyanga [areas], experienced the destruction of over 30 000 hectares of forest and timber land.”28 People are forced to relocate when faced with severe climate conditions, leading to an influx of people into more stable environments. The consequences of migration can be observed when displaced persons collide with people in their new destinations. Women have been reported as particularly facing threatening conditions because of erratic climate changes in the various parts of Africa discussed above. When the weather changes unpredictably, the immediate response for women (who may have primary caregiving responsibility for the vulnerable in society such as the sick, elderly, children, disabled, and others) is to resort to migration, as this would reduce their vulnerability and give them the opportunity to cope with the situation in a better way.

Effects of Inter na l Displ ace m ent Overpopulation

The effects of internal displacement are numerous. The results of the mass exodus of people from one state to another or one geographical setting to another first come in the form of overpopulation of certain locations. Governments usually give specific financial attention to urban development, as this reflects the structure of society. However, sudden environmental challenges lead to sharp increases in the number of people settling in other geographical settings, and this requires the plan for such settlements to be broadened; otherwise, the internal challenges will skyrocket. Overpopulation is therefore a potent reason for the destabilization of the existing structure in the destinations of displaced persons. Housing problems are very likely to become the primary area of continuous challenges confronting a metropolis that has received high numbers of displaced persons. The fact that housing problems have been a long-standing challenge facing the majority of African nations adds to the conclusion that overpopulation produces more severe constraints both for the displaced and for the prior occupants of the place. To increase the security architecture of the migrants’ destination, the government expends more finances, and this usually means that funds meant for other areas or for other social services are no longer available. 2 8. Mudefi et al., “Impact of Climate Change.”

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Overpopulation can be a burden to the community again by overburdening the infrastructure of a city. A city is the product of a network of interconnected structures such as roads, medical facilities, transportation systems, and housing that are all built and designed with reference to specific population figures and projections. There is an immediate challenge when these systems are overstressed. The potential for them to get overused is increased when IDPs place pressure on limited infrastructure. Apart from housing, another affected area is the transportation sector, which often needs to be expanded to meet the demands of the population explosion. An overworked infrastructure leads to premature breakdown and sets the pace for fast decline in the quality and organization of the cities. Today, cities such as Lagos and Nairobi are reported to be overcongested because they have received large population movements over time. Overpopulation is connected to the problem of migration and displacement because migrants and displaced persons not only increase in their own numbers but also add to the figures through procreation. Accommodations can be a recurrent challenge to city life when confronting large intakes of displaced persons. From Nairobi in Kenya to Lagos, Abuja, Sokoto, and Port Harcourt in Nigeria to Alexandra and Durban in South Africa, the reality that population growth affects the anticipated progress of the cities cannot be downplayed. More available labor means the negative practice of capitalist ideology on a larger scale. More people in a destination can disrupt economic growth and foster underdevelopment. When people are displaced to more rural or semiurban areas with available space, displaced persons camps often spring up, as in figure 8.2, making it possible for governments and humanitarian agencies to try to address some of the needs of the displaced persons. Violence and Insecurity

Another crisis that may result from internal displacement is the escalation of violence and other conflicts, which in the end leads to insecurity. Clashes of interests happen because livestock feed on the crops and produce planted by cash crop farmers. In cases where internal suspicion is rife, it increases the potential for confrontation and clashes. The rift between these two groups of people can be associated with the environmental challenges faced by livestock farmers that propelled them to move to places where their livestock can be taken care of. Sometimes, these nomads move along with weapons that are used against potential antagonists or individuals who may stand in their way. When this goes on indefinitely, it poses a great threat to the security architecture of the people and makes them more vulnerable. From Ethiopia to Ghana, Kenya, Mali, northern Uganda, and other places where livestock

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Figure 8.2. Kibumba displaced persons camp in Goma, North Kivu, in the DRC, on the site of a former Rwandan refugee camp, and run by the displaced persons themselves, with services provided by the UN and NGOs. Julien Harneis, https://www.flickr.com/photos/julien_harneis/2467999253 /in/photostream/. Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org /wiki/File:Refugee_camp.jpg.

farmers migrate because of the unfriendly environment, there have been reports of clashes between crop farmers and livestock herders. The knowledge that livestock farmers brandish sophisticated weapons inspires the original occupants to take to violent means in response to their offensive nature or to protect themselves from unforeseeable infractions. This therefore breeds insecurity and leads to the escalation of tension. Migrants in urban areas may also engage in different forms of questionable activities that are capable of threatening the security architecture of the society. Nonetheless, the situation is usually complex because displaced persons and nonnative migrants also tend to be preyed on, owing to their vulnerability. Socioeconomic Transcendence

While much of our discussion has focused on the negative consequences associated with internal migration, there are many improvements that can occur in the migrants’ destination. Increased population can often be a driver

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of rapid economic growth despite its potential to wreak damage. Population increases can contribute to economic growth because of competitive labor environments, which drive efficiency and productivity. Job opportunities are extensive in cities because of the fluid nature of the setting, where menial jobs and informal enterprises can be started at any time. It is well documented that in cases of international migration, migrants can enhance the GDP of their home country through the remittance of monies generated in their diaspora environment to their home countries. Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Ethiopia, and a host of other African countries have benefited immensely from the economic advantages that international remittances provide. Remittances can be a source of relief for people at home in times of national economic recession or depression. The point here is that a similar situation can occur even within countries where IDPs and other migrants are able to achieve economic betterment. The situation of IDPs in this sense yields a symbiotic benefit for the destination of migration. The city that needs increased labor gets to engage the services of migrants to boost the economy of the metropolis. Cities such as Lagos, Sokoto, Kano, Port Harcourt in Nigeria, Accra in Ghana, Nairobi in Kenya, and Johannesburg in South Africa have all increased their internally generated revenue and have benefited economically from the labor industry of various kinds of migrants including IDPs, especially when these migrants have skills that are transferable and in demand. People engaging in different job opportunities also increase tax revenue for governments. This therefore negates the erroneous appraisal of internal displacement and internal migration that sees only the negative sides of the phenomenon. When appropriate policies and strategies are put in place, they can become the engine for rapid economic growth and urban transformation. Since internal migration has the capacity to positively affect the lives of the migrants, they enter their preferred destination in high numbers for quick turnaround. Except in cases where there is a linguistic difference, IDPs may integrate easily into the community in their destination of migration and, as citizens, have almost equal access to public facilities available therein. This increases their productivity because their benefit from this arrangement is tied to their financial returns. When migrations are managed properly, they can bring greater economic impact to the society by increasing their productivity and contributing immeasurably to the development of the settlements. Because they are usually faced with challenging situations in their primary settlement and fear the consequences of going back there, migrants often increase their productivity and therefore contribute immensely to the socioeconomic advancement of their destinations. In most cases, they financially support their family members

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who are still stuck in their home base, thereby contributing to their welfare from the money made in their respective destinations.

Conclusion This chapter has addressed the various forms and instances of internal displacement within African countries and how this has changed the trajectory of the continent. We have tried to establish that internal displacement that produces movement from one geographical setting to another within national borders shares sufficient similarities with international displacement. In these cases, migrants are inspired to change their environment following the pressure of push factors, which include desertification, drought, flooding, deforestation, other climate change effects, violence, and insecurity, among other things; while at the other end, pressures of pull factors such as employment opportunities, peace and security, ecological stability, tranquility, and modernity are primary forces attracting people to new destinations. Although many of these challenges span decades, the fact that they have experienced unprecedented increases in recent times accentuates the reality that they cause forced displacement of a magnitude that has never been experienced before now. When the environment suddenly becomes hostile to people and their livelihoods, which in most cases account for their economic or financial progression, it becomes inevitable that they migrate as a coping strategy. Livelihoods have been threatened and people’s financial situation worsened because of the increased wave of desertification in Africa. People have been displaced as a result and have embraced the most unthinkable solutions to their challenges. Desertification is devastating, and the effects are generally felt across the board because the economic, mental, and social health of those affected by it carry the scars for a longer period. Although they have the opportunity to move away from the degraded environments, the fact that they are ravaged by the experience situates their conditions in desperation. In the same vein, we have highlighted how climate change effects are a potent reason for internal displacement. Scientific research has revealed how humans are perpetually placed under the threat of climate change in the contemporary world, as it has the capacity to cause unprecedented chaos. A change in climate will affect a large number of things because it comes with fluctuating temperatures that may be hazardous or unfriendly for animals, crops, people, and ecosystems. Various African countries have begun to experience the severe damage that climate change is capable of bringing, and that has forced them to change their environment. Apart from forcing them to go elsewhere in search

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of greener pastures or comparatively secure environments, the situation is usually more complex, as their sources of income are decimated. This underscores the reality that the effects of climate change are felt beyond the physical and economic arena. People are forced to seek alternative living in other places when they are challenged. The African Union has taken the global lead in instituting a continental framework for the protection of IDPs as discussed in previous chapters. However, there is a need for global efforts in this arena to be similarly concretized.

Part III

DISPL ACED LIVES

nine

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REFUGEE CAMPS AND SET TLEMENTS IN AFRICA

Introduction Refugee camps in Africa are some of the most visible consequences of the conflicts that have plagued the continent for the past fifty years. James Milner estimates that as of 2004, there were some two million refugees living in camps across the continent, some of whom had been in exile for decades.1 Recent statistics from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) indicate that as of 2018, 78.5 percent of the 6.3 million African refugees lived either in camps or in other refugee settlements, while 21.5 percent lived in private accommodations.2 Going by this estimation, and in light of the conflicts and violence the continent has experienced, the population of refugees in camps and settlements remains unpredictable but will assuredly be characterized by an unwholesome increase. In 2015 alone, the UN refugee agency reports that twelve new official camps were established on the continent and nine others were expanded to increase their capacity.3 The explosion of refugee numbers in camps and settlements has been alarming, and permanent solutions need to be implemented. In many societies, the construction of special places for the protection of displaced people is central to the negotiation and implementation of asylum policies. Shelter and security are essential features of providing stability to displaced communities. This chapter investigates refugee camps and settlements in Africa by exploring the nature of their establishment and 1. Milner, Refugees, State and Politics. 2. UNHCR, “Global Report 2018.” 3. UNHCR, “Africa.”

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the practices and philosophy behind their incorporation into African spaces. The chapter also explores the sociopolitical and economic impacts of refugee camps and settlements in Africa. To address the situation of refugees in Africa, it is prudent to begin by examining the conceptualization of refugee spaces and spaces for refugees (camps and settlements) in the African context.

R efuge e Ca m ps v er sus R efuge e Settl e m ents: A Concept ua l Differ ence? The question whether there are conceptual or practical differences between camps and settlements, as well as the comparative advantages of each, has been the subject of debate in Refugee Studies literature for some time. As Gaim Kibreab put it in 1985, it is the “most sustained single controversy in African Refugee Studies.”4 The controversy arises from definitional incompatibilities, differing mandates of humanitarian agencies, practical versus operational versus rights-and-justice orientations to refugee assistance, political considerations, and many other factors peculiar to local contexts.5 Some authors have proposed that both terms be used less as dichotomous types of refugee accommodations and that existing arrangements be seen instead as points on a continuum between both possible accommodation types. In a review of the literature, Anna Schmidt recommends five “parameters” that inform the definitions and classifications of refugee accommodations in most of the refugee literature. These include the following: 1. Freedom of movement: the more restricted, the more camp-like a refugee settlement is. 2. Mode of assistance/economics: camps are usually based on relief and food aid, with restrictions on refugees’ economic activities. 3. Mode of governance: the extent of power and external control over refugees’ social and economic lives and other freedoms varies, with camps being near-absolute in commanding this.

4. Kibreab, African Refugees. 5. A debate in the Forced Migration Review editions of 1998 focuses on some of the major points of disagreement in this regard. Jeff Crisp and Karen Jacobsen argue in support of considering camps as inevitable and focusing on making them work, while Richard Black maintains that the alternatives are being dismissed and that evidence for better non-camp alternatives exists. See Crisp and Jacobsen, “Refugee Camps Reconsidered”; and Black’s response, “Refugee Camps Not Really Reconsidered.”

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4. Designation as temporary locations or shelter: often, camps are established as temporary locations, though today, this distinction is almost completely erased as protracted refugee situations have kept refugees in various African countries in the same camps and locations for several decades. 5. Population size and density: as the population size and density of a designated area for refugees grow, it gradually assumes a more camp-like character.6 While this is a valuable assessment of the considerations guiding the classification of refugee settlements, would it then be possible to arrive at a definition of camps and settlements that would be generally applicable? The question still remains unresolved and perhaps will remain so. Robert Chambers distinguishes refugee accommodations based on settlement types such as self-settling, organized settlements, and camps: “Self-settling describes refugees who seek livelihoods outside organized settlements or camps and without sustained official assistance. Organized settlement is where refugees are provided with a place of residence and a means of livelihood. Most organized settlements are agricultural and almost all of these are smallholder settlements. Camp refers to an administered refugee center where refugees are provided with all or part of their subsistence without prospect of their becoming fully selfsupporting in that place.”7 While this classification based on the habitation structure looks compact and easily demarcated, refugee habitations are not always so easily distinguished from one another because of the fluid nature by which refugees enter and depart from one space to the other and the ever-changing dynamics of the spaces themselves. In each structure, change can occur rapidly; the influx of refugees can quickly change the configuration of these classifications. The overflow of an organized settlement can lead to the establishment of a camp, while self-settlement can speedily be transformed into an organized settlement as the refugee population expands. This means that refugees’ structure of habitation is fluid and constantly evolving through the mass influxes of displaced persons, which is the present situation in much of Africa. Refugee camps and settlements are also different in terms of structure and system of operation. The structure of refugee habitation is essential to the security and socioeconomic realities of the refugees’ existence and stay in the host communities and countries. 6 . Schmidt, “FMO Thematic Guide.” See also Black, “Putting Refugees in Camps,” 4–7. 7. Chambers, “Rural Refugees in Africa.”

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Spontaneous or Self-Settlement

The first and most common form of refugee accommodation is often referred to as “spontaneous settlement,” which occurs when refugees find accommodation and assistance within the local community.8 This form of settlement relies on the charity of family members or kin living in the host country, who assist the refugees by providing temporary or permanent shelter in their homes and communities. This type of settlement may, however, be strained by larger influxes of refugees, which may necessitate the removal of these persons into organized settlements or camps. Karen Jacobsen observes that in the case of African refugees, it is impossible to estimate the population of those living outside camps, as they self-settle, but this has been estimated to be almost 60 percent of the total refugee population on the continent.9 It is important to note, of course, that numbers associated with who is in camps and who is in settlements can be quite unreliable given the constraints discussed here.10 The control of refugee habitation is highly fraught in Africa, and it is often more realistic to think of settlement as a fluid process in which refugees move into and out of organized settlements based on a variety of factors ranging from local socioeconomic conditions and authorities to individual coping strategies and decisions.11 This conception of refugee settlement is defined by instability and flexibility, allowing for uncensored entry and exit, which are inimical for the security of other refugees in camps. Thus, there are a host of issues associated with spontaneous settlement; this self-settling system creates unstable data and makes it difficult to evaluate the needs of refugee populations that may leave and return to camps and organized settlements after, say, a hunger spell that causes a shortage of supplies. Another problem associated with this structure is the exposure to criminal activity and security risks. Some of the refugees roam the streets without the prospect of shelter and may perpetrate vices such as prostitution, theft, robbery, and other crimes. Spontaneous settlement can compromise the already frail security and introduce armed refugees into the host community. On the other hand, spontaneous settlement allows the refugee to retain a sense of control or agency, however small, over their circumstance, which propels them to seek self-sufficiency rather than dependency as much as possible.

8 . Jacobsen, “Framework,” 18. 9. Jacobsen, “Framework.” 10. For a compact review of the literature on refugee camps and settlements that highlights the debates in relation to this, see Schmidt, “FMO Thematic Guide.” 11. Jacobsen, “Framework.”

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Organized Settlements

Unlike camps, settlements are spaces that do not have strict boundaries and restrictions but that allow for free movement and a measure of integration with communities of the host country. Settlements range from organized spaces to self-settled spaces. Chambers identifies the merit of self-settlement and organized agricultural settlements as the two major means whereby refugees may become self-reliant and achieve adequate livelihood.12 This system, though it looks promising, does not account for the scarcity of land in Africa and may cause problems due to mass influxes of refugee populations and diminishing lands for agriculture. This also means that African states can experience a scarcity of lands for infrastructure development. Ultimately, as the problem of refugee influxes has persisted, self-settling and organized settlements tend to transform into encampment to curtail land-use problems. Uganda has been internationally recognized for its organized settlement approach under its SelfReliance Strategy policy for refugees. This policy allocates land to refugees, allowing them to have freedom of movement and access to economic activities. In this model, refugees are not sequestered from the host communities but have the potential to become integrated with their hosts. Chambers has illustrated the merits of self-settlement versus organized small settlements. For Chambers, self-settlement is cost-efficient for host governments because fewer administrative functions are required, and, most importantly, it enhances the independence of refugees. This system is also effective because it can reduce costs compared with camps while promoting freedom and movement for refugees. The self-settlement system does pose potential drawbacks in that many refugees fleeing from threats and crises in their home countries do not possess enough capital to become self-reliant. In Zambia, for example, some Angolan refugees had to begin trading their possessions almost immediately on arrival in order to provide for themselves.13 Many refugees struggle with psychological issues from their exposure to war and may be incapable of self-reliance. There may also be unavailability of arable land, as was the case for many Burundian refugees in South Kivu in Zaire from 1972 onward, or for the Eritrean refugees at Wad el Hilayew in Sudan when that was a major refugee center.14 Selfsettlement can also affect host communities by driving wages down and food 1 2. Chambers, “Rural Refugees in Africa,” 22. 13. Ibid., 23. 14. Chambers, “Rural Refugees in Africa.”

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Figure 9.1. Kiziba refugee camp in western Rwanda, housing mostly Congolese refugees. Wikimedia Commons, htt ps://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kiziba_refugee _camp.jpg.

prices up, and, especially if the poorer hosts also have to rely on laboring for their livelihoods, they may be even worse off than the refugees if the refugees get free food and they do not.15 Camps

The debate surrounding camps has often centered on the problems associated with them, and camps have gained notoriety in popular imaginaries and discourses. A camp is viewed as a “non-place”16 because of its precarious standing and lack of permanent identity and often is “a new place, grown out of blank humanitarian space, and created, contested, negotiated, organized and given meaning by refugees, . . . [hosts] and humanitarians.”17 Refugee camps may be open or enclosed spaces used for restraining the movement and activities of 15. Ibid. 16. Augé, Non-places. 17. Jansen, “Accidental City.”

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refugees. Camps are purpose-built sites, usually close to the border and thus often in rural areas.18 Camps are attempts by host governments and agencies to provide temporary places of sanctuary to refugees. Dwelling structures may take the form of traditional huts, shacks, tents, abandoned buildings, schools, and even open grounds in some cases. The Kiziba refugee camp in western Rwanda pictured in figure 9.1 shows a camp that is composed of concrete buildings, while the Bria camp in the Central African Republic, in figure 9.2, exemplifies more temporary shelter types. Jacobsen opines that one reason host governments and many relief agencies prefer camps is that in addition to making the management of assistance easier, camps are seen as facilitating repatriation—not least because the austere conditions discourage people from staying in them long.19 Iffat Idris also argues that an assessment of the refugee habitation systems reveals that the “traditional” approach of setting up refugee camps is ineffective in many respects—particularly in terms of promoting self-reliance—and hence to be avoided.20 This argument, though partially true, is deficient in taking cognizance of the African context of large numbers of refugee influxes, socioeconomic dynamics, security threats, political volatility, and protracted refugee situations. Idris reiterates that camps promote dependency among refugees and, in the long run, pose a financial burden to host countries.21 While this may be true, it can be argued that many refugees also seek asylum for economic reasons. Many are incapable of selfsustenance whether in their countries or in the host community and in most cases need to be placed in camps where basic support can be administered by donor organizations and host governments. This is not to suggest that camps are ideal systems for refugee situations, as the propensity for gender-based violence and violence toward vulnerable groups, such as children and the aged, is rife. Camps can also often present health risks such as disease, which can easily spread. Nonetheless, these issues are difficult to separate as unique to or arising from one system or the other. Designing systems to serve as suitable habitations for refugees, provide sustainable options for host governments, and lessen administrative difficulties for agencies and donors are some of the conflicting considerations in the adoption of camps and settlements in Africa. 1 8. Jacobsen, “Forgotten Solution.” 19. Ibid. 2 0. Idris, “Effectiveness of Refugee Settlement Approaches,” 2. 21. Ibid.

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Figure 9.2. Refugee camp in Bria, Central African Republic, 2018. VOA, https://www.voaafrique.com/a/d%C3%A9gradation-de-la-situation -humanitaire-en-centrafrique/4698920.html. Wikimedia Commons, https:// commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Refugees_camp_in_PK3,_Bria,_Central _African_Republic,_12_ June_2018.jpg.

Th e Location of R efuge e Ca m ps a n d Settl e m ents The majority of Africa’s refugees are rural-to-rural migrants. Relatively few are equipped with skills other than those applicable in a rural milieu, and thus there is little or no opportunity for their effective absorption in urban centers. Moreover, since most of the continent’s cities experience serious problems of unemployment, governments of asylum states are often reluctant to have rural refugees migrate to urban areas. Therefore, in most cases, refugees have no option but to remain concentrated in rural locations within border regions as government policies restrict them to those areas.22 Refugee camps and settlements are often located in the outskirts and rural areas, often close to borders, partly because refugees have been perceived as 22. Rogge, “Africa’s Resettlement Strategies,” 195.

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unskilled and unfit for absorption into the urban areas of the host nation. B. C. Nindi opines that about two-thirds of Africa’s refugees are of rural background. They tend to cross borders en masse in relatively remote and uninhabited areas, where they settle in districts that lack the services and infrastructure necessary to bring them adequate assistance.23 Settlements come in a variety of forms. Some promote integration into local communities or urban centers, while others isolate refugees from the host community, depending on the system of operation desired by the host government. Refugee camps and settlements across Africa have common issues that unify their experiences, but there also exist areas of departure depending on local contexts. Rural or urban settlements require support from the host community or country to be able to secure the livelihood of the refugees. Aderanti Adepoju examined the Tanzanian settlement system, which was in the manner of a systematic rural settlement for Burundian refugees and which also coincided with the national program of small village establishment.24 He found that “when tens of thousands of refugees from Burundi sought refuge in the densely populated Kigoma valley on the shores of Lake Tanganyika in 1972, the Tanzanian authorities offered to resettle them on virgin land further east at Ulyankulu and Katumba. Within a year, each settlement had a population of more than 60,000 refugees, making them at that time the largest organized refugee settlements in Africa.”25 This assisted settlement implies that refugees are granted land to establish their settlements and grow their foods. This encourages them to be self-sufficient and promotes opportunities to assimilate with the locals. This type of settlement is an organized settlement, in contrast with the self-settlement option discussed previously, by which an individualized settlement system is allowed. Self-settlement may also involve settling with close kin in the host nation or living independently. While there exist debates on the benefits of self-settlement and organized settlements, Nindi avers that the concentration of a large number of refugees in a settlement environment may breed a sense of renewed nationalism and unhealthy activity (including possible subversive activity) vis-à-vis their country of origin.26 The potentiality of refugees reviving dissident activities in the host community is high, and this may encourage the bearing of ammunitions by locals, thereby endangering the

2 3. Nindi, “Problem of Refugees.” 2 4. Adepoju, “Dimension of the Refugee Problem,” 27. 25. Nindi, “Problem of Refugees,” 392. 2 6. Ibid., 394.

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lives of other refugees and citizens. This was the case with Rwandan refugees in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Tanzania, and Uganda in the postgenocide period from 1994 onward. Brett Moore notes that most camps are swiftly constructed as an emergency response to rapid displacement and in many cases are planned incrementally, and even retrospectively, in attempts to impose order on chaotic, ad hoc camp layouts.27 The temporariness of these camps then becomes permanent structures for refugees due to inadequate resources to provide suitable alternatives. Idris argues that refugee camps present even greater barriers to care than most other settings in the developing world because they tend to be remote, poorly accessible by road, and have limited power supply.28 In contrast to Idris’s argument, the remoteness of refugee settlements, the availability of unoccupied lands, and refugees’ exhaustion from long journeys create an imperative for instant solutions such as these often remote locations. The fact that settlements are usually situated in the poorest places far away from civilization, basic services, and accessible roads is argued to be necessary to contain the risk of exposing vulnerable populations to attacks. Children, the aged, the sick, and people with disabilities require settlement locations far from possible infiltration by enemies in their countries of origin. However, these refugee camps and settlements often lack adequate facilities to meet the needs of the displaced people, as these require long-term planning, which would mean preempting the influx of displaced persons into the host country. Many camps and settlements in Africa are characterized by substandard and unsanitary plastic sheet shelters, tents, and shacks that are inadequate in the extreme weather, which causes many refugees to suffer from prolonged ailments and diseases. Moore also notes that the political context of the host country is a key determinant of the adequacy of a refugee settlement. The attitude of the host communities, security concerns, and the willingness of a host government to meet their treaty obligations have a direct impact on the viability and adequacy of refugee settlements.29 Thus, “the factors for a refugee settlement to thrive, rather than merely to exist, are rarely explicit and easily determined, nor are they stable, but a resilient refugee community will invest in a settlement if enabling factors such as their legal status, security of tenure and economic opportunity exist.”30 2 7. Moore, “Refugee Settlements and Sustainable Planning.” 2 8. Idris, “Effectiveness of Refugee Settlement Approaches,” 12. 29. Moore, “Refugee Settlements and Sustainable Planning,” 5. 30. Ibid.

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The stability of a refugee settlement hinges on several factors listed above as well as the cooperation of both sending and receiving countries to provide resources for the gradual development of a camp into a sustainable settlement, the coordination of long-term investments from humanitarian and development actors to enable the strategic planning of a community, and the emulation of conventional urban planning approaches.31 Settlements have the attribute of permanence and self-sustenance, unlike refugee camps, where refugees depend on external support and supplies from agencies and local and international organizations. These settlements, compared with refugee camps, which “are often spontaneous and temporary creations in which refugees almost exclusively depend on relief handouts,” place a greater focus on long-term accommodation and are “characterized by infrastructure such as schools, hospitals, brick buildings, and boreholes.”32 The settlement system ensures that refugees have control over their time and lives in that they have greater chances of integrating with the citizens and opportunities for economic security. Refugees in camps have less control over their livelihood and even fewer chances of integration into the host communities. Erik Svedberg argues that although the settlement system possesses ample benefits, it still has some shortcomings detrimental to the refugees. One of the main issues is the separation that it creates between the refugees and the host society.33 The settlement is often far removed from the conventional community, thereby restraining integration and harmony between the refugees and the host country. This also affects the freedom to participate in socioeconomic activities in the host communities. Not only does this seclusion infringe on the rights of the refugees, but it also undermines refugees’ ability to become self-reliant.34 However, this argument fails to consider whether refugees prefer to integrate with locals who may not accept them or even share any sociocultural and religious characteristics. The choice of integration with the host community must reside with the refugees and locals, as an attempt to force either side may prove counterproductive. The structuring of camps and settlements in urban or rural locations must be strategic in considering the host government’s capability, the refugees’ preference, the host communities’ reaction, administrative convenience, livelihood opportunities, and a host of other salient factors. 31. Ibid. 32. Svedberg, “Refugee Self-Reliance,” 10. 33. Ibid., 11. 3 4. Ibid.

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Politica l a n d I deologica l Pr e m ise s of R efuge e Accom modations The political and ideological stances that necessitated the open-border policies of African states in previous years and the recent reluctance to host and provide support to refugees are critical to understanding the conditions of refugee camps and settlements on the continent. One identifiable approach or philosophy is the open asylum policy, explicated by Milner as follows: “If a host state applies international and regional refugee protection standards, allows access to and cooperates with international organizations, and grants refugees the full range of social, economic and political rights contained in international refugee law, such as freedom of movement and the right to seek employment, they may be said to have adopted an open asylum policy.”35 The implementation of an open asylum policy contingent on cooperation with international agencies and refugees’ free assimilation into the host country is problematic for many African countries, hence the rarity of this approach in contemporary times. Restrictive asylum policy, however, is defined by the prevention of entry of refugees, dissociation from international bodies, and disregard for legal rights of refugees. Both delineations of political and ideological refugee policies are flawed. In the African milieu, the complete adoption of open-border policy seems impossible to achieve due to many inhibiting socioeconomic and political conditions plaguing African nations. Many host countries lack the capacity to meet these policy stipulations, so a complete disregard or total adoption of either the open or restrictive asylum policy is not achievable. Therefore, straddling the two policies seems closer to the reality as the political and ideological premises of refugee camp and settlement situations in Africa. Milner further argues that a number of factors unrelated to the activities of refugees influence the political and ideological undertakings of many African countries with regard to refugees in Africa.36 While this argument may be partly correct, to a larger degree the now-prevalent mass influxes of refugees demanded a review of ideologies and policies of refugee support in order to prevent a total collapse of the host country. The precarious conditions of many African countries demand rigorous and effective policies for the continuance of a stable and thriving host government. Pan-Africanism and solidarity with liberation movements were central elements of the idea of many African states in the 1960s and 1970s. This idea of 35. Milner, Refugees, State and Politics, 8. 36. Ibid., 3.

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the state contributed to open asylum policies for refugees fleeing wars of national liberation, even when such policies resulted in retaliation by the colonial power and attacks on the host state.37 The Pan-African pulse in the 1960s generated an ideological and political basis for the embrace of refugees and construction of camps and settlements across Africa. The acceptance of Pan-Africanism by states across Africa may be attributed to its novelty and promising principles, which were not fully sorted through to weigh its consequences for the evolving nations and how it would impact their socioeconomic, political, and security systems. This Pan-Africanist ideology on which the open-door policy was built did not consider the effects of the policy on socioeconomic change in the host and origin countries. “The ‘golden age’ period coincides with the ideological call for PanAfricanism and African solidarity for the total liberation of Africa. With this ideological call, not only states but also local communities felt a moral obligation to welcome and host refugees from areas affected by liberation struggles and self-determination.”38 The so-called “golden age of asylum” signifies the beginning of the phenomenon of open-border policy across Africa, which was based on hospitality and assistance of fellow Africans who needed security and refuge from oppressive colonial authorities. The argument as to whether the open-border policy was due to “traditional hospitality” or the novelty of asylum seeking or Pan-African ideology is sometimes not settled. However, the debate against the premise of traditional hospitality as the basis for the open asylum policy is that it has no political or ideological premise, which renders it insubstantial and less acceptable to many African states. The adoption of open-border policies could not have been simplistically due to just traditional hospitality for its wide acceptance in countries across Africa and its achievement in the 1960s and 1970s, especially during the heydays of liberation wars. The Pan-African ideology, though, presented a holistic and well-formulated principle that was adopted to unite all Africans and provide support as well as refuge for displaced people. This ideological premise ensured an opendoor policy for entry to other states among Africans in need of shelter and protection. The Pan-African movement, which inspired the emancipation of African states from colonial rule, also prompted the solidarity on which the establishment of refugee camps and settlements was based. These structures were created to provide refuge and protection to freedom fighters and

37. Ibid., 9. 38. Rwamatwara, “Forced Migration in Africa,” 182.

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apartheid opponents from South Africa, as highlighted by Ionel Zamfir.39 Any examination of asylum policies in Africa should consequently be rooted in an approach that recognizes the politics of asylum in Africa.40 The political currents of most African states are susceptible to upheaval, leading to the perception of refugees as burdens, although pressures from external agencies force them to formulate policies affecting refugees. However, Milner notes that the signing of the 1969 OAU Refugee Convention marked the formalization of an open-door policy where African countries readily admitted all those in search of security and safety.41 The signing by member states connotes the legal recognition and adoption of the political and ideological framework of the open-door policy. A review of policies concerning refugee camps and settlements in Africa is crucial to the end of the protracted refugee crises on the continent. Idris concedes that the move from camps to alternatives is perhaps most clearly seen in a recent policy on refugees proposed by the UNHCR in 2014 that encouraged the avoidance of camps but the implementation of alternatives rooted in refugee protection and well-being.42 The policy, intended to ensure a better situation for refugees, has no substantial foundation or method of implementation. This makes it impossible to follow through as a durable solution to the protracted refugee situations in Africa. The notional policy of alternative measures to camps and organized settlements looks promising on the ideological level, but its implementation and cost-effectiveness have yet to be considered for states across Africa. If more open asylum policies are to be encouraged today, it is important to learn from history and develop a more comprehensive understanding of the complex set of factors that affect the asylum policies of African states.43 Milner also observes that in the context of a rapidly rising refugee population, economic crises, and politicization of refugees, two of the most pressing concerns for African states have become sharing the burden of hosting large refugee populations for extended periods of time and the security implications of hosting refugees.44 Therefore, policies on refugee situations in Africa have to be context-bound to different regions and states with similar or dissimilar situations.

3 9. Zamfir, “Refugee Policies in Africa,” 4. 4 0. Milner, Refugees, State and Politics, 4. 41. Ibid., 22. 42. Idris, “Effectiveness of Refugee Settlement Approaches,” 14. 43. Milner, Refugees, State and Politics, 37. 4 4. Ibid., 26.

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Grow th of R efuge e Ca m ps a n d Settl e m ents in A fr ica There has been a steady increase of refugees in protracted conditions due to the unceasing eruptions of violence in African states. The available numbers, however, only reflect the countries with a semblance of stable data, which is inadequate to gauge the present increase in refugee camps and settlements in Africa. Nonetheless, this trend shows that a lot has to be done to get accurate figures of refugees in various situations such as in organized settlements, in camps, self-settling with families, and scattered in various places. These figures are indeed very high and still rising as refugees are being accommodated in very poor countries that already struggle to provide for their own citizenry. It seems that refugee numbers will not be diminishing anytime soon, as the conditions in the origin countries are yet to be improved; instead, they have worsened due to the protracted conflicts and economic recession. Previous chapters have traced the beginning and growth of the contemporary refugee phenomenon in Africa to the struggle for independence by most African states in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Subsequently, the forced displacement of people in Africa was the effect of power struggles among factions and groups within these newly independent countries. These postindependence crises were in most cases the result of continuous colonial domination by local leaders and between groups aiming to change the political scenery through exclusions in the distribution of political and economic power among ethnic groups. More and more refugees are created by these kinds of crises all over Africa. The most significant new refugee and IDP displacements have stemmed from the crises in the Central African Republic, Mali, Nigeria, and South Sudan, as well as the Syrian conflict, which has led to 163,000 refugees seeking asylum in northern Africa. The crisis that accompanied the overthrow of the government in the Central African Republic by the Seleka rebel movement in March 2013, and the subsequent surge in ethno-religious violence, displaced 490,000 people internally, while another 181,000 fled across borders into Cameroon, Chad, the DRC, and the Republic of Congo.45 The estimation of the current population of refugees in camps and settlements in Africa is a huge task that may not be easily completed because of the difficulties of enumeration and issues arising from the failure of governments and porosity of borders. Nindi asserts that difficulties in this regard include the inability to separate economic or educational migrants from those who would

45. Zamfir, “Refugee Policies in Africa.”

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qualify as refugees in the strict legal sense.46 Besides this issue, there exist other problems of statistics inflation and reduction. Some official estimates exaggerate numbers to obtain additional relief supplies or to score political points, while others undercount their estimates of refugee populations.47 For example, after initial commendation for friendly asylum policies extended to refugees, in 2018, Uganda drew widespread international criticism when it was revealed that the country had inflated the numbers of refugees that it had offered settlement. Three Ugandan officials were found to have colluded with staff of the UNHCR and the World Food Programme to do double registration and register fake names. In an audit, up to about three hundred thousand such instances were found, with millions of dollars in aid having been diverted.48 Some other issues contributing to the demographic inaccuracy are the incessant influxes and undocumented spontaneous/self-repatriation. Furthermore, the proportion and absolute numbers of self-settling refugees are much harder to estimate.49 Refugee camps and settlements emanated from political instability, civil wars, economic downturn, and various debilitating factors in nations across Africa. Adepoju noted that this deteriorating situation was caused largely by a series of political crises that erupted in several African countries, notably Zaire, Ethiopia, Somalia, Angola, Chad, and Uganda, as well as by the liberation struggles in Zimbabwe, Namibia, and South Africa.50 These refugees are products of their societies’ violence and political upheaval that have necessitated them to seek asylum elsewhere. Egide Rwamatwara also notes that several conflicts experienced on the continent in the same period meant that many countries are at the same time refugee-producing and refugee-receiving countries.51 These situations become a hydra-headed problem whereby a country is producing and receiving refugees at the same time. This issue is notably the case in Cameroon, Rwanda, Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, Uganda, Congo, Angola, the DRC, and many others. This situation means that these countries are greatly overwhelmed in terms of solving the existing refugee problems in their countries and at the same time managing internal conflicts that make them contributors to the population of refugees in other neighboring countries and camps. 4 6. Nindi, “Problem of Refugees in Africa,” 388. 47. Ibid. 4 8. European Council on Refugees and Exiles, “Inaccurate Statistics”; Kafeero, “Uganda”; Okiror, “Refugee Numbers Were Exaggerated.” 49. Nindi, “Problem of Refugees in Africa.” 50. Adepoju, “Dimension of the Refugee Problem,” 21–22. 51. Rwamatwara, “Forced Migration in Africa.”

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Figure 9.3. Refugee camp in Kimbumba in eastern Zaire (now the DRC), in 1994, right after the Rwandan genocide. CDC, US; Wikimedia Commons, htt ps://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File: Rwandan_refugee_camp_in_east_Zaire.jpg.

Many African countries are experiencing an upsurge in population in refugee camps and sett lements, which is creating tensions and strains on the host nations. Kitenge Fabrice Tunda also notes that the Great Lakes region of Africa has been engulfed in violent intrastate confl icts and proxy interstate hostilities for several decades. The Rwandan genocide, numerous armed confl icts in the DRC, and the civil war in Burundi are a few examples of the challenges to peace and security that the region has experienced, with millions of people killed and displaced.52 Figure 9.3 shows the Kimbumba refugee camp in eastern Zaire in 1994, right after the Rwandan genocide, capturing just one instance of the vast human displacement from that shocking event. Perhaps the most disturbing of the refugee situations in Africa is the demographic composition of refugee groups, which normally include a disproportionate number of children and women.53 Also, in some cases, transit centers initially designed for manageable numbers of arriving refugees have become converted to refugee camps now hosting as many as five times the initial human 52. Tunda, “When Refugees Cannot Return Home,” 2. 53. Adepoju, “Refugee Problem in Africa,” 23.

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capacity of these spaces.54 Furthermore, the demand for boundary adjustments to accommodate the sociocultural realities of the countries concerned and to regroup the populations of ethnic groups arbitrarily assigned to different countries by colonial cartography have also led to further refugee situations in recent years.55 The urge to maintain or expand national boundaries is another related instigation of crisis in many African countries resulting in the dispersal of people into refugee camps and settlements. These expansionist policies usually exist between two nations claiming rights to a particular landmass between them. The back-and-forth exchange of refugees among states experiencing conflicts contributes to the protracted refugee crises. Besides these human-made causes of increase in the population in refugee camps and settlements, natural and environmental factors are also responsible for the overflow in these systems. The occurrence of landslides, drought, famine, floods, and such disasters in African states impacts the already fragile economies and influences the increase of refugees in other neighboring nations.

Wom en a n d Chi ldr en R efuge e s in Ca m ps a n d Settl e m ents It is often reported that refugee women and children constitute not less than 75–80 percent of the refugee population in camps in most locations across the globe. While refugee camps are meant to be places of refuge for people fleeing danger, in reality, the opposite is often the case. The dominant reputation of refugee camps is as sites of violence and pervasive insecurity. This insecurity affects refugees, relief workers, and the host communities around the camps.56 For women and youth refugee populations, this feature of camps is especially grievous. In their groundbreaking 2002 account of women and war across the continent, Elisabeth Rehn and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf report that the “majority of women we met, whether refugee or internally displaced, told us that they did not feel safe in camps.”57 The predominance of women in refugee camps and settlements exposes them to multiple violent experiences from various sources, including other refugees and militia mingling with the refugees, hostile locals, or even camp officials.58 The sources of personal or physical insecurity 5 4. Ibid., 26. 55. Ibid., 24. 56. Jacobsen, “‘Safety First’ Approach.” 57. Rehn and Sirleaf, “Women, War, Peace,” 25. 58. Yacob-Haliso, “Gendered Experiences of Refugee Women.”

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include “violence and abuse, including assaults by armed elements or groups and abduction, and various forms of sexual and gender-based violence, such as rape, domestic violence, sexual slavery, sexual abuse, forced pregnancy, forced marriage, sex trafficking, infection by sexually transmitted diseases, forced sterilization, and sex discrimination and exploitation.”59 Domestic violence affecting women and children is particularly insidious, as it is widespread, often tolerated by cultural norms, and possibly hidden from the public gaze, all factors that make it deadly for the victims.60 The longer the refugees spend in encampment, the greater the possibilities for domestic violence from intimate partners in particular, as “psychological strains for husbands unable to assume normal cultural, social and economic roles can result in aggressive behaviour towards wives and children . . . [and] the enforced idleness, boredom and despair that permeate many camps are natural breeding grounds for such violence.”61 In their tenth-year assessment of the implementation of the UNHCR Guidelines on the Protection of Refugee Women, the Women’s Commission reported that Zambian refugee women attributed the increased levels of domestic violence to beer brewing in camps.62 This combination of boredom, frustration, and alcohol consumption as a cause of domestic violence has shown up in accounts by Sudanese women in Eritrea’s Elit camp, Angolan displaced men and women, and Congolese refugees at the Gihembe refugee camp in Rwanda.63 Where women also have to compete with men for resources in the camps, patriarchal subjugation and sexual exploitation may result. Additionally, the design of camps often does not take into consideration the protection of women in displacement situations: “Some physical security problems arise from poor siting of camps and bad design. Those located close to borders are notorious for being unsafe because of frequent cross-border raids by armed elements, including soldiers and state security officials, and abductions. Poorly designed camps are often overcrowded, and unrelated families may have to share space without privacy. Inadequate lighting, latrines placed too far from living quarters, and insufficient night patrols expose women to rape and other attacks, especially at night.”64

5 9. Yacob-Haliso, “Women, Camps and (In)Security,” 99. 6 0. Oyinloye, “Issues and Trends.” 61. Martin, Refugee Women, 12. 62. Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children, “UNHCR Policy.” 63. Ibid.; Barber-Madden et al., Poverty, Violence and Health; Rehn and Sirleaf, “Women, War, Peace,” 26. 6 4. Yacob-Haliso, “Women, Camps and (In)Security.”

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Children evading the violence in their home countries are often fending off or experiencing one form of violence or another while journeying from their places of origin to camps and settlements. On many occasions, separation from family members occurs at the time of flight from the conflicts in their countries of origin, leaving these children to compete with adults for meager resources and often leading to sexual exploitation and abuse such as rape, prostitution, and exchange of sexual favors for food. Besides this physical manifestation of violence, a much deeper affliction is inflicted on these children where there are no records or an adequate child protection system to prevent or minimize their exposure to psychological trauma. The predominance of women and children among refugees in Africa reflects both the major causes of exile and, indirectly, the young age structure of the African population. The rapid rate of population growth produces a young population.65 This situation places the future of Africa in jeopardy as large numbers of refugees are children with bleak prospects. The aggregate of children in various protracted refugee crises shows that if necessary solutions are not found and implemented, the African youth may be unable to achieve their maximum potential, unlike their counterparts in developed nations. There is a high probability that there will be a large gap of inequality between these African youths and their counterparts in industrialized nations with little or no place for them in the world. Refugee children have limited opportunities for education and training that would give them better prospects, and even when they can access these resources, they are more likely to drop out or underperform due to the trauma of their experiences with abuse, violence, and conflict. Among the most persistent protection problems are sexual and genderbased violence, human trafficking, and smuggling of persons occurring in the context of mixed migratory flows.66 Women and children are hugely affected by violence of this nature, as children separated from their parents are abused and women contend with sexual predators in these camps. Badiah Haffejee and Jean F. East posit that African women from minority ethnic groups or clans such as Somali Bantus and Ogadenis are often most vulnerable, subjected to sexual and other gender-based violence in refugee camps, sometimes by other Somalis, Kenyan police, camp officials, aid workers, or security employees.67 While this experience applies to many refugee women and girls in refugee 6 5. Adepoju, “Refugee Problem in Africa,” 32. 6 6. Zamfir, “Refugee Policies in Africa.” 67. Haffejee and East, “African Women Refugee Resettlement,” 5; Bundi, “Plight of Refugees in Africa.”

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camps in Africa, Haffejee and East neglect to consider that it is not a singular factor of belonging to minority ethnic groups but a result of multiple intersecting layers of identities, which include their gender, class, status (i.e., refugees), ethnicity, (dis)ability, and so on. The high incidence of sexual and gender-based violence in refugee camps and settlements has staggering effects of traumatic and psychological imbalance for the refugee victims. The experiences of war, displacement, separation, sexual and gender-based violence, hunger, drought, and so on in refugee camps and settlements erupt into substance abuse, depression, identity crisis, trauma, mental health crises, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Unlike most of their male counterparts, refugee women and girls are at the receiving end of this violence and most of the time are powerless to defend themselves or even seek redress. Haffejee and East also observe that this violence has far-reaching effects on women, as it affects their ability to seek employment and their job performance.68 These circumstances leave refugee women in an unfavorable situation compared with their male counterparts, who are more likely to receive employment opportunities, creating an unequal balance in socioeconomic statuses. The concerns of host governments, donors, and agencies are fixed on physical provision of shelter and food, while enough attention is not drawn toward this situation and how it can be stopped. This calls for more concerted efforts in addressing this problem in refugee camps among women and children, as there is more than hunger, shelter, and educational issues in the refugee camps and settlements. Literacy rates among male and female refugees are notably low, especially for the female gender, as many African refugee women and girls are from countries that place a higher premium on the education of the male gender and relegate women and girls to traditional roles of housekeeping, childbearing, and domestic activities. African gendered cultural norms can also affect employment possibilities.69 Refugee men are likely to be regarded as hardworking, resilient, and employable, unlike refugee women. In analyzing women and children’s safety in camps, certain considerations must be given attention. There is a need to (a) contextualize the discussion to specific cases and contexts; (b) contemplate the sociopolitical, legal, psychological, and psychosocial environments that make insecurity possible; (c) consider other elements of women’s situations that are contributing to their vulnerability, such as age, gendered social norms, and presence or absence of an 68. Ibid., 5. 69. Ibid., 6.

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adult male head of the household; and (d) analyze displaced women’s attempts to pursue their own survival and satisfaction.70

V iol ence a n d Secu r it y Issu e s Refugee camps in particular are often places of outright danger, for refugees and relief workers, and, by virtue of their destabilizing effect, for host communities living around them.71 One of the devastating impacts of refugee camps and settlements in Africa is the potential for proliferation of militant activities, crime, and violence in host communities. An increase in the refugee population in a single camp tends to raise security issues both around it and nationally, as camps sometimes serve to conceal the activities of armed militia from feuding nations. Kerstin Fisk opines that while camp settlement may have security implications for the host community—refugees as well as the local host community—its effects have not yet been examined beyond a small subset of case studies.72 Refugee camps and settlements have impacted the security situation in many host countries, and these have been generating debates over time about the security implication of these camps and settlements. Z. B. Mutongu also stresses the phenomenon of insecurity of the host nation influenced and compounded by the influxes of illegal firearms and refugees. Porous and unmanned international borders in Africa are enabling factors of security problems. Border politics and skirmishes create security issues, especially when refugees dominate these spaces. To fully understand the factors responsible for these dangerous situations, Jacobsen asserts that knowledge of the political details in both countries is necessary. The agendas of the actors involved in the chaos and border politics are important to contain and eliminate these security risks. The security crises include the collapse of law and order, threats and intimidation, and loss of property and lives orchestrated by armed militiamen. The establishment of refugee camps and settlements puts pressure on the security structure of the host community and country. This security issue depends in part on the nature of the civil conflicts in refugees’ home countries, on the particular interests and agendas refugees bring into the refugee-populated area, and on the nature of the refugees’ experience in the area.73 This presumes that refugees may have some hidden agenda or interest in coming to the host 7 0. Yacob-Haliso, “Women, Camps and (In)Security.” 71. Jacobsen, “Framework,” 3. 72. Fisk, “Camp Settlement,” 59. 73. Jacobsen, “Framework,” 20.

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country other than to seek asylum and that the nature of the conflicts in their home countries can stimulate another in their host community. Another instigating factor for security issues is the presence of the military in refugee camps and settlements. Jacobsen asserts that this situation can be found in southern Sudan, along the Thai-Burmese border, and along the Tanzanian-Burundian border.74 The high concentration of freedom fighters and warriors in camps can unsettle the balance of power and lead to rebellious uprisings. Camp conditions can also lead to interrefugee conflict and violence against women and children, especially if these camps are close to each other.75 The conflict between refugee camps and settlements situated close to each other can spill to neighboring communities, thereby affecting the safety of locals and citizens. It is imperative to be observant of the refugee sociopolitical problems in order to gain information on how to combat and prevent an explosion of security problems. Jacobsen identifies two types of violence targeted at and suffered by refugee camps and settlements situated close to the border and locations rife with border conflict. The first type, military threats, occurs when camps or refugees are directly attacked by being shelled or subjected to raids by rebel forces or regular (government) forces of the host or sending state. When camps are attacked, it is not only camp populations and relief workers who are at risk but also surrounding communities of local people and self-settled refugees who also suffer the effects of roving gangs of armed units.76 Refugee camps and settlements are sometimes entangled in the web of security problems in Africa, as they are targeted for violence by militaries or feuding communities. This was exemplified on May 4, 1978, when the South African Defence Force (SADF) attacked Kassinga, Angola, killing six hundred Namibian refugees.77 These attacks are usually based on refugees’ involvement in conflict against the state with hegemonic influence over their own nation. In the case of the Namibian refugees, the South African government accused them of conspiring with their fellow countrymen in the struggle for liberation. This was replicated in the January 1981 SADF raid on Maputo, Mozambique, killing twelve South African refugees; the December 1982 SADF attack on Maseru, Lesotho, killing thirty South African refugees and twelve Lesotho nationals; and the May 1983 bombing of Matola by the South African Airforce.78 74. Ibid. 75. Ibid. 76. Jacobsen, “Framework,” 5. 77. Milner, Refugees, State and Politics, 28. 78. Ibid., 29.

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This first category of security problems involves external threats from the host or origin countries. The second category includes violence, crime, and intimidation that occur within refugee camps, resulting from the absence or breakdown of law and order or sometimes simply as a result of poor planning or policy.79 Refugee camps are often riddled with violence, abuse, and intimidation from ethnic factions, groups, or even relief workers or refugee leaders. Jacobsen observes that violence and intimidation in camps are also used for political purposes— to pressure refugees to leave the camps or to enter them, to repatriate or not to repatriate. The latter was widely believed to be the case in the Goma camps, where camp leaders intimidated and threatened refugees who sought to return to Rwanda.80 These camp-based security issues are not given much attention by the host countries, as they have little or no obvious impact on them, especially when the camps and settlements are located far away from their citizens. Camps where petty and organized crime flourishes can become zones of drug smuggling, human trafficking, illegal logging, and gun running. As in any high-crime area, the noncriminal population is subject to more generalized violence, which leaches out into the surrounding community. In most camp situations, crimes go unpunished because there is no adequate force to back up what rule of law does exist.81 Refugee camps have high potentials for producing security loopholes and hideouts for criminal syndicates, gangs, and terrorists. This phenomenon eludes containment and so flows to the communities around the camps, educing national political and security challenges. Both refugee camps and settlements can stimulate conflict, as clashes between refugees and citizens or locals over scarce socioeconomic resources are imminent security problems. This often arises when locals harbor resentment toward refugees for perceived wrongdoings, such as theft or immoral acts. Sometimes, too, this occurs because of inequities resulting from refugees’ access to relief resources or because refugees are blamed for other problems (including security ones) in the refugee-populated areas and locals want to pressure refugees to leave.82 Jacobsen proposed some solutions to tackle the menace of security problems, including the demilitarization of camps and the relocation of camps and settlements away from the borders. 7 9. Jacobsen, “Framework,” 5. 80. Ibid. 81. Ibid., 5–6. 82. Ibid., 6.

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Camps are largely undefended repositories of resources, including food, vehicles, and relief supplies, as well as people, who can be forcibly recruited for military or sex or labor purposes, or taken hostage as a way to get international media publicity. Camps can become integrated into the local political (war) economy and be viewed as a war resource. Governments involved in internal or regional conflicts have also deliberately targeted or used refugees and camps as part of a military strategy to weaken and demoralize opponents, to promote ethnic cleansing, or to encourage or discourage repatriation.83 Refugee camps become places of insecurity where refugees sometimes experience a second threat to their existence by being forcibly removed from these camps and settlements. These situations demonstrate that refugee camps have many security deficiencies. These deficiencies create conditions for violence and insecurity. Experiences of refugees scattered in settlements are quite different, as they may encounter antagonism or xenophobic attacks from locals and citizens over strained economic resources. Jacobsen points out that many refugees in camps are rural people with little education who are predisposed to crimes and forced labor as they have little or nothing to engage them productively. The presence of weapons increases the combustibility of the situation in and around the camps, as does the problem of bored and frustrated young men in camps, who are candidates for involvement in crime or recruitment to militias.84 In refugee camps and settlements, locals who are somewhat neglected by the government may resent the influx of these people, perceiving them as rivals and enemies. Thus, in most cases, refugees are escaping a terrible situation in their home countries only to eventually be immersed in a similar situation in the host country.

Li v elihoods a n d A ssista nce in R efuge e Ca m ps a n d Settl e m ents Refugee Livelihoods

One of the biggest problems faced especially by African refugees who have spent many years in exile is that of a sustainable access to livelihoods and economic empowerment. Jobs are often scarce in the arid rural areas where camps are sited, and refugees may lack the capital to invest in income-generating activities. In the near future, the African continent may be faced with an 83. Ibid., 11. 8 4. Ibid.

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ineffective system of employment due to the effects of mass influxes of refugees on the already strained systems. Most of the continent’s cities experience serious problems of unemployment, so governments of asylum states are naturally reluctant to have their rural refugees migrate to urban areas.85 Many of these African countries are dealing with rising unemployment among youth, and the influxes of refugees into this situation is a catastrophe in the making. There are many other effects of refugee camps and settlements in various countries as well as across the continent. However, research on the Uganda case study has demonstrated the complex contributions that refugees in settlements can make to local markets by harnessing their skills, networks, and connections to global markets in varying ways.86 Thus, there are many ways by which refugees in camps and settlements may contribute immensely to the economy of the host communities, through their presence as labor in industries, construction sites, quarries, and agricultural sectors. The presence of refugees in camps and settlements can be managed to produce positive results despite extant literature on their adverse effects on the economies and security across Africa. For this to be achievable, all actors (refugees, donor agencies, and host governments) in this situation must be available and ready to work together. Nutrition and Shelter in Camps

Many other issues threaten the lives and livelihoods of refugees in camps. Malnutrition and inadequate food rations are a common reality in camps, especially overcrowded ones, which seems to be a common attribute of many refugee camps in Africa. Inadequate food supply, low-quality food, and lack of dietary regulations have severe consequences for the refugees in camps and most specifically for pregnant women and children. In at least fifty sites in nine African countries, the World Food Programme has been forced to cut food rations by up to 60 percent, affecting eight hundred thousand refugees. As of mid-June 2014, one-third of refugees relying on food assistance had been affected, with most experiencing over 50 percent cut in their rations.87 Camps that are structured to accommodate people who have lost their homes become a steady place of death for vulnerable persons. While emergency shelters are provided for refugees within a short time of arrival, most camps across

8 5. Rogge, “Africa’s Resettlement Strategies,” 197. 86. Betts, Bloom, Kaplan and Omata, Refugee Economies. 87. Zamfir, “Refugee Policies in Africa,” 4.

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the continent are characterized by degraded plastic sheets, tents, and shacks, and nonfood items are not sufficiently available for regular distribution.88 While refugees are badly exposed to the elements even under normal circumstances, they are particularly vulnerable to the extreme weather conditions, such as the storms and flooding now affecting the newly arrived South Sudanese refugees in the Gambella region of Ethiopia. Such a situation is even worse where it is not possible to secure land for camps or settlements, so that the refugees remain for months in reception or transit facilities.89 This is the situation of many refugee camps and settlements, which demands that serious measures be taken to improve their conditions. Education Deficits

Besides the issues of food deprivation and severe malnutrition, some camps have no structures for education, training, and skill acquisition that might help refugees have relatively normal lives. Even where educational facilities exist, they may be hampered by inadequate resources, including educational materials, teachers, and physical infrastructure commensurate with the population of displaced persons. Refugee camps and settlements contend with high numbers of uneducated youths and children, teenage and unplanned pregnancies, early marriages, and child abuse and labor. Thus, these camps may become the training grounds for youth without any meaningful prospects to be misguided by recruitment into criminal groups. Where refugee children and youth are not in camps or organized settlements, their access to education may be even more restricted if the host government has not deliberately planned such access. In the case of self-settled refugees, hiding their children from schools may be a way of retaining their presence in the country if they wish to remain hidden from the authorities. These have long-lasting impacts on youth refugee populations, discussed in a separate chapter in this book. The Economic Impacts on Host Communities

The influx of refugees into camps and settlements has tremendous implications for the economic and political situation in the host community. Where social services and natural resources, already constrained, are put under additional pressure, this can engender frustration or hostility among the local community.90 John R. Rogge observes that in most cases, the concentration of refugees 88. Ibid. 89. Ibid. 9 0. Ibid., 7.

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Figure 9.4. Buduburam refugee camp in Ghana, home to over forty thousand Liberian refugees during the Liberian confl ict. Wikimedia Commons, htt ps://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Buduburam -refugee-camp.jpg.

places severe strain on existing infrastructure and creates land scarcity, food shortages, and increased unemployment.91 Jacobsen also notes that refugees and refugee camps can disrupt economic activities of interest to particular actors in the region, which can lead to security problems for refugees.92 The creation of sett lements or camps in urban or rural areas with potential for mineral resources can impact the economy of the host country and even the interest of corporations in investing in such places. The establishment of refugee camps and sett lements in strategic locations has critical consequences for the socioeconomic conditions of the host countries and communities. Refugees, together with the relief resources that follow an influx, create significant disruptions in the refugee-populated area. Changes in demographic and ethnic balances, reassigning of local resources such as land and water, the 91. 92. 93. 94.

Rogge, “Africa’s Resett lement Strategies.” Jacobsen, “Framework,” 19. Ibid. Rwamatwara, “Forced Migration in Africa,” 178.

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creation of new infrastructure and services, and environmental strains can all lead to perceptions by the government and local people that refugees are creating problems.93 The economic burden of creating camps and settlements is huge and is often not included in the host country’s yearly expenditure, so the host country struggles to both accommodate refugees and provide for their own citizens. These influxes also demand costly infrastructure investments that include the construction of roads, camps, markets, schools, and hospitals. Jacobsen also observes significant changes in the host country economies, producing what is called “refugee economies,” as divergences in the prices of goods and services emerge. These economic challenges often disrupt the economic prospects of the host country, or as we have noted above, may facilitate economic growth.

Conclusion: Cu r r ent Tr en ds in R efuge e Ca m ps a n d Settl e m ents According to Rwamatwara, “Postcolonial Africa is faced by a complex refugee problem . . . and the effort to pave its path and affirm itself in the [sic] global politics. In refugee matters, the greatest challenge facing independent Africa is the ever-growing number of refugees and the generalized fatigue in handling the refugee problem.”94 The present trend in refugee camps and settlements is the crisis of protracted encampment. Millions of African refugees are living in protracted situations in camps and settlements with no foreseeable promise of repatriation or (re) integration. Idris notes that the average protracted refugee situation has lasted twenty-six years, while some refugee camps and urban settings are now home to a third generation of displaced persons.95 The Buduburam refugee camp in Ghana, pictured in figure 9.4, initially built to house refugees from the Liberian civil war became home to a second generation of refugees, many of whom could not return at the end of that war. Idris reviews the situation in Dadaab and Kakuma camps. These camps were established in 1992 to create temporary housing for ninety thousand refugees fleeing Somalia’s civil war. They have now been there for over twenty-five years, and currently Dadaab remains the largest refugee camp in the world.96 This protracted crisis in Africa is the aggregate of generations of refugee influxes, the failure of both origin and host governments to contain the crisis, reduction and loss of funding from international donor 9 5. Idris, “Effectiveness of Refugee Settlement Approaches,” 13. 96. Ibid.

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agencies, and unending political conflicts. Africa’s growing refugee population indicates that there are new and existing challenges that are growing alongside the refugee numbers. Millions are also facing food insecurity. These figures illustrate the dependence of the regional economy on agropastoral activities with their vulnerability to climate change. The present refugee problem has reached a crescendo that is too overwhelming for the African continent to solve, thereby indicating the need for the urgent intervention of both internal and external organizations, agencies, and world powers.

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URBAN REFUGEES

Introduction Not many studies have expanded our understanding of the experiences and approaches to the management of urban refugees in Africa.1 As African refugee numbers burgeoned in the decades after independence, so too did the characteristics, locations, and settlement patterns of refugees evolve over time. Refugees require physical protection from harm and danger as well as access to food, health care, and other social and material resources. While governments and international organizations such as the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) have a responsibility to provide these protections, they often fall short. The politics of refugee protection have led to different contexts for refugees across Africa. In these efforts, refugees find themselves living in diverse contexts, in both rural and urban spaces. Refugees in urban spaces offer a number of insights into the relationship between refugees and their hosts, hence the focus of this chapter. Refugees are continuously reminded of their transitional status in urban communities and that their ability to stay in their new communities is contingent on the events in their country of origin. When events in their country of origin have calmed, they are often hounded by host governments and subjected to deportations or forced repatriation. These actions are usually justified as providing an opportunity for refugees to contribute to peacebuilding and

1. For example, see Kibreab, “Eritrean and Ethiopian Urban Refugees”; Sommers, Fear in Bongoland.

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development in their own countries but are often merely a mask for xenophobic attitudes and political expediencies. This chapter begins by situating urban refugees within the milieu of refugee accommodation options offered by states that have managed refugees on their territory and within the broader global urbanization trends. This makes it possible to better crystallize the motives for refugees choosing urban environments and to understand the particular conditions in which urban refugees find themselves. We then explore the urban refugee experience as it relates to legal recognition; refugee status determination; host country relations; security; socioeconomic, protection, and assistance issues; and the UNHCR’s evolving policies on urban refugees and their implementation.

R efuge e Accom modations Camps

Many governments in Africa are averse to the idea of indiscriminate accommodation of refugees. This is because of those governments’ perception of refugees as persons with the propensity to undermine the security of the host country. As a result of this, the environment created for refugees by countries that accommodate them is often closely regulated and monitored. Rules, regulations, and policies are all formulated by these countries to contain the anticipated challenges of hosting refugees. Refugees are kept in spatially segregated environments where they can be assured of a degree of safety. The majority of refugee camps on the African continent are in rural areas, although this varies depending on the host nation. Restrictions placed on refugees seek to achieve various purposes, particularly their active containment. Historically, especially in the years after independence, refugees in some African countries were assumed to have the capacity to destabilize their environment, and governments began taking proactive measures to manage the consequences of accommodating large-scale refugee migrations. In consonance with the plans of governments, the UNHCR and other humanitarian organizations consider the plights of refugees in camps and assist in redressing them, and policies for managing their situation are also formulated for this purpose. However, there are situations when refugees obstruct these efforts and move beyond the stipulated boundaries. The restrictions placed on refugees in camps are not only spatial. The limitations placed on them geographically are to enable the government to predict their economic and social growth as well. Refugees are usually not expected to

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enjoy maximum prosperity or comfort in order to discourage permanent settlement. Therefore, their progress is managed and observed through the economic restrictions around their segregated environment. For refugees who stay in camps, their access to basic amenities is limited and often deliberate. Governments’ involvement in the lives and spread of refugee influence in the camp environment are usually around concerns with security, which they surmise would be vulnerable if refugees were allowed to gain privileges and freedoms. Without restricting the actions of refugees, the potential to engage in intermittent struggles cannot be downplayed. Similarly, the xenophobic thinking and attacks in South Africa, for example, are predicated on a belief that refugees and immigrants are more economically successful than the nationals. Camps are therefore restricted places where governments arrange for refugees so that they can be monitored and their basic needs met without disrupting the host society. The argument is also that camps make it convenient for humanitarian organizations to access and provide services to refugee populations as well as be involved in the search for solutions. Basically, governments make policies that explicitly prevent refugees from total or even partial integration into the host society. When refugees are not integrated, their actions remain narrowly prescribed by the regulations of their host communities. Confining refugees to camps enables governments to cope with whatever results, either negative or positive, that accommodating them would generate. When the freedom of refugees is limited and their movement monitored, their host countries are only controlling the possibility of seeing an eruption of refugees or their overbearing influence in the determination of the general peace available in those places. Organized Settlements

As noted in the preceding chapter, organized settlements are different from camps in that they allow for considerable levels of freedom for the refugees. Unlike camps, organized settlements also enable refugee communities to interact to a great extent with communities within a host country. Although these interactions are still generally controlled, the refugees’ relative access shows that they have considerably more freedom of movement than refugees restricted to camps. Organized settlements also provide more access to economic activities. They are therefore a deliberate decision by the government to regulate the activities of the refugees so that they are able to contribute to the economic and social life of their host communities. Social and economic interactions thus offer refugees an opportunity to contribute significantly to the development of the community through payment of tax and contributions to other community development projects. Even though they are given an environment to settle in

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and are offered the opportunity to mingle with the people, they are still being monitored by institutions in the host nation. In the situation where refugees are accommodated in organized settlements, they are usually expected to have some internal political coordination that would assist in curbing any negative tendencies of members. Without this, some members of the group would violate the rules and therefore attract the wrath of the government. Ultimately, host states believe that the inability to control the growth and activities of refugees can particularly endanger the general peace of their countries. Many governments are against the accommodation of refugees because they are seen to have disturbed the existing peace of their host communities in the past. Another distinction between camps and organized settlements can be found in the level of socioeconomic restrictions placed on refugees. Although the allowance of refugees in organized settlements to participate in the activities of their host communities does not automatically translate into the status of an insider, they are better integrated into the host societies by their relative freedom and safety, but they are still often reminded of their need to return to their own country. The essence of the organized settlement, therefore, is to afford refugees an opportunity to be exposed to a better environment with relative peace that would enable them gradually grow in their economic endeavors. They are given the opportunity to develop a measure of economic self-sufficiency so that they will not be a complete burden to their host government. It is not impossible for those that are granted the opportunity to settle in an organized environment to both positively affect their new environment and make admirable efforts to extend this to their home countries. However, organized settlements maintain the attributes of a controlled population. Self-Settlement

Self-settlement is characteristically different from the above forms of accommodation but is an outgrowth of these other forms of settlement. Refugees in urban areas are most often influenced by the economic potentials of their host communities and are compelled to abandon the usually poor conditions of their camp or organized settlement environment. This way, they intend to improve their financial situation and therefore migrate to these urban settings with the hope of finding opportunities. Refugees who self-settle in cities often rely on the assistance of acquaintances or kin. Such refugees may practically disappear into the fabric of the city, becoming distinguishable only by their different ethnic or linguistic traits or by other markers of outsider status that they have. Refugees who settle themselves have decided to go beyond the protection

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of the UNHCR. Even though they have decided to leave or avoid the camp organized for refugees, self-settled individuals often remain closely monitored by appropriate policies of respective governments. While the other forms of settlements are restricted spatially and economically, self-settled communities have the potential to evade the stringent conditions placed on encamped refugees and can achieve maximum impact to turn their lives around. Another important characteristic of self-settlement is that individuals are not as physically vulnerable to the social structures and institutions available in their host countries, as they can evade and hide from these. Having the ability to manipulate their environment for economic growth enables them to seek preferable alternatives in their quest for integration. In most cases, the self-settled individuals maintain connections with an increasing network of people with whom they share similar language, culture, and perception, as they use these contacts to navigate the urban areas they often migrate to. One of the challenges inherent in the self-settlement system is the possibility of adding to the overcrowding of the cities if there are large and sudden influxes. Refugees and migrants who were inspired to change their environment in the hope of financial growth usually bank on their acquaintances who have been in the city to ease their settlement. Even when refugees are allowed the opportunity to settle themselves in the urban environment, they still remain unequal due to the status of “otherness” conferred on them by the host communities. They are faced with restrictions that are characteristically different from those faced by refugees in organized settlements or in camps. In extreme cases, they can become participants in criminal activities.

U r ba niz ation, U r ba nism, a n d R efuge e s in A fr ica n Citi e s Cities in Africa are destinations for refugees because of their tendency to provide ecological and economic safety for people who are disturbed by war, political or security challenges in their home countries and communities. The development of urban centers in the proportion that Africa has today is closely associated with the European imperialist agenda on the continent. Although bigger settlements with capacities to accommodate larger populations existed prior to their coming, the sudden increase in the numbers and rapid development of certain cities is marked by the presence of the colonialists who introduced different dimensions to the process of urbanization. Today, cities are growing across the continent, and corresponding displaced populations are filling many of these cities. The rise of refugee crises from politics or

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environmental challenges has also attracted various policies to regulate, monitor, and control the activities of migrants and refugees in cities. Urban populations surged in relatively recent history because of the factors identified above. Many governments initially failed to understand the connection between the influx of migrants and refugees in their environment and their corresponding economic development, and as a result, they placed restrictions on the movement of refugees and migrants into cities. This attitude against the phenomenon of migration therefore has affected the policy directions of policy makers, as they are inadequately committed to the trends of migrations and how they stand to make the situation beneficial to both refugees and host communities. There are conflicting findings in the literature about the impacts of the movement of refugees into urban communities; what remains constant, however, is that urbanization could be one of the reliable solutions to the challenges facing certain refugees. The growth in the number of people who migrate into African urban communities is stunted, as refugees are fast evacuating urban settings in places such as Tanzania, Uganda, Benin, the Central African Republic, the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Lesotho, Mauritania, Niger, and Senegal, especially in the first decade of the twenty-first century, studies find.2 Medium-sized cities have less capacity to expand their economic trajectory because of the limited resources available for the reformation of the polity. Therefore, urbanization in Africa does not automatically signal an increase in population. This is because, as some refugees are too poor to afford the demands of the city, they seek alternatives in neighboring places or move back to rural camps and settlements. The cost of living in the cities always comes as a challenge for impoverished urban dwellers, and this sometimes brings about their shift from these places to a comparatively liberal environment that can accommodate them. A growing literature explains why the spiral migration away from the African urban communities is occurring. Many of these urban settings are expanding their limited geographical spaces in their quest to create opportunities for migrants and refugees as a proactive measure for managing risks. It is thus the economic conditions of the cities that perhaps sustain the refugees who decide to settle in these places despite obvious impending dangers. In Africa, there has been a lack of reliable data that can provide a clear picture of the refugees that are in urban communities. While the number of cities increased after independence, there remain major impediments to assessing the size of populations in these spaces, despite the best efforts of many researchers. 2. Potts, “Africa’s Rapid Urbanization.”

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The reason is political. The Democratic Republic of the Congo, Angola, and even Nigeria are asserted to be densely populated but conducted their last population censuses decades ago. Knowledge about the refugees’ presence in their urban settings is difficult to assess because of the lack of national population censuses. Given this reality, the number of refugees who are legally and legitimately contained in cities and how they contribute to the economic development of these places can be difficult to arrive at. Thus, the risk element usually associated with refugee influx or presence cannot be accurately assessed. The lack of reliable data constitutes a challenge for the analysis of refugee life in cities and how their presence continues to influence the ways urban communities are shaped. In many urban settings, there are many slums and ghettos where the economically disadvantaged are usually segregated. As such, refugees typically wind up there, and their status makes it difficult to provide necessities that will assist in improving their conditions. Rapid urbanization in Africa has not usually involved the expansion of the available institutions and resources to serve those on the lower rungs of the economic ladder. Hospitals are not increased to cater for the population, and road infrastructure is equally not exponentially increased to mitigate the heavy concentration required. Therefore, the settlement of refugees in African urban communities has not only added a heavy burden to the management and safety of refugees in the city; it has also contributed to an unimaginable barricade to their growth. This is further showcased when there are emergencies. Urbanism in Africa faces enormous challenges owing to the inequalities and the lopsided distribution of resources.3 Access to basic amenities is not evenly distributed, and this is a challenge to the safety and well-being of refugees in cities. The lack of safe drinking water on its own predisposes people to health challenges that can lead to more serious illnesses. Nearly one in every five deaths under the age of five worldwide is due to a water-related disease.4 Between 1990 and 2015, there was a wide decrease in the availability of safe drinking water in Eritrea, Malawi, Namibia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, in their urban centers especially.5 Statistics show that urban access to improved drinking water sources is struggling to keep pace with urban growth.6 The aggravating effect of this is usually felt by the lower classes, who cannot afford basic amenities by themselves. This explains why the 3 . David Dodman, “African Urbanization and Urbanism.” 4. Water Project, “Facts about Water”; see also World Health Organization and UNICEF, “Diarrhoea.” 5. Potts, “Africa’s Rapid Urbanization.” 6. World Health Organization, “Drinking Water.”

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case of refugees in the city can become very precarious. More and more, urban development in Africa has not been intended to assist refugees. Generally, therefore, refugees are confronted with overwhelming challenges that neutralize all efforts to transform their immediate lives and environment. Living in slums, not getting adequate medical or health insurance, and being condemned to poor water and sanitation and the use of unhygienic latrines all differently work together to make life difficult for this demographic. Strong security architecture qualifies an urban setting as a desirable environment to live in, but this is often lacking. Accordingly, cities without the needed infrastructure to survive remain hostile to the accommodation of refugees. Another critical issue surrounding refugees and urbanization in Africa is the susceptibility of these cities to violence. Restive groups are easily formed in an environment where there is unequal or lopsided distribution of wealth. People with common interests rally together easily because of their shared experiences and the fact of deprivation of basic amenities that can be used to transform their lives. Therefore, in many cities in Africa, it is not unusual to come across criminal engagements, political and social violence, thuggery, and insurgency, among other factors contributing to crime and insecurity. Those who are denied access to wealth or are hindered by the discriminatory strategies of governments often resort to illicit behavior for survival. Urban unrest approaches the peak around electioneering periods when political bigwigs employ the services of street urchins, thugs, and criminal elements to carry out their parochial agenda. It is probable that some migrants and refugees squatting in urban centers or living on the streets may be recruited into these groups with the promise of some financial reward. With the lack of data (or the existence of unreliable data), it is difficult to accurately track and manage these kinds of refugee activity in urban centers. The fact that governments do not provide the needed amenities alone does not account for the challenges that confront refugees in urban environments. Indeed, the cost of living in cities is one of the factors barring refugees from finding stability in cities. It is apparent that accommodation, food, and transportation costs, among others, make it difficult for refugees drawn to cities to transform their lives. These challenges come with devastating consequences. The high cost of food, for example, and the exorbitant prices for accommodation or rent contribute to the precarious medical conditions of refugee demographics in cities. The realities of these urban settings combine to frustrate urban refugees generally. They are denied access to opportunities and wealth that can transform their lives and improve their living conditions. This therefore creates a cyclical reality of agony for refugees in the city.

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R efuge e Stat us Deter m ination a n d L ega l R ecognition of U r ba n R efuge e s a n d A s y lu m Se ek er s The legal provisions of the UN and OAU Conventions exist to protect refugees in most contexts. Without laws protecting refugees in their places of asylumseeking, they would become more susceptible to insecurity there and may become victims again. Therefore, the legal framework for refugee protection in Africa seeks to protect refugees irrespective of their location or accommodations. In 2009, the Kampala Convention also offered guidelines for African countries on accommodating internally displaced persons (IDPs) and providing a peaceful atmosphere where they can live and work. The legal protection of refugees is intimately tied to, even concurrent with, the process by which they are recognized and accorded the status of refugees. This grants them access to assistance and protection wherever they may find themselves while in exile. This important aspect of the refugee experience is, however, more complicated for refugees in urban areas—hence the focus of this subsection. Refugee status determination (RSD) is the process by which states and the UNHCR determine which individuals or groups are eligible for asylum and thereby for international protection. It is a process that combines legal, political, and administrative aspects to ascertain applications for asylum in particular host countries. RSD is an essential component of the international refugee regime, as the core international legal instruments establish particular definitions of who a refugee is, thereby determining which individuals can access the benefits of international protection. RSD is conducted primarily by states receiving refugees and refugee applications but also by the UNHCR in situations where states are not party to the 1951 Convention or where they are either unable or unwilling to invest the time and resources for the procedure. In such cases, states may request the expertise of the UNHCR to conduct RSD in their country. In doing this, the organization is guided by its 1992 Handbook on Procedures and Criteria for Determining Refugee Status under the 1951 Convention and the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees.7 At any given time, the organization is directly involved in RSD in between fifty and sixty countries around the world.8 The debates about who qualifies for refugee status under international law, as well as who should be considered for protection under the law, have been discussed in prior chapters and will not be reproduced here. This book has, 7. UNHCR, Handbook on Procedures. 8. UNHCR, “Protection.”

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however, demonstrated how this question can be the difference between a refugee’s access to protection, rights, security, and solutions and a lack of these fundamentals. A major part of the global architecture for refugee protection hinges on the determination of refugee status or at least on the outcome of the RSD processes and procedures. As noted previously, refugee camps are conceived as relatively “neat” ways of easily capturing and assessing groups of people who may jointly qualify as refugees, and for administering aid and solutions to them. However, when refugees are self-settled and dispersed into the local population, and more so when they are in bustling urban areas, these processes and their access to recognition, protection, and assistance cannot be taken for granted, and if not properly managed, this can lead to urban refugees’ lack of rights and protection. Thus, a necessary first step is to identify these urban refugees and determine persons who legally qualify as such. Given that they are not only a dispersed population but also a highly mobile one, RSD can be a difficult process, particularly in instances where refugees are part of mixed migrations or have mixed motives, including both political persecution and economic survival in seeking asylum. Centrally, the dichotomy between a rural and an urban refugee is particular to and important mainly in African countries, relative to refugees and asylum seekers in the countries of the Global North—in Europe, North America, and Australia. In the latter regions, RSD is a highly individualized, formal process that considers the applications of persons who present themselves for refugee status on the basis of their individual claims. Their geographical location in rural or urban areas does not affect the legal procedure that the person must go through to be recognized as a refugee. The process is uniform irrespective of the refugee’s location. Conversely, the admittance and recognition of refugees on a group basis has been standard procedure on the African continent since the very first anticolonial refugee situation, the mass influx of over two hundred thousand Algerian refugees into Tunisia and Morocco in the late 1950s, which made it evident that it would be impractical to conduct individualized RSD procedures as had been intended under the 1951 UN Refugee Convention in Europe. The UNHCR had to rely on Europe’s similar experience with Hungarian and other large refugee groups that had in the past been similarly granted group refugee status on the basis of their persecution as a group;9 also, simply because these refugees were welcome and needed at the time, there was no need to carry out a long and expensive individual RSD process. Hence, with this precedent set since the 1960s, African states have in general terms granted prima facie 9. Elie and Hanhimäki, “UNHCR and Decolonization in Africa.”

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group refugee status to persons who arrive in an asylum country as part of a group during known political crises or wars. Noteworthy in the context of our discussion in this chapter specifically is that under this widely implemented system, the vast majority of the millions of African refugees who arrive as groups are settled in rural areas, usually in camps, or other kinds of organized settlements. Their movement is typically restricted to these rural areas, and the extent of their integration into the host country is often deliberately limited. In this situation lies the particular circumstance of urban refugees on the continent. In what Michael Kagan has called the “one country, two procedures” approach,10 African countries typically institute a different refugee determination system for refugees who are found outside the group or encampment system and who apply for refugee status in urban areas. These refugees are usually subjected to individualized procedures and often more negatively prejudiced systems than those granted refugee status via group basis and who have been settled in camps and settlements in rural areas. Often presumed to be regular migrants in search of jobs and economic opportunities but without the requisite qualifications to be admitted as such, urban refugees face far higher rates of denial of their application than their counterparts in rural areas. The implications of this are stark: most urban refugees then have to live outside the formal refugee protection system and are vulnerable to harassment, social marginality and its economic repercussions, refoulement, and deportation. The Zambian case plainly exemplifies the dual RSD system that many African countries operate. The government carries out RSD by itself, although until the 1990s, the UNHCR conducted RSD for them. There are two separate RSD procedures in Zambia, and the choice of which to use depends on the refugee’s location at the time of application and the relevant treaty under which they apply, whether the 1951 UN Refugee Convention or the 1969 OAU Convention. The refugee’s location refers to whether the refugee is applying for asylum while in the camps and settlements in the rural provinces or whether the refugee is applying from the capital city of Lusaka, in the urban area. Furthermore, when applying in the rural areas, it is the 1969 OAU Convention that applies, as it allows for prima facie recognition of refugees, whereas applications received in Lusaka are treated under the 1951 UN Refugee Convention, which emphasizes individual eligibility. If a refugee is recognized as such in the provincial RSD system, the person is sent to live in a camp, as section 12 of the Refugees (Control) Act of 1970 requires a refugee to live in a refugee settlement. If a refugee undergoes RSD in Lusaka, they are subjected to a rigorous process that again 10. Kagan, “Legal Refugee Recognition.”

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ends up with the person being sent to one of the refugee camps, if their application is successful. However, the Immigration and Deportation Act No. 18 of 2010 allows refugees to continue to live in urban areas only if they possess an employment, investors or study permit, and they must apply separately for such permission to the Committee on Urban Residence.11 Like Zambia, Uganda also explicitly mandates persons recognized as refugees to live in rural settlements under its Control of Aliens Refugee Act of 1960, which was succeeded by the Refugee Act of 2006. The implication of this requirement is that a refugee’s or asylum seeker’s access to recognition, assistance, and protection depends on their geographical location, as all those considered refugees—with few exceptions—are expected to reside in rural settlements where they can be provided with assistance. The majority of those living in urban areas face indigence and poverty because of the lack of recognition accorded to them for defying the stipulation of rural residence. To enforce the rural settlements residency requirement, refugees who wish to live in Kampala, the capital city, must demonstrate “self-sufficiency” by employment or other means, or be professionals or students with demonstrable occupation in the city. As may be expected, this can be a very difficult condition for refugees to fulfill. If they do not fulfill this condition, RSD implies that an urban refugee basically ceases to be recognized as a person in need of protection. Large numbers of urban refugees thus have no legal recognition as such. In 2005, the UNHCR, following the Ugandan national RSD guidelines as described above, determined only 210 asylum seekers for refugee status, out of between 10,000 and 50,000 refugees living in Kampala that the refugee agency itself had previously established.12 In South Africa, refugees are expected to write an application to be forwarded to the Refugee Receiving Officer at any of the five Refugee Reception Offices in Johannesburg, Pretoria, Cape Town, Durban, and Port Elizabeth.13 The failure to conform to this rule within fourteen days of arrival in the country invalidates their access to refugee status and renders them illegal immigrants, and the hostility and stringent conditions associated with such status follow them. There are also many African countries that do not offer formal legal protections for urban refugees. These countries usually resort to ad hoc policies to address issues that surround refugees in cases of emergencies. Kenya, for example, relies on uncodified rules when dealing with refugees.14 The country 1 1. Chitupila, “Administration of Refugees in Zambia.” 12. Bernstein and Okello, “To Be or Not to Be.” 13. Sapa, “21 SA Citizens Died.” 14. Human Rights Watch, Hidden in Plain View.

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abandoned its RSD efforts early in the 1990s with major influxes of refugees from Sudan, Ethiopia, and Somalia and ceded this responsibility to a chronically underfunded and underresourced UNHCR.15 These issues usually combine to make life in the city difficult for refugees, as the absence of appropriate institutions to manage and govern their activities and relationship with their host communities means that they are at risk of harsh treatment from this environment. In other words, when there is no codified framework, it increases the susceptibility of refugees to violence, crime, impoverishment, and other related issues that combine to endanger their lives. Even in cases where the recognition of refugees in these contexts is clearly highlighted and codified, it is usually deliberately obstructed. Similar cases of RSD in urban versus rural areas are reported in many other parts of Africa.16 The lack of legal recognition of urban refugees often leads to unforeseeable infractions on their fundamental rights. For example, thousands of refugees are spatially restricted in detention centers, an attempt to segregate them from the population of indigenes. This lack of legal covering therefore signals that the protection of refugees’ interests is still minimal, despite the fact that many African countries are signatories to the various refugee and human rights conventions. The problem of legal recognition becomes complex even in cases where refugees or the laws guiding them are explicit because they are often constrained by their circumstances. When the society is incapable of providing for the needs of refugees, especially those rights spelled out by policy, definitional problems will not take the important position. This means that those legal injunctions and the protections that accrue from the status of refugees in urban settings become less important, especially where there are inadequate economic frameworks that would enable the enforcement of these laws. Even in areas where economic protection is guaranteed, the reduced attention given to refugees’ integration can also militate against them. Domestic politics often overrides the sense of humanity of some urban communities because the attention they give to the integration process reflects their indifference to refugees. Thus, on the African continent, refugees in urban areas find themselves in a particularly difficult situation, from the earliest stages of their displacement experience, in the attempt to convince the asylum country and the international community through the UNHCR that they are indeed worthy of legal 1 5. Odhiambo-Abuya, “United Nations High Commissioner.” 16. Ricarda Roesch et al. also report on the experience of Chadian and other African refugees in the camps in Tunisia, for example. See Roesch et al., “Deficiencies of UNHCR’s RSD Procedure,” 46–49.

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protection through RSD that counts them as eligible and grants them identification documents. This granting of eligibility, recognition, and documentation is a basic requirement for accessing protection and assistance, which unfortunately, as we have seen above, in some cases may also mean that refugees in urban areas are considered to not need assistance, to not need full protection, and to be eligible for only legal protection in extraneous and exceptional circumstances. The grievous split between protection and assistance as well as the splintering of protection into compartments is made possible in the absurd circumstances that African countries contrive by constructing RSD processes that aim to consign refugees to rural settlements only. This is a decision that emanates from these countries’ domestic political considerations and often seeks to limit the integration, prosperity, and permanence of refugees in order to keep their citizens happy. This decision also comes from external considerations, by which states aim to make the magnitude of their refugee hosting apparent through the construction of large, visible camps and settlements, to attract and retain the attention and aid of humanitarian agencies to serve these refugees, taking the burden of assistance off the host state. Obviously, the UNHCR is complicit in the use of RSD in less-than-protective ways that marginalize refugees in urban areas. Inevitably, these refugees fall through the cracks of international protection.

Protection a n d A ssista nce of U r ba n R efuge e s The protection and assistance rendered to refugees can be categorized into two kinds: one, the protection for those within camps or organized settlements; and two, that for the self-settled refugees whose chances of economic independence are incomparable with the people in the first category. For those limited within the camps and the organized settlements, their protection is exclusively the responsibility of the state that offered them refugee status, in combination with the UNHCR and other agencies that provide humanitarian assistance to refugees. Those in this category are usually vulnerable and incapable of instigating movements that can initiate their upward mobility toward economic self-sufficiency. Thus, they tend to be heavily and perpetually dependent on the provisions made available by these forces (that is, the governments of their host communities and the humanitarian community). Political power, in other words, conditions what they can do and minimizes their influence. Therefore, the spatial separation of these refugees from locals is a deliberate exercise. However, those refugees who prefer to be self-settled can be less dependent on the government and humanitarian goodwill. They are the groups of refugees

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usually found in the urban environment. With greater individual agency, they feel free to pursue personal economic development insofar as they do not contravene the regulations of the host communities. For this category of refugees, protection is based on the local context, and the attention given to them is not entirely different from that given to other citizens. Through their economic activities, they may be able to afford the social services available to other members of the community, enjoy the opportunity for education, and have the capacity to provide suitable shelter for themselves. Ultimately, they are above the level of restricted refugees, who tend to be exclusively dependent on governments and aid agencies for financial support. Here, the stigma of being a dependent alien cannot be superimposed on a refugee who has worked to attain a measure of economic freedom. In situations where refugees have turned their fortunes around, they are then at further risk of displacement by the locals who may show resentment for their success. Aided by the growing apathy of African countries in conducting credible censuses, the numbers of refugees in metropolises are increasing because of the assistance offered by refugees who have established themselves to those with whom they share genetic or cultural ties. Therefore, the assistance that is rendered to these urban refugees does not always come from the government. Save for the provision of social services that fall within the responsibility of government, the assistance that refugees get in urban centers is often sourced from individuals within their own filial, kin, and affective networks. The implication of this is that urban refugees who are dependent on one another for livelihood and survival may be living in precarious circumstances dependent on the continued goodwill and prosperity of the persons offering them support in these urban areas.

Econom ic Acti v iti e s Refugees tend to quickly integrate into the economic system of their host communities if given the opportunity. There are two reasons for this. First, refugees are ready to accept cheaper offers for their labor compared to the locals, who already have a fixed wage demand for different jobs. Second, refugees who were highly skilled and became displaced because of ecological challenges, for example, may have better opportunities in the urban environment where skillful or competent hands are desired. Given that urban communities can offer better opportunities for different people, highly skilled refugees have immense benefits from these available opportunities to improve their economic circumstances. Although many communities, especially in the urban centers,

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complain about the level of unemployment, refugees often skew unemployment data, and this is a key factor challenging the economic transformation of refugees in African urban communities. Generally, the result of refugees’ economic involvement in the urban environment generates admirable results for their business. However, it frequently exacerbates worries about local labor markets. As such, refugees are active contributors to competition in the labor industry that challenges people to acquire better skills, which would enhance the success of the communities. When locals compete to increase their skills and competence, the effects can be significant, as their creative instincts will be channeled and used to benefit their immediate environment. From this, various business or economic models will be structured, and the competition that this attitude will attract has the capacity to launch the community to economic heights. In simple terms, refugees’ access to economic opportunities can bring about needed transformation. However, in some situations, the refugees’ entrepreneurial spirit may be doused by the understanding that their stay is somewhat temporary and their future uncertain. Having to accept this reality can depress their energy and may sometimes drain them of their motivation. In spite of this, some are committed to making use of the opportunity in their quest to assist those members of the same clan whom they left behind at home or in the rural refugee camps. Except for the relatively few refugees who receive assistance from the government, refugees in urban Africa tend to be mostly self-reliant. Their selfreliance strategy rests on the economic improvement they make to support themselves. Self-reliant refugees may achieve robust economic success and enhance their integration into society. Despite their relative advancement in the urban environment, however, they are still functioning under the status of refugees. In other words, their economic activities have the potential to catapult them into a different position that they perhaps cannot attain in their war-ridden environment or in places where they are vulnerable to ecological challenges. However, their self-reliance is beneficial to the extent that they understand the boundaries they are meant to comply with, based on the rules of engagement, because, in this context, they are still classified as refugees.

R isk s in th e U r ba n En v ironm ent The challenge facing many African urban communities is their financial sustenance, and this makes it difficult for them to integrate refugees into cities. The provision of settlements does little to correct this reliance. Growth in numbers reconfigures the way refugees perceive their host countries. They may become

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involved in criminal activities that have aggravating consequences on the host communities. However, they are usually victims of deliberate scheming by criminal locals who are ingenious enough to use and make them responsible and accountable for suspicious activities. Although there are instances of refugees being complicit in destructive escapades, they are generally innocent of the claims made against them. Despite this, host communities still cast suspicion on refugee communities. This suspicion often leads to the criminalization of urban refugees by their host communities. Refugees often become the scapegoats and, as a result, the targets of physical violence. The issues around refugee profiling are sensitive, as there are instances, as mentioned above, where refugees are involved in illegal activity. Enhanced by the lack of data that is prevalent in the majority of African urban centers, the perpetration of these illicit activities remains unrecorded and understudied. The security challenges facing the urban centers therefore become more complex than could be easily addressed. When difficulties arise, refugees are targeted by hostile members of the host community who have ab initio been against the settlement of refugees. As such, their lives are further endangered during emergencies and security upheavals within the host country’s cities. Politicians and government officials also reject the integration of refugees because of the perception that security challenges are usually connected to the rise in refugee numbers. They also sometimes exploit this perception to shore up public support for their personal political gain. The suspicion is rife. The inability to bring solutions to this age-old challenge is underscored by the reluctance to take brave measures to contain them. Since many urban centers also lack sufficient financial resources to provide strong safety nets, many refugees who decide to settle there face the challenge of shelter or accommodation in the early period of their relocation. Many refugees are attracted to cities because of the evidence of success brought to their home communities or to refugee camps by the other refugees and migrants who previously lived in those places, but they do not sufficiently ponder the housing crisis in cities. For example, Lagos hosts many refugees and migrants who are effectively homeless persons in the city. This is similar to what happens in many African urban communities in contemporary times. The limited resources available in the city usually cannot be deployed to build shelters for refugees when locals are equally facing financial difficulties and lack of resources. Reports abound of refugees in urban areas being housed in places that are no better than detention centers or jails. Sometimes, they have only temporary, often crowded accommodation provided by nongovernmental agencies, including faith-based organizations. As such, refugees endanger their lives in

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the city because of the attraction of economic success, which they estimate would be difficult without making such sacrifices. The fact that housing costs can be overwhelming contributes to the challenges that face refugees in the urban environment. Although they may have greater opportunities, the cost of living, feeding, and clothing usually overwhelms them and puts them at risk of homelessness. When they are not legally recognized as refugees, the range of options for economic advancement becomes limited. In some cases, they become victims when they encounter criminal attacks. Since many refugees, displaced persons, and migrants from different ethnic, cultural, and national backgrounds find themselves in the city, the government may be incapable of linking the culpability of refugees with their background. Migrants and IDPs from a particular part of the country, knowing that their data is not captured by the government, could engage in criminal activity, while other refugees then become the potential victims. As previously discussed, the fact that countries are signatories to the relevant refugee treaties does not actually translate to their observation of these treaties. Xenophobia has beleaguered countries such as South Africa that face the problem of clashes between nationals and refugees because they wrongly consider refugees as aliens who have come to take their economic opportunities. Of course, it would be difficult to cast aspersions on South Africa for a number of reasons. They have been victims of apartheid for so long that their perception of land and politics has been redefined by colonial imperialism. This issue in South Africa is compounded by the xenophobic view that most migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers in the country are economic predators who have come to take opportunities and resources from citizens. The choice of South Africa as a destination for many forcibly displaced persons is predicated on two factors: one, the economic prospects of the country, which are higher than those of most others; and two, the proximity of the country to their own countries. Many refugees understand the long process of granting asylum to people of their status. However, they may be faced with incompetent handling that fortifies their bias about the country. They are exposed to incompetent officials whose ignorance and prejudice combine to elongate the process of integration of refugees into the system. Many refugees who settle in South Africa intend to make economic progress. However, the fact that they are not fully protected by the regulations of the country jeopardizes their interests. The negative narratives peddled by some South African media are also instrumental in the xenophobic thinking that has become ubiquitous among South Africans. These misconceptions of refugees’ existence have become widespread, and the citizens began taking offensive measures against refugees. This in the end exposed

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refugees to great risks as their lives were endangered. Although the country is signatory to the relevant UN Conventions that express and recognize the rights and freedoms of refugees, as well as the OAU Refugee Convention, their constant employment of aggressive means when relating with refugees and migrants puts the lives of these persons at risk and diminishes any assessment about their protection of these demographics. A number of refugees who have made considerable economic progress have been killed in xenophobic attacks.

Host Cou ntry Concer ns: Secu r it y All across the world, the accommodation of refugees is hinged on humanitarian considerations and selfish interests at the same time. Humans have a natural tendency to suspect the presence of “outsiders,” especially those with whom they do not share language, beliefs, and culture, particularly when their presence is seen as having the potential to disrupt the existing peace of a community. As such, people become apprehensive and resistant to what they see as an invasion by others. Some of the suspicion of refugees may also be based on a history of familiar experience, which may have reconfigured citizens’ perceptions about these persons. The destabilizing impact of Rwandese refugees in the region during the 1990s is an instructive example of this.17 In contrast, people may accommodate refugees for selfish reasons when they expect the migrants to undertake arduous tasks that they consider too difficult or demeaning in some way. In this sense, they exploit the presence of refugees to perform tasks that are deemed below the capacity or dignity of nationals. A very good example of this can be found in the intercontinental slavery experience that spanned centuries. In contemporary times, citizens nurse and express fear when they encounter an influx of refugees to their country in large numbers. Nearly all the countries of the world limit their compliance with refugee law and UNHCR policies in some way because every one of them nurses an existential, though mostly unfounded, fear against unchecked freedom for refugees. Evidence from Sudan, for example, indicates that though refugees are accommodated, they are constantly reminded of their refugee status, which serves to relay to them the message of limited hospitality extended by the host country.18 By applying policies that remind them of their transitory nature in the countries of asylum, the host nation thereby seeks to fortify the security of the country and forestall a situation in which refugees may disrupt the peace of the country or community. 1 7. See Yacob-Haliso, “Identities, Conflict and Africa’s Refugee Crises.” 18. Karadawi, “Dynamics of Policy.”

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In essence, governments in Africa are deliberate in their engagement with refugees, and as noted earlier, their accommodation of refugees is predicated on the condition that the latter’s actions be well monitored to prevent their indulgence in criminal or other activities that they believe can break down security in the country. Basically, a government surveillance system over the site allocated to refugees is to study their movements, read their engagement, and then analyze their operations. In fact, refugee-hosting nations do this constantly. The interest with which refugees’ movements are monitored will almost always reveal that their privacy is being violated and their rights infringed. The fear that refugees will disrupt the peace of the community is often the reason for these security concerns. Host countries therefore respond in several ways. Securitization

With governments openly suspicious of refugees, profiling has led to the formulation of policies to restrict their movements and engagement within specific settings, and it is understandable why governments embark on what has been referred to as securitization in the literature. Barry Buzan and colleagues assert that a situation is securitized when it “is presented as an existential threat, requiring emergency measures and justifying actions outside the normal bounds of political procedure.”19 Governments all the way from Africa to America to Australia constantly engage in the securitization of refugees, playing on public fears and anxieties to construct refugees discursively and practically as threats to the security and livelihoods of their citizens. The presence of refugees in the urban environment is securitized by placing them under public scrutiny and undertaking political decisions about their welfare and security, especially negative ones. This strategy enables the government to treat refugees in ways that contravene the contract of safety agreed on by the international community. One thing that allows the securitization of refugees to escape the legal boundaries of international relations and diplomatic exchange is that, because the universal primary objective of government is security, welfare, and protection of society, states feel free and justified to attack the refugees’ environment using security challenges as an excuse. Statutorily provided with the mandate to enforce society’s security architecture, government officials employ totalitarian rules and methods to contain the freedom of refugees. Ordinarily, refugees are confined to spatial settings that are under the watch of the government. This places them at the mercy of governments, who occasionally invade their settlements under the guise 19. Buzan et al., Security, 23–24.

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of enforcing security rules. In many cases, governments cite security as the reason for violating or demolishing the places where urban refugees reside. The reason for bringing down their shelter under the excuse of brewing security challenges is to ensure that refugees are unsettled psychologically, as this would make them understand that their permission to dwell in the country is not interpreted as latitude for outright assimilation. Securitization is another instrument used in the urban environment to keep refugees in check and to remind them that their stay in the urban area is tenuous at best. This measure appears to be somewhat extreme, but governments usually consider it a reliable solution to the problem of refugees’ influx into the urban areas. Criminalization of Refugees

When discussing the topic of migration and refugee creation, scholars often make the mistake of generalizing about refugees’ status. When people are displaced, they do not automatically become rural dwellers or poor people who do not understand the procedures of living in an urban environment. While the thinking behind this misconception is flawed, it is also important to state that all refugees are not prisoners of poverty. Some of them were displaced due to political or ecological exigencies. The initial process of criminalization begins when governments assume that refugees are a potential threat to the urban structures because of their perceived inexperience about living in an urban environment. The refugees confined within the rural environment are believed to be less susceptible to violence and criminal activity than their counterparts in urban communities. But when refugees that were formerly urban dwellers are relocated to rural areas, they often desert the place of their settlement. Since many refugees believe that their chances of economic success are higher in urban environments than in rural areas, they will often take questionable routes to get to cities. This means that they sometimes bribe their way through or take other dangerous measures in their quest to get to the city. Given the porous security architecture of many African countries, refugees may have easy access to the city one way or another. There is an awareness even by the government officials themselves that many of the refugees and asylum seekers in the city arrive through unsanctioned means. This therefore increases their security focus on refugees with the belief that they can be flushed out by placing them under serious security measures. Refugees who accessed the urban environment with illegal documents and are without traces of cultural or linguistic affinity that can clear them are therefore targeted with harsh policies that drive them from the city. The effect of criminalization of urban refugees is that they easily become victims of offensive actions or violent attacks by the host community members.

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In situations where the refugees are age-old enemies with a history of mutual violence, refugees are easily made victims, and there are inadequate government interventions that can quickly rescue them from the imminent danger. From the refugees in Sudan, Burundi, and northern Uganda to those displaced during the apartheid regime in South Africa, refugees are always the primary target of physical abuse because they are suspected by various interest groups. When efforts aimed at the defamiliarization of the refugees from the urban communities are made, it therefore empowers them to take various measures that they calculate would improve their lives quickly. As such, a number of refugees that take to criminal activities are exploiting the weak structures of the urban areas to their own advantage. Hence, their criminalization becomes a mutually reinforcing cycle. Socioeconomic Concerns

It is important to note that most refugees do not pose any existential threat to the upward trajectory of the urban environment; instead, they contribute to economic growth by adding to the labor force of the area. However, when the number of refugees grows beyond anticipation, it may be considered potentially destabilizing to the local economy by the host communities. Except in cases where the income sources of the host communities are increased, a surge in population figures is often, at least initially, a negative influence on the socioeconomic system of many communities. It is widely understood that African countries are only recently expanding the number of their urban communities. This is because of the understanding that to keep up with contemporary dictates, societies need to develop some settlements in such a way that they would accommodate larger populations. This development achieves two important things. First, development provides the opportunity for refugees to settle, and, second, it proffers solutions to the myriad economic challenges facing the countries. Despite this lofty intention, however, the resources needed for the upliftment of these newly urban places are not readily available. Most urban communities are overwhelmed with the numbers of refugees (including migrants and other displaced persons) for reasons discussed previously. IDPs who are displaced by desertification and other ecological challenges tend to move en masse to their proposed locations of settlement, so that their sense of unity, their cultural practices, and their common spirit can be harnessed for common benefit. While this thinking is harmless and natural, it poses challenges to the host communities. The latter need to evaluate their own collective safety when a large number of refugees suddenly flood into

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their communities. This is against the backdrop that various other displaced groups tend to move into their space if they are equally confronted with emergent challenges. For example, Somalis moving to Djibouti and Ethiopians fleeing their country to the same destination in the 1990s were major population movements. Accordingly, the host countries and communities are afraid of the potential hazards of incorporating a large number of people in a short amount of time. Notwithstanding the fact that many scholars believe that the fear of refugees is unfounded or unsubstantiated, there are important factors around migration that need to be considered. In the case that refugees are separatists or subversives who are sometimes disposed to violence or have been used to it, some of them use their new environment as a springboard to incubate their rebellion. When they do this, the economic, social, and political conditions of their host communities become susceptible to danger and can be affected by their actions. Most refugees are peaceful, but their presence geometrically increases the socioeconomic responsibility of the host government according to their number, and this becomes another reason for the resentment against the refugees. In essence, an increase in the population of urban dwellers signals negative trends in the minds of many host governments and their citizens. When they bring additional economic development in the provision of labor and skills, still, any surge in criminal activity that coincides with the presence of these demographics contributes to fear and resentment. The socioeconomic pressures and concerns of urban communities need to be considered when we ponder some other important factors. First, the social security, economic wellness, and political existence of the refugee community are jointly taken care of by the UNHCR and the corresponding host governments. While the former coordinates or provides emergency relief materials, periodic humanitarian aid, and ongoing legal protection to enhance their safety, the latter provides the environment to ensure that they are in a proper position to do so. Second, the nationals are always there with their own existential challenges, which do not automatically disappear when refugees join them in the city. Instead, refugees’ presence often seems to escalate these challenges. This means that existential challenges such as unemployment often skyrocket when the refugee population is not taken care of. Refugees usually also need jobs with which they can complement the efforts of different relief agencies in catering for themselves. In fact, refugees doing work is necessary because the packages that come from aid agencies, if they do come, are often inadequate and must be supplemented. Therefore, the inability of the host government to

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provide job opportunities for them signals maltreatment on the side of the government. It puts pressure on the government and again shapes their political perception by the public. Consequently, many governments surmise that giving refugees the needed employment opportunities to sustain their living means that the nationals feel endangered. Citizens often view these scenarios as their own entitlements being given to refugees. By doing this, the country of asylum and local authorities are perceived to have violated their statutory responsibilities by not prioritizing their own citizens and their welfare. Apart from seemingly giving the government a bad image, it contributes to hostility against refugees. This accounts for why some governments decide to portray refugees as a burden to urban centers.

U NHCR U r ba n R efuge e Polic y a n d Li m itations Refugees in African urban communities face immense challenges that make them unusually vulnerable. The awareness of this has prompted organizations, governmental and nongovernmental, to come to the aid of refugees by providing solutions that address their immediate concerns. Contrary to widespread opinion that economic or financial upward mobility is relatively easy in the cities, poverty in the urban environment usually takes a multidimensional character. Considering the basic fact that several factors deliberately deny minorities (especially the refugee demographic) basic access to opportunities that would help turn their lives around, in combination with forces that monitor their movements and behavior, it is apparent why the compounding issues that face refugees in the city sometimes overwhelm them. Refugees in the urban environment are exposed to unusual deprivations, lack of access to employment opportunities, poor housing services, and poor medical facilities, if at all available to them. Children and young refugees in urban areas may not have access to schools or environments for safe development. Against this backdrop, many organizations collaborate with the host government to formulate programs and to promote basic human comforts for the refugees. The UNHCR has over time come to the realization that policies catering to urban refugees’ needs have to be especially formulated in order to reduce the vulnerabilities of this group. The organization initially overlooked, underestimated, or indeed undermined the need for recognizing the rights and protections for refugees in urban areas. From the early 1990s, the UNHCR began to see the need to move away from what had been an ad hoc and widely variable response to urban refugees. In October 1995, the organization produced a paper

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prepared by its Inspection and Evaluation Service that articulated what it called “UNHCR’s Policy and Practice Regarding Urban Refugees.”20 The document, which was based on the experience of a range of UNHCR staff, identified the major issues of concern with respect to UNHCR work with urban refugees and advocated for the development of a unified policy, possibly for the first time. However, the paper was overly and overtly concerned (perhaps justifiably so) with the issue of funding: it dedicated a whole section to the funding question, noted early in the rationale for its advocacy the growing reluctance of donors to fund long-term “care and maintenance” of urban cases, and pointed out that while urban refugees at the time constituted less than 2 percent of the UNHCR’s refugee caseload, their needs demanded up to 10-15 percent of the organization’s financial and human resources.21 In March 1997, when the UNHCR released its UNHCR Comprehensive Policy on Urban Refugees, there was a swift and loud outcry over the tone and contents of the proposed policy, which prompted a redrafting and reissuance of the document as UNHCR Policy on Urban Refugees later that year, on December 12, 1997.22 The 1997 policy reflects the biases and prejudices that UNHCR staffers had with regard to urban refugees at the time. The focus on “irregular movers,” the utter lack of protection guidelines, and the basic assumption that genuine refugees belong in rural camps, not cities, pervaded the policy, rendering it insensitive to the plight of urban refugees and blinded to core protection, assistance, and solution issues necessary for changing the unsatisfactory situation of urban refugees’ management. The UNHCR seemed to insist throughout the policy that refugees were not entitled to leave their country of first asylum under any circumstances, even in the face of verifiable security threats there; not entitled to live outside camps where they could be seen, counted, and fed; and not entitled to seek self-reliance by other means save through humanitarian assistance, while on the other hand, they were not entitled to continue on humanitarian assistance unless they left urban areas and could not claim refugee status otherwise. As an influential Human Rights Watch report later put it, “the major criticism centred on the unfounded core message—that it was either overtly illegal, or against efficient program management, for refugees to reside in urban centres. UNHCR’s policy conclusion was unabashedly to reduce programs for urban refugees and to prevent refugees from locating in

2 0. UNHCR, “UNHCR Policy and Practice.” 21. Ibid. 22. UNHCR, UNHCR Comprehensive Policy; UNHCR, UNHCR Policy on Urban Refugees.

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urban environments.”23 Indeed, the UNHCR’s own internal evaluation by the then newly-created Evaluation and Policy Analysis Unit roundly critiqued the policy as being seriously unrepresentative of the UNHCR’s core protection mandate to refugees, and a follow-up document proposed guiding principles for dealing with urban refugees.24 It also became apparent that the policy not only left many other refugees vulnerable and without protection but also contradicted other UNHCR policies. The policy did not define who an urban refugee is, leaving a large number of refugees uncounted; also, field staff sometimes attended only to refugees in one major capital city without any effort to serve refugees in other cities and urban areas within the same country. The UNHCR’s Evaluation and Policy Analysis Unit noted rightly that the policy was based on a questionable assumption that the vast majority of urban refugees are young, able-bodied males, able to fend for themselves in urban environments, neglecting large numbers of women, children and families, disabled, elderly, sick, and other refugees also demonstrably present in many of the world’s urban centers.25 With respect to refugee women in urban areas in the developing world, including Africa especially, the Human Rights Watch report (which was based on fieldwork in Kenya and Uganda) noted several “blind spots” and contradictions: while the UNHCR Guidelines on the Protection of Refugee Women of 1991 made detailed recommendations on assistance and layout of refugee camps, “similar recommendations [were] not made for assistance programs or housing arrangements for women refugees in urban centres”; it considered physical attacks and sexual abuse in camps but did not recognize the existence of the same problem in urban areas; while the policy correctly associated the problem of prostitution with the illegal status of urban refugee women, it made no recommendations to change the situation; and while the UNHCR’s Guidelines on Prevention and Response to Sexual Violence against Refugees acknowledged that this danger may exist in women’s homes both in camps and in urban situations, it did not mention the situation of homeless refugee women who sleep on the streets as being particularly vulnerable to sexual violence.26 Similar shortcomings can be seen in the lack of protection for children in urban areas.

2 3. Human Rights Watch, Hidden in Plain View, 162. 2 4. Obi and Crisp, Evaluation of the Implementation; Obi and Crisp, Protection, Solutions and Assistance. 25. Obi and Crisp, Evaluation of the Implementation, 2–4. 2 6. Human Rights Watch, Hidden in Plain View, 166–67.

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In spite of the severe shortcomings of the 1997 policy, the UNHCR did not amend the policy for many long years. Due to the external backlash from the policy as NGOs and others working with refugees lambasted the organization, but perhaps more so due to the resistance, internal divisions, and discord that trailed the policy and its criticism, the organization lacked both the will and leadership vision to take the obvious next step in revising it for the sake of the urban refugees.27 As Jeff Crisp relates, it took over a decade and a change of organizational leadership and focus with the appointment of Antonio Guterres as High Commissioner for a new policy on urban refugees to emerge in 2009: the UNHCR Policy on Refugee Protection and Solutions in Urban Areas.28 Striking a very different tone from the 1997 policy, the new 2009 policy stated firmly that it was “based on the principle that the rights of refugees and UNHCR’s mandated responsibilities towards them are not affected by their location, the means whereby they arrived in an urban area or their status (or lack thereof) in national legislation. The Office considers urban areas to be a legitimate place for refugees to enjoy their rights, including those stemming from their status as refugees as well as those that they hold in common with all other human beings.”29 This rights-based approach has gradually transformed the organization’s approach to refugees, although even as of 2009, “practice had already run ahead of policy,” because, “confronted with a growing number of urban refugees, and in the absence of clear directions from Headquarters, UNHCR staff had in many instances developed their own urban refugee strategies.”30 An Urban Refugee Steering Group was also formed within the organization to oversee and monitor the implementation and effectiveness of the 2009 policy toward achieving best practices. A 2012 global survey of the UNHCR’s work in the twenty-four countries with the largest number of urban refugees indicated that the 2009 policy was being vigorously applied, as it provided twelve clear operational entry points for protection of urban refugees. Perhaps one of the most important takeaways from the global report was the overwhelming impact that government policies have on the quality of life of refugees in urban areas, as well as placing limits on UNHCR action on behalf of refugees. Importantly, while the policy advocated the urban refugees’ right to freedom of movement and to choose whether to live

2 7. Crisp, “Finding Space for Protection.” 2 8. Ibid. 29 UNHCR, UNHCR Policy on Refugee Protection, 3. 30. Crisp, “Finding Space for Protection,” 93.

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in a rural or urban setting, in a camp, settlement, or other accommodation, the global survey found that five countries of the twenty-four surveyed continued to enforce compulsory encampment policies. Of these five countries, four are African countries: Ethiopia, Kenya, Sudan, and Zambia.31 Generally, the UNHCR has implementation limitations tied to the shortcomings of the various policies, as noted above, and to its status as a humanitarian agency limited by state politics. In getting the needed welfare services to the refugees, the UNHCR usually faces budgetary constraints that dictate the quality of assistance offered to refugees, which thus affects the condition of refugees in urban settings.32 In addition to this, refugees’ integration in their host destinations is a concern. In cases where they face persecution and the ecological challenges that initiated their migration do not subside, these individuals must be accepted by the host countries on their territories, and these countries must “act in concert in true spirit of international cooperation in order that these refugees may find asylum and the possibility of resettlement.”33 This policy seeks to protect the lives of refugees from being endangered when host countries or communities decide to repatriate refugees, especially at the wrong time. What is noticeable is the UNHCR’s failure to account for the reality that refugees from varying community and cultural backgrounds are together in the urban environment at the same time, and therefore the capacity of the host community to extend hospitality to them all cannot be easily guaranteed. Today, with recent global developments, especially the fallouts of the wars in Syria, Yemen, Libya, and so on, the number of urban refugees globally has exploded, as well as the numbers reaching distant countries in their wandering search for safety and solutions. Millions of refugees in the Middle East live in countries without camps and live alongside the nationals in various kinds of locations across the country. As the situation has evolved, the UNHCR responded in 2014 with its “UNHCR Policy on Alternatives to Camps,” which recognizes that while some 40 percent of refugees still live in camps, millions have settled otherwise by themselves in both rural and urban settings.34 The objective of the new policy was clearly stated: “UNHCR’s policy is to avoid the establishment of refugee camps, wherever possible, while pursuing alternatives to camps that ensure refugees are protected and assisted effectively and 31. UNHCR, Implementation of UNHCR’s Policy. 32. Crisp et al., “Surviving in the City.” 33. Ibid. 3 4. UNHCR, “UNHCR Policy on Alternatives.”

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enabled to achieve solutions.”35 The extent to which this progressive move is implementable and transforms refugee protection will depend on the many factors already discussed in this chapter.

R e se a rching U r ba n R efuge e s: Difficu lti e s Researching urban refugees is one of the challenges emanating from the aforementioned complexities of managing this refugee demographic. The gaps associated with UNHCR and state policies can be spotted in problems with record keeping. Bearing in mind that the recent history of refugee explosion in Africa is unprecedented, the fact that the UNHCR and host government personnel allocated to record keeping are often very few contributes to the myriad problems around refugee profiling and welfare in the urban areas. An increase in their number logically demands that more hands be contracted to manage records of refugees in the cities. The officers given the responsibility of determining the status of refugees in the cities are few, making their delivery of services difficult or even impossible. Regions that have large refugee influxes into the city are provided with a paltry number of officers saddled with the duty of protecting the interests of the multitudes, generating and keeping refugee records, and reporting to the appropriate authority. This affects the status of refugees in two ways. First, it slows the process of integration because without the necessary documentation process, accessing the urban settlements or assistance and services will be more difficult. Second, it exposes refugees to danger if they press on to urban areas using questionable routes. To follow due process would mean protracted delays before a refugee could receive asylum. The fact that most refugees are settled in areas near their home communities affects their chances of survival, especially when they encounter delays in their documentation or status determination process. Ultimately, the lack of adequate personnel to take the responsibility of record keeping or determining the status of refugees gives more opportunities for nefarious actors to prey on vulnerable individuals. It is a policy deficit that leads to an inadequate workforce for the logistical handling of refugees, and the result of this can be deleterious. Even when the UNHCR provides the necessary personnel, the fact that they are bound to function within the parameters of the host government policies is another weakness of the UNHCR efforts. Many of the hosts of refugees have resorted to limiting their movement or their mobility within

35. Ibid., 6.

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the city. While this policy seeks to control their engagement and indulgence, it increases the fears of the refugees and asylum seekers. The multiplicity of refugees and their nationalities can often limit the effectiveness of UNHCR policy. Although the body seeks to protect the welfare interest, religious concerns, and social security of refugees, the standing impediment to this is the fact that many of them are in urban environments. To protect their individual interests would be extremely difficult, if not strictly impossible. Many refugees escape the processes laid down for their documentation and protection and disappear into the city. For the refugees who are in this category, advocating for their safety in the urban environment can be difficult. Apart from this, whatever personal experiences face them in the city have to be handled personally without the help of any official agency. This is because they have left the safety net of the government and the UNHCR, and humanitarian assistance will therefore elude them. To cope with the refugee population in the urban areas is always tasking because of the ways they are able to maneuver in the city. For those who have family members or friends that can assist them, keeping track of them or their records becomes more improbable. Researching refugees is made more difficult by their deliberate attempts to avoid surveillance. Many refugees are in the urban centers and decide to continue in their stealth because they know that when their identity as refugees living illegally in the city is discovered, they are at risk of deportation or being the target of more hostile policies. Discovering refugees can be acutely difficult especially when refugees have identical language and culture with areas where they seek refuge. Distinguishing them from the nationals is difficult. For example, the Burundian refugees that fled to Djibouti had their cultural family in their host country and had the opportunity to mingle easily among the people. Therefore, it is considerably easier for them to evade the arrangements made by the government and to find means of survival by themselves, by disappearing into the city. In this case, except when their covers are blown by close contact, identifying them has always been extremely difficult. For researchers to understand what this type of refugee undergoes in the city is therefore quite difficult, and the same factor complicates how they can be integrated legitimately in the first place. Many urban centers in Africa welcome different categories of migrants on a daily basis. Migrants are created not only when their environment is under threat of ecological challenges but also when they are under economic pressure. Such persons, particularly when they share a considerable proximity with the urban environment, show up in the city anytime they decide to, using their relationships with people in the urban setting to relocate there. Lagos, Kano, and

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Figure 10.1. Eritrean asylum seekers in Levinsky Park in Tel Aviv, Israel. Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:African _refugees_in_Israel.jpg.

Port Harcourt in Nigeria, for example, see influxes of migrants into their environment every day. Accra in Ghana, Djibouti in Djibouti, Nairobi in Kenya, Johannesburg in South Africa, and other fast-developing urban environments in Africa are bound to experience influxes of people. Similarly, refugees from the Horn of Africa, who have means and contacts, regularly cross the Gulf of Aden to countries of the Middle East, such as the Eritrean refugees in Tel Aviv pictured in figure 10.1. Even when the UNHCR personnel are increased to keep records of refugees, the fact that they usually become overwhelmed by repeated arrivals of rounds of mixed migrants makes the duty of documenting them a herculean effort. The contemporary trends of mass and mixed migration are thus an impediment to research that centers on knowing about the conditions of refugees in urban settings. In the same vein, the combination of poor economies of some urban communities, their obviously underdeveloped facilities, and poor data collection and retention all add to issues that make researching refugees difficult. When the urban environment itself does not keep the data of its citizens, the resulting

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challenge can be monumental. Data integrity is extremely hard when an area does not keep actual records of events and people it houses. It creates stress for researchers because of the problem they face in their process of data gathering. Ordinarily, if refugee data is accessible from a central point, interpreting the data is relatively easy because it is possible to engage the services of data analysts who can provide needed information on refugees. And finally, successful research often requires the cooperation or permission of the host government, who in some situations may not be inclined to provide their permission to researchers.

U r ba n R efuge e s a n d Du r a bl e Solu tions The UNHCR has proposed local integration as perhaps the most reliable durable solution to the challenges of African refugees in urban environments. Urban refugees face perpetual challenges from host countries, who are often uninterested in integrating them. Over the past few decades, some hostile urban communities who believe refugees are a potential threat to their peace have defied the arrangements of organizations seeking to protect the interests of refugees. Histories of mutual suspicion between the origin countries of refugees and the refugee-hosting countries influence the relationship between them in emergency situations. In situations where their window of preparation for movement from their unstable environment to another is narrow, refugees may be forced to move to hostile neighboring countries and communities with whom they share mutual animosity, thereby putting their protection under contention. The UNHCR therefore believes that the integration project must be built on a strong foundation where refugees and their countries of asylum share relative understanding and mutual respect. This would reduce the harsh treatment they may be subjected to at their destinations. For example, a host community that is confronted with massive economic or social challenges would perhaps transfer their aggression to those given the status of a refugee. The thinking that their current condition is because of the influx of refugees therefore makes their treatment of refugees extremely harsh. This is why the UNHCR also proposes the opportunity of repatriation for refugees. Refugees value being reunited with communities that share their cultural background and their families so that they can lead their normal life after their countries are back to their normal activities. When the situations that led to the displacement have been stemmed by the intervention of different organizations or the

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ecological challenges ravaging their society have subsided, they consider the option of repatriation. Repatriation is the direct opposite of local integration, and it is founded on cooperation from the host countries in their making of policies that would not jeopardize refugees’ chances of moving back to their country of origin. In fact, host governments usually strive to ensure that the level of accommodation provided for refugees in urban centers should not diminish their chances of returning. In other instances, refugees prefer to be resettled in a third country; the case of Liberian refugees in Ghana is a good example. A number of refugees were clamoring to be resettled even though the chances of this occurring were statistically slim. Nonetheless, most of them, having received news that events back home had returned to normalcy, became keenly interested in being repatriated. It is arguable, but perhaps this would have been difficult if the host country had given them unlimited opportunities to operate freely in the cities of Ghana. When the causes of displacement can be surmounted or resolved, the UNHCR has advocated the option of repatriation. Repatriation desires to bring about the reunification of refugees with their national background. This is precipitated by the understanding that displaced individuals usually have important contributions to make to the growth of their countries and homes in the postconflict era. When refugees seek refuge in a new environment, the fact that their presence in host communities can provide a combined advantage of security and opportunity to learn from them is underscored by the numerous contributions they make while in exile. Especially for those who are integrated into the city, they have better opportunities to make financial advancement that can be used to transform the lives of people who are at home. However, it appears that refugees found in urban areas are often reluctant to be repatriated. This is usually because they might have achieved some economic success while in cities that gave them opportunities. Considering that refugees have the right to choose their fate, they are protected by the expectation of voluntariness of repatriation. Also, they should not be forcibly repatriated, because events occurring in their countries of origin may still endanger their lives. Some refugees are freedom fighters inspired to change their locations because of the imminent danger of persecution and would also resist every effort to relocate them back when the atmosphere is unsuitable for their peaceful reintegration. Refoulement, the act of forcefully taking refugees back to places where they stand lower chances of survival for reasons of religion, race, ideology, gender identity, and so on, can be devastating

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under these circumstances. For example, the repatriation of LGBTQ+ people to the countries that persecute them endangers them. By doing that, the country of asylum is putting their lives under severe threat and danger. Refoulement is unsuitable for those displaced by political exigencies or ecological challenges because it places the refugees in a more threatening situation than what led to the displacement. Ultimately, international law is not supportive of such actions and has embedded non-refoulement at its core to prevent countries from endangering the lives of refugees. The principle is an essential protection strategy aimed to prohibit any country from forcefully removing refugees or transferring them into environments where they are generally under more threatening conditions. This principle is necessary to protect refugees from torture, maltreatment, and gender-based violence, among other indignities from countries that are hostile to them. Many countries that resort to this are deliberately trying to endanger the lives of refugees to forestall future refugees from choosing their country as a place of asylum or resettlement. However, such a method is extreme and can lead to another reason for interstate violence, which can produce even more displacement. Therefore, repatriation without the consent of refugees is discouraged, and refoulement must be disqualified as an alternative.

Conclusion By now, we have explained what urban refugees are and the challenges that confront them in their displacement experience. Urban refugees above all things are victims of displacement who need instant alternatives to remedy their situations. When displaced, refugees face the choice of being settled in camps or organized settlements or being self-settled. Those who are placed within camps are usually restricted spatially and monitored closely by the host government. Under this structure, the economic growth of refugees is usually limited. Those in organized settlements have a better chance at freedom than their counterparts in the camps. They are equally restricted and monitored but not in the strict sense of the people in camps. Organized settlement is arranged because there is a need to keep records of refugees’ movement and activities in the environment. That way, their presence will not constitute a threat. Selfsettlement is the other alternative taken by refugees who do not feel comfortable being restricted into the organized settlements and camps. Usually aided by acquaintances in the cities, self-settled individuals in urban centers may have a better opportunity to make financial and economic achievements in their stay in the urban environment.

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Urban life and refugees’ safety can be somewhat antithetical to each other. The city is designed to frustrate refugees for different reasons. Many urban authorities unfairly believe that refugees constitute a nuisance in the city and can tear down the fabric of the environment’s structure. As a result of this fear, refugees may be confined to live in slums and other dejected areas in cities, where they are usually confronted with complex challenges of insecurity, sanitary and health deficits, or the combination of all. Despite being restricted to such environments, refugees are regularly securitized and criminalized. Their places of settlement are constantly monitored or bulldozed by host countries or communities with the excuse that they are seeking to maintain the security of the country or settlement. The implication of this is that they deliberately take refugees back to the lowest social level so that they are incapable of wielding much economic power to challenge or compete fairly in the city. Often, refugees in the cities are criminalized and endure harassment from law enforcement. In addition to this, their access to social welfare services is unpredictable. They fall victim again in this aspect because they are poorly provided with needed services. Refugees in the urban environment are exposed to all these dangers because they are often perceived as a burden on city life. Given that there are limited resources to go around, aggression is transferred to them by the hostile community, who allege that the influx of refugees places a burden on the available infrastructure. In some cases, refugees become victims of violence— physical, gendered, and political. While there is the possibility of city systems becoming overwhelmed by large influxes of refugees, the fact that refugees are always prejudicially treated and judged beforehand has been the primary reason for their exposure to many challenges.

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AFRICAN REFUGEE WOMEN Gendering Policy and Protection

Introduction The gendered face of an African refugee in the media and popular discourses is that of a woman, and most often, a woman holding a child or children. In the popular imagery, the African refugee is a woman in dusty and tattered ankara (African print) lappas, often without shoes, carrying a child on her back, surrounded by several other children inside a refugee camp—as in figure 11.1. It is impossible to visit a refugee camp or settlement on the continent and not be struck by the predominance of women in these spaces. And it is not only in camps and settlements but also in cities that the faces of women are becoming emblematic of refugees.1 Women constitute about 50 percent of most refugee and displaced person populations, with some estimates as high as 59 percent.2 Children (boys and girls) under the age of eighteen constitute 40 percent of all refugees worldwide.3 The fact that these numbers are sometimes contested becomes a further challenge for planning and programming for refugee women.4

1 . Refer to the discussion in the chapter on urban refugees in this volume. 2. UNHCR, “Women”; Egbetayo and Nyambura, “Forced Displacement in Africa.” 3. UNHCR, “Figures at a Glance.” Note, however, that although the literature and practice tend to treat women and children as a single group, this chapter focuses primarily on women refugees and refers to children’s issues only when these overlap, which can be quite often. We focus on refugee youth in another chapter. 4. While some authors view these refugee statistics as possibly undercounted, others perceive the statistics as overinflated to create a sense of magnitude that impels action. For the former position, see Martin, “Refugee and Displaced Women,” 72–91; for the latter position, see Freedman, “Mainstreaming Gender in Refugee Protection,” 589–607.

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Figure 11.1. Malian refugee women in Gaoudel, Ayorou district, northern Niger, waiting for UNHCR relief items, with their children. Jhntering, https://flickr.com/photos/139065770@N08/41462675121. Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gaoudel_Mali_refugee _women.jpg.

This chapter explores the complicated nuances, dynamics, and practical realities relating to the lives of African refugee women on the continent and beyond. It begins with a discussion of the gaps in the scholarly literature and the necessary elements of a gender analysis that would enrich any study of African women refugees. The chapter then proceeds to a discussion of how the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and governments have attempted to deal with the gendered nature of displacement over time, in both policy and practice. The experiences of women who become refugees are then carefully unpacked with reference to their protection issues. The chapter concludes with suggestions of paths forward in achieving better results in the protection of refugee women in Africa.

Gen der ing a n d Histor icizing th e St u dy of A fr ica n R efuge e s Scholarly literature has shown unequivocally that conflict and displacement affect men and women differently, necessitating a constant awareness of the

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need for research to interrogate the particular experiences of women in refugee and displacement settings.5 Unfortunately and paradoxically, though, research on refugee women has lagged behind the broader literature on refugees generally. Reviewing the scholarship that existed on refugee women in the 1980s, Helene Moussa concluded that women were no more than a “footnote” in the literature.6 What existed at the time was “not only exploratory and descriptive but most often distinctions between men and women, let alone gender relations, were not made. It was safe to assume that the experience of men was the focus of research.”7 The single continental exception, and possibly the earliest specific study of African refugee women in the postcolonial era, was a 1986 report commissioned by the newly formed African Training and Research Centre for Women (ATRCW) within the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA). The study, conducted by Shanyisa Khasiani of the University of Nairobi, Kenya, was titled Refugee and Displaced Women in Independent African States.8 This study only began to scratch the surface of the issues facing refugee women at the time, pinpointing the fact that humanitarian actors and states were neither fully apprised of nor equipped to address these issues, even as they burgeoned rapidly. The existence of the ATRCW itself was a product of African women’s activism on the regional and global stage, an organization without a counterpart anywhere in the world at the time of its inception. It is significant that the refugee women study was one of the earliest studies commissioned by this notable agency and points to the importance and urgency of the subject. In the decades since, the narratives about refugee women and girls have tended to essentialize and decontextualize their experiences, doing further violence to their stories. Refugee women are often portrayed as the real “wretched of the earth,” disadvantaged in every position, and perpetually marginalized. Since a majority of the world’s refugees are to be found in developing countries, refugee women tend to share the poverty, deprivations, and pathologies of the general population in those countries, while at the same time having particular problems related to their displacement, especially the trauma of violence and persecution.9 It is important to note, however, that there is a long 5. Sorenson, “Women and Post Conflict Reconstruction”; Yacob-Haliso, “Intersectionality and Durable Solutions”; Yacob-Haliso, “Gendered Experiences.” 6. Moussa, Storm and Sanctuary. 7. Hajdukowski-Ahmed, Khanlou, and Moussa, Not Born a Refugee Woman, 4. 8. United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, and ATRCW, Refugee and Displaced Women.

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historical record, often ignored, that shows African women as more than just victims but also as architects of their own destinies as well as of their societies. In other words, women in African conflicts have not always shown up merely as dependent refugees and displaced persons but have played other roles, and those other narratives need to be considered in order to have a more complete understanding of African women’s historical positions. African women have participated in conflict simultaneously as civilian victims of violence (which includes as refugees and internally displaced persons) and as combatants or militants, sympathizers, enablers, combat support systems, and in other similar roles in various conflicts. Women have been engaged at the logistical, ideological, and combatant levels and comprise between 10 and 30 percent of armed forces.10 This historical role of women in conflict came to the fore especially in the decades of anticolonial resistance and the decolonization of the continent throughout the twentieth century. Women’s resistance is recorded in many countries across Africa including Ghana, Nigeria, and Zimbabwe, and they fought in the conflicts in Angola, Mozambique, and South Africa, among others. Siphokazi Magadla further provides a long lens that not only traces women’s participation from the wars of national liberation up to the ongoing war on terrorism but also seeks to disrupt the traditional categorizations in the scholarly literature between combatant and noncombatant roles and between men’s, women’s, and girls’ roles.11 Yolande Bouka asserts that the absence of these accounts from history has had serious consequences for the continent, as decolonization itself remains an incomplete process because of it.12 Thus, women’s roles in conflicts have only recently been acknowledged and included in both African women’s studies and the broader corpus of historical and social science literature on African history, politics, and society. The important works of African writers such as Senegalese author Ousmane Sembene’s God’s Bits of Wood, about women’s anticolonial resistance in Francophone West Africa; Chinua Achebe’s Girls at War; Buchi Emecheta’s Destination Biafra; Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun; and Nuruddin Farah’s Maps are but a few examples of the attention given to these vital narratives.13

9. Martin, Refugee Women. 1 0. Oluwaniyi, “Women’s Roles and Positions.” 11. Magadla, “Theorizing African Women and Girls.” 12. Bouka, “Women, Colonial Resistance and Decolonization.” 13. Thanks to Biko Agozino for private correspondence on this.

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The implication for our study of refugee women is that while their general conditions on the continent have indeed deteriorated over the years, in many instances, their very decision to flee was an exercise of agency and not of victimhood. Additionally, many of them took the opportunity of their exile to engage in productive economic activities and peace activism and to gain skills for postconflict peacebuilding. For example, Liberian refugee women engaged in peace activism and helped end the conflict in their homeland and sustain postconflict peacebuilding.14 A vibrant scholarly movement has developed to disaggregate, mainstream, and illuminate the study of refugee women. This scholarly current has hinged on the division within the broader feminist movement with regard to the concerns of first-world, white middle-class women versus those of thirdworld, African and colored women. Today, while the refugee literature still habitually refers to refugees as an undifferentiated mass, as “flows,” “streams,” and “waves,” as David Turton eloquently puts it, the need to disaggregate the numbers and thereby better see the nuances and differential impacts of displacement on refugees is now better appreciated by scholars in this field.15 A second and equally important point is that even within the same gender, refugees’ experiences are further influenced by variations of age, class, race, (dis)ability, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, place of residence (urban/rural), and so on.16 Ignoring these diversities has implications for refugee women’s experiences of assistance and protection while in exile, as well as their capacity to access durable solutions and contribute to society as exiles or as former refugees—returnees or new diaspora. Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso has argued elsewhere that an intersectional feminist approach is one of the most helpful ways to analyze refugee women’s positions because it permits us not only to see differences between men and women, male and female, and not only to see diversities among women and men but also to understand and explain how these differences structure society and especially how they are shaped by social structures and institutions.17 The latter postulation translates to the fact that in the study of refugees, it is not enough to acknowledge difference 14. Mama and Okazawa-Rey, “Militarism, Conflict and Women’s Activism”; Medie, “Fighting Gender-Based Violence”; Fuest, “This Is the Time”; Moran, “Our Mothers Have Spoken”; Tripp, Women and Power; Olonisakin and Okech, Women and Security Governance; Yacob-Haliso, “If I Could Speak.” 15. Turton, “Conceptualizing Forced Migration.” 16. Hyndman, “Feminist Geopolitics Meets Refugee Studies”; but see Yacob-Haliso, “Intersectionality and Durable Solutions.” 17. Yacob-Haliso, “Gendered Experiences”; Yacob-Haliso, “Intersectionalities and Access”; Yacob-Haliso, “Intersectionality and Durable Solutions.”

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and diversity; it is necessary to recognize and critique the social, political, and structural context within which refugee women live and survive. In fact, the refugee situation itself changes gender relations, as demonstrated by study after study.18 Exile often unmasks latent power relations that are taken for granted in the home country, and in the context of an alien place, it either empowers or further disempowers one gender to the detriment of the other, destabilizing cultural foundations for social behavior, with consequences for refugee people.

Acti v ism a n d Polici e s for R efuge e Wom en’s Protection Although women have always been part of refugee movements, their presence, concerns, rights, and protection have not always been recognized, planned, or prioritized. This, of course, may be partly attributable to the marginalization of women in the larger society. At the beginning of the twentieth century, refugee situations multiplied and expanded across the world. But it was the period after the Second World War that saw the emergence of a European refugee regime and its rapid expansion to a more global framework. Simultaneously, decolonizing countries began to produce “new” refugee situations that challenged the European regime. The postcolonial wars and economic collapse that followed postcolonial politics further compounded the African refugee experience. Yet, through these progressions, recognition and assimilation of refugee women’s issues trailed behind developments in refugee protection, whatever the situation and context. Over time, though, attention to refugee women’s issues has been incrementally incorporated into refugee law, state practice, and humanitarian policy and programming. Women and the 1951 UN Convention

At the inception of the modern international refugee regime heralded by the creation of the UNHCR in December 1950 and the institution of the 1951 UN Refugee Convention, the general image of the refugee projected by law and policy was that of a white, European male. This was borne out in the fact that the UN Refugee Convention, like most other human rights instruments of the time, was written in a gender-blind manner that recognized neither the gendered aspects of these situations nor the political nature of that elision. To some extent, this dominance of the image of the white male refugee might have been largely reflective of reality, as refugees then explicitly fled political persecution 18. Buckley-Zistel and Krause, Gender, Violence, Refugees.

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and were products of the breakdown of major European empires that realigned nationalities and social groups and remade nations in the aftermath of the First World War. The UN Refugee Convention, which emerged from the ashes of the Second World War and the emergent Cold War, was also a product of the political realities of the time. These political conditions were such that they privileged the protection of, again, what was typically seen as mainly white males, who were fleeing the Soviet Union to find refuge in the countries of western Europe as the Cold War intensified.19 And yet, history is replete with the record of many refugee women—including famous ones such as Hannah Arendt—who migrated in this period and apparently were treated as ungendered subjects at the time. Because the Convention was gender-blind, it could not identify refugee women or address issues specific to them. In particular, gender-related persecution was not included as a possible ground for seeking asylum, and the particular protection and assistance problems of being female in the refugee situation were not anticipated in the design of the Convention. Nationalist struggles and postcolonial wars in the Global South emerged not long after the Convention, which began to shift the European refugee regime toward change, first imperceptibly but in a short time quite rapidly. The Partition of British India, literally overnight in 1947, into India, East Pakistan (later Bangladesh), and West Pakistan, forcibly displaced over twelve million people. That mass migration, one of the greatest human movements in history, was accompanied by such inordinate interreligious and intercommunal violence, including the rapes of at least seventy-five thousand women, that it has been compared with the Holocaust carried out by Nazi Germany.20 That this major migration did not seem to have in any meaningful way influenced the drafting of the UN Convention of 1951 is quite a curiosity but, yet again, typical of the Eurocentric world of the time.21 Nonetheless, African nations soon gave the European regime additional reason to see refugees that were not white, not male, and not adult as persons equally in need of protection. As discussed elsewhere in this book, with the fiercely fought liberation wars of African independence, and the relatively early descent of postindependence African nations into authoritarianism and war, egged on by the machinations of the rival blocs of the Cold War, the UNHCR and other actors had to make quick decisions about the scope of the Convention and its applicability. 19. Loescher, UNHCR and World Politics. 2 0. Dalrymple, “Great Divide.” 21. Conversely, and also curiously, the Jewish Holocaust was a major influence on the UN Refugee Convention, bequeathing to it the basic definition of a refugee being a person persecuted by their state.

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Entry of African Refugee Women into the Regime

Needless to say, refugee situations in Africa featured significantly different refugee demographics from those in Europe. The expansion of the global refugee regime to Africa, Asia, and other major refugee situations in the Global South increased attention given to women as a significant refugee demographic. The very often cited axiom that refugee women and children constitute not less than 75 percent of refugees can be attributed to the emergent reality that African refugees from the 1960s onward presented to refugee managers and agencies, according to one UNHCR official.22 Coupled with the vibrant activism of the global women’s movement in the decades following the creation of the United Nations Organization and the resultant growth in the number of conferences, agreements, treaties, and protocols on women and gender issues, the expansion of refugee issues in the Global South led refugee policy makers and humanitarian actors to reckon with the numbers and needs of refugee women under their purview. But this took many long years to arrive at. In the meantime, as mentioned previously, developments in the global context of transnational women’s rights activism are important in accounting for the eventual impetus for the specific protection of refugee women. There is no way to understand the entry of women as particular subjects of international refugee law and practice without a recognition of the ways the international political system itself was gradually changing at this time to make women more visible in international relations. The period 1945 to 1975 saw what is usually referred to as the second wave of women’s transnational mobilization, following a first wave that can be dated as far back as the late 1800s that had focused on issues of suffrage, peace, and equal access of women to education, labor rights (equal pay for equal work), and social welfare concerns.23 The UN Commission on the Status of Women, established in 1946, is the principal intergovernmental body for promoting gender equality and women’s empowerment globally, and it became an important hub for coordinating women’s rights advocacy at the international level. Perhaps the most important impact came from the UN World Conferences on Women and the UN Decade for Women (1975–1985), all of which led to progress that for the first time brought international consensus on a number of women-related issues and concerns. The United Nations has been referred to as the “unlikely godmother” of the global women’s movement for the leadership role it took. Margaret Snyder, the founding director of the 2 2. Peart, “UNHCR and Refugee Women,” 101–8. 23. Tripp, “Evolution of Transnational Feminisms.”

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United Nations Fund for Women (UNIFEM) and cofounder of the African Centre for Women at UNECA, wrote of this moment in history: “The UN in its turn became women’s guardian and advocate, the ‘unlikely godmother’ on whom women have depended to put forward legislation for adoption by all countries, to offer us chances to meet across national and regional borders, to open doors for us to join discussions of issues that impact our lives as farmers, independent workers, and employees, as mothers and wives, as victims of war and agents of peace.”24 While this first-time meeting of North and South as supposed equal partners in a common cause was bound to generate significant tension, nonetheless, the different experiences, goals, and visions of the women broadened the scope of the women’s rights agenda. At the UN Conferences in Mexico (1975) and Copenhagen (1980), women from the Global South challenged their counterparts from the North to go beyond the latter’s fixation on patriarchy and equality feminism and see how concerns about underdevelopment, colonialism, imperialism, and the unequal global economic order were key to explaining women’s oppression in third-world women’s own contexts, not simply patriarchy.25 By the Nairobi Conference of 1985, “feminist activists in the North had come to accept the importance of global development concerns as relevant to women, and women in the South became more willing to focus on gender equality.”26 The 1990s subsequently saw major achievements of the global women’s movement, such as the prioritization of the problem of violence against women and the successful incorporation of the women’s agenda into the more widely accepted normative framework of human rights. Still, even by the Beijing Conference of 1995, women from developing countries expressed their dissatisfaction with the fact that women from the North prioritized reproductive rights and discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation over their own concerns such as the restructuring of international debt for more equitable global relations, which would improve Global South women’s lives.27 Ultimately, the Beijing Conference effectively sloganized and concretized “women’s rights as human rights,” while the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action that was agreed on has been reviewed by member states every five years since.28 Throughout this decades-long struggle for women’s rights on the global stage, African women and African movements were key contributors to the 2 4. Snyder, “Unlikely Godmother,” 24–25. 25. Tripp, “Evolution of Transnational Feminisms.” 2 6. Ibid., 62. 27. Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Second Wave of Feminism.” 2 8. UN Women, “World Conferences on Women.”

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global advancement of women’s cause in varying ways. African women’s movements incorporating women from diverse racial, religious, ideological, class, and other backgrounds have been significant shapers of policy and politics in their own countries.29 Aili Tripp argues that these African women’s groups were not created by the international momentum of the time but rather predated them and then proceeded to shape the international process with their experiences and perspectives. Hence, it was specifically African women that lobbied for the creation of the ATRCW as part of UNECA, the first of its kind globally, which became the prototype for others. With the leadership of the Ghanaian businesswoman Esther Ocloo, who cofounded Women’s World Banking to bring together local credit associations and investment capital for women, it was African women in the 1970s who pioneered the collection of gender-disaggregated data on gendered labor, which led to major changes in economic theory. It was also African women who made the pursuit of peace and women’s involvement in peace processes central to the Beijing Conference in 1995, ultimately leading to the landmark UN Security Council (UNSC) Resolution 1325 on women and peace and security in the year 2000.30 Today, African women’s movements continue to work in symbiotic relationship with the United Nations on women’s rights issues that concern the continent.31 A veritable corpus of international human rights and women’s rights legislation has grown over the years to frame norms and expectations around women’s varied concerns globally, including the Declaration on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (UNGA Resolution A/RES/2262, November 7, 1967); the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW; December 18, 1979) and its Optional Protocol (October 6, 1999); the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women (UNGA Res. A/RES/48/104, December 20, 1993); UNSC Resolution 1325 (2000) on Women and Peace and Security (S/RES/1325 [2000], October 31, 2000); the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children (November 15, 2000); UNESCO Resolution 2005/31 on Mainstreaming a Gender Perspective into All Policies and Programmes in the United Nations System (July 26, 2005); UNSC Resolution 1820 (2008) on Women and Peace and Security (on Sexual Violence as a Weapon of War, June 19, 2008); UNSC Resolution 1888 (2009) on Acts of Sexual Violence against Civilians in Armed Conflicts (September 30, 2009); UNSC Resolution 29. Kang, Bargaining for Women’s Rights. 30. Tripp, “Evolution of Transnational Feminisms.” 31. Okedele, “United Nations.”

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1960 (2010) on Women and Peace and Security (on conflict-related sexual violence, December 16, 2010); and others. The UNHCR, Policy, and Refugee Women

To return to policy developments with regard to the protection of refugee women and girls specifically, rather regrettably, the tremendous momentum generated by the global women’s rights movement described above did not catalyze into rapid and commensurate changes in the refugee regime. In fact, it was not until the late 1980s that any sort of attention to gender began to emerge in the policy of the UNHCR, the global refugee agency with primary responsibility for the global refugee population. There are many reasons for women’s entry into the refugee regime. First were the undeniably significant numbers of refugee women in the refugee demographics of emerging situations in the developing world, relative to the European situation, which had, so far, been the model for international responses to refugee situations. Refugee women would have remained invisible to refugee policy makers and humanitarian actors for much longer without the expansion of the international refugee regime into Africa (as the first region the UNHCR fully entered outside Europe) in the aftermath of the nationalist and postindependence wars that besieged the continent from the 1960s onward. Second and relatedly, not only were the numbers growing in these refugee situations in the developing world, but also, the associated challenges of providing assistance and protection for women as part of refugee populations were unprecedented and required urgent resolution. For example, whereas previously aid and assistance were typically given by households defined according to European ideals of the nuclear family, with the overwhelming number of female-headed households, child-headed households, unaccompanied and single mothers, and complex “households” without a clear nuclear structure, this model needed to be thrown out. Furthermore, with horrifying tales of sexual violence being perpetrated against refugee women in Southeast Asia and during the Vietnamese boat people refugee crisis, refugee protection needed to cover the particular vulnerabilities of women refugees more specifically.32 Third, it appears that the UNHCR’s engagement in Central America, especially with refugee women in El Salvador and Guatemala, had shown the organization the possibilities of facilitating capacity building of refugee women and the positive impact this could have.33 The fourth factor, and in fact the 3 2. Freedman, “Mainstreaming Gender in Refugee Protection.” 33. Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children, “UNHCR Policy.”

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most directly impactful influence, is the coincidence of growing international activism for women’s rights, which made the problems of refugee women and girls, be it violence, poverty, or displacement, part and parcel of women’s rights agenda and, by extension, the human rights agenda. Consequently, developments within the United Nations Organization itself and the persistent activism of women’s rights groups and transnational organizations began to exert significant pressure on the UNHCR to review its policies and practices with respect to women refugees. Beginning in 1979, the UN General Assembly (UNGA) turned its attention to refugee women and girls. On December 17, 1979, the UNGA passed a resolution recognizing that the urgent needs and problems of women refugees the world over had not yet been studied and that the subject should be included in the agenda for the UN Women Conference of 1980 to be held in Copenhagen, which was to mark the halfway point of the UN Decade for Women. Notably, it was this UNGA resolution that first mandated the UNHCR to dedicate its agenda, resources, and experience to studying and providing understanding to the United Nations Organization and concerned NGOs about what the situation of refugee women the world over looked like and to recommend measures to be undertaken, with particular sensitivity to regional peculiarities.34 Prior to this time, it is doubtful that the UNHCR had made this effort, even as the organization had experienced tremendous expansion in the decades since its founding, which had understandably put pressure on its staff and other resources. The result of the UNGA mandate was the 1980 UNHCR report titled “The Situation of Women Refugees the World Over,” perhaps the very first study of the category of refugee women by the refugee agency, and obviously an externally imposed imperative.35 But not only had the UNHCR not initiated this assessment; the prevalent organizational culture was such that it also had not seen a need for moving in this direction. The 1980 report was noteworthy in several ways, apart from being the first of its kind by the UN refugee agency. The report called for a “specific targeted approach” to meet women’s “special needs.” It was also this study that reported for the first time that refugee women and their dependents constituted a staggering 80 percent of refugee populations of concern to the UNHCR globally. Meanwhile, continuing its determination to focus on women’s advancement, on the day following its mandate for the refugee women report, the UNGA, on December 18, 1979, adopted CEDAW. The UNHCR on its own 3 4. UNGA, “Resolution A/RES/34/161.” 35. UNHCR, Situation of Women Refugees.

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part, after producing the 1980 report, seems to have returned to its usual way of doing things without specific attention to women, until the pressure from the women’s organizations coming together at the next UN World Conference for Women again propelled response to the demands for refugee women’s issues to be highlighted and attended to. Hundreds of refugee women were in the parallel NGO forum held during the Nairobi UN Women’s Conference that ended the UN Decade for Women in 1985, following which an International NGO Working Group on Refugee Women (IWGRW) was formed in Geneva in 1986 to coordinate engagement on the subject.36 This working group’s location in Geneva was also helpful in facilitating access to and monitoring of the UNHCR, whose headquarters are also in Geneva. The IWGRW in 1989 organized the First International Conference on Refugee Women, which the UNHCR sponsored a number of refugee women to attend.37 It was in 1985 that the UNHCR began to gradually step up and address the reality that refugee women faced as distinct subjects of international law, refugee policy, and humanitarian practice. Ahead of the Nairobi UN Conference that year, the organization convened a Roundtable on Refugee Women in Geneva on April 25 to discuss the issues and strategically included high-level delegates who would also participate in the Nairobi Conference soon to take place that year. Consequently, coupled with the work of the refugee NGOs at the meeting, the Nairobi Forward Looking Strategies included specific mention of refugee and displaced women and children in its paragraphs 298 and 299 as one of the specially highlighted “areas of special concern” for international action on women.38 Following this, still in the same year, refugee women appeared on the agenda of the UNHCR Executive Committee (ExCom) for the first time at its thirty-sixth session, resulting in ExCom Conclusion No. 39 of October 18, 1985, on Refugee Women and International Protection.39 The statement noted that refugee women are “exposed to special problems” resulting from their “vulnerable situation” and recommended that states and the UNHCR adjust their programming to meet the “specific problems of refugee women.”40 Of interest in this ExCom Conclusion, and perhaps more transformational than the foregoing cited parts, is the suggestion that “states, in the exercise of their sovereignty, are free to adopt the interpretation that women asylum-seekers who face harsh or inhuman treatment due to their having transgressed the 3 6. Union of International Associations, Yearbook of International Organizations. 37. Hajdukowski-Ahmed et al., Not Born a Refugee Woman. 38. United Nations, “Nairobi Forward Looking Strategies.” 39. UNHCR, “Refugee Women and International Protection.” 4 0. Ibid., para. (c), (d), and (h), respectively.

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social mores of the society in which they live may be considered as a ‘particular social group’ within the meaning of Article 1 A(2) of the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention.”41 This final paragraph of the Conclusion was germinal in that it was formally suggesting for the first time that United Nations member states reconsider the restrictive and gender-blind Cold War definition of a refugee and that gender-based factors may be sufficient reasons for seeking asylum and granting of international protection. Other ExCom Conclusions that followed soon after this continued to urge states and the UNHCR to pay attention to issues of humanitarian assistance, violence against women, and the need to generate more data and information about refugee women and girls.42 In the same year, a working group on refugee women was set up within the organization, a potential focal point for the first time, but which still demonstrated relative unwillingness to commit resources and personnel to refugee women’s issues, as the working group was made up of junior staff.43 By March 1988, though, a UNHCR Steering Committee on Refugee Women was put in place to improve attention to protection of and assistance to refugee women. This time, the deputy high commissioner in the agency was made chair of the Steering Committee, a signal of the growing importance attached to the matter. In 1989, the position of senior coordinator for refugee women was finally appointed, supposedly a temporary position.44 However, Erin K. Baines reports that the senior coordinator of the time, Ann Howarth-Wiles, was met with considerable reluctance within an organization in which many staff and management continued to believe that general human rights approaches and the refugee conventions of the time were sufficient to provide for all refugees and that focused attention to refugee women was not warranted.45 Hence, the temporariness of the position could be understood as relating to the sense within the organization that soon there would be no need for an in-house gender advisor or department, and the office would wither away. Thankfully, this has not been the case. Another major leap forward in managing refugee women occurred in 1990 with the publication of the UNHCR Policy on Refugee Women. This would be closely followed in 1991 by the Guidelines on the Protection of Refugee Women. 41. Ibid., para. (k). 4 2. See ExCom General Conclusion 46 of 1987, Conclusion 54 of 1988, and Conclusion 60 of 1989, in UNHCR Division of International Protection, Thematic Compilation. 43. UNHCR Gender Equality Unit of the Division of International Protection, “From 1973 to 2013.” 4 4. Ibid. 45. Baines, Vulnerable Bodies, cited in Freedman, “Mainstreaming Gender in Refugee Protection”; see also Freedman, Gendering International Asylum.

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The two policies signified the progress that had been made on the issue as well as the substantial ground remaining to be covered. It had taken the organization forty years since its inception to get to the point at which it saw the need for a women-focused policy. A much welcome development, nevertheless, and a relatively concise seven-page document, the 1990 UNHCR Policy on Refugee Women outlined a framework to guide the organization’s activities. It enunciated the organizational goals, policy objectives, and operational objectives. It was clear about adopting a “mainstreaming/integration” approach as its “basic principle” and sought to address and integrate women’s needs and concerns as part of overall program planning and implementation. The policy stated explicitly that it was premised on “the recognition that becoming a refugee affects men and women differently and that effective programming must recognize these differences.”46 The 1991 Guidelines that followed the UNHCR Policy were designed to guide staff of the UNHCR and its implementing partners. It was clear about following the framework laid down by the 1990 Policy and similarly adopted its underlying principle as being to “integrate the resources and needs of refugee women into all aspects of programming,” but at the same time, it would “recognize that special efforts may be needed to resolve problems faced specifically by refugee women.” In this, the guidelines also adopted gender mainstreaming as its preferred approach. Its stated purposes were to help humanitarian workers “to identify the specific protection issues, problems and risks facing refugee women,” with reference to traditional protection concerns, as well as the identification of measures to ameliorate, prevent, and report these concerns. The guidelines covered matters on the planning and assessment of refugee women’s protection situation; types of protection needs that may be expected in different situations and specific interventions that may be needed (in particular, physical security problems and legal protection problems); preventing abuse at the borders, in refugee camp and settlement design, delivery of assistance, education, skills training and income-generation activities; help for victims of protection problems; and finally, measures for eliminating protection problems identified and for reporting. Furthermore, the guidelines made fundamental but previously unexplored linkages useful for humanitarian action on behalf of refugee women, including between protection and assistance, legal and physical protection, and actual protection and response to protection problems: “The Guidelines include but 4 6. UNHCR, “UNHCR Policy on Refugee Women.” See part 1 on general principles relating to the recognition of differences and part 2 on the mainstreaming approach.

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go well beyond traditional notions of protection through promotion of refugee laws by emphasizing the intrinsic relationship that exists between protection and assistance. They review the range of legal and physical protection needs that arise for females in refugee situations, outlining those areas of protection that are in need of particular attention and response and the actions that can and should be taken when protection problems occur.”47 Significance and Shortcomings of Policies on Refugee Women

The profound importance of these developments in policy making about refugee women cannot be overstated. The subjects of the policies, the refugee women and girls, were visible to states, policy makers, and humanitarian actors for the first time, even though they had always been there but had remained invisible. While the contemporary international refugee regime, given its roots in post-1945 human rights developments, had always (at least in theory) seen refugee rights as human rights, the point that women’s rights were a necessary consideration and that women’s rights were fully human rights had to be forced into these conversations. To be sure, policy attention also ultimately required the dedication of funds, staff, offices, space, time, and effort to the protection of refugee women and girls, without which conferences and dialogues would have remained rhetoric and noise. Additionally, the existence of policy developed a field for specialized expertise for those who would eventually participate in elaborating this aspect of the regime, including relief agencies and academics. However, the relationship of academics to expertise in this subject, as with many other subjects in women’s studies, has worked both ways—that is, academics have both influenced policy and seen their work shaped by policy. For instance, the 1991 Guidelines were actually drafted by Susan Forbes Martin,48 whose double-edition book, Refugee Women,49 which was published a year later, is a basic reader on the subject. Most importantly, these policies also began to identify how the nooks and crannies of refugee protection practice had implications for refugee women, and refugee women in various settings across the globe began to benefit from programming that was specific to them, planned for them, and directed at addressing their needs. It is in relation to this latter aspect of the refugee policies of the 1990s that we must turn in evaluating the trajectory of women and girls’ protection since 47. Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children, “UNHCR Policy”; emphasis in original. 4 8. Martin, “Refugee and Displaced Women,” 1. 49. Martin, Refugee Women.

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these watershed moments in refugee protection policy and practice. While these policies were groundbreaking for their time and in the ways mentioned above, they indeed came far but no further. In other words, it seems that the most important contribution they made was to bring awareness to the humanitarian community of the existing protection needs of refugee women and girls, and not much else. Because of the framing of the two documents above, which as we have shown partly derived from the broader women’s rights advocacy of the time, the policies remained relatively conservative with regard to implementing changes that would have been transformative of gender relations where refugee women and girls are concerned. To elaborate, it is important to note that all the institutional developments outlined above maintained a steadfast focus on women’s issues and not on gender concerns. While recognizing women as a distinct subset of the refugee population was by itself a significant leap, it was not sufficient for impactful change. Redolent of the women’s activism of the time, the refugee women policies and actions reflected the Women in Development (WID) framework that emerged in the 1960s and was still predominant in the 1980s. WID was a pioneering approach to development work that emphasized recognizing the roles of women in economic development and advocated for their inclusion and incorporation into existing economic systems and for the acknowledgment of their previously existing economic activities. Ester Boserup’s 1970 book, Woman’s Role in Economic Development,50 was seminal in this regard, as in particular it showed women’s largely unrewarded economic activities in agricultural sectors of the developing societies she studied. For instance, she observed that “the trading women of West Africa are famous. In Ghana women account for 80 percent of the trade labor force; in eastern Nigeria and the Yoruba region of western Nigeria they account for about half the trade.”51 Such major findings made her study a reference point for development work that wanted to take women’s work seriously, and indeed influenced governments, the United Nations, the World Bank, and other major global institutions. Thus, many governments and policy-making institutions, local and global, adopted this approach and were content to merely include women rather than examine the root causes of women’s marginalization and discrimination and the social relations that produce these—in other words, gender.

50. Boserup, Woman’s Role in Economic Development. 51. Ibid., 69–70.

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In response to these criticisms, WID, after reformulation to Women and Development, gave way to Gender and Development (GAD), an approach that sought to place women and men within the social context of their existence and interrelations. GAD arose out of the previously enunciated criticisms by women activists from the Global South who felt that their experiences and context were not adequately represented by the prevalent liberal feminist approaches of the time, represented by WID, which sought to merely include women in development on the basis of “equality” with men, without sensitivity to the contexts within which these discourses were to apply. In the field of forced migration studies, WID birthed Women in Forced Migration (WIFM), which coincided with the early stages of the inclusion of women in the development of the field of refugee and forced migration studies, and which in the 1980s was also in its infancy. WIFM later gave way to Gender and Forced Migration as a gendered analysis became sine qua non to understanding the relative positions, contexts, abilities, advantages, and disadvantages of refugee women and girls within a global system that was both their oppressor and their “savior.” A gendered analysis requires that states and humanitarian actors take note of the social relations between men and women and how this accounts for their behavior, needs, and contributions. Furthermore, the conception of refugee women and girls as victims and as essentially “vulnerable” pervades these early refugee policies. This flat, onesize-fits-all conception of women further victimizes and revictimizes them. It does not allow for a nuanced appreciation of how difference produces particular characteristics of women in particular contexts. Assuming that there is one essential “Refugee Woman,” it overlooks the obvious reality that even among persons of the same gender in the same displacement context, there are diversities of experiences, age, sexual orientation, ethnicity, race, class, and ability, among others, which produce considerable variations in women’s positions and therefore should mandate the responses and solutions that are applied. Likewise, the steadfast focus on the mainstreaming approach led these policy instruments to simply “add-women-and-stir,” a common pitfall when there is no real institutional commitment to transformation. Yacob-Haliso has argued elsewhere that “its ‘add-women-and-stir’ approach was blind to the fact that gender inequalities are embedded in deep social and political contexts that are unique per category of refugees or per refugee situation around the world. For refugee women, I contend, their multiple disadvantages emanate from intertwined factors of subordination comprising personal factors and structural factors emerging from the international political system. . . . Without a critical

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gender analysis of women’s lives and positions, these women-focused policies were not transformative in their attempt to improve refugee women’s lives.”52 In the years following the formulation of these policies, implementation issues also came under focus. Ten years after, the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children (later renamed the Women’s Refugee Commission [WRC]), with support from the UNHCR and the governments of the United States and Canada (major donors of the UNHCR), conducted an assessment of the implementation of both the 1990 Policy and the 1991 Guidelines. While admitting that the 1990 Policy and 1991 Guidelines were most impactful in the area of creating broad awareness among refugee managers and field staff and in providing a ready field manual for how to address women’s issues, the WRC Assessment found major shortcomings in implementation. The report found that “overall, implementation of the Guidelines was found to be uneven and incomplete, occurring on an ad hoc basis in certain sites rather than in a globally consistent and systematic way. Positive actions tend to be sporadic, and they are often insufficient to provide refugee women with equitable protection.”53 This was partly due to (1) general challenges of refugee management such as the dangerous, unstable, and impoverished conditions of many refugee situations and the lack of North-South burden sharing; (2) lack of adequate guidance on issues such as domestic violence, sexual exploitation, urban refugees, and internally displaced women; and (3) a significant dearth of organizational commitment to gender equality programming, lack of refugee women’s participation in the process, and severe funding shortfalls and staff cuts in the field, which meant that important programs could not be implemented and there weren’t enough hands to oversee the troubleshooting of protection problems affecting refugee women.54

R ecent Polic y De v elopm ents The guidelines were eventually revised following a series of developments as well as increased targeted actions by the UNHCR that paved the way for this. External to it, the Beijing Platform for Action (1995) and UNSC Resolution 1325 on women, peace, and security (2000) created the right atmosphere for continued advancement on refugee women’s issues. Internally, in June 2001, the global refugee agency held its first-ever dialogue with refugee women, inviting 5 2. Yacob-Haliso, “Gendered Experiences,” 10. 53. Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children, “UNHCR Policy,” 2; see also Buscher, “Refugee Women,” 4–20. 5 4. Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children, “UNHCR Policy.”

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fifty refugee women to Geneva out of over five hundred in local and regional consultations to hold talks. This resulted in two notable outputs: the High Commissioner’s Five Commitments to Refugee Women and the document titled “Respect Our Rights: Partnership for Equality, Report on the Dialogue with Refugee Women.” In 2002, the UNHCR issued guidelines on the application of the parameter of gender-based persecution under the 1951 Convention. In addition to the poor rating of the UNHCR in the WRC Report in the year 2002, a shocking and devastating report of a joint assessment by the UNHCR and Save the Children-UK containing testimony from over a hundred refugee children in camps in West Africa about extensive sexual exploitation and abuse of mainly refugee girls by mainly humanitarian workers, impelled urgent action.55 In 2003, there was the “Guidelines for Prevention and Response to SGBV: Sexual and Gender Based Violence against Refugees, Returnees and Internally Displaced Persons,” and in 2004, the Age, Gender and Diversity Mainstreaming Strategy (AGDM) was launched. Eventually, in January 2008, the agency published the UNHCR Handbook for the Protection of Women and Girls56 to replace the 1991 Guidelines as the grundnorm for the treatment of refugee women’s issues in all the locales where the UNHCR was and would be engaged globally. The organization continues to issue specific Guidelines on International Protection that deal with refugee women’s issues, implements the AGDM, and continues in the search for durable solutions. In concluding this policy discussion, we bring the conversation back to the African continent, where the global developments detailed in the preceding pages had a direct impact on the treatment of refugee women, as Africa has remained the region with the highest proportion of refugees globally. As noted, African women, women’s movements, and studies of African women were vital in pushing for change in the global human rights regime and in overturning the invisibility of refugee and displaced women. With major conflicts that rage in every part of the continent from Angola to Burundi, Cameroon, Uganda, the Central African Republic, Cote d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Liberia, Libya, Sierra Leone, South Africa, South Sudan, Sudan, Western Sahara, and literally everywhere, over the seventy years since independence, African women are veterans in the experience of forced displacement and uprootedness. The perpetual experience of conflict and war in African women’s lives put them at the forefront of advocacy for an international framework that recognizes the differential impact of war on women and men 5 5. UNHCR and Save the Children-UK, “Sexual Violence and Exploitation.” 56. UNHCR, “Handbook for the Protection.”

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and the need to center women in the architecture and processes of peace and security at all levels. Indeed, UNSC Resolution 1325 owes this to African women specifically. But it is not only from the advocacy that comes from suffering that African women contributed to the development of UNSC Resolution 1325, among others. It was during Namibia’s presidency of the UNSC that the resolution was listed, deliberated on, and unanimously adopted by the council.57 In addition to the policies discussed in this section, African refugee women contributed to and drew protection from African Union (AU) human rights frameworks that apply to all Africans and to women on the continent. As in the promotion of gender equity in United Nations processes, in the formation of the African Union, “[African] women’s organizations were active throughout the transition from the OAU to the AU, calling for gender balanced leadership within AU institutions and lobbying for stronger commitments to women’s rights.”58 Some of the products of their activism relevant to protecting women and girls in conflict and refugee situations include especially the 1969 OAU Convention Governing the Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa; the African Charter on Human and Peoples Rights of 1981 (the Banjul Charter); the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa, 2003 (the Maputo Protocol); and the African Union Convention for the Protection and Assistance of Internally Displaced Persons in Africa, otherwise known as the Kampala Convention of 2012.

A fr ica n R efuge e Wom en: Contin u ing Issu e s It is clear from the foregoing discussions of developments with respect to the protection of refugee women what issues have been of concern to the states and humanitarian agencies that manage their affairs. The preceding discussion has foregrounded the progressive inclusion of women in refugee policy and the various impetus that made this possible. Yet the more things change, the more they remain the same. In other words, in spite of the advancements in policy design and understanding of refugee women and girls’ issues, they continue to face the same vulnerabilities of decades past, and even perhaps at higher and more alarming levels. This is stark when one refers to the early UNECA/ ATRCW report by Khasiani in 1986, which detailed not only the political and economic environment for the creation, accommodation, and protection of 57. Hendricks, “Progress and Challenges”; Ilesanmi, “UNSCR 1325 and African Women.” 5 8. Adams, “African Women’s Movements,” 2; see also Adams, “Regional Women’s Activism”; Adams and Kang, “Regional Advocacy Networks.”

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African refugee women but also the already apparent lack of durable solutions and the frustrating increase in the volume and problems of refugee women on the continent.59 Dale Buscher eloquently expresses this vexing lack of improvement in refugee women’s lives, relative to the profusion of policy that has developed over the twenty years of their article’s assessment: “Some might say . . . that the paper overload has not, for the most part, led to corresponding improvements in the lives and protection of refugee women. Refugee women continue to get raped; refugee girls continue to drop out of school at higher rates than boys, especially in the upper primary grades; refugee women continue to have few opportunities to earn income or learn marketable skills; and although serving on refugee leadership structures in larger numbers, refugee women’s participation often cannot be considered meaningful.”60 Below, we discuss only a few of the situations that demonstrate African refugee women’s experiences that persist. Gender-Based Violence

Women are vulnerable to sexual and physical violence in the chaotic situations responsible for their displacement, and they remain so during flight, in exile, and even upon return.61 In an account provided by L. Miller following a Sudanese military invasion in a small and rural part of Sudan, the woman in question tells the tale of being gang-raped while eight months pregnant. The trauma led to the death of her unborn child, and yet she was forced to birth a still baby.62 This brings to mind the health implications of refugeehood for women whose natural reproductive capability often attaches additional health consideration to them. In other words, because of their biological sex, women are at greater physical risk of life-threatening health complications during times of chaos or war. H. Loveness Schaffer observes, Often, women also face additional hardships. They usually assume responsibility for children, elderly, and sick relatives. They often must find food, water, and other basic necessities for all their dependents. Pregnant women are at particular risk of serious health problems from insufficient nutrition. If they are not killed when caught, women risk being raped or sexually exploited. . . . Some research estimates more than 15,000 women and girls forcibly detained in Rwanda in 1994 were raped, and as many as 5,000 59. UNECA/ATRCW, “Refugee and Displaced Women.” 6 0. Buscher, “Refugee Women,” 6. 61. Yacob-Haliso, “Investigating the Role of Government.” 62. Miller, “Irony of Refuge.”

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women and girls became pregnant from rape following the deliberate sexual violence of the 1994 genocide campaigns in Rwanda.63

The report further reveals subsequent rape encounters in the process of flight as well as the victim’s ostracization from family. Among other issues, women continue to live with the trauma of their experience and the stigma of rape. This underscores some of the African cultural stigma toward women who have experienced gender-based violence and trauma. This example is far from an isolated incident, as further research shows that refugee women are at greater risk of increased sexual and domestic violence, which is especially prevalent during social conflict. Sexual violence is even employed as a tool for domination and humiliation by the perpetrators, as there are numerous reports that show wives, mothers, and daughters beaten and raped while their fathers, sons, and husbands were made to watch. Consolidating this claim is Tina Sideris, who states that “rape and other forms of sexual violence became weapons of terror and intimidation. Women were raped in front of their husbands, children, and compatriots. There are widespread reports from women and men testifying about husbands being used as mattresses—they were forced to lie on the ground, while their wives were raped on top of them. Children were raped in the presence of their parents.”64 This humiliating process has been adopted as a weapon to affront and humiliate the men in question. In this case, women and children have become mere pawns in the sadistic and egoistic battles of men, further validating Simone de Beauvoir’s postulation of women’s subhuman status in the universal process of gendered coexistence.65 Miller notes that following the genocide in Rwanda, a mayor was convicted of rape and other sex crimes, which were used as additional weapons of the genocide; rape in this case was used as a means of torture.66 Conflict and instability have been proved to intensify the rates of domestic violence against women.67 Although domestic violence and other forms of gender-based violence against women is widespread, as society disintegrates in cases of instability, the alteration of the normal tends to take a toll on the human psyche, increasing stress levels and therefore promoting hostility toward women. Also, in the process of flight, which is often done without prior 6 3. Schaffer, “True Survivors,” 31. 6 4. Sideris, “War, Gender and Culture.” 65. De Beauvoir, Second Sex. 6 6. Miller, “Irony of Refuge.” 67. Medie and Yacob-Haliso, “Limits of Theorizing Legislation.”

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planning, people tend to lose their sources of livelihood, and in the case of women, they become dependent on male authorities, some of whom take advantage of this dependence to perpetrate sexual exploitation and abuse. In the absence of male figures, women also bear the sole burden of taking care of children, the elderly, the sick, and other dependents and must therefore provide necessities such as food, clothing, and shelter. They often assume the position of healers for ailing children and other family members even as they navigate flight under extremely difficult conditions. In some situations, the fleeing women are caught and murdered, and others are spared but captured and made sexual slaves by their captors.68 Locations and Relocations: Camps and Resettlement

Women who survive the process of escape must still navigate the difficult process of integration as they seek refuge. The process of fleeing one’s hometown for another alters normalcy and structure for all persons involved. Normalcy in this context implies rightness with society and the continued observance of culture, values, and the perceived norms. Therefore, alteration to the flow of these factors signifies something abnormal. In the case of the war in Mozambique in the 1970s and 1980s, reports reveal that there were cases where children raped their mothers, the carcasses of the dead were left unburied, sources of water were contaminated with dead bodies, and sons killed their fathers.69 In this situation, the social fabric has been torn into strange pieces, and clearly nothing remained normal. Aside from this inversion of normal, when persons lose access to the most basic services and resources as well as the familiarity of society, which is in itself a support system, normal has been disrupted. Their perception of life takes a different turn while their sense of security, human dignity, and tangible security is ruptured. Women in these scenarios may lose their agency and are forced to endure many abusive situations to survive. Nevertheless, many feminist scholars have also argued that there is a continuum of violence extending from “peacetime” to wartime as violence against women is embedded in the very fabric of society and is part of the “normal” life for women. What war does is to unmask and intensify this violence, and unleash it without mitigation on the weakest in society. Having fled their homes, refugee women find already existing refugee settlements or create one for themselves in neighboring communities still within or outside their own country. In cases where they have to seek refuge 6 8. Miller, “Irony of Refuge.” 69. Sideris, “War, Gender and Culture.”

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in other countries, there are prescribed procedures for their admittance primarily because the refugee is by law eligible for international protection in the form of asylum, material relief, and even permanent resettlement.70 Having met some of the basic prerequisites for refugeehood in the host country, asylum seekers might gain refugee status. As refugees, they may be provided with necessities such as shelter, water, food, material support, and medical care. Refugee children are often provided with education within their camps. The host country oversees the welfare of the refugees; often, the government employs personnel who ensure the smooth administration of the camp. The refugees are often restricted to their camps and are allowed to leave only when they have obtained necessary permission. They often have to apply for permits for local movement and state their reasons, and the authorities have to deem it fit for authorization. Leaving without appropriate authorization often attracts its own repercussions—for instance, the defaulting refugee risks losing certain privileges such as food rations and even accommodation, especially for those who stay away for a long time.71 In these settlements, the weight of women’s culturally prescribed responsibilities toward the children and the elderly contribute to making life extremely difficult for them. The chasm of gender inequality continues to widen in refugee camps as refugees reenact their gendered lifestyles in the camps. For instance, in many African homes, it is a cultural norm for women to care for the children and the husband, while it is considered shameful for husbands to attend to mundane household tasks such as cooking and cleaning. With the additional stress of trauma and absence of resources, these tasks without help no doubt complicate the issues of comfort in exile. The men continue to assume roles of authority, while women continue in their subservient roles, and in the allocation of relief materials and basic resources, the male refugees and camp leaders often get the bulk, and the prerogative for distribution is left to them. Therefore, in the absence of a male representative of a family, inequitable distribution is likely.72 Girls and female youth face the threat of sexual violence, as cases of sexual violation by fellow refugees and even humanitarian aid workers are not uncommon.73 Rape of women is often normalized in situations of chaos, while men also face the risk of death. Jena, a female asylum seeker in Malawi documented by Schaffer, at the point of entry and application for asylum, narrates 70. Shacknove, Who Is a Refugee? 71. Schaffer, “True Survivors.” 72. Martin, Refugee Women. 73. Amnesty International, No Place for Us Here.

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the ordeal of sexual violation that she experienced in Somalia while the male asylum officers in Malawi scoffed at her predicament, as shown in the excerpt below, while requesting “tangible” reasons for her admittance as a refugee in their country: “Some of the male asylum officers started giggling and making disparaging comments in their native language. They insisted that Jena tell them the real reason why she had left Somalia. They were ready to recognize her refugee status only if her story indicated some of the well-established rationales for accepting asylum seekers, rationales such as ‘being afraid of being killed because she was from a minority ethnic group’ or ‘her husband had been killed by warlords from a different ethnicity.’”74 Also, in camps and settlements, women and girls are often sent out to fend for their families, gathering supplies such as firewood and water under very risky circumstances while the men are shielded from the possibility of losing their lives.75 The reality is that these tasks are extremely dangerous, and women face greater dangers of rape, abduction, and murder under such conditions. Refugee camps also continue to register higher rates of domestic violence than regular society, while women continue to navigate daily living in these most challenging of situations. Bermudez Anastasia Torres observes that the rivalry of ethnicity is often part of the package for African refugees in camps, given the causes of many African conflicts. Sometimes there are obvious power struggles where the stronger or more populous ethnic groups come out on top. They subjugate the rest of the group, while men abuse women from other groups both sexually and physically as a way to maintain dominance.76 Gender-based violence suffuses the experiences of African refugee women, and the inadequate societal response to this situation is cause for concern. The cultural sacredness associated with sex and womanhood in most African cultures results in an unhealthy silence on issues of sexual abuse and rape. These cultural norms forbid sexual discourses and discourage advocacy against rape in these communities. Victims of sexual violence find it difficult to express themselves and to call out their rapists. As a result, perpetrators of sexual crimes enjoy impunity and continue their crimes unchecked. As noted by Nimo Bokore, “For a mother, a night in a refugee camp also means no sleep. She has to fight to survive the night, protecting herself and her children from wild animals and human brutality.”77 When thought is given to the menace 7 4. Schaffer, “True Survivors,” 39–40. 75. Miller, “Irony of Refuge.” 76. Torres, “FMO Thematic Guide.” 77. Bokore, “Suffering in Silence.”

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of rape, it is often treated with levity, caused by the cultural perception of an inherent and permissible male desire to hunt. Furthermore, women are often blamed for their own rape. In fact, some communities go as far as ostracizing the rape victim, often accusing them of having done something to attract the rapist. Miller further states that “moreover, in many communities the act is seen as an embarrassment to the community and to the victim’s family. Some African beliefs assert that a raped woman is untouchable, dirty, or somehow defective. From this perspective, the social stigma of rape creates an intense form of psychological trauma, caused by the rejection from husbands and communities. How can refugee victims of rape receive any justice if they are consistently placed in circumstances where they are judged by those who are supposed to help?”78 Schaffer also observes that the status of refugeehood does not suppress unhealthy cultural rituals that subjugate and oppress women. With the level of trauma these refugees have experienced, one would think some practices would take a back seat while the issue of survival is at the forefront. However, this seems not to be the case. A person is often an embodiment of their cultural values irrespective of circumstance or location. That being said, the issue of female genital mutilation, also known as female genital cutting, is prevalent in some parts of Africa, and it is therefore unsurprising to see that the practice is still being strictly enforced on young African women by close relatives and friends in refugee camps. With a focus on young women from Somalia, Schaffer states that the act is performed on women between the ages of four and ten, even though the World Health Organization has condemned such acts as harmful to young women. It is even regarded as a persecutory action in some asylum courts. Sadly, this practice continues to prevail in these cultures. Under normal circumstances, female genital mutilation poses extremely high health risks for girls and women. In the highly unsanitary conditions of many refugee camps, it becomes an even greater risk to perform this procedure, and it is even more persecutory if the mothers of the young women in question do not consent. Schaffer provides an account of an African mother from Zambia, Amina, who faces the challenge of not just protecting herself from harmful cultural or religious practices but also protecting her young daughters. In the excerpt below, Amina struggles to keep her two daughters away from the oppressive act of genital mutilation; she is almost shunned by the rest of her refugee community, while her uncles felt it was within their jurisdiction to make this life-changing decision for Amina’s two children even without their

78. Miller, “Irony of Refuge.”

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mother’s consent. In her culture, as is the case in many other African cultures, the male heads of an extended family such as the uncles are culturally and even legally recognized guardians of the children. In other words, the woman in this context, especially in the absence of a husband, is stripped of her right to make decisions for her children. This shows the minimal authority a woman has in a family: “Therefore, Amina’s uncles, who also lived in the refugee camp, threatened to take the girls to Zambia to have them circumcised. The uncles thought they were able to make decisions for Amina and to make such threats because in many African customs, uncles are considered legal guardians of their nieces and their nieces’ children, especially where there is no other male figure in the niece’s household. With permission from the camp administration, Amina sent the girls to live with a friend in the city, but she received more threats from her uncles.”79 The health implications of refugeehood and the attendant sexual abuse on women cannot be overemphasized. The process of fleeing one’s homeland without warning implies that persons who are vulnerable to complications and myriad health issues are part of the fleeing mix. These persons often include pregnant women who under normal circumstances require the utmost medical care and support, let alone in abnormal times. These women often face the risk of forced abortions and miscarriages, while the ones who are lucky enough to carry their babies to term are faced with delivering their babies in the most unsanitary conditions with no health professionals and little or no experienced help. Some of them develop complicating conditions, while others have to deal with nursing infants in such riotous and chaotic situations. Rape poses more health-related risks, ranging from the contraction of STDs such as HIV to “trauma to reproductive organs, including fistula and unwanted pregnancies that can lead to unsafe abortions and other complications.”80 Rape victims are more likely to experience psychological consequences, including “anxiety, shame, post-traumatic stress, depression, loss of sexual pleasure, fear of sex, and a loss of function in society.”81 Women and girls must also deal with their menstrual flows in unsanitary conditions, often without sanitary products, with little or no privacy. These conditions could also create room for more health issues for the women involved. These are apart from other health issues that could be engendered by the unfamiliarity of the situation 79. Schaffer, “True Survivors,” 42. For other accounts, see Rehn and Sirleaf, “Women, War, Peace,” 25. 80. Laurie and Petchesky, “Gender, Health, and Human Rights,” 27. 81. Ibid.

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and communities that they run to for help. Crista E. Johnson-Agbakwu and colleagues note that the process of settlement for these women could trigger psychological stressors that could lead to physical health issues in light of the differences in cultural orientation of both host and refugee.82 In the process of integration, there could be cultural misunderstandings and discrimination that could further mount psychological pressure on the refugees. Also, given the low budgetary concerns of most African countries, women and men stand the chance of losing their lives to treatable and manageable health conditions, since their access to qualified health care and health supplies has been reduced. Economic Issues

Economic self-sufficiency is strongly supported by the refugee policy in many countries of resettlement; refugees are expected to acquire the skills necessary to earn a living so as not to require financial assistance.83 More specifically, Badiah Haffejee and Jean F. East note that US refugee policy mandates that women refugees join the workforce within ninety days of their entry.84 However, given that women are usually the most disadvantaged members of their abandoned communities, it is unsurprising that many of them have little or no education and sometimes no relevant skills, which makes their quest for integration into their host communities more difficult and their search for a means of daily living much more challenging. Resettlement agencies in most countries focus on the most employable members of the group, and therefore, due to their disadvantages, refugee women hardly constitute a tangible proportion of the resettled. These jobs often go to the men, leaving a large percentage of families without economic support. Given their limited chances for economic stability, some women and young girls resort to exchanging sex for food and other supplies.85 Research shows that in Africa, women are major producers of agricultural products, often as subsistence farmers and sometimes even as large-scale farmers.86 However, with the forced evacuation from their homes, women become incapacitated and often have little or no access to the farmlands in their host communities. Only in a few instances are they able to carry out modest 8 2. Johnson-Agbakwu et al., “Adaptation of an Acculturation Scale.” 83. Haffejee and East, “African Women Refugee Resettlement.” 8 4. Ibid. 85. UNHCR and Save the Children-UK, “Sexual Violence and Exploitation.” 86. Bryson, “Women and Agriculture”; see also Boserup, Woman’s Role in Economic Development.

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Figure 11.2. Refugee woman from Darfur, Sudan, at Farchana refugee camp in eastern Chad, processing millet for family and market consumption. EU Civil and Humanitarian Aid, https://www.flickr.com/photos/69583224@ N05/8022578954. Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org /wiki/File:Darfurians_refugees_in_Eastern_Chad.jpg.

agricultural activities, such as the Dafurian refugee woman in figure 11.2, which may have little market value. Haffejee and East also observe that women’s access to vocational training and education in refugee camps is very limited.87 Often, when women are lucky enough to find work, it is usually menial jobs with bad remuneration and in places where they are further abused, such as domestic service. They are also faced with a gendered and racialized labor market. Assimilation for resettled African women refugees undoubtedly implies more adjustment problems especially in cases where there is a difference in cultural values. In these host communities, particularly in Western countries, women and refugees in general tend to experience socioeconomic demotion. For educated and skilled African women, their qualifications and skills often go unrecognized in these Western countries, leaving them without prospects for high-paying jobs. The implication is that many will have to start their lives

87. Haffejee and East, “African Women Refugee Resettlement.”

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afresh, working low-paying jobs to put themselves through school while the economic, social, and emotional well-being of their young children suffers. Others who are incapacitated or cannot acquire Western qualifications have to make do with low-paying and often culturally demeaning jobs to meet the economic needs of their families. In situations where the men are the affected party, it still finds a way to negatively impact women. Aside from the fact that the economic welfare of dependent women is threatened, the implication of the failure to recognize one’s qualifications, which is often the source of one’s identity and respect (as in the case of doctors and teachers), is that some men tend to take out their frustrations on women in the household. Some walk away from the overwhelming responsibilities of family, leaving the women to care for their children without help. Those who do not leave often turn to domestic abuse. The following excerpt provides a refugee’s personal narrative with regard to the implications of the failure to recognize non-Western qualifications for African women: Some of us are forced to go back to school and start afresh, just because my educational background is not Australian. Some of our husbands came with their degrees from home, yet they had to do the same thing over again, and this can be very stressful not only to our partners, but to the whole family. Our men want to fulfil their manhood by being the bread winner, and when that fails the anger would be transferred to us women, any small problem would be turned up to be big. At the end of the day, I tried to put up with his stress and my own stress and the children stressing me. But the source of the problem here is not being able to do what you want to do to fulfil your needs, the needs of the family, etc.88

With rates of domestic abuse being higher among refugees, the question therefore is how women handle this form of abuse. Prior to the inversion of the normal, some women had authority figures to report to who often dealt with the issue appropriately or law courts where they made their cases and had their spouses restrained. However, as refugees, they often lack that kind of familial and legal support and therefore have to endure violence without recourse. Schaffer notes that refugee women are not entirely without recourse when it comes to physical or sexual abuse; they have free access and support of the law courts in any asylum country that is a part of the 1951 Convention following Article 16 (1) in relation to the status of refugees.89 She notes, however, that 88. See the interview on a South Sudanese women focus group, in Tilbury and Rapley, “There Are Orphans in Africa.” 89. Schaffer, “True Survivors.”

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most women are ignorant of this privilege, mentioning the Malawian example; these women rarely took cases to the Malawian courts, and those who were aware rarely spoke the Malawian languages. Some others felt a sense of loyalty to their people and therefore felt a sense of betrayal reporting one of their own to the courts of their host communities. They often took their grievances to “refugee committee leaders,” who were predominantly male with little or no legal training.90 Language Barriers

Alongside the issues discussed so far, language barriers are another cause for concern. Among asylum seekers, language barriers make claims for asylum more complex than they should be.91 Communication is an integral part of integration, while mutual intelligibility and understanding of language are clearly key to successful communication and to successful integration. For African refugee women, language often constitutes one of the sources of struggles and frustration, as they usually do not possess the language skills of their host communities. Expanding on this, Epimague Twagiramungu observes that female refugees in the US are usually less proficient in the English language than their male counterparts.92 They are often uneducated, and for the educated ones, some of the languages spoken in their host communities are not languages they have been exposed to in the process of education. For instance, refugees from francophone parts of Africa will experience more difficulty acclimatizing in English-speaking host countries irrespective of their educational qualifications. The absence of the necessary language skills makes employment negotiations difficult, while the chances of cross-cultural and transnational networks are curtailed. In fact, the refugee woman is silenced. Haffejee and East provide the following statistics to support this claim: “Over the years, women refugees from Africa have not fared well in employment. In 2007, 13.6% females were unemployed compared to only 5.9% males who were unemployed . . . Women refugees from Africa are often not English proficient and have less formal education than do their male counterparts.”93 Language thus has significant implications for women’s employment, their economic well-being, and, ultimately, their survival.

9 0. Ibid., 43. 91. Berger et al., African Asylum at Crossroads. 92. Twagiramungu, “Phenomenological Study of Lived Experiences.” 93. Haffejee and East, “African Women Refugee Resettlement,” 6.

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Xenophobia

Xenophobic discrimination and prejudice based on foreignness are challenges refugees come across in their host communities. Xenophobia, which refers to a strong aversion toward foreigners, can instigate discriminatory practices against refugees. Although the UNHCR frowns upon xenophobic refugee discrimination and places the act on the list of priorities to curtail for refugee protection, these situations persist.94 Sometimes this discrimination or prejudice can take a violent turn, plunging the refugees right back into the den of insecurity they just left behind or compounding the trauma they had just scaled through. In other words, they can still be prone to physical attacks, and for women, rape by host nationals and even public officials such as the police might not be out of the question. Tendayi E. Achiume puts it more explicitly, stating that “brutal attacks against foreign nationals threaten the lives of refugees in contexts as varied as Libya, Greece, the United Kingdom, India, Malaysia, Thailand, Ukraine, and even the United States.”95 This situation is often not instigated by having not met the criteria for refugee status. In other words, it might not matter whether the refugees possess the appropriate documents that legalize their stay; sometimes, they are physically or verbally attacked for the mere fact of their foreignness. No doubt, the black African woman in this context is doubly prejudiced for her race (a subject that continues to trigger global discussion), especially in non-black communities; for her foreignness; and sometimes for her religion. Haffejee and East observe that African refugee women like Sudanese women, who are often Muslims garbed in hijab, which is a physical representation of the Islamic religion, are sadly associated with terrorism in the US.96 These women often experience oppressive reactions to their religious identity, and most of them provide testimonies of discrimination as a result of their identities. In this scenario, the web of intersections (race, religion, gender, status, etc.) that constitute women’s oppression becomes more apparent. Aside from these overt displays of xenophobia, refugees are also at the mercy of institutional xenophobic practices. Sometimes these are in the form of government processes and policies that sustain inequalities that could otherwise be avoided across groups. Some of these policies and processes limit refugees’ employment opportunities, housing, or access to basic services such as 9 4. Achiume, “Beyond Prejudice.” 95. Ibid., 324–25. 96. Haffejee and East, “African Women Refugee Resettlement.”

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education and health care.97 Sometimes even after undergoing formal education and training, some refugees are still discriminated against when it comes to high-remunerating employment. Even when they are legally granted access to basic social services such as health care, some institutions find ways of exerting discriminatory practices on refugees. Achiume observes that in some asylum countries such as South Africa where refugees are legally entitled to medical care, testimonies like this are common: “In many cases when they seek health care, clinics and hospitals either refuse to treat them, terminate their care prematurely, charge them excessive fees, or verbally harass and mistreat them for being foreign.”98 This will take a toll on women refugees who have been forced by circumstance to solely shoulder the responsibilities of their households. This implies that their children will not be given adequate health care in cases of health crisis, while the pregnant among them will have no access to professional prenatal care and delivery. These factors contribute to mental health issues for women refugees and make successful integration more difficult in their host communities. Repatriation

When the dust settles in warring countries, what happens to the citizens that have fled their homelands? Most often, when war, instability, and other forms of threat to people’s lives abate, it is expected that refugees in various neighboring or distant countries will return to their home countries. In fact, the UNHCR considers the repatriation of refugees to be the best of the pathways toward providing solutions for refugees.99 Voluntary repatriation is considered a lasting solution to refugees, but not all refugees consider this a welcome turn of events. Scholars such as Schaffer, with reference to the experience of Rwandan, Somali, and Burundian refugees, note that often when it comes to repatriation, male refugees flee their camps to find refuge in other countries.100 Most of the time, the women are left with the sole responsibility for their children, their relatives’ children, and even orphans with nobody else to help them. This reluctance toward repatriation comes from the fear of possible counterattacks, revenge killings, or imprisonment for the men, but the women are not left out of these likely consequences. Therefore, some of the women left behind refuse

9 7. Ziersch, Due, and Walsh, “Discrimination.” 98. Achiume, “Beyond Prejudice,” 332. 99. Achiume, “Beyond Prejudice,” 332. 100. Schaffer, “True Survivors.”

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to sign up for repatriation in fear for their lives and welfare in countries that had earlier failed to protect them, or in solidarity with their husbands’ decisions. However, whatever the refugee’s decision, they face the challenge of integration or reintegration in their host communities or their origin countries, respectively. Ordinarily, the refugee should be provided with access to social services such as education, health care, and avenues to rebuild cultural and social ties. This is particularly important for the repatriated refugee, male or female, but this is hardly the case after repatriation to most African countries. African women, from Rwanda to Liberia, suffered disproportionately upon their return.101 A larger population of the women returnees were the heads of their households, which comprised their children or the children of deceased relatives and friends. The burden of reintegration becomes clearly overwhelming in these situations. Some women were deprived access to their former homes, lands, and other properties, while others whose properties had been destroyed had to start afresh with little or no support. The others still in refugee camps must worry about acceptance from the new government alongside these struggles of the returnees. Returnee women also face the risk of being ostracized in a culturally prescribed manner as a result of their traumatic experiences. When a woman who has been the victim of rape, for example, is discovered, she is stigmatized, while her marriage or remarriage prospects drastically reduce. In the case of clear evidence of abuse, such as the presence of rape offspring, women are left to deal with the societal backlash and rejection of the child. Others return with mental illnesses induced by trauma and also have to deal with the stigma attached to mental illness. They are also prone to the exacerbation of their mental conditions given the lack of social and cultural support from their communities and the limited access to mental health facilities, while the whole environment continues to provide physical reminders of their loss and suffering. Irrespective of these foreseen challenges awaiting the repatriated African woman refugee, no doubt some women would voluntarily opt for repatriation. In cases like this, the woman might have been separated from her family in the course of flight, and so some or all of her family members might have been left behind; she could also have other ties such as land, houses, or industries. Whatever the reason, it is unsurprising that people often voluntarily want to return to their homes. The UNHCR considers the successful repatriation of refugees their responsibility, and the legal, physical, and material safety of the

101. Schaffer, “True Survivors”; Yacob-Haliso, “Illusion of Home.”

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repatriated refugees is indeed the ultimate goal.102 The UNHCR engages the support of the national authorities of both asylum and origin countries. They also seek the support of humanitarian agencies, the diaspora, and other nongovernment agencies who consider the welfare of humanity their priority to ensure the smooth reintegration of returnees. In fact, all the relevant actors that could ensure the success of this repatriation process should be and are usually involved. For refugees interested in repatriation, the UNHCR assumes the responsibility of providing access to relevant and topical information on the condition of their home countries. They also negotiate agreements between the countries of origin and asylum for the best approach to successful voluntary repatriation.103 Refugees are entitled to the right to return, only when they feel the need to or when their fear has abated; they should neither be coerced nor compelled against their will. The UNHCR is responsible for monitoring the integration and reintegration processes for the refugees who opt for integration in their asylum countries and repatriation to their origin countries, respectively.104 There have been successful repatriation programs for Africans, as noted by the UNHCR: “Despite the challenging environment, progress has been made in certain contexts. The voluntary repatriation of Angolan refugees, for example, ended in September 2015, with approximately 4,600 persons returning that year. Overall, some 18,000 Angolan refugees have returned home since 2014. In 2015, some 5,000 Rwandans voluntarily returned home, bringing the total number of returns to over 160,000 since 2000. Under the Comprehensive Solutions Strategy for Rwandan Refugees, States have committed to implement its main elements and to complete all voluntary returns as soon as possible, but no later than 31 December 2017.”105 The violence of war often leaves a dominant population of broken females whose experiences are heavily laden with brutality. They have watched the inversion of the normal; their daughters have been raped, maimed, or murdered; and a majority of their sons and husbands have been killed or jailed. They have not emerged unscathed; they have also had their own share of the hellish experience, and consequently, the population of many postconflict African countries such as Rwanda has a majority of a female working population. According to Human Rights Watch, the genocide

102. UNHCR, “Ten Point Plan.” 103. Ibid. 104. Ibid. 105. Ibid., 185.

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in Rwanda left behind a population that is about 70 percent female.106 These women have been invested in the reconstruction of their homelands and naturally formed groups and associations locally and nationally with the aim of providing much-needed support and assistance to other survivors, returnees, orphans, and widows. This situation calls to mind the resilience and strength of the African woman. They are often known to be strong pillars ensuring the survival of communities around the world. Psychological Effects of Refugee Experiences on African Women

The issues examined so far weigh heavily on women refugees, causing negative psychological reactions and making their settlement process much more complex. Displacement experiences have enormous psychological impacts on women’s well-being, and Farida Tilbury and Mark Rapley have noted that the challenges of resettlement constitute the highest cause of psychological instability and distress for refugee women.107 Although mental issues are not gender specific, women are recorded to often experience more mental-health-related issues than men and have a disproportionate experience of depression, isolation, PTSD, anxiety, and other symptoms.108 Women tend to undergo these negative experiences on a larger scale, and this is understandable given all the factors discussed here. All forms of conflict and violence increase the risk of a person’s inclination to the above mental issues; however, the level of exposure determines the severity. Following a recent study conducted in the US to gauge the rate of mental issues among refugee youth in the country, young women were revealed to experience significantly higher rates of mental health symptoms, with a ratio of 25:50 between boys and girls, respectively.109 Sideris states that “post-traumatic stress disorder or varying combinations of its symptoms are identified as the principal outcomes of war-related events for women.”110 This mental burden further jeopardizes their chances of employment, integration, and normalcy even long after the danger of war is gone. The impact of the unfamiliarity of the environment in which African women try to settle cannot be overemphasized. Tilbury and Rapley identified most of the factors creating distress and depression among African women refugees 106. Human Rights Watch, Shattered Lives. 107. Tilbury and Rapley, “There Are Orphans in Africa.” 108. Ibid. 109. See Wilson, Murtaza, and Shakya, “Pre-migration and Post-migration Determinants.” 110. Sideris, “War, Gender and Culture.”

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in Western Australia as structural and material in nature. The differences in cultural ideologies, as earlier stated, stimulate psychological stressors that could lead to mental health issues. Among these are structural issues such as differences in intergenerational and intergender relations triggered by the resettlement and fleeing processes. They also note that changes and movement often lead to the renegotiation of gender roles, which women were used to and comfortable with.111 Women also suffer from a perceived loss of identity and social belonging. In normal circumstances, the African woman’s identity is derived from her interaction and relationship with others, from cultural and religious perceptions of herself, and from a collective rather than merely individual conception of herself. Therefore, with community in the form of kinship groups and the attendant cultural and social rules, practices, perception of ancestors, ties to one’s land, family and historical bonds, and so on, gone or redefined, refugee women struggle with social dislocation and a perceived loss of identity. These social losses are leading causes of distress and mental issues among African refugee women, as the woman’s happiness and peace of mind are often linked to those of her family and children. Sideris engaged some of the women displaced by the war in Mozambique, and the following is one of the accounts of the social losses engineered by the war: “The war has taken our ixinzuthi. We are not the way we used to be before the war. In our villages we were people with dignity. We farmed the land of our ancestors. We provided for our families. We were respected. But the war has taken it away. The ixinzuthi is who you are. It goes together with your spirit. If your dignity is respected your spirit also will be okay. (Martha).”112 The ixinzuthi mentioned above refers to the very fiber of one’s being; it translates literally to the “shadow of a person.” Studies and scholars of African philosophy view it as “the shadow, moral weight, influence and prestige, the personality or the soul.”113 It is a pretty weighty concept, one that seems to connote tragic mental consequences in the event of its loss. Issues such as culture shock and the overwhelming differences in conceptions of family and relations, the difficulties in securing employment in a foreign country, survivor guilt, challenges with recognizing the qualifications of educated or skilled women, unsuccessful acclimatization attempts and general homesickness as a result of unfamiliarity, constant fear over the welfare and 111. Tilbury and Rapley, “There Are Orphans in Africa.” 112. Sideris, “War, Gender and Culture,” 716–17. 113. Bergland, Zulu Thought-Patterns and Symbolism; and Hammond-Tooke, Rituals and Medicines.

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safety of relatives left behind, other daily struggles such as caring for children and family without the familiar support of an extended family, language barriers, losing absolute control over the children’s cultural upbringing, having to help them with their education in a foreign land, and many more contribute to the immense psychological challenges facing African women refugees.114 With regard to the sense of displacement that accompanies refugeehood, Sideris points to the following accounts of women who provide personal stories of their anxieties, worries, and the depth of their feelings of loss and displacement: “In this place we are suffering. The worst part of it is that we don’t plough. We are used to ploughing. There in our place we got mielies [corn] from our fields, we got maybe vegetables. We supported our children quite well (Alice).”115 Alice mourns the loss of her economic means and empowerment, and understandably so, given that to the African woman, the land provides her with specialty and empowerment. As noted above, African women are famed as the leading agricultural producers in the continent as both subsistence and large-scale farmers. For most Africans, the relationship to one’s land is a crucial aspect of one’s being. Therefore, taking that away from her is like making her relinquish her source of strength and accomplishment as well as her maternal ability to provide for the nutritional needs of her children. In another excerpt, the speaker expresses loneliness and loss of security and family support structure, support and security being feelings that come from kinship and family: “I found that all my relatives who were left in Mozambique, my uncle and his children, all died. This happened when Renamo was still there. They lit a fire and all the people in this house were killed. It is really terrible because if you know that maybe you have got a problem, you always go to your relative. But now I have got no-one, nowhere to go even in Mozambique. (Lucia).”116 These factors are enough to engender psychological and physiological trauma and other health issues in anyone. However, the question is, how do refugee women deal with mental health? As noted by many scholars, the issue of mental health is unacknowledged in many African cultures, making it much more difficult for women to navigate the complexities of their mental well-being. Being associated with social stigma further complicates chances of seeking or gaining access to mental health services, which often do not exist or are inadequate in these cultures. In Somali culture, as noted by Bokore, “there is no cultural context to deal with the trauma of sexual violence,” and since a major part of 114. Tilbury and Rapley, “There Are Orphans in Africa”; Sideris, “War, Gender and Culture.” 115. Sideris, “War, Gender and Culture,” 717. 116. Ibid.

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women’s trauma and eventual mental health issues emerges from sexual violence and abuse, it is indeed an unfortunate situation, one that lets the affected women live with the full weight of unresolved trauma, which in turn affects their quality of life.117 Discussions of any sexual kind are highly prohibited, and sex is often associated with taboos and shame, which inhibits a cultural context to process sexual violence and trauma. Somalia is not the only society that is silent on issues related to sex. In many African contexts, victims of sexual violence are often stigmatized, blamed, and even punished.118 In the event of conception from rape, these offspring are regarded as less than human, often unfairly christened “bastards” or “illegitimate” children. In Mozambique, Sideris notes that children that are products of rape are often referred to as Lixo, which translates to “rubbish,” and since it is usually a mother’s joy to have her children socially regarded and accepted, it places a toll on these mothers while the children suffer for the unjust crimes of ruthless and entitled men.119 Women are often ostracized, and their chances for marriage or remarriage are ruined. Women in most cultures of Africa have to bear the responsibility of sexual integrity, and they are often seen as the bearers of culture. In some cases, women try to eliminate such pregnancies, usually with the help of nonprofessionals, further endangering themselves while being vulnerable to likely complications and infections. However, in the absence of a child as evidence of sexual assault, it is unsurprising that women who are victims of sexual violence tend to keep the experience to themselves, let alone seek professional help. That being said, the mental well-being of women who are caregivers and nurturers is often neglected. The brave among women search for coping mechanisms; some thereby resort to the abuse of drugs or alcohol, further jeopardizing their physical and psychological health.

Conclusion Having explained the challenges facing African women refugees, this study does not in any way negate the sufferings and challenges of other refugees; however, it embarks on a review of the scholarship surrounding African women refugees to underscore the peculiarities of their gendered challenges in the hope of bringing visibility to women refugees from Africa. To mitigate the 117. Bokore, “Suffering in Silence,” 99. 118. Schaffer, “True Survivors.” 119. Sideris, “War, Gender and Culture.”

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challenges of women refugees is first to appeal to African societies to shun war and promote peace and justice. This is primarily because the business of refugeehood is an expensive one; aside from the inhumanity witnessed in war, sustaining refugees in various countries is an exorbitant expedition. James L. Carlin notes that the expenses involved in providing comfortable settlement plans for refugees, such as employment and relief materials, often discourage the involvement of countries. Refugee admittance is perceived as an economic and political menace.120 However, when they do host refugees, they might not invest the funds adequate for the settlement of these refugees. Therefore, the need to eliminate refugeehood cannot be overemphasized. Certain calculated measures should be put in place. National governments should initiate laws or policies of inclusivity that will consider minority groups in the society, since significant refugee crises in history are products of wars provoked by the marginalization of minorities and the feelings of superiority of one group over another. This is essentially to eliminate the feelings of marginalization that are imminent in the operation of exclusionary policies and actions. Feelings of marginalization alongside other societal issues often provoke anger that contributes to reprisals, further exacerbating disagreements and threatening greater unrest. However, since disagreement, misunderstandings, the need to dominate, and altercation are natural to human existence, refugeehood is inevitable, and so are the distinct challenges of African women refugees. To alleviate these challenges, this study makes a few suggestions. In the first place, more research and data are needed to better understand the situation of refugee women and girls in various contexts around the continent. This will improve understanding, policy, and programming on better protection for African refugee women and girls. Additionally, refugee women should be informed of the options available to victims of any form of gender-based violence as well as their lawful access to local courts. Given the sensitivity of issues related to the sexual abuse of African women, the relevant authorities should practice cultural and emotional sensitivity and ensure the availability of women interpreters and interviewers during asylum processes alongside the solution of choice.121 These appointed interviewers and interpreters should be trained in psychosocial counseling to provide the security and comfort that women victims deserve in relaying their experiences. Male refugees should also be sensitized against engaging in all forms of violence against women, while proper measures should be put in place to prosecute violent and sexual 120. Carlin, “Significant Refugee Crises.” 121. Schaffer, “True Survivors.”

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offenders. Mental health facilities, like counseling, should be made available and more accessible to women who have obviously experienced traumatic situations to speed up their adjustment process and stability. Countries of asylum should, in collaboration with the UNHCR and other humanitarian actors, ensure women’s access to national services such as health care, justice, and education. Emphasis should be placed on female skill acquisition and education, as this will improve women’s prospects for employment and incidentally the welfare of refugee families, especially children. Women should also be included in panels and institutions that make decisions concerning refugees in either origin countries or asylum countries. This is because they are more likely to be able to provide useful insights on their experiences as women and advise on how to ensure the proper management of war-affected women, including paying attention to healing and opportunities for the affected women’s fresh start. The UNHCR and other humanitarian agencies should invest in mediation between the refugees and the citizens of the host communities. They should also strive toward maintaining constructive relations between them and citizens of their host countries. That way, a feeling of deprivation or competition between both can be avoided. Efforts should be put in place for the successful reintegration of repatriated refugees. National authorities in origin countries should assist women returnees in reclaiming their lands and properties, and their safety should be prioritized; measures should also be laid down to ease the process of rebuilding for persons who have lost everything. Governments of African nation-states should review property and inheritance laws that alienate and marginalize women to allay the difficulties of repatriated women.122 There should be simultaneous coordination between the national governments of the origin countries and the international agencies and organizations to achieve this. Similar measures must also be guaranteed when women are naturalized in their country of first asylum or resettled in advanced countries.

122. Ibid.

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AFRICAN REFUGEE YOUTH

Introduction Young people are vital to the development of any society given their characteristic energy, drive, dreams, and capabilities. Globally, 1.2 billion young people make up 16 percent of the global population.1 Africa has the world’s youngest population, compared with the youth population in other regions (see fig. 12.1). African youth make up 40 percent of the world’s youth population.2 Africa, in many ways, is now a continent of young people, a phenomenon described as the “youth bulge.” A whopping 75 percent—that is, three-quarters—of the African population is below the age of thirty-five, up to 60 percent is below the age of twenty-five, and nearly 50 percent is under the age of nineteen.3 Youth comprise more than half the population of several African countries, and Niger has the youngest population in the world, with a median population age of 15.1.4 For the purpose of this study, we adopt an elastic definition of youth: while the standard United Nations definition refers to youth as persons between childhood and adulthood, typically between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four, and the AU African Youth Charter adopts the ages of fifteen to thirty-five, in a few

1. United Nations, World Youth Report 2018, 12. 2. United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, “Africa’s Youth.” 3. United Nations Office of the Special Adviser on Africa, “Youth Empowerment”; Mo Ibrahim Foundation, “Africa’s First Challenge.” 4. United Nations Office of the Special Adviser on Africa, “Youth Empowerment.”

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Figure 12.1. Youth as a share of the total population by region, 2015. Source: United Nations, World Youth Report 2018.

instances in this chapter the discussion includes children, without prejudice to national and regional official defi nitions that may exist.5 Despite their numbers, the sad reality is that young Africans, who are supposedly an investment for the posterity of any nation, are being displaced, marginalized, alienated, and victimized on a large scale. Widespread confl icts, poverty, bad governance, corruption, limited opportunities, and migration by compulsion or the willful search for better lives outside their nationalities are the reality of many young Africans. With the growing crises and consequent displacement of persons across the continent, the number of young refugees continues to increase astronomically. The UN Children’s Agency asserts that “children are dramatically overrepresented among the world’s refugees. Children make up less than one third of the global population, but they were half of the world’s refugees in 2018. Today, nearly one in three children are living outside their countries of birth as child refugees; for adults, the proportion is less than 5 percent.” According to the UNHCR, 57 percent of all African refugees are children, which adds up

5. African Union, “African Youth Charter”; United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, “Defi nition of Youth.”

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to about four million African child refugees by the end of 2017.6 These children are victims of persecution, insecurity, and wars, which are the outcomes of poor governance and underdevelopment. Young African refugees are also not a homogenous group. They belong to diverse nationalities, cultures, ethnicities, religions, races, genders, and ages. Nevertheless, irrespective of their demographic diversity, their experiences as young refugees are similar, while their status as refugees has a uniform impact on the continent. For a continent still grappling with development in which youth populations should play substantive roles, the questions are, What is the impact of the alarming number of African refugee youths on the continent’s development? How do young people weather the storm of displacement in the various asylum countries of the continent and other parts of the world? This chapter addresses the issue of young African refugees in relation to the development challenges of the continent while also examining the experiences and challenges of these young refugees in their various asylum countries. It also explores the factors that contribute to the resilience of young African refugees, to provide a holistic perspective on the experiences of these refugees.

You th a n d th e Qu e stion of A fr ica n De v elopm ent The alarming increase of young African refugees is proof of growing instability on the continent. One implication of this trend is that much of the continent’s great minds and human resources are being underutilized, wasting away in refugee camps and on the margins of society. Africa inadvertently loses out on the mental and physical capacities of these displaced youths who could have among them future intellectuals and experts capable of contributing solutions to the continent’s staggering development issues. One could question whether Africa is at loss for human resources and if it has successfully harnessed even the non-displaced youths on the continent. As valid as this question is, a major part of Africa’s potential is being lost to the menace of bad governance and the attendant chaos. To a large extent, the forced migration of African youths is as much a cause of the continent’s brain drain as voluntary migration. How then do young refugees fare in areas of child and youth development? One of the fifteen Sustainable Development Goals requires that governments should provide all children in Africa and beyond access to basic primary

6. United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) Data, “Data Snapshot.”

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education.7 Noting that education is a crucial factor in the development of young refugees, many are faced with the challenge of having no access to basic education or not completing the cycle of schooling already initiated prior to displacement. As observed by Lawrence Meda and colleagues, in South Africa, secondary education opportunities for refugee youths are very limited, and their access to primary education continues to be low.8 Elizabeth Walton asserts that “there is ample reason for despair about the progress of inclusive education in South Africa. Despite sound and well-intentioned policies, exclusion from schools and within schools remains the experience of many children and young people in this country.”9 Children’s right to education is a globally accepted ideal that takes into consideration the personal and societal benefits of education. However, with the inability of some young refugees to access education, not only is their personal development affected, but society and the African continent continue to bear the brunt of uneducated youths. Education for children and youths is a tool for self-reliance, protection, enlightenment, and myriad other personal benefits. To society, education is an investment in socioeconomic, cultural, and political development. However, refugee status is a marker for alienation and deprivation for young Africans; it leads to their inability to access education. Therefore, with a fusion of their frustrations, potential psychological destabilization, and disruption in notions of identity and belonging, strength, and drive, African societies are setting themselves up for an implosion. Having large clusters of uneducated, ablebodied, and driven youth is an indirect endorsement of all forms of violent and nonviolent crimes. Within African countries where displaced youths are temporarily residing as internally displaced persons (IDPs), asylum seekers, or refugees in camps and cities, crimes suspected to be perpetrated by youths are a threat to societal development. Marc Sommers also notes that a substantial yet largely ignored portion of the refugee population is the undereducated and unskilled refugee youths who reside often illegally in cities after having fled across borders or left refugee camps.10 This informs Sommers’s opinion that a youthful Africa is the new emerging Africa. A youthful Africa in criminal discourses is an Africa filled with potential offenders. Validating this notion is the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime with the following opinion: “Throughout the world, teenaged   7. Meda, Sookrajh, and Maharaj, “Refugee Children in South Africa.”   8. Ibid.   9. Walton, “Getting Inclusion Right,” 240–45. 10. Sommers, “Young, Male and Pentecostal.”

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and young adult males commit most of the crime, and Africa’s youthful population (43% under the age of 15) means that a greater part of the society falls into this pool of potential offenders. Many of these young people are not enrolled in educational programmes and cannot find employment.”11 The reality of a predominantly youthful refugee crisis in Africa has many security implications for the already wobbling security structures of the continent and is a sure road map to perpetual underdevelopment. With a poorly funded criminal justice system, crime continues to go unaccounted for.12 Young people are risk takers, and concealing or engaging in illegal activities to ensure survival often means that refugees are flouting the camp rules and the rules of host communities. Some young refugees in camps are primary actors in the climbing rates of rape, robbery, prostitution, and physical violence.13 And yet, youths are hardly passive participants in their settlement in exile; rather, they are usually involved in active acclimatization activities, some a positive testament of their resilience and ingenuity, as in the case of Rwandans in Tanzania, which we discuss later in this chapter. Resilience, however, is not all we need to know about the activities and experiences of young refugees. Countries such as The Gambia, given their ineffective immigration control and porous borders, have become an attraction to many young undocumented runaways from the region as a transit route for dangerous crossings to Europe. They are usually under the age of seventeen and are often involved in violent acts and other delinquent expressions. These actions can be linked to their harrowing experience of war, their difficulties in successful integration, social isolation, and even mental health issues, factors that constitute the experiences and challenges of refugees.14 Following widespread violence in African countries such as Nigeria, there is an upsurge in IDPs who, as noted by Stephen Adewale, are mostly able-bodied youths between the ages of nineteen and forty.15 The increase in the number of IDPs in northeastern Nigeria has contributed to a spike in criminal activities in the country. The proliferation of guns and firearms in the country makes it even easier for this young, displaced, and poorly managed population to engage in criminal activities. Due to their justifiably higher levels of stress from

11. UN Office on Drugs and Crime, “Crime and Development in Africa,” ix. 12. Ibid. 13. Meffert and Marmar, “Darfur Refugees in Cairo.” 14. Ensor, “Crossing Borders.” 15. Adewale, “Internally Displaced Persons.”

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trauma, they are often much more predisposed to the abuse of drugs and to other harmful behaviors.16 Experiences of violence have a major role in young refugees’ resorting to violence. Experience of violence is a leading cause of mental health issues in young people, which they often cope with by externalizing delinquency and aggression.17 Therefore, it is unsurprising that young refugees are sometimes affiliated with gangs and gang activities, which Maria Ensor perceives to be an effort to deal with their transformation and experiences of exclusion.18 This might indeed be a primary cause, but it does not take away from the fact that the predominance of unskilled, barely educated young refugees, documented and undocumented, roaming the streets of urban Africa risks a prevalence of crime and invariably a setback in Africa’s holistic development. Poverty is one of the biggest contributors to criminal activities. There is a clear link between welfare, security, and development. Refugees and IDPs are usually among the most poor and needy of a society, even prior to their displacement. Many are poorly educated and unskilled, while some of the skilled among them are unemployed and have dedicated their craft to the proliferation of criminal activities to compensate for the inadequacies of the government and ensure their survival.19 Regarding IDPs, we also note here the almajiri system in northern Nigeria, where young boys (mostly between the ages of three and twelve) are sent off to Islamic centers to learn the Quran under the tutelage of a Malam (Islamic teacher). I. Aghedo and S. J. Eke attest that the system is failing, and instead of learning the Quran, these children are abandoned or sent off to beg for alms on the streets.20 They also note that as of 2011, there were about eight million almajiri in northern Nigeria, most of them left loose and roaming on the streets.21 A good number of these children have become delinquents, criminals, and prey for all sorts of predators, and the entire scheme seems to constitute a nuisance to society. These societal ills have a ripple effect on the continent’s development. There are direct and indirect consequences of a neglected, predominantly youth refugee population in parts of Africa. Often, the growth and position of a region on the global scale are a function of its public perception and collaboration with 1 6. Ibid. 17. O’Donnell and Roberts, “Experiences of Violence.” 18. Ensor, “Crossing Borders.” 19. Olukoju, “Never Expect Power Always,” 86. 2 0. Aghedo and Eke, “From Alms to Arms.” 21. Ibid.

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other nations. That is, the global perception of Africa is immensely important to potential foreign investment in the continent’s economy as well as meaningful collaboration in socioeconomic and technological advancements. However, the perception of the continent has continued to cost it meaningful growth and international investment. Aside from impacting economic advancement, the often-negative reputation affects the global disposition toward Africans around the world. Often, well-meaning Africans are discriminated against or denied certain privileges due to the continent’s unfavorable reputation, while the exponential growth of refugees casts the continent in a poor light, painting a picture of chaos, crime, and poverty and therefore placing the continent on the sidelines of meaningful global affairs. The development implications of the proliferation of young refugees across the continent call for an investment in proper management of young refugees. The presence of refugees has an enormous impact on the already battered economic, environmental, political, and security challenges of the continent. It puts enormous strain on the welfare of the citizens of the asylum countries while also counteracting the development efforts of these nations.22 The large refugee populations create competition for basic yet scarce resources such as food, water, housing (more construction demands and hikes in accommodation prices), sanitation, power, energy, fuel, land, medical resources, education, transportation, jobs, social services, and other facilities that are not easily accessible even to citizens of African host countries. This tilts the government’s interest away from the pressing development needs of their communities toward the demands of refugee sustenance. Public resources are invested in refugee protection, nourishment, and assimilation while also attending to the varied demands of their own local populace. The following excerpt from a UNHCR meeting provides specific reports on the monetary demands on countries hosting refugees: “A World Bank-sponsored study of uncompensated public expenditures arising from the refugee presence in Malawi recommended an emergency assistance programme in 1990–91 of up to $25 million. According to a systematic analysis of public expenditures, this was the amount, after deduction of international aid provided through UNHCR, invested in refugee related government assistance and administration during the preceding two years. Other refugee hosting countries could cite comparable experiences.”23 In addition, apart from the enormous monetary implications of refugee maintenance, the influx of refugees can create a case of excess demand for goods and services in refugee-hosting communities and regions. 22. UNHCR, “Social and Economic Impact.”

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This situation leads to inflation without proportionate employment remuneration for citizens and refugees alike. For young refugees, the scramble for scarce resources can have negative or positive implications for the host communities depending on the approach to the management of the youth population. Therefore, to tilt the predominance of youth refugees in favor of the host community, the education and skill acquisition of these young refugees should be carefully catered to. The management of refugee youths demands the establishment of refugee learning centers or an investment in the absorption and adjustment of young refugee students in already existing education systems.

Ch a ll enge s of You ng A fr ica n R efuge e s The journey that leads to refugee status is a long and arduous one. It commences with chaos and other threats to human safety in the form of wars, human rights abuses, or persecution and continues with a flight by persons involved to seek asylum in other countries or neighboring cities. The succeeding process is admittance into camps or other settlements, documentation, living as a refugee, and then eventual resettlement or repatriation. To be admitted for asylum or resettlement is to go through several complex processes to prove refugee status. For instance, A. Kerrie Pieloch and colleagues note that in Canada, “once arriving . . . a person who is seeking refugee status must go through a quasi-judicial process to determine their refugee claims, which can take several years. If their claim is rejected, then they face possible deportation.”24 These processes are clearly not easy on anyone, let alone children and adolescents, and are therefore complicit in some of the psychological and physical challenges in their development. Having survived the horror of wars and persecution, some young people have been raped or have witnessed the murder of their parents and loved ones and then also have to deal with the complex demands of adaptation in their new environments. Some of them, female and male alike, were forcibly conscripted and were part of fighting forces in combatant and noncombatant roles. Young Africans seeking asylum in Western countries are forced to adjust to an utterly different reality while dealing with perpetually changing societal conditions.25 Adjustment is often more complex than it is made out to be; it is a more complicated process having to deal with the sociolinguistic and cultural differences 23. Ibid. 2 4. Pieloch, McCullough, and Marks, “Resilience of Children.” 25. Sleijpen et al., “Between Power and Powerlessness.”

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between their home countries and their host countries, which further complicates their psychological welfare. There are challenges at each stage of the refugee’s journey. According to Pieloch and colleagues, the stages can (arguably) be divided into three parts: premigration, migration, and postmigration/resettlement.26 At each stage, there are specific challenges. For example, in the premigration stage, which is the stage that leads to the decision of flight, young people can experience exposure to violence and war, human rights violations, torture, and, in fact, a complete inversion of the state of normalcy. There is also the high possibility of forced separation between young people and their families. To underscore its immense impact, Laura Bates and colleagues note that “children separated from their parents and other adult relatives during conflict are a particularly vulnerable group.”27 Also, in this stage, rape and sexual assault are experienced by children of both sexes, although young women experience this at disproportionate rates. In the migration stage, the children’s education is disrupted, and they are further faced with unsanitary and unsafe living conditions, plus the threat of homelessness. They are also faced with many undignified and difficult circumstances, such as having to depend on other people or aid agencies for food, shelter, and even clothing. They are often denied rights during the refugee process. Also, even after going through the unsettling stage of flight or migration, they must familiarize themselves with the new systems of care and social services in their host countries. For the African youth in Western countries, it is almost certain that they will experience discrimination on the basis of race and differences in cultural orientations and language. They must manage the shock that comes with being plunged into an alien culture. They often must battle with the realities of instability, as their families might continue to move frequently. Their long experience of violence also has a huge role to play in the success or failure of their adjustment. Some of these young people have been recruited as child soldiers. Sommers notes that “child exploitation is a central military

2 6. Of course, this categorization is problematic on various levels, as it is oversimplified: the stages are not mutually exclusive and can overlap, the refugee life/solution-seeking phase is conflated with “postmigration,” and this may not be so, and the movement between stages is certainly nonlinear, that is, a person can return to a previous stage rather than move to the next expected stage. Nonetheless, we employ this categorization here simply to show the problems that young people face at various times in their refugee lives and not to imply in any way that those lives are reducible to only these three stages. 27. Bates et al., “Sudanese Refugee Youth.”

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strategy.”28 Therefore, they either have been perpetrators of brutal actions such as rape, indiscriminate killing, and destruction of property or have been overly exposed to them. Others have been on the receiving end of these inhumane acts. However, they are all victims of exploitation. Child soldiers are often seen as expendable materials given the predominance of orphaned and separated children in war zones and are therefore often used as spies, abused, and taken as “bush wives.” In cases where they are too distraught and unable to deal with the psychological consequences of their position, they are replaced.29 Marieke Sleijpen and colleagues note that due to this history of violence, young refugees are at risk of psychological or physical ailments ranging from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) to sleep deprivation, behavioral and mood disorders, and an assortment of emotional problems.30 Furthermore, coupled with their history of violence is the stress of acculturation, which has dire psychological implications for the well-being of young refugees. Acculturation in this context is a form of adjustment that is elicited from interaction with people of diverse cultural backgrounds, which in turn leads to cultural and psychological changes manifested in behavioral modifications or a shift or readjustment in lifelong perspectives.31 Acculturation is integral to the resettlement of refugees in their host countries. As outlined by W. John Berry, there is a framework of four change strategies for acculturation, which comprise assimilation, separation, integration, and marginalization.32 Assimilation implies that the refugees will have very little contact with people from their ethnic and cultural groups, and consequently, they will have greater contact with persons from the dominant or host cultural groups. The likely outcome is that the young refugees in the mix unconsciously adopt the cultures of the host countries, relinquishing the cultural practices of their birth countries. If this acculturating strategy is adopted consciously or unconsciously by the refugee, there is no doubt that young refugees battle with the psychological implications of this indirect withdrawal from the comfort of cultural familiarity and therefore will most likely suffer from anxiety or the stress of a perceived loss of identity. The strategy of separation requires the rejection of the culture of the host community for the exclusive investment in one’s own familiar cultural terrain. 2 8. Sommers, “Young, Male and Pentecostal,” 364. 29. Sommers, “Young, Male and Pentecostal,” 364. 30. Sleijpen et al., “Between Power and Powerlessness.” 31. Brand, Loh, and Guilfoyle, “Young African Female Refugees.” 32. Berry, “Immigration, Acculturation and Adaptation.”

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Although this seems like the safest course of action for many young refugees, it also comes with consequences. The reason for flight in the first place is to find safety within the confines of another nation; often, refugees pursue resettlement and begin to pick up the pieces of their lives in a new country. The strategy of separation is not the wisest course of action for anyone seeking to find a new life in the host community. This is because cross-cultural interaction is crucial to the settlement of young refugees in their host community. Cultural interaction is inevitable in school settings and in areas of employment and residence; therefore, separation is not ideal for resettling refugees, young or old. The next strategy is that of integration, in which refugees get to maintain connections to the cultures of both their birth and host countries. In other words, they continue to stay in tune with the values of their native cultures while making room for the values of their host countries. The question is, at what cost? Rachael Brand and colleagues observe that this strategy demands a certain amount of cultural shedding. That is, the refugee with full knowledge of their ethnic cultural values has to shed some of it to accommodate some of the new culture of the host country. They also note that refugees often become conflicted about what cultural aspect to adopt and shed, which is a stressful exercise that brings about acculturative stress for young refugees.33 However, this is by far the most positive and practical acculturation strategy, given the option of staying in touch with one’s roots while selectively giving room for the consideration and acceptance of another culture. A study on sources of acculturative stress among young Sudanese refugees cited in Brand et al. revealed that “[among] 20 Sudanese adolescents, aged between 13 and 18 years of age living in Brisbane, Australia . . . the main sources of acculturative stress for the young refugees were lack of English language proficiency, strict parental control and conflicting cultural rules between the Sudanese and the Australian culture. The female adolescents also reported that they do not enjoy the same degree of freedom as permitted by their parents compared to their Sudanese male counterparts.”34 The strategy of integration does not entirely apply to very young refugees without a strong family support group and who did not have the necessary amount of time to internalize the beliefs and cultures of their origin communities. They are therefore left with no choice but to adopt the strategy of assimilation. Among these strategies, the persons most likely to adopt them are the marginalized who have little or no interest in the maintenance of culture (home or host) and therefore have few attachments. 3 3. Brand, Loh, and Guilfoyle, “Young African Female Refugees.” 3 4. Ibid., 91.

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Irrespective of the acculturation strategy adopted by young refugees, they are still up against a great deal of structural challenges. Having earlier discussed the diversity of the young African refugee (with regard to race, gender, ethnicity, language, culture, sex, and religion), it is unsurprising that a majority of their acculturative stress stems from these markers of diversity and identity. Race is an integral aspect of young African refugee experiences in Western countries. As a predominantly black-skinned continent, not disregarding white South Africans and other lighter-skinned Africans from northern African countries, the vast majority of young African refugees are dark skinned. The young African refugee resettling in a predominantly white community is conspicuous on the basis of color and other physical features and may be discriminated against. As Brand and colleagues opine, “It is common for refugees who resettle in a predominantly white, English-speaking country like Australia to experience discrimination on the basis of being ethnically or culturally different from the majority of the population.”35 They often go on to experience everyday and institutional racism premised on age-old prejudices against black people. They are vulnerable to victimization by bullies in schools, and Val Colic-Peisker notes that they tend to experience more discrimination than other lighter-skinned refugees from the Middle East.36 According to a study conducted on refugees in Nepal, black Somali refugees are doubly prejudiced against: first, for their religious beliefs, since Islam is often equated with terrorism, and second, for their race and skin color. They are often taunted or verbally abused, as in the following account from a female Somali refugee: “It is even difficult to roam on the streets, people start staring at you, they will start calling you names like kala, habsi [“black” in derogatory language] (Somali female, 20).”37 They are also denied vital amenities such as housing, although some of them attest to the kindness of some of their landlords: “The Nepalese don’t want to rent us their flats because of our colour . . . From the morning till evening we go out to look for a house everywhere in the city. Even with the help of the Somali community it was difficult for us to find a house (Somali female, 52: focus group).”38 Language and ethnicity tend to present their own challenges for young African refugees. In Western societies, young African refugees with little or no education or who simply have not been exposed to the dominant language of 35. Brand, Loh, and Guilfoyle, “Young African Female Refugees,” 91. 36. Colic-Peisker, “Visibility.” 37. Thomas et al., “Resilience of Refugees,” 5. 38. Ibid.

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their host country tend to be discriminated against for their accents or their inability to speak the host language fluently. In schools, they are often bullied for the same reason, and so they struggle with their schoolwork as a result of their inability or difficulty in understanding the language of instruction. However, this does not continue to be the case, as young refugees tend to adjust quickly, often mastering the dominant language of their host community. They experience these discriminatory practices in various social environments such as schools, work areas, and even religious places. The socioeconomic instability of young Africans affects their experiences as refugees in the host or destination countries.39 In class-conscious communities, young refugees of school age are often the target of bullies as a result of visual indications of poverty such as the poor state of their uniforms or clothes. These factors, coupled with the need for social belonging, elicit many emotional challenges for school-age children. Young refugees who are already struggling to fit in are also being bullied and discriminated against. Such bullying occurs on account of not just their differences in physical appearance such as race, clothing, disability, language, cultural disposition, or religion but also the obvious signs of their family’s financial struggles. All these factors further compound the trauma of persecution refugees experience. In places like the US, Badiah Haffejee and Jean F. East note that Islam is often equated with terrorism. For refugee women who wear a hijab and other traditional Muslim identifiers, their religion becomes a basis for discrimination and stigmatization. Haffejee and East go further to substantiate this notion by underlining the experiences of one such woman: “Safiya, a Somali, explained that her veil was always an issue and that she has been told on several occasions at work to use smaller veils so her long veil does not interfere with her job security.”40 Teenage girls who are still grappling with the identity challenges associated with the shift in location also have to deal with the stigmatization of their hijab and the resultant discrimination. These factors contribute to their acculturation stress and also impact their mental and psychological development. Young refugees are also victims of structural forms of xenophobia. The aversion to foreigners and the fear of foreignness are some of the biggest challenges facing refugees. Foreignness in this context refers to being perceived as or actually being a national of a different country or culture. This form of

3 9. Doyle and McCorriston, Beyond the School Gates. 4 0. Haffejee and East, “African Women Refugee Resettlement,” 6.

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discrimination as noted by the UNHCR is usually on the basis of “race, color, descent, or national or ethnic origin, including in combination with other grounds, such as religion, gender and disability.”41 This antipathy is often reflected overtly or covertly, such as when a refugee is bullied for having an accent or speaking a different language or is discriminated against for her hijab and traditional clothes, or even the physical attacks against foreign nationals and their businesses in the case of South Africa, which has become infamous for its xenophobic responses to foreigners in the country.42 More specifically, Tendayi E. Achiume observes that the safety of refugees is often threatened by brutal xenophobic attacks in their host countries. The young African refugee in this context is either directly or indirectly attacked: “Sometimes this discrimination is violent. Brutal attacks against foreign nationals threaten the lives of refugees in contexts as varied as Libya, Greece, the United Kingdom, India, Malaysia, Thailand, Ukraine, and even the United States. This is the case regardless of whether they possess legal documentation authorizing their presence in these countries. Refugees are also regular targets of verbal and physical harassment by private citizens and even public authorities, such as police officers.”43 Refugees’ livelihoods are also undermined by racism and xenophobia. This structural discrimination presents itself systematically; it is woven into the social system. Businesses and educational institutions find new and inventive ways to conceal but implement their xenophobic antipathy toward refugees. They are often restricted or denied access to certain services such as health care, education, and formal employment, irrespective of their qualifications and skills. The existence of complex and unrealistic requirements for formal employment with decent remuneration means that refugees are often unable to meet these standards and are therefore stuck with the worst-paying jobs, while their young children and wards struggle with the attendant financial challenges, are granted unequal opportunities with the citizens of their host countries, and yet are often expected to compete on equal grounds. Education for young children is a human right, one that is recognized in international human rights law and has rightly been extended to refugee children in many countries of the world. However, the question is, how practical and effective is this extension, since refugee children around the world still battle with the challenges of accessing basic education? This calls to mind the institutional discrimination against child refugees across the globe. This sheer 4 1. Achiume, “Beyond Prejudice,” 324–325, 331. 42. McConnell, “Migration and Xenophobia.” 43. Achiume, “Beyond Prejudice.”

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prejudice can present itself in varied ways, as in the following excerpt: “This would be the case where a refugee is barred from enrolling in a public elementary school by an administrator who explicitly states the basis for the denial as anti-foreigner prejudice. Alternatively, a refugee may be barred from enrollment because she cannot produce a recent academic transcript and birth certificate. All her documentation was destroyed during her flight from her country of nationality. Furthermore, she cannot seek copies of this documentation from her country of nationality because to do so would jeopardize her asylum claim.”44 The UNHCR, as noted by Achiume, is constantly putting measures in place to eliminate explicit xenophobic actions against refugees using its emerging “antixenophobic discrimination policy.”45 This policy is directed at the discriminatory practices of host countries against refugees but does not take a holistic view of xenophobic discrimination. As commendable as their actions are, their inability to take a comprehensive view of what constitutes xenophobic discrimination means that xenophobic discrimination against refugees has continued unabated. Achiume also notes that much of the discriminatory actions against refugees have been covert and involve no “explicit prejudice-based xenophobic discrimination.”46 Therefore, much of the lives of refugees are woven around institutional forms of discrimination that put them at risk of overt displays of xenophobic prejudice. This kind of prejudice explains the case of refugee children who are bullied due to reflections of the economic struggle in the form of clothing or inability to pay fees and other bills. It is a vicious cycle, where their parents are first unable to secure high-remunerating employment following the institutional restrictions that made it so; and then the young children have to bear the direct consequences of being bullied or teased on the basis of worn school uniforms, unhealthy appearance, inability to go on school trips due to costs, and so on. The result is that some young refugees are denied opportunities, making them repeat the cycle, fall lower than their predecessors, or, worse, get involved in criminal activities that further expose them to “explicit prejudice-based xenophobic discrimination.”47 In other words, justice, though perverted, is easily, cruelly, and swiftly served to foreigners. The case in Egypt is not very different. Ensor notes that the refugees in the country are much more marginalized given that the country has no enshrined 4 4. 45. 4 6. 47.

Ibid., 326. Ibid., 348. Ibid., 326. Ibid., 323.

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refugee policy, although they have ratified several international treaties on refugee rights.48 Consequently, the refugees have limited or no access to social services and support in the form of education, health, or economic services. In this case, the UNHCR is expected to provide these services directly. Restrictions of this kind have immense implications for the mental and physical growth and development of young refugees, and the restriction on education disproportionately affects them. Following the example of South Sudanese refugees in Egypt, one can argue that cultural and religious ideologies could also serve as impediments to the public services that young refugees can access. According to Ensor, unlike refugees from Iraq, who are prevented by Egyptian authorities from attending public schools, South Sudanese children are allowed to attend these schools. However, some of the Sudanese families “consider local curricula unacceptable and undermining of their own cultural values, as the imposition of Islamic culture by the Khartoum government was among the chief reasons that prompted them to flee their country.”49 Ensor notes that the UNHCR provides alternative refugee schools that even offer tuition grants provided by Catholic Relief Services. However, the one limitation of these refugee schools is that they are not accredited by the ministry of education.50 Among these constraints are the gang culture in the area and refugees’ membership. Ensor observes that gangs in the area are divided into groups, and each group has a territorial claim on two of the schools offering secondary-school certificates to the refugees—the African Hope School and the Sakakini.51 Therefore, refugees who are nonmembers or allies of the gangs are not allowed to attend either of the schools. Aside from schools, other aspects of the community’s resources such as housing are reportedly also gang-controlled. Given that education and environment are of immense importance to young refugee development, these constraints have negative implications for the growth and social adjustment of young African refugees. Putting it more specifically, Ensor opines that “constrained educational attainment in turn impacts job opportunities. For refugees and other foreigners, legal authorization to work in Egypt cannot be obtained without sponsorship from an employer, and is further constrained by stringent labor requirements, such as demonstrating

4 8. Ensor, “Crossing Borders.” 49. Ibid., 120. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid.

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that no Egyptian would be able to fill the job in question. Legal employment is consequently limited to an extremely small, educated elite.”52 Limited access to health-care services is also one of the institutional challenges of refugees across the world, young and old, including Africans. According to Ramin Asgary and Nora Segar, refugees and asylum seekers have very poor access to health-care services; in fact, they are last on the long list of other immigrant groups to have access to health care.53 As an example, Achiume examines the health-care system in South Africa and its disposition toward foreigners and refugees. By written law, refugees are entitled to the same health benefits as citizens; however, Achiume notes that this is hardly the case, following a Human Rights Watch report on refugee access to health care that states that “in many cases when they seek health care, clinics and hospitals either refuse to treat them, terminate their care prematurely, charge them excessive fees, or verbally harass and mistreat them for being foreign. Even where health care providers are aware of what the law requires, they may refuse to treat refugees because they are foreign.”54 This is a very inhumane situation given the prior traumatic experiences of refugees and asylum seekers. Some refugees have been tortured, sexually abused, maimed, exposed to harsh weather conditions, and starved, and so they often battle several consequential health challenges. They are also prone to a long list of psychological health issues such as PTSD, depression, and anxiety, which often results in long-term physical health conditions. Additionally, they are prone to several infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, hepatitis B, and certain parasites, some of which are the effects of unsanitary and unhealthy encounters in their process of flight and even encampment. Asgary and Segar also note that nutritional illnesses, dental issues, and chronic diseases significantly affect the group as well. Other health concerns are products of the physical trauma experienced by many.55 It is not uncommon to come across tissue and head injuries, visual or sight impairments, epilepsy, fractures, maimed private parts, and other effects of sexual assault and violence.56 Therefore, denying them access to basic health-care services is often a death sentence. The high cost of medical services is another structural barrier restricting refugee access to medical services in their various host countries. Often, refugees are overwhelmed by the cost of medical care and so end up not seeking 5 2. Ibid. 53. Asgary and Segar, “Barriers to Health Care Access.” 5 4. Achiume, “Beyond Prejudice.” 55. Asgary and Segar, “Barriers to Health Care Access.” 56. Ibid.

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medical assistance. They often pray that they do not fall ill. This approach is not far-fetched given the high religious disposition of Africans across the globe. In interviews conducted by Asgary and Segar for their study on “Barriers to Health Care Access among Refugee Asylum Seekers,” some of the respondents stated, “‘I just pray all the time that I don’t fall sick . . . because if it happens that I really have to go to the hospital, I don’t know how I’m going to do that’ [IN]. Another said, ‘Affordability is a very big issue here. Insurance is expensive. Even Americans can’t afford it. So what you think about us?’ [FG].”57 This limited accessibility of health services affects the entire population of refugees across the world. However, it affects the younger population twice as much, because not only are they affected directly by medical conditions such as psychological distress, effects of physical trauma, or sexually transmitted diseases, which reduces the quality of their life if left untreated; they are also indirectly affected because whatever happens to their older family members such as parents impacts them too. However, irrespective of these myriad challenges, studies show that young African refugees have remarkable resilience, regardless of their history of trauma and the adversities of resettlement.58

R e si li ence of You ng A fr ica n R efuge e s Resilience is a calculated effort, a demonstration of strength that requires one to adopt effective coping mechanisms and strategies in the face of difficulties in order to maintain one’s psychological well-being.59 It has been appropriately defined in the context of refugees as the “ability to cope, withstand stress and recover from the challenges associated with forced migration and becoming a refugee.”60 In 2019, 17,735 unaccompanied and separated children—children below the age of eighteen who had been separated from their families and were not under the care of any adult—applied for asylum in Europe.61 The children are vulnerable and not only face the rigorous ordeal of the asylum process but also have to endure the trauma of separation and displacement. However, it is quite remarkable that most of the children and young adults adjust and thrive despite their overwhelming challenges, like Grace, the playing South Sudanese child refugee pictured in figure 12.2. There is therefore a need to recognize and 57. Ibid., 514. 58. Ensor, “Crossing Borders.” 59. Brand, Loh, and Guilfoyle, “Young African Female Refugees.” 6 0. Ibid., 102. 61. UNICEF Europe and Central Asia, “Latest Statistics and Graphics.”

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Figure 12.2. Grace, a five-year-old South Sudanese refugee in Dadaab refugee camp, Kenya, plays like all children. Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Grace,_5 _years_old,_a_Refugee_from_South_Sudan,_in_a_see-saw_in_Daadab _Refugee_Camp.jpg.

engage the agency and resilience of refugees across the globe so as to truly understand the various challenges and coping methods adopted. The resilience of young African refugees is evident in several actions and decisions taken in the course of their resettlement. Having survived a history of violence, extortion, and abuse is proof of their doggedness in the face of adversity and evidence of their ability to acclimatize in spite of the unyielding prejudices of the societies they find themselves in. Marjorie A. Muecke states that “refugees present perhaps the maximum example of the human capacity to survive despite the greatest of losses and assaults on human identity and dignity.”62 They often subscribe to self-reliant tactics for survival such as rural-to-urban migration or camp-to-city migration. In Sommers’s observation, young Burundian refugees in Tanzania exhibit this determination in their movement to Tanzanian cities in search of better life, doing so with a fervor that matches that of the nonrefugee youth, and often spontaneously settle there.63 From the 6 2. Muecke, “New Paradigms,” 515. 63. Sommers, “Young, Male and Pentecostal,” 350.

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onset of their journey to resettlement, they flout the rules of camp confinement by exploring entrepreneurial options in cities, and even while in camps they actively invest in self-sustaining ventures, some of which are testaments to their industriousness. They can be living in host community cities but not as registered residents. F. C. Thomas and colleagues also note that in the course of their research, they often encountered self-settled refugees in parts of Nairobi running personal businesses, and some had expanded enough to hire other refugees and even local Kenyans.64 Sommers states that “the case of Rwandans in refugee camps in western Tanzania after the civil war and the 1994 genocide in Rwanda offers a vivid recent example. Field research in camps in 1994 and 1996 there found Rwandans forming their own Swahili classes, organizing militia training exercises, trading and travelling widely, and alternatively raiding and working for local Tanzanians—all of which the refugees knew, were against Tanzania’s regulations.”65 In addition to their resilience, Brand et al. note that many young African refugees are unwilling to dwell on their past experiences.66 Although most of them have endured psychological distress due to their traumatic history, many still look hopefully toward the future, refusing to let their experiences define them. According to Sleijpen et al., many Ugandan adolescents who had been privy to war and the atrocities of war did not show any signs of psychosocial distress four years after the end of the war.67 Most young refugees harbor dreams and hopes for the future. Brand et al. also note that in Australia, many young refugees are “optimistic about the role they will play in Australia and how they will integrate their careers and dreams into the Australian way of life.”68 Often, this optimism and hope or the absence of both is a function of the treatment they receive from their host community. It is true that young refugees experience several challenges and traumatic experiences during their journey, all of which are worth intensive study. However, Sleijpen et al. further suggest that alongside the study of struggle and adversity among refugees, efforts should be made by scholars toward studying and analyzing the resilience of refugees. Specifically, they call on researchers to identify the protective factors these youths have deployed in coping with adversity, as this can provide insights into the conditions that make such resilience 6 4. Thomas et al., “Resilience of Refugees.” 65. Sommers, “Young, Male and Pentecostal,” 348–49. 6 6. Brand, Loh, and Guilfoyle, “Young African Female Refugees.” 67. Sleijpen et al., “Between Power and Powerlessness.” 68. Brand, Loh, and Guilfoyle, “Young African Female Refugees,” 103.

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possible. Young Africans themselves identify factors such as peer, family, and community support, acceptance of their religious and cultural values, and individual differences as vital to their ability to forestall psychological distress and promote resilience. Family and Peers

In the absence of institutional support, young refugees turn toward their immediate families and friends for support and solidarity during their journey. These familial relationships aided their resilience in the absence of institutional support from their host communities. They helped reduce if not eliminate the signs of psychological distress expected from displaced persons. This is expected given the family and community orientation of many African cultures. Most African refugees have kept the flame of community and family burning even as refugees in distant lands. In the absence of immediate families due to separation or death, refugees sought out new families within their communities: “Tribal elders and caretakers in the refugee camps were another important source of support for the youth. A few of them reported having individual families from their tribes who took them in and provided care at various times in their journey. However, for the most part, it was the elders from their tribe living in the camps or functioning as caretakers assigned by the UN who provided support to the unaccompanied youth.”69 This provided the young with immense financial and nutritional support, moral and cultural support, and an upbringing that is necessary for their physical growth and character development. The significance of family, friends, and community as a buffer to the stressful experiences of refugees is captured in the following statement by a young Sudanese refugee: “We are happy when we come together—Somalis as a group when we come together—when we come to the community centre, when we come together in our homes, when someone is sick and we come together, we feel happy (Somali female, 30: focus group).”70 Thomas et al. also recognize family support as a vital part of refugee coping strategies. Findings from South Africa, Tanzania, and western Europe corroborate this conclusion. However, this is not to say that persons with close family support do not experience the same degree of obstacles as others without; rather, young Africans with family support tend to cope better than others without. Among unaccompanied young refugees, friends and peers were identified as the primary support

6 9. Bates et al., “Sudanese Refugee Youth,” 177. 70. Thomas et al., “Resilience of Refugees,” 6.

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system. Playing with their friends, say football, for example, as in figure 12.3, provided a much-needed distraction from the many existent stressors. According to one of the Sudanese refugee youths encountered by Bates et al. in the course of their research, “What helped me most was my friends,” and another noted, “We decided to come together, older boys and younger boys and those in the middle and stay together as a family.”71 Community Support

Community support in this context takes two forms: support from one’s own refugee community and support from the host community. In the absence of host community support, the refugee community often fills in the gap, or vice versa. However, the host community needs to have a strong refugee policy, one that recognizes refugee struggles and aims to ease them, to be able to provide enough support for refugees. Some countries serve this purpose by conducting research on existent refugee communities and instituting practical ways to mitigate their struggles. They often provide community-based health programs that are designed to target refugee children and provide for their mental and physical health care. Canada, for instance, applies a “tiered approach,” which aims to include the community and families in the mental treatment of young refugees. The community provides the children as well as their families with muchneeded psychosocial support, also providing culturally adapted communitybased mental health treatment for the children involved. Countries such as the US have applied this approach in dealing with mental health cases in Somali child refugees. Often, a mere show of support, acceptance, and understanding of refugee struggles goes a long way to promoting resilience among these young refugees. Schools can also be safe havens. Pieloch and colleagues confirm that in Canada, some creative workshops were implemented to ease the acclimatization of young refugees. Children were encouraged to speak about their experiences and talk about their culture. They were encouraged to use artistic expressions such as photography, collages, paintings, and drawings to analyze their feelings. In Norway, “a school . . . with a large population of immigrant (refugee) children implemented a school-wide intervention to increase positive behavior, interactions, and learning environments in school. The goal of this program was to promote social competence through school-wide positive behavior support of all students in every grade.”72 Churches in their host community often serve as good community support systems for young refugees. 7 1. Bates et al., “Sudanese Refugee Youth,” 177. 72. Pieloch et al., “Resilience of Children,” 336.

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Figure 12.3. Refugee youth from different countries in the Dzaleka refugee camp, Malawi, meet every Sunday for a game of football. Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sunday _Football_in_Dzaleka.jpg.

Church activities and groups such as drama clubs help distract and ease the stressors in their daily lives. Young refugees often look forward to their church services and programs, as church members provide personal support to the young refugees. In the absence of their parents, church sermons and clergy help foster hope in the youngsters and encourage them to invest in education and look forward to reuniting with their families. Individual Differences

Much of a person’s reaction to life depends on their personal outlook. Matthew Hodes and colleagues are of the opinion that further research on refugee adjustment and resilience should take into consideration the individual differences among refugees that may contribute to their resilience. Several researchers have studied the role of gender in resilience, revealing that young female asylum seekers exhibit higher levels of symptoms of depression and PTSD than males.73 Personal outlook is also associated with individual differences. In situations of distress, people with a more positive outlook toward life tend 73. Hodes et al., “Risk and Resilience.”

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to adjust and thrive better than those without. Among the Sudanese young refugees resettled in the United States, they identified a preoccupation with the future instead of the past as one of the factors that aided their resilience. Young refugees resolved not to indulge their trauma but rather invest in their education to be of help to themselves and their country in the future. Many are unaccompanied refugee children under eighteen, and they hope that when and if they reunite with their parents, the latter will be proud of them for their achievements. In this context, hope is a major driving force of resilience.74 Altruism as an approach to life, adopted by some refugees, helped foster their resilience, according to Pieloch et al. In their opinion, adolescent refugees in Sweden who took on a social approach centered around helpfulness to society seemed to adjust better and showed less signs of psychological distress and mental illnesses.75 The same goes for Sudanese refugee children living in Arizona in the United States, who were appreciative of what they had and expressed gratefulness in their actions toward their host community; such feelings made it easier for them to adjust to their new cultural environment. Some others attributed their drive to be self-sufficient and tap into the resources of their host community as one of the factors that promoted their resilience. Sociability and intelligence are also identified as part of the individual peculiarities that promote resilience in young refugees, say Bates et al. Sociability in this context has to do with the individual ability to coexist peacefully and constructively with the rest of the refugee group, while intelligence refers to ingenuity in the face of adversity.76 For example, “One youth told of how he managed to cross the Gilo River between Ethiopia and Sudan without drowning, as so many of the refugees did. Although only a boy of age 7 or 8 at the time, he and his friends fashioned a raft from plastic that the UN had left in the refugee camp and floated across safely.”77 Such instances of ingenuity have often made a difference in coping with the stresses of survival among young refugees. Religion

Some of the hope and drive that promote resilience in refugees is derived from their religious beliefs and is “a significant coping mechanism.”78 In Pieloch et al., a Sudanese child refugee in Massachusetts attributed his survival to the 7 4. Bates et al., “Sudanese Refugee Youth.” 75. Pieloch et al., “Resilience of Children.” 76. Bates et al., “Sudanese Refugee Youth.” 77. Ibid., 177. 78. Thomas et al., “Resilience of Refugees,” 6.

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help of God: “God wants me to be alive.” Another child, identified in Bates et al., saw God as the reason for their survival: “If God wanted me to be dead, I would be dead now. But I am not, so he must have other plans for me.” Another young refugee quoting his trust in God stated that “if there is no place to go, God can work you through bad things.”79 Some other refugee children attributed their adjustment to fervent prayers and God’s intervention. Former child soldiers were reported to have acknowledged God’s support in their journey. According to them, they were not abandoned by God, and for some others, their strength came from divine support. While religion has been recognized as a coping mechanism, this recognition of religion is contextual. Africa is well known for its great religiosity and its cultural consciousness of metaphysical and supernatural existences; therefore, finding succor and strength in religion is not surprising. Cultural Values and Belief System

Cultural values and belief systems of their home culture have been identified by scholars as other factors that aid resilience in young African refugees. Culture and belief tend to have a psychological presence in most people. Among the Sudanese children resettled in the United States, some of the older ones identified the early inculcation of values by their parents as a useful source of guidance on good conduct and acceptable behavior. They attest to often remembering the admonitions and lessons of their parents and have tried to live their lives the way they assume their parents would have wanted them to.80 The arrangement of family and peer support among refugees is a key factor in understanding how refugee communities develop resilience. A sustained connection to their culture aided their adjustment processes. The presence of elders from these cultures in the lives of young refugees, either as UNHCR-appointed supervisors or as members of the refugee group, aided the sustenance of their cultural practices and promoted the children’s connection to their culture. For example, one refugee mentioned that cultural dances held on Sundays were a big help in keeping him connected to their culture. Bates et al. are of the opinion that cultural values help keep young refugees away from trouble.81 Drawing from the cultural reserve, elders help guide youngsters in culturally appropriate behavior and conduct. They maintain the

7 9. Pieloch et al., “Resilience of Children,” 12. 80. Bates et.al., “Sudanese Refugee Youth.” 81. Ibid.

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culture of respecting elders since, as in most African cultures, the Sudanese believe that age bestows wisdom, which could be why most of their advice is heeded by the youngsters. Culture demands that they honor and guard their family reputations, and this influenced most of their actions, as the youths were often wary of indulging in certain activities that might reflect negatively on their family, community, and culture.

Conclusion This chapter has explored the development implications of the displacement of young African refugees, who are disproportionately burdened by the uneven distribution of resources and uneven access to vital welfare such as schools and health care. This sometimes pushes young refugees towards nonconstructive behavior and criminal activities, sometimes just to survive, other times as just an externalization of their frustrations. Whatever the reason, these activities negatively impact African society. They put the lives and properties of citizens at risk while also discouraging foreign investment in Africa. Still, young refugees display remarkable resilience in the face of extreme adversity. Given the unresolved political and ecological crises in many parts of the continent, the crisis of refugees will persist. However, constantly focusing the study on just these challenges, although useful in making the struggles of refugees more visible, might not provide the much-needed holistic perspective to tackle the inequities faced by refugees around the world. There is a need to highlight the resilience of young African refugees with as much fervor as we study their challenges. This study and work by scholars such as Thomas et al., Bates et al., and Pieloch et al. recommend that further research should explore the resilience factors and strategies of young African refugees. We further recommend that in measuring the processes of resilience for young refugees, there is a need for contextualization, as all processes cannot be applied uniformly to all refugees irrespective of their sociocultural differences. In other words, what is beneficial for Africans when put in context might not be beneficial for non-Africans. In more specific terms, Sleijpen et al. observe, “Using Western instruments to measure resilience in non-Western groups might be of limited value because hidden resilience sources, which may not come to the notice of those who define resilience from a Western perspective, can be missed.”82

82. Sleijpen et al., “Between Power and Powerlessness,” 2.

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Finally, this study emphasizes the need for scholars to constantly engage the development implications of the increasing numbers of young African refugees within the continent and across the globe. This is because as the underdevelopment of Africa has persisted, it is necessary to engage every possible factor decelerating her development in hopes of mitigating the problem by any means necessary.

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HOPE IN DISPL ACEMENT Refugees and Cultures of Creativity

Introduction This chapter looks at ways in which creative arts exist for refugees and forcibly displaced persons as avenues for coping with the often-harsh realities of refugee life, as well as tools for recreating culture, redressing the past, and cultivating hope for the future. It begins with a discussion of culture as it relates to refugee situations, in order to extrapolate, engage, and foreground creativity as an important tool in the lives of refugees. By focusing on the relation between culture and refugee life, we want to consider how creative avenues can help ameliorate the consequences of forced displacement. This chapter also argues for a shift away from monochromatic understandings of culture as the primary source of conflict, the type of factor that persistently contributes to forced displacement. While not rejecting the role of culture in conflict, we want to consider alternative ways in which culture can offer redemptive opportunities in the aftermath of cataclysmic events by highlighting the affective possibilities and functions of creative culture as employed and created by refugees. The chapter starts by placing culture in the web of turmoil that surrounds forced displacement. We seek to understand how culture is as important to the making of conflict situations as it is to the correction of displacement. Collectivity, in this context, is the bedrock of culture and therefore suffers from the consequences of displacement. The idea pursued here accentuates the instrumental power of culture, with the aim of shifting focus from its muchpurported role as an inciting factor in violence toward an understanding of culture’s ironic status as both victim and tool. Culture is often the starting point of processes that culminate in displacement; hence, while culture becomes

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a victim in the event of extensive annihilation that induces displacement, it can also be the active tool through which individuals can restore history and heal community. Cultural ethnocide comes before and follows genocide. The chapter stresses this, with a view to situating artistic practices as creative culture. The chapter foregrounds creative practices as cultural forms that can be deployed as tools for combating the realities of displacement.

Forced Displ ace m ent a n d th e Pl ace of Cu lt u r e Refugee situations are rife across the world, a symptom of a pervasive and systematic breakdown of the foundations on which world cultures, societies, and civilizations are built. One of these foundations is collectivity. Collectivity operates on the notion of togetherness, distinctiveness in diversity, and shared responsibility for the progression and flourishing of the human race, regardless of the sui generis constitutive nature of cultures within which these are realized. Culture is a microcosm of the larger human race and its workings; each cultural formation reduces the human species into a cluster of persons identifying as kin and kith on the basis of defined, sometimes essentialist and sometimes fluid parameters. Culture, therefore, is a pattern of living, of being human, and it remains so by virtue of human association—that is, to the extent to which people are willing and ready to defend it. Culture is fluid and unstable. Yet, despite its fluidity, culture continues to encompass and signify the totality of the ideological and epistemological expressions of individuals who identify with each other as members of the same group based on the extent to which they share or aspire to group-identifying features. Culture is thus inherently dynamic; its contradictions should be seen as defining features as opposed to indicating a fixed assumptive approach to the world. While culture binds people together1 by creating norms and standards, these norms and standards are not unchanging. Rama Mani notes the adhesive nature of culture when describing it as a thread linking past, present, and future.2 The fluid and unstable nature of culture is a function of the continuous and changing historical realities experienced by people. Reappraising culture as fluid can also reveal its role as an inciting factor in conflicts. In essence, collectivity (as actions of either cultural dissidents or conformists) aids the growth and transmutation of culture. Culture can grow only if there are internal and 1. Benedict, Patterns of Culture. 2. Mani, “Women, Art and Post-conflict Justice.”

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external forces of change acting in concert on it. It progresses or regresses based on its responses to these forces of influence.3 The factors surrounding refugee situations where people are forced to seek safety and asylum in foreign lands directly challenge this idea of collectivity; they also, in the process, question culture. From Burundi, Rwanda, and Uganda in East Africa to Azerbaijan and Armenia in eastern Europe, the forced displacement of people often results from violent conflicts stemming from ethnic distrust and nationalist essentialism. These instances of forced displacement and violence are evidence of the breakdown in ideas of collectivity, which ultimately evidences breakdown in culture. The Rwandan and Biafran situations, to be more specific, were corollaries of people rejecting nationalist narratives that had previously formed bonds of togetherness. Africa and many African states being colonialist projects, essentialist narratives were created that allowed different ethnic groups to forge a single identity along nationalist lines. This means the bonds of collectivity are tied to nationalist sentiments— a feeble bond, as indicated by the incessant ethnic and religious rivalries on the continent as well as genocides and refugee situations. One major setback of essentialist narratives such as this is that they are exclusivist and intolerant of fluidity, making them prone to engendering violence, since they are often idealistic compared to the dynamic nature of reality. In recognition of this, Feston Kalua has argued against a monolith African identity as well as recognizing Africa as a colonialist configuration.4 The culture of nationalism itself, responsible for the creation of nation-states from independent ethnic groups, suffered when collectivity fissured along ethnic lines. References to Tutsi as cockroaches by the Hutu militias and killing of the Igbo in the north of Nigeria are all consequences of a divisive approach to nationalism—that is, the absence of inclusivist collectivity. Whether in the form of genocide or pogrom, the first juncture of national breakdown, the type that leads to forced displacements and nationals turning into refugees, is at the point where the bonds of collectivity break down. Ideals and values that espouse communalism such as sharing and solidarity, which have held societal structures together, are often targeted. The ideals, narratives, and philosophies that had bound people are discarded, deliberately attacked, and wrecked, leading to ethnic, cultural, and national breakdown. This process from collectivity to forced displacement, where collectivity as a tool for culture-making is instrumentalized by a group for exclusionary acts 3. Ibid. 4. See Kalua, “Homi Bhabha’s Third Space.”

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against another, is one major reason culture has been identified as a catalyst for war and displacement. Culture has often been invoked for bellicose motives and as such is frequently seen as a provocative resource for confrontational and divisive nationalism, the kind that has plagued several ethno-pluralist countries, from Africa to the Middle East and to the United States. One other reason for this point is well echoed by Mani, who argues that “conflicts imputed to religion, ethnicity, racism and gender are seen as evidence of culture’s inherent tendency to provoke violence.”5 Mani’s point offers important clarity as to why culture’s causative place in the engendering and sustaining of violence is often referenced. In multiethnic communities, where culture is the distinctive signifier of heterogeneity—the cultural differences that signify homogenous groups as separate from one another—it is not uncommon to handpick or relate interethnic schisms that are products of culture or are religious and perhaps politically driven as unintended but direct consequences of culture. Where culture plays even a small part in the formation of cleavages around which intolerant ideals are empowered and exclusivist ideologies mobilized, its role is amplified. Culture, after all, is the embodiment of features that constitute a people’s distinctiveness, the totality of a group’s essence, suggesting and presupposing difference. Culture is the fault line that secures the place of difference among groups or societies. Given that culture is the foundation on which identity is structured and the framework from which people develop worldviews that shape interaction, it is hard to divorce the causes of violence, mass displacement, and forced exiles from it. It is harder still to not attribute to culture the role of the catalyst for ethnic rivalry. The pogroms and genocidal events that have plagued nations in Africa have been tied to differences in culture. This prescriptive reference to and consideration of culture in relation to violence is itself a consequence of a larger issue: the treatment of culture as static, fixed, and monolithic. Since cultures are fluid and shaped over time by internal and external factors of a given people, any consideration of culture as static glosses over the historical complexities that shape culture and intergroup dynamics. It is relatively easy to emphasize the divisive consequences of culture if it is seen as fixed in its definition and relation to others. In other words, it is easy to hold the culture of a group of people as providing a basis for ethnic belligerence if that culture is seen as residing completely outside a symbiotically structured network of cultures, or if it is seen as totally and mutually exclusive with other cultures. The risk of seeing culture as immutable is that culture 5. Mani, “Women, Art and Post-conflict Justice,” 547.

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can easily become divisive, oppressive, or, worse, inferior. All these negative considerations pose significant risks to culture, one of which is the fact of culture becoming a target of dominant groups or governmental forces seeking to exterminate or repress others. Culture can be seen as a fault line or a point of division between groups and people and thus a target for destruction. In genocides, pogroms, wars, and violence that lead to forced exile, displacement, and refugee situations, culture often becomes a target of annihilative forces such as dominant ethnic groups or state-sponsored groups. There are several examples from human history that corroborate this: the European incursion into Africa and their annihilative colonization of the Americas, especially the lands of Native Americans, are processes of cultural destruction and subjugation. While the approaches and extent of cultural destruction differ, what the Europeans did was the same: systematic destruction of indigenous culture and forcible replacement with their own. As pointed out by Anibal Quijano, the extensive and systemic extermination of indigenes by Europeans in the Americas that led to the killing of about sixty-five million people over fifty years were in essence a demographic and cultural destruction.6 Cultures and societies were targeted for replacement, evidenced by how “cultural repression and the massive genocide together turned the previous high cultures of Native America into illiterate, peasant subcultures.”7 A distinction—among many others—is often made regarding the cultural colonization of Africa, Asia, and America: that the destruction of culture in Africa is significant enough to alter the continent’s demographic and cultural orientation, but less in comparison to the Americas and significantly more than Asia in terms of intensity.8 A look at these continents and the fate of the indigenous formations within them or the state of indigeneity provides useful context for this discussion. The rationale behind violence and genocide that create conditions for displacement of people proceeds from a parochial and lopsided view of culture. Minorities suffering at the hands of dominant cultures and government forces are categorized based on their cultural affiliation and orientation. The case of displacement in northern Uganda, especially the Acholi, is a result of governmental crackdown and rebel forces.9 The fate of the Igbos during the Civil War

6 . Quijano, “Coloniality and Modernity.” 7. Ibid., 170. 8. Ibid. 9. McCain, “Art of Creative Conflict Resolution.”

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in Nigeria was a result of their cultural affiliation and configuration; even the continued atrocious displacement of northerners in Nigeria by the Boko Haram terrorist sect is not divorced from cultural factors since, in Nigeria, religion and culture (ethnicity) are often inextricably connected as strong bases for resource control as well as mobilization for other group-oriented causes. The same is true of the Rwandan genocide, where a rhetoric of cultural inferiority was deployed to stoke genocidal acts toward the Tutsi, dehumanizing them in terms such as “cockroaches.” The massacre of the Tutsi covered all aspects of Tutsi identity, physical and ideological, culminating in an attempt to obliterate them. And the systematic use of rape as a weapon of war in Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and other African countries is an attempt at enforcing cultural genocide. The rhetoric of cultural superiority with dehumanizing and devastating consequences for a society or a group of people demonstrates the weaponizing of language as a creative means of targeting specific groups. The Holocaust is a good example of this, with Nazi Germany rejecting through state-sponsored communication the cultural legitimacy and humanity of the Jews. Genocides and other causes of displacement are dehumanizing occurrences, and they often proceed from complexes and supremacist ideals. Communication as a creative tool toward inducing and harnessing harmony thus breaks down and becomes one-sided, flowing through contrived channels constructed for agenda-driven purposes. Consequently, language as a tool of nationalism and nation-building breaks down, or, as Chantal Kalisa explains, genocidal acts and forced displacement because of violence, war, and rebel insurgency or terrorism aid the disintegration of language.10 When language breaks down, creativity follows, which has drastic consequences for the maintenance of culture, such as daily rituals, life events, plastic expressions, and epistemological practices. It is without doubt that attacks on culture lead to forced displacement of people, where nationals become refugees, and they have drastic consequences for the language and the epistemic practices and creative expressions that language engenders and sustains. This connection between violence, displacement, destruction of culture, and breakdown of language and the loss of creative rituals, practices, and expressions is pronounced in any region and among people who have experienced the incapacitating effects of forced exile. Even when such forced migrants seek asylum in foreign spaces, the destruction of culture is so thorough that they often must reinvent, revive, or remediate those lost rituals and practices in new spaces. 10. Kalisa, “Theatre and the Rwandan Genocide.”

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Since people are their culture, attacks on people are attacks on culture. The displacement of people is also the displacement of culture; the same goes for decimation and annihilation of a group of people.11 Genocide and related events of collective destruction are thus a process of unmaking cultures, where, as put by Kalisa, “entire generations are lost, family lineage is destroyed, and community life disrupted.”12 Genocide and pogroms often obliterate mythologies, rituals, foundations, arts, and institutions. To cite an important example, between 1975 and 1979, during the Khmer Rouge rule in Cambodia, culture suffered drastically when artists and intellectuals were murdered. Jennifer Goodlander estimates this murder rate at 90 percent, which, in her words, returned culture to “Year Zero,” a metaphor for extensive cultural retrogression.13 These processes of holistic cultural damage through bloodletting and ethnic-related violence have had drastic effects on folkloric and epistemological rituals as well. Not only are cultural means of survival targeted for destruction, but cultural forms as coping mechanisms—coping with the realities of displacement—are also obliterated, which has drastic consequences for refugees in their exiled spaces. If the annihilation of culture through genocide or pogroms effects the ob­ literation of creative practices required to cope with the reality of displacement, as well as the ability to revive rituals that had sustained their culture and remediate those revived forms, surviving and thriving beyond the constrained possibilities of forced displacement involves rejuvenating the creative process. Put differently, refugees often return to the creative process and rituals to revive their culture as well as deal with the turbulent process and outcomes of forced displacement. Hence, culture not only is inherently prone to instigating violence but also can provide alternate ways of recovery. Since culture captures the diverse and unique ways that a group of persons provide meanings to their existence as well as vantage points to engage experiential realities and the world, in the instance of forced exile and destruction of societies, it can provide channels toward regaining perspective and meaning.14 Its ability to be defined by its fluidity and response to contextual stimuli makes it a resource for displaced persons. Creative arts and a culture of creativity provide avenues for displaced persons to achieve closure, deal with the past, and galvanize the necessary positive 1 1. Relph, “Place and Placelessness,” 43–52. 12. Kalisa, “Theatre and the Rwandan Genocide,” 517. 13. Goodlander, “Sbeik Thom,” 40–52. 14. Relph, “Place and Placelessness”; Mani, “Women, Art and Post-conflict Justice.”

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orientation toward facing the future. Arts thus become a tool, a pathway, and a medium in the hands of refugees. But it is clear that on one hand, culture can itself become a victim of genocide, having its very foundations (epistemic practices, institutions, and plastic arts) as well as pillars (artists, custodians, and innovators) destroyed in the process of exterminating or laying waste to a particular group. On the other hand, culture can serve as a turning point with which refugees can reclaim aspects of their past, find closure, and (re)create imaginaries that bestride the past, present, and possible futures. Having therefore intimated and explored culture’s victim status as regards human displacement as well as its integrality as a needed tool for displaced people in refugee settlements, it is important to examine creativity or creative acts in relation to the phenomenon and experience of forced displacement.

Displ ace m ent a n d Cr e ati v it y Creativity is a form of expression. Given the extent to which this is true, it is not far-fetched that refugees often resort to creative arts as a tool of transcending the realities forced on them by circumstances. Creative expressions and plastic arts have been discovered as abounding in several measures from one refugee camp to another. At the surface, it would seem that the harsh realities of refugee life would stem the growth and cultivation of artistic activities such as music-making, poem composition and performance, dancing, graffiti art, speech-making, spoken word, and other forms of performing arts. Camps and other refugee situations generally can be fraught with material and existential issues. For instance, apart from the unpleasant reality of being uprooted from one’s home as a result of violence and losing relatives and friends, refugees in new settlements are often housed in dedicated camps, reemphasizing their alienation and disconnection from home as well as the rest of the world. Host governments, which are time and again wary of allowing the immigration of refugees and the implications of this on the local economy, often resort to crafting policies and placing hurdles that discourage integration.15 Refugees are often considered expensive, which limits the kinds of schemes that host countries and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) provide for supporting the cultural development of displaced persons. Sometimes, host countries discourage integration; as a result of this, they place refugees in organized settlements to minimize resource spending or rely on the UNHCR to provide support. In the latter situation, the tendency of the 15. Shelley, “Refugees as Valuable Resources.”

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UNHCR to implement short-term assistance programs meant to respond to immediate situations often makes this hard, especially when refugee situations are protracted. In such cases, short-term assistance often becomes long-term, inducing unplanned costs that support the thesis of refugees as expensive. With the host countries failing to provide opportunities and programs geared toward integration and independence of refugees, the life of the refugee is all the more complicated.16 Refugees are thus denied opportunities to produce and contribute to the local economy; rather, host countries contribute to their status as dependents relying on allocated resources by limiting refugee freedom. Refugees often have to stay in allocated settlements without enough economic prospects, thus being seen as burdens to host governments as well as the UNHCR and more or less depleting resources that would have made life easier. The planning structures of international assistance programs and the restrictive policies of host countries require that refugees find alternative methods for survival. While the strategies of survival can vary, creativity is often vital to ensuring positive outcomes. Creativity is a strategy for achieving a sense of control as well as a coping mechanism for individuals. In recognition of the drastic implications of prerefugee circumstances and the experiences gained when displaced people maintain refugee status, some international bodies are purposely involved in humanitarian services that target mental and physical health. The World Health Organization (WHO), for instance, has improved on its approach to migration, shifting from a primarily humanitarian-centered approach to strategies that consider the physical and mental health of their beneficiaries to close the gap between the health implications of forced displacement and migration and the rate of these types of exoduses.17 Some of the innovations brought about by this shift in focus and approach are creatively inclined. Emma Rose and colleagues’ study mentions Art of Recovery, a collaborative project between the WHO, the European Union, the UNHCR, and the charity Freedom from Torture that explores the benefits that participatory arts afford traumatized victims of displacement.18 One of the most important premises on which this particular study rests is the recognition of the place of creativity or creative arts as beneficial to refugees, physically and mentally. Hence, refugee camps, despite their challenges, are often sites of creativity, with refugees participating in artistic activities. These activities are 1 6. Ibid. 17. Rose et al., “Art of Recovery.” 18. Rose et al., “Art of Recovery.”

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often products of tours by professional performing bodies or groups to create and educate through art, of those art practitioners visiting camps for inspiration from the existing artistic practices, or of refugees creating, recreating, and reviving art forms through participation.19 In the hands of refugees, creative arts can perform many functions, such as achieving some sort of economic relevance and improving camp life, serving educational and informational purposes, and engaging psychological issues arising from refugee reality. They are also used as tools for attitudinal change— that is, for effecting shifts in behavior and orientation.20 These arts can be used by refugees as creative responses to events leading up to displacement as well as their current conditions.21 They can also serve identity purposes by functioning as mediums for articulating past or current identities and showcasing how displacement and violence affect not only social structures and culture but individual identity as well.22 Too often, displacement and refugee status create situations for developing hybrid or fractured identities. The hybrid identities are a result of the state of flux in which displaced people exist, manifested in the atmosphere of the refugee camps or settlements. These settlements are often located ideologically and socioculturally between refugee people’s culture and that of the host nations. Refugees’ identities can be fractured to such an extent that they are unable to achieve any sense of wholeness as a result of restrictive policies put in place by host governments, and this impinges on people’s cultural expression and their ability to engage with the host culture. By living on the fringes, they are denied belonging; because their senses of home, culture, and identity are subjected to the same annihilative experiences induced by the conflict that led to forced displacements, displaced persons often emerge traumatized, shocked, and broken, with their inner selves severed from or barely connected to the cultural factors that had afforded them a stable identity prior to their displacement. The culture that had organized their unity is sometimes returned to ground zero, while they are left to grapple with being disconnected from the very fundament on which personhood is forged. In this context, artistic practices by refugees can also perform the function of memory by recollecting and reaffirming collective identity and associated cultural features from which individuals self-fashion personal identities. These culture forms also aid in celebrating renewals and the process of cultural 1 9. Andemichael, “Positive Energy.” 2 0. Ibid. 21. Kalisa, “Theatre and the Rwandan Genocide.” 22. Goodlander, “Sbeik Thom.”

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synthesis that leads to hybrid identities. They also can be tools of recovery and of historicization.23 South Africa and Rwanda are popular examples of this, with theatrical forms serving as tools of testimonials or of recording events as well as of sensitizing the public to the experiences of trauma and displacement. Kalisa’s work, for instance, makes a case for the kinds of theater that exist in Rwanda, their purposes, and how their existence connects postconflict societies with their violence-prone pasts. Performance and theater can be recovery tools in hot zones as well as those emerging from volatile situations or with such history as South Africa related to the necessary processes of “Truth and Reconciliation.”24 The utility of creative art in provoking situations like this is even more appreciable when the culture-making possibilities of creative arts are considered. Victims of conflict societies often have to re-create and reaffirm cultures, as has been pointed out. This is done in several ways, with art practitioners and troupes visiting refugee settlements and learning from the heavily themed and sometimes historically charged artistic practices engaged in by displaced persons. For this reason, such creative practices frequently spill out of dedicated settlements, and these decontextualized art forms develop a life of their own, spawning new traditions and communal art that retains inherited core and thematic essences, or they aid in the creation and affirmation of other related artistic practices. Sometimes they reinforce older practices. Owing to the fact that postconflict societies are populated “not only by direct victims and perpetrators, but also indirect victims, direct and indirect beneficiaries, and complicit or unwitting bystanders,” creative practices can not only perform recovery functions but also aid transformational justice.25 Earlier in this chapter, the cultural essence of creative arts was established, reinforcing the status of artistic practices as culture. Inasmuch as this is irrefutable, such creative cultural arts can also participate in the processes of reparative justice, which according to Mani, “encompass in parallel both official and un-official, social and cultural mechanisms to respond to the sui generis needs of heterogeneous societies.”26 Mani makes a case for expanding the scope for transformative justice that conceptually accommodates culture, with the argument that reflects the thrust of this chapter: since culture is the structure of society and the bedrock on and from which society takes shape, including 2 3. Kalisa, “Theatre and the Rwandan Genocide.” 2 4. Kalisa, “Theatre and the Rwandan Genocide.” 25. Mani, “Women, Art and Post-conflict Justice,” 546. 2 6. Mani, “Women, Art and Post-conflict Justice,” 546.

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conflict-ridden societies, it can provide avenues for or serve as an influential force in restoring some measure of peace and justice for people. Creative culture and artistic practices as demonstrated and deployed by displaced persons can perform in this capacity. Given that some of these arts, such as poetry, narratives, music, and other oral arts, serve as mediums of journalizing experiences, (post)conflict societies can have a significant portion of their cultural forms that were previously lost to violence documented, remembered, and even revived. Refugees can approach artistic practices as tools to honor and remember the past as well as for dealing with the discomfort of a protracted refugee status.27 They also aid in providing panoramic or sometimes condensed versions of cultural history or ethnic and social-cultural relations in ways that prompt people to be conscious or rethink established ideas that guide ethnic relations on collective and individual levels. Creative culture and artistic practices have multiple functions for refugees, providing significant measures of respite as well as opportunities to revisit the past and address their present realities, all in the bid to keep hope alive as they navigate refugee life, in settlements or on the streets. Following this discussion, therefore, is a discussion of how these creative practices assist refugees in achieving a measure of hope while also fulfilling other functions. With examples drawn from existing works, we focus on the usage and import of these various arts in the hands and lives of displaced persons, with the view to emphasizing the dual role creative culture can play in reversing some of the damage done by conflict and violence that create refugees while also aiding in sustaining culture (the totality of life) and person (refugee).

Cr e ati v e Cu lt u r e a n d R e m e m br a nce of th e Pa st Culture is often annihilated, or reduced to ground zero, in the aftermath of conflict, especially those that lead to mass extermination and forced exiles. Conflict-ravaged societies fall victim to this flattening of culture, and several examples abound in Africa. The case of the Tutsis in Rwanda and Uganda is an important example. In the one hundred days of slaughtering and laying waste to Tutsi heritage by the Hutu extremists, which left about eight hundred thousand people dead and more fleeing, Tutsi people watched their heritage and history grind to a halt. The same ethnic rivalry in Uganda laid waste to the life and cultural lives of ethnic minority Tutsi resident there. Genocides and

27. Najafizadeh, “Poetry, Azeri IDP/Refugee Women.”

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displacement led to the emergence of Tutsi diaspora outside the countries or societies of conflict, an intracontinental and intercontinental diaspora. Oral performances are a unique component of African societies, a product of orality, which remains a means of expression in oral-based societies.28 Orality structures societies as self-constitutive and self-generative and shapes oral thought, the psychological state responsible for oral creations.29 Consequently, the continued existence of orality as a mode of expression, despite displacement of its primary users, retains the features of that society, its culture (institutions, epistemologies, and practices), and its realities. Hence, a popular oral and dramatic form of theater has abounded in Rwanda (home and diaspora) through its displaced citizens. Tutsi and other Rwandans have engaged theater and theater forms as tools of revisiting the past and documenting the genocide, alongside creating awareness and partaking in reconciliation processes. The commemoration of the Rwandan genocide in and outside of Rwanda every April through theater is a popular example of this. Some of the theatrical performances of the genocide at home and abroad are based on accounts by victims, whose rendition of their experiences and their subsequent enactments serve commemorative and mnemonic functions or work as intangible memorabilia. Kalisa’s work provides an important example of situations where documentary films suffused with significant theatricality are premised on testimonies of refugees and victims of genocidal conflict. In these reenactments of lived experiences, victims reaccess and reassess their past. For example, the German documentary Der Mo¨rdermeiner Mutter, translated as My Mother’s Killer, was directed by Martin Buchholz, who tries to recreate Euge´nie Musayidire’s confrontation with the individual held responsible for her mother’s accused death; having insisted on a reenactment of the murderer’s killing of her mother, she reenacts it, shadowing the acts of the killer.30 Written narratives have also offered a means of creatively dealing with the past. One major reason for the rise in the use of creative arts to engage the past owes to the approach of some international agencies to refugee situations. The explicit advocacy for humanitarian and human rights staff and personnel to work with refugee communities and displaced persons, especially children, by providing semistructured educational services through art (music, poetry, narratives, etc.) and recreational events bolsters refugee use of art as tools for dealing with the past. It also ensures that this approach remains integral to 2 8. Ong, Orality and Literacy. 29. Olowookere, “Orality and the Bible.” 30. See Kalisa, “Theatre and the Rwandan Genocide.”

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the community itself.31 In using such creative means and methods to educate young refugees as well as offspring of older ones, the past is ushered into the present. In addition, the UN Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) in 2007 proposed a prospectus that championed the use of arts (performing to plastic) to engage refugees.32 As refugees are often trapped between a violent past that leaves unanswered questions and an unstable present fraught and defined by unending transition and limited freedom, creative artistic practices allow refugees the berth and tools they need to recall, deal with, and find closure from the past. The Convention on the Rights of the Child, the IASC Guidelines on Mental Health and Psychosocial Support in Emergency Situations, and the Handbook for the Protection of Internally Displaced Persons are also important initiatives.33 They advocate the use of artistic practices such as singing, dancing, drawing, and enactment in engaging references; the positive implication of this is that it not only fosters a culture of creative artistry in an unlikely setting but also allows displaced persons to rework their own cultural arts into these forms, revive them, or address their cultural past through them. These artistic activities and initiatives pave the way for new forms of collectivity, especially through participatory arts, where many people are involved in creatively dealing with the past. In dealing with the past, refugees or displaced persons provide one another, as groups, with opportunities to reconnect with their past. As the kind of migratory experiences that lead to forced displacement are characteristically dehumanizing, violent, and traumatic, refugees and displaced persons are often disconnected from the past through forced severance from family, friends, work, and other daily rituals of life. They have to exist constantly in the present, mostly without anchors. In this sense, forced displacement manifests what Rose et al. call the potential extremes of migration: migration is a “potentially traumatic experience felt by the individual as a discontinuity, a breakage in the self, in the relationship with the environment, and with the individual’s past.”34 Collective artistic practices such as drumming and singing not only allow for retaining the associative feeling and philosophies of communalism that undergird many African cultural practices

3 1. See Andemichael, “Positive Energy”; see also Global Protection Cluster, Handbook. 32. Andemichael, “Positive Energy.” 33. See United Nations Treaty Collection, “Convention”; UNHCR and WHO, “Mental Health of Refugees.” 3 4. Rose et al., “Art of Recovery,” 4; see also Grinberg and Grinberg, Psychoanalytic Perspectives.

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and ethnic lives but also allow for recreating practices that protect against the dissociative and alienating effects of forced migration. They often pull refugees away from negative psychological responses to trauma such as self-isolation, social withdrawal, and relying on inner resources or trying to single-handedly navigate the turbulent realities of being disconnected from their roots by creating room for new possible associations. As it is crucial for refugees and displaced persons to find and re-create familiar collective structures for their well-being, the collective and participatory arts in refugee settlements and within groups formed by displaced persons provide useful avenues of experience sharing, recreating semblances of the past, and collectively processing shared trauma.

A rtistic Pr actice s a s Coping M ech a nisms Creative arts as tools of social and community building are not alien to Africa; therefore, it follows naturally that displaced persons would resort to visual expressions and artistic endeavors in addressing their realities. In Africa, interventions are often made by displaced persons as well as invested bodies toward reconciliation that have important implications for the lives of refugees. These interventions, aside from providing the necessary psychological and psychosocial effects required to stem the tide of turbulence that defines a refugee situation, also provide healing and therapeutic effects. For example, initiatives that have an indigenous bent, while fulfilling these functions, aid in reconnecting with the past, which not only connects refugees with ideals of their home but also enhances the mental states of displaced persons. These initiatives are structured in several ways, but they often have one major goal: enhancing the lives, sustainability, and sense of belonging (to the past or present, host or home community) of displaced persons, in order to enhance their mental conditions, and the collective approach of these initiatives promote harmony with both the host and home communities.35 Indigenous initiatives, which involve creative expressions that are locally run, locally driven, and anchored in existing and thus familiar practices, evoke culture in displaced persons as well as galvanize feelings of attachment that are vital to sustaining a positive mental disposition to the condition of displacement. The ability of initiatives to promote familiar cultural practices lost to or fragmented by war creates a sense of community, since they carry over communal feelings and restore a sense of collectivity. Some of these practices 35. Rose et al., “Art of Recovery.”

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Figure 13.1. “You are your own source of happiness. Despite the fact that you are a refugee (in hard situations), you can still be happy,” is the caption of this picture, taken by Godfrey Kassano at the Nakivale refugee settlement in Isingiro District, Uganda. Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Refugee _Children_ Joy.jpg.

are singing, dancing, and drumming. In northern Uganda, among the Acholi, drumming and singing are prevalent. Re-creation of these in displaced persons’ camps is not uncommon, even when they are remediated with materials found within the camp. Hence, traditional dances such as the bwola and dingi-dingi and other sociocultural rooted forms are introduced into the camps.36 Art in Africa is functional, a collective effort and participatory art that carries meaningful and transformational effects. Preconflict African societies manifest these ideals and qualities in their art forms, and it is only to be expected that in the hands of refugees, these indigenous initiatives will echo these realities. Refugee youths in urban cities often manifest the dissent and oppositional features of African creative culture through expressive and politically inclined arts such as painting and graffiti. They also engage in the more traditional arts of singing and dancing, formally and informally, as the youth in figure 13.1 in the Nakivale refugee settlement in Uganda. Some of the practices that are introduced as initiatives are remediated, creating hybrid cultural forms. These kinds of practices may be locally driven but

36. McCain, “Art of Creative Conflict Resolution.”

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are expressed through foreign art mediums. Music among displaced people offers more examples of this. Considering the extent and reach of Western culture, it is not uncommon to find urban refugees mixing core African music forms with received poetics. Acholi singers, to cite another reference, promote a kind of reggae-rap-R&B fusion with Afrocentric—that is, Acholi—beats.37 These hybrid forms are used by urban refugees to explore the realities of their lives. Aided by their access to host resources as well as the magnanimity and structured response plans of international organizations, refugee youths have employed these fusions and hybrid forms to distill their experiences and reach a broader audience. They have also creatively adapted these foreign forms to accommodate indigenous sonic heritages in order to have a sense of belonging in the world while also staking a claim in it—a claim previously denied them by displacement forces. In using these hybrid forms to discuss issues often associated with displacements such as shame, mental health issues, children’s rights, reconciliation, justice, estrangement, and loss, they tackle personal issues in therapeutic ways. One other common artistic form is break dancing. Break dancing is an artistic statement that merges African music with Black diasporic theatrical forms of body contortions. Break dancing to African music is a popular expression among African youths, and displaced northern Ugandan youths often return to this art form as an avenue to achieve healing and social change while emphasizing the realities of their experiences or engaging the process of enactment as a stage for self-renewal. Considering the volatile nature of northern Uganda that has made it a zone prone to human displacement as a result of insurrectional and terrorist activities as well as other extreme ethnic conflicts, several culture-driven initiatives that begin outside dedicated settlements by displaced urban refugees often find their way back into camps through several creative outlets, increasing their participants, longevity, and creative base. Sometimes, as in the case of the Acholi, calculated planning by camp administrators, humanitarian staff, or the refugees themselves allows for access to these hybrid forms through dedicated channels such as radio. Also emphasized by Lindsey McCain, who has done work on the area, ample opportunities like this foreground a common creative referent between refugees sharing a cultural and historical arc, wherever they may be.38

3 7. Ibid. 38. Ibid.

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As to be expected, there are purely transported and translocated creative practices that are foreign, introduced with the aim that these acts will aid the processes of recovery and reconciliation needed by victims of displacement trauma. While these initiatives expand the creative bases of refugees, having achieved some measure of integration, they lack the grounded roots that indigenous or hybrid cultural practices have that would, at the very least, provide relief and psychological unity from the fragmentary effects of trauma and violent conflicts. Transplanted artistic practices can transcend the boundaries of fixed settlements into more open social spaces by refugees to allow for an expansive and collective creative frame of reference; hence, they aid in the healing process that necessarily should follow experiences of violence. Drawing, sculpting, and painting—while not solely European—are some of the artistic initiatives introduced to camps. Some of these transplanted arts and the practices they engender controvert some of the fundamental realities and associated rituals traditionally required in dealing with them. Response to creativity in Africa is ritualized, and it is not enough to expect participants to yield their trauma or emotions to the art form immediately, which might be the case in the place of origin of these arts. As Kalisa has argued, what conflict societies experience and genocide generally does is to obliterate rituals that define epistemic and creative practices alongside other institutions of culture, so that in reviving culture and dealing with these incidences after the fact, those rituals are exhumed and revived or reinvented, even when the means of doing this is foreign.39 In this case, it would be culturally dissociative for displaced persons to approach transplanted artistic practices as a foreigner would or for refugees to be expected to approach these art forms the way they would have done theirs. In recognition of this discontinuity, it is common to come across positions that these recontextualized initiatives lack sensitivity to indigenous ways and societal procedures of dealing with loss, trauma, and other effects of conflict. In this case, some of the transplanted visual arts and associated practices would require refugees to flout those indigenous rituals and sociocultural norms circumscribing their responses to and expression through art therapy. Aside from plastic arts, other performing arts have been introduced that offer therapeutic functions of recovery and reconciliation. In 2008, for instance, the National Theatre in Kampala performed a play titled Butterflies of Uganda with a Ugandan cast, which followed the narrative of a young girl-child soldier in

39. Kalisa, “Theatre and the Rwandan Genocide.”

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a conflict-ridden northern Uganda.40 The play was initially presented in California. It provided displaced persons and much of the world opportunities to recover and deal with the past, securing their mental health from the damage of trauma and shame.

R et u r ning from Grou n d Zero: Cu lt u r e a n d Hu m a ns At the beginning of this chapter, we noted that artistic practices form a creative culture and that cultural practices aid in reversing the process of cultural death initiated by genocide, pogrom, and other experiences of collective violence. Going by this, artistic practices used by displaced persons, either in commemoration of the past or as individual means of dealing with the realities of those events, also have an impact on the culture and the individuals. Creative forms induce the successful return of cultural rituals that define collective sociocultural experience. In the eradication of lineages and thus generations and the suspension of communal life, culture either remains at a standstill or reverts to the metaphorical ground zero. Creativity and creatives are targets because they are often at the forefront of dissent and are capable of garnering international sympathy and support. And since many cultures’ response to genocide, as can be seen in many African countries, comes after the fact, what is often first relied on is the creative and epistemic practices. Rwanda, for example, has taken years since the genocide to rise from the calamitous consequences of the destructive actions of the Hutu militias and the Rwandan Patriotic Front, while countries such as Uganda have continued to sag under the weight of these events. Kalisa frames the picture appropriately in their submission that “no society has readyprepared rituals to deal with the aftermath of such a collective experience of death and destruction. New rituals must be formed so that people can mourn their dead, properly commemorate the event, preserve the memory, and create a path to reconciliation.”41 In creating paths toward reconciliation and in the creation of new rituals for this, culture is often revived and even remediated. Reviving cultural rituals in novel ways that are redolent of the past, without them seeming strange and contrived, often involves introducing them through evocative channels, which artistic practices are. Consequently, creative culture aids the revival and foregrounding of new cultural forms that are highly evocative of the cultures of 4 0. McCain, “Art of Creative Conflict Resolution.” 41. Kalisa, “Theatre and the Rwandan Genocide,” 517.

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the past. The daily rituals renegotiate those of the past, so that in the aftermath of genocide or in postconflict societies, new cultural forms reflect all stages in a society’s cultural history. Additionally, with the emergence of these new rituals and cultural forms that reflect a society’s historical processes, at least at the preconflict, conflict, and postconflict stages, comes the emergence of new identities. Displaced persons often have to negotiate their identities as they are shaped by their experiences and their location. It is not strange to find subpoetic forms such as refugee poetry in dedicated settlements that speak to the hybrid and often fragmented identities of displaced persons, even when the displacement is internal. These art forms, aside from being used to address realities, echo the identity of the displaced person, foregrounding touchstones that have shaped spatial affiliations that the displaced person considers important. On this note, creative arts aid in educating others about the plight and identity issues of refugees and other displaced people, while also serving as modes of instructing postconflict generations about lost pasts. The identity of the refugee, in this sense (and which is sometimes hybridized), becomes a bridge harnessing the future and the past for those who are oblivious of what has transpired. Therefore, it is not out of place to assert that creative cultures in the hands of refugees and displaced persons change attitudes and inform perceptions while also increasing knowledge. It is important to acknowledge the double function of creative practices in this context. Restrictive policies by host governments on refugees’ immigration have created room for the latter to be perceived in a certain way, promoting dominant narratives, which hold important implications for refugees and their self-worth. In restricting the extent of integration, such policies further exacerbate the alienation and other psychological issues refugees feel from being torn from their home and not belonging. Citizens of host countries are often predisposed to viewing refugees in certain light, argue Margaret Beattie and Janet Randell.42 This owes to the prevalence of certain narratives that shape the perception of refugees. One such narrative is that the host society is a generous place, an opinion shaped by the number of asylum seekers trying to gain admittance into the society. The downside to this kind of narrative is not only that it engenders some sort of blindness to refugees, which erases their concerns about restrictive policies and their effects, but also that it casts them in a negative light as discontented and unnecessary competitors for limited resources. In addition, it glosses over the precarious situations of

42. See Beattie and Randell, “Using Refugee Stories.”

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refugee life; since the host society is seen as already magnanimous and accommodating, it precludes any change in policy that might have eased the discomfort faced by refugees. The consequence of these thorny issues is that refugees barely escape that cultural ground zero that violence and conflict have reduced them to. Creative arts by refugees can aid in overturning these harmful narratives, engendering new attitudes that have positive ideological and behavioral implications for displaced persons, which assist in integration as well as creation and implementation of more accommodating and economically viable policies. For outsiders, creative art performs an important function of “render[ing] palpable the anguish of unknown victims and transform[ing] them from overwhelming faceless numbers to individual humans deserving agency.”43 Changing these dominant narratives has tremendous impact on displaced persons; with other benefits already addressed, it allows for appreciating the conditions of displaced persons and encouraging them to become contributors to host societies, which also addresses the narratives of displaced persons as burdens and liabilities, not assets. In contributing to host societies, through either the creation of art or commercialization of such art, artistic forms help humanize refugees and provide creative and economic agency to displaced persons.

Conclusion In relation to genocide and group hating, creative culture serves a variety of functions. It is often a target of the violence that displaces people because of its agential and society-making functions. In relation to artistry, aspects of culture are weaponized and destroyed to preclude the agency of creative arts. Still, artistic practices abound wherever Africans are. As cultures are laid waste and cultural members are displaced, creative arts galvanize the resurrection and return of culture-specific rituals that have defined the displaced society. These rituals enliven cultural life. In practicing artistic forms, displaced persons can through participation revive familiar cultural patterns, engendering and entrenching the social contracts that define preconflict society.

43. Mani, “Women, Art and Post-conflict Justice,” 552.

Part IV

PROTECTION AND SOLUTIONS

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REFUGEE PROTECTION AND MANAGEMENT

Introduction The High Contracting Parties . . . Noting that the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees is charged with the task of supervising international conventions providing for the protection of refugees, and recognizing that the effective co-ordination of measures taken to deal with this problem will depend upon the co-operation of States with the High Commissioner.1

Protection is the very core of the responsibility that the international community owes and promises to refugees. It is the axis on which the entire international refugee regime presumes to revolve. Protection derives from the default responsibility created by the failure of national governments to provide security and welfare for their citizens, who, by exiting the territorial jurisdiction of their state of nationality or habitual residence, must rely on the international society for their survival and welfare. Protection entails providing legal recognition, identification, and remedy for refugees; providing physical protection and humanitarian assistance; and searching for durable solutions. Each of these domains of international responsibility is expansive in its own right and has implications for the quality of life enjoyed by refugees. International protection essentially extends the normal safeguards, rights, and freedoms that citizens expect from their own governments to refugees while seeking the means by which refugees may again reaccess national protection. Protection ideally should operate on a continuum between short-term assistance for survival 1. Preamble to the 1951 UN Convention on the Status of Refugees.

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and the design of strategies for refugees to begin their lives anew and thrive in whatever circumstances they find themselves in. Article 35 of the 1951 UN Convention explicitly gives the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) the “duty of supervising” protection as outlined by not only this Convention but also other international treaties that pertain to refugees. The UN Convention lays the foundation for this supervisory role of the UNHCR in its preamble, where it states unambiguously the important intercourse that must exist between the agency and national governments if meaningful refugee protection is to be realized. In recognizing the imperative of effective coordination and cooperation between states and the UNHCR and between states themselves, the Convention foregrounds the importance of the international effort on behalf of refugees. The interrelationship between assistance, protection, and durable solutions, and between states and the UNHCR in refugee management and achieving these objectives, is the central concern of this chapter. Created in the Cold War to serve the agenda of the West in giving support mainly to European refugees fleeing communist governments, the UNHCR has had to grapple with the strictures and limits that its founding statute imposed to emerge as a dynamic institution with a far broader reach and impact than its original design. Due to the nature of its responsibilities and roles as the primary global refugee protection body, the UNHCR engages in a myriad of global, regional, and national multilateral and bilateral partnerships that, broadly speaking, are related to refugee policy management. These collaborative measures have led to relationships with a variety of actors, including states; intergovernmental organizations (in this particular case, the UN, the AU, and other African subregional bodies such as the Economic Community of West African States [ECOWAS], Southern Africa Development Community, and the like, through specialized agencies such as the UN Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights, International Organization for Migration, United Nations Children’s Fund, and others); nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) such as the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, International Detention Coalition, and Association for the Prevention of Torture; and civil society organizations. This strategy has also influenced high-level discussions on migration through the global and regional consultative initiatives of these bodies, such as in the 2013 UN High Level Dialogue on International Migration and Development, Regional Conference on Refugee Protection and International Migrants in West Africa, the Global Migration Group, and the Global Forum for Migration and Development, just to mention a few. As the foregoing has shown, over

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the years the UNHCR has developed close working relationships with a variety of organizations, including those whose focus is on climate change, conflict management, human rights protection, migration management, good governance advocacy, and many more areas related to refugee situations. Describing how imperative this broad-lens strategy is to the global refugee regime, Antonio Guterres, the former chief of the UNHCR, explained that “by creating an environment in which migrants’ rights are respected we will also be creating an environment in which UNHCR can more effectively exercise its mandate for refugee protection and solution.”2 As the global body searches for collaborative regional strategies, efforts have been made by regional bodies to incorporate its Ten-Point Plan of Action, which promotes the inclusion of refugee protection considerations into migration strategies. Fitting into this strategy are the various initiatives taken so far by the ECOWAS in ensuring social cohesion of peoples in the region, such as the ECOWAS Plan of Action for a Common Approach on Migration and the ECOWAS Free Movement Protocol.3 Legally, these instruments provide people with equal socioeconomic opportunities such as citizenship, residence, and working rights anywhere within the subregion. However, like other initiatives such as the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol, and the 1969 OAU Convention, the success of these initiatives is mixed.4 In tapping into these instruments, certain models, structures, and programs have been adopted by African states in collaboration with the UNHCR and the AU, all with the view to manage and protect African refugees. Some of these refugee management models are examined in this chapter to assess the extent to which states and the UNHCR have implemented the norms and legal instruments that govern the refugee regime in Africa. This chapter also offers a critique of recent efforts contained in the Global Compact on Refugees (GCR), with an intention of highlighting the extent to which it addresses extant concerns about the protection of African refugees.

R efuge e s in De v elopm ent: Towa r d Du r a bl e Solu tions to R efuge e Cr ise s in A fr ica This chapter connects the discourse on African development with that on solutions applied to the African refugee crisis. As a conceptual frame within 2 . UNHCR Division of International Protection, “Refugee Protection,” 17. 3. UNHCR, “Refugee Protection and International Migration.” 4. See, for instance, UNHCR, “Nigerian Spontaneous Refugee Returnees.”

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which policies and programs are designed to end refugee crises, durable solutions are a major instrument for reducing the total number of refugees and for preventive measures against situations that could lead to forced displacement in the future. This way, durable solutions serve at once as a measure for the resolution, management, and prevention of forced displacement.5 The ultimate objective of durable solutions is the reconstitution of the national identity of refugees in a dignifying manner as well as the protection of returnees. To this extent, it has three major alternatives for the management of refugee situations. The first is the return of refugees to their country under a voluntary circumstance that prioritizes their safety, security, and human dignity. This is referred to as the process of repatriation, in which refugees are expected to participate actively in assessing, ascertaining, and accepting the situation for a return.6 Representation in most cases, however, is done by the UNHCR office representatives in the states involved. While this is the common end result of the refugee situation in Africa, given the geopolitical atmosphere of states in the region, an alternative is the adoption of refugees by their host country through the process known as local integration. And finally, refugees may gain the citizenship of a third country through the naturalization process, referred to as resettlement. As the United Nations Development Group (UNDG) Guidance Note on Durable Solution for Displaced Persons observed, and as many studies have shown, “forced population displacement has primarily focused on the provision of humanitarian assistance and international protection,” while “the needs of displaced persons are often not incorporated into recovery and development plans, and, in some instances, displaced persons have been presented as a burden, hampering progress towards development, rather than as a potential asset.”7 The truth of refugee management is that there cannot be a durable solution to any forced displacement crisis without an intentional focus on respecting the potentials and human rights of a given population. In other words, there cannot be durability to any solution provided for refugees and other displaced persons without empowerment and focus on long-term gains rather than the short-term benefits that characterize the relief-humanitarian model.8 The success of durable solutions also depends on the security and stability of the place refugees are to be settled, whether their country of origin, their 5 . Addo, “Refugees’ Expectations.” 6. Long, Point of No Return. 7. UNDG Programme Group, UNDG Guidance Note, 1. 8. See, for example, Verwimp and Maystadt, “Forced Displacement.”

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host country, or a third country.9 All these were already the focus of the global refugee regime by the turn of the millennium, with various coordinating efforts at the global level targeted at developmental and integrated approaches to the protection and management of refugees. The year 2000 was meant to be a turning point in the global governance of the refugee regime. It offered several opportunities for the review of existing models of managing the global forced displacement population situations.10 Through several meetings, conferences, and consultations, global efforts began to transition from the so-called care-and-maintenance approach, which essentially saw African refugees “warehoused” for extended periods, to the refugee development approach and related integrated models of management. While the former approach was premised on food and material handouts for refugees (see fig. 14.1), with the hope that the situation that had cut them off from their home is temporary, the latter came from the realization that previous assistance efforts have primarily focused on the loss of national protection, which the global and regional legal instruments seek to replace through international protection. This is added to the prevalence of protracted refugee situations around the world, particularly in the Global South, which defied the hope of shortterm management. Hence, the latter approach seeks to incorporate refugees into general developmental programs and policies and, through this, integrate them into their host communities by way of “participatory, community-based and self-reliance oriented approaches,” while still being protected by the global refugee instruments until a durable solution is obtained.11 Even then, this approach extends to their postsettlement period, as it ensures that returnees are properly reintegrated into the society to avoid backflows, at worse, or living at the margins of the society upon their return or (re)settlement.12

  9. This is why the non-refoulement clause is described as the cardinal principle of the 1951 Convention. UNHCR, “1951 Convention.” 10. Efforts in this regard cover the management of displaced persons as refugees or IDPs and the process of their resettlement in their displaced communities. 11. UNDG Programme Group, UNDG Guidance Note, 1–2. 12. After attaining a durable solution through any of the options mentioned above, former refugees sometimes relapse to their displaced or refugee status, as it becomes apparent that they are not protected by the durable solution that has seemly offered them the opportunity to regain national protection. In particular, repatriation efforts to unsettled countries of origin produce reversals, that is, returnees turning right around to go back to the country of asylum. This situation is referred to as backflow as reintegration efforts become daunting to attain or fail outright.

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Figure 14.1. Men unloading food aid donated to victims of conflict- and disasterinduced displacement in Jowhar, Somalia. AMISOM, https://www.flickr.com/photos/au_unistphotostream/10823875514/. Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2013_11_12 _ Jowhar_Flood_ J.jpg_(10823875514).jpg.

This new approach was necessary in the face of protracted refugee crises that could not be managed through mere aid distribution. Not only did the care-and-maintenance approach amount to and is used in the justification of rights violations, but it also deprived refugees of a decent living as they were at the mercy of material handouts from donors, often leaving them even more vulnerable and dependent. As Emmanuel Nabuguzi succinctly put it, “It is this perception of the refugees as a ‘political/security problem’, as an economic ‘burden’ and as a ‘temporary’ phenomenon which has led to the policies aimed at controlling, segregating, pacifying, depoliticising and therefore marginalizing the refugees so that they do not become a source of conflict in intra-state and inter-state politics.”13 Yet the politics of excluding refugees from development programs is in itself a manifestation of the politicization of refugee situations. Part of the protection provided for refugees in the international and regional protective instruments 13. Nabuguzi, “Refugees and Politics in Uganda,” 6.

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discussed previously is their access to, as much as practicable, the same treatment and privileges as others enjoy in their host state. Through this measure, states and other stakeholders are legally bound to respect the rights to work, to make a decent living, and to aid the human capacity development of this population of people. Hence, the millennium efforts were not entirely novel. However, according to Tony Waters, there was a turning point with the response of the international community to the refugee crisis in the Great Lakes region when over two million Rwandan refugees fled their homes after the genocide in 1994 to seek refuge in countries such as Tanzania, Burundi, and Zaire.14 In a bid to promote the developmental and integrated model in the developing world, the United Nations and other major Western donors funded the International Conferences on Assistance to Refugees in Africa in 1981 and 1984 as well as the International Conference on Assistance to Refugees in Central America in 1989, based on the concept of “Refugee Aid and Development” promoted by the UNHCR in the 1980s.15 The integrated approach that later came to be at the forefront of the millennium’s renewed efforts has its root in the United Nations Inter-Agency Standing Committee, established in 1992 in response to the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 46/182 on the need to fortify humanitarian assistance.16 Targeted Development Assistance and the Transitional Solutions Initiative came to mark the 2000s in this regard.17 Three major factors account for the policy change of this period: one was the end of the Cold War, which reduced the political currency of African states among the major international donor communities and their financial agencies; the second was the battered economic reality of African states from the 1980s onward, aggravated by their relationship with the Bretton Woods Institutions, especially in the implementation of the structural adjustment programs; and the third was the plethora of refugee and displacement crises in Africa and different parts of Asia and Latin America. These events occasioned a fundamental shift in the international refugee regime in Africa. Not only did they culminate in greater donor lethargy and dwindling international solidarity and burden sharing, but new priorities emerged in the 2000s revitalization that reignited the Conventions and Protocols that define refugee management and protection, in what became known as Convention Plus. Opening a path for others to build on in the millennium was the Declaration of States Parties and 1 4. Waters, “Assessing the Impact,” 142–43. 15. Harild and Christensen, “Development Challenge,” 5. 16. Refworld, “Inter-Agency Standing Committee.” 17. Betts, “Development Assistance and Refugees,” 51–53.

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a Programme of Action by United Nations member states at the conclusion of the December 2001 Ministerial Meeting of States Parties to the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and/or its 1967 Protocol. Therein, states reiterated their continued support for the 1951 Convention as the global pillar for refugee management and protection.18 Indeed, this was an important outcome of the Global Consultations on International Protection initiated by the UNHCR in the 2000s for a broad discussion with all stakeholders. The significance of this lies in the fact that it was a necessary start for all other initiatives to be taken in the new millennium in that it served as an official pledge by states to support other initiatives building on this strategic instrument. In putting together what Ruud Lubbers, the then–High Commissioner for Refugees, described as the “Convention Plus” approach, governments, intergovernmental and nongovernmental organizations, refugee experts, and the UNHCR came together in the late 2000s for talks that would last eighteen months. The High Commissioner elaborated the Agenda for Protection and Convention Plus that emanated from the conclusions and recommendations from the Global Consultations thus: “The ‘Plus’ concerns the development of special agreements or multilateral arrangements to ensure improved burden sharing, with countries in the North and South working together to find durable solutions for refugees. This includes comprehensive plans of action to deal with mass outflows, and agreements on ‘secondary movements’, whereby the roles and responsibilities of countries of origin, transit, and potential destination are better defined. It also includes agreements aimed at better targeting development assistance in refugees’ regions of origin, and multilateral commitments for resettlement of refugees.”19 The Agenda for Protection was successful because of the recommitment of states and stakeholders of the global refugee regime as well as the consensus reached on the need for flexibility, and because it drew on the consultations in the UNHCR Programme of Action. The development approach and the integrated model of refugee management began to take form with the inclusion of displaced persons in the 2004 amendments to Common Country Assessments and the UN Development Assistance Framework (UNDAF) Guidelines. This resulted in the instruction passed to the United Nations Country Teams (UNCTs) to consider the inclusion of durable solutions for displaced persons in analysis, development, implementation as well as the program and policy evaluation matrix of the strategic development framework. This was in 1 8. UNHCR, “Declaration of States Parties.” 19. UNHCR, “Agenda for Protection,” 6–7.

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response to the UNCTs’ survey and conclusions, which identify forced population displacement as a major challenge facing the UNDAF. The inclusion of this category in UNDAF strategic developmental programs and policies was to be anchored by states with the help of the UNCTs. Consequently, the UNCTs were at the time saddled with the responsibility of helping countries implement their national development plans with full consciousness toward displaced persons and their host communities, especially in areas related to the attainment of the Millennium Development Goals, which mobilize resources for the eradication of extreme poverty, human capacity building, gender equality, access to efficient health-care facilities, and sustainable and safe environment.20 The approach and responsibility of the UNCTs in this matter, using the 4Rs model of the UNHCR, cover repatriation, reintegration, rehabilitation, and reconstruction.21 Their work was divided into two stages: the refugee and post-refugee periods. At the refugee stage, displaced persons are to be governed by the developmental policies and programs that serve the rest of the host state population, while at the post-refugee stage, states are equally enjoined to accelerate refugees’ reintegration path through aiding their rights to property, means of livelihood through human capacity building, and human dignity. Whereas all of the conclusions and recommendations of previous initiatives are largely based on expansions and reiterations of the 1951 Convention provisions, in light of current developments, a fundamental operational shift surfaced in the implementation of all these with the introduction of a closer and more efficient interagency approach to formulating, implementing, monitoring, and evaluating the management and protection of refugees and other displaced persons. This interagency link is what the responsibilities given to the UNCTs in that 2004 UNDAF review came to symbolize in the refugee regime. Envisaging this expanded responsibility, the Programme of Action, in the same spirit as others before it, promoted more equitable burden and responsibility sharing as well as improved state capacity to receive and protect refugees in a dignifying manner. 20. According to a recent document, “The UN development system currently counts 130 UN country teams (UNCTs) serving a total of 164 programme countries and territories. On average, each UNCT has 18 UN entities, of which 13 are resident entities. UNDP, UNICEF and WHO are the UN entities with broadest UNCT membership, being resident members of all 130 UNCTs. They are followed by UNFPA (in 126 UNCTs), FAO (121), UNESCO (114), ILO (111), UNHCR (102).” Currently, the module of work and configuration of the UNCTs is being reviewed for effective implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals. See UNDS Repositioning, “Proposals for a New Generation.” 21. UNHCR, Framework for Durable Solutions.

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By encouraging states and other stakeholders to link refugee issues with national, regional, and multinational development plans, the UNHCR notes, “The Programme of Action identifies specific objectives and activities grouped according to six interrelated goals: strengthening implementation of the 1951 Convention and its 1967 Protocol; protecting refugees within broader migration movements; sharing burdens and responsibilities more equitably and building capacities to receive and protect refugees; addressing security-related concerns more effectively, redoubling the search for durable solutions for refugees; and meeting the protection needs of refugee women and children.”22 In preparing for the UNDAF 2004 decision, the ambitious initiatives of the Agenda for Protection, which came into effect in 2002, morphed into the UNHCR’s Framework for Durable Solutions for Refugees and Persons of Concern in 2003. This incorporated the principles of these initiatives into a single framework that sought to bring together the capacities and resources of all stakeholders, including the host and refugee communities, development and humanitarian partners, and governments, in comprehensively tackling poverty, displacement, and underdevelopment in refugee hosting areas through the instrument of the Development Assistance for Refugees (DAR) program.23 The Framework serves as a coherent multilateral special agreement, meant to complement the 1951 Convention in line with the Agenda for Protection, in regard to the concerns of the High Commissioner on the need for the development of new arrangements and tools. Expressly, “this Framework for Durable Solutions aims to achieve, through Development Assistance for Refugees (DAR), Repatriation, Reintegration, Rehabilitation and Reconstruction (4Rs) and Development through Local Integration (DLI), sharing burdens and responsibilities more equitably and building capacities to receive and protect refugees; and, redoubling the search for durable solutions.”24 As DAR represented the integral components of the UNHCR Framework for Durable Solutions, it focused on helping forcibly displaced populations in achieving self-reliance through the systemic creation of policies and programs for human capacity building. DAR became an irreplaceable component of the Framework because it integrated the hard-learned lesson that development induced by self-reliance remains at the heart of any successful durable solution to protracted cases of forced displacement. However, DAR remained a paper tiger without an effective burden-sharing structure between governments of states 2 2. UNHCR, “Agenda for Protection,” 10. 23. Jallow and Malik, “Handbook,” vi. 2 4. UNHCR, Framework for Durable Solutions, 3.

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in the Global South and North and between humanitarian and multi- and bilateral development agencies. Although the details of such burden sharing varied from one situation to the next, the political will of governments remained important for the sustainability of such initiatives. The host government takes “the lead and owns the process, while UNHCR would play a substantial role in bringing the partners together and facilitating the process.”25 This is what was referred to as the principle of “National Responsibility and International Solidarity.” In the long run, this approach saves the UNHCR and donor communities from endless humanitarian interventions through ceaseless purchase and distribution of relief materials in the face of protracted refugee situations, while at the same time, development bodies find their goals better achieved, especially in the area of poverty alleviation through human capacity development. Assistance programs prioritizing self-reliance and relief-substitution strategies in their activities tap into the resourcefulness of refugees, as they are expected to produce many of the relief items themselves through self-production or purchase, thereby limiting their vulnerability, stigmatization, and dependency. This approach has clear benefits for all parties involved. This integrated approach is embodied in the involvement of the UNCTs, where not only are refugees expected to be included in the development plans, but all UN agencies and various bodies responsible for development initiatives and coordination are linked up at the national, regional, and global levels. One of the common failures of development programs and policies is the disconnect between these initiatives and the people meant to benefit from them. Many developmental programs are based on the assumptions of the experts without the participation of the community of beneficiaries.26 But through the participatory model fused into this integrated and developmental approach, both the refugees and their host communities are involved in the design of selfreliance programs. The need for the involvement of the host community in this endeavor is premised on the same marginal status they often represent with the refugees. Refugee camps or communities are often placed in areas at the marginal levels of development in the state. These areas often portend a low political capital that does not warrant any meaningful government presence; hence, they reflect poverty and underdevelopment. This situation brings about a few issues of vital consideration. First, in a protracted refugee situation, socioeconomic strains on the host community often generate resentment of refugees. 25. Ibid., 12. 2 6. See, for example, Zetter, “Refugee Survival,” 214–29.

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Second, attempts to change this narrative by aiding the refugees at the expense of their host communities often only exacerbate these strained relations. Therefore, while preparing refugees in a protracted situation for durable solutions through development and self-reliance initiatives within this integrated model, their host communities are to be considered in the developmental schemes of the state. As such, schools, health-care facilities, water and sanitation, and the like, which in most cases are not readily in place in these remote areas, cannot be made available solely for the refugee populations with the exclusion of their hosts. If well implemented, this approach also sees to the situation whereby refugees themselves attract infrastructure to these remote areas, as they draw international attention to the challenges already being faced by locals. In some cases, this approach enhances the possibility of durable solutions through local integration. DAR implementation is akin to the Development through Local Integration (DLI) initiative; both are intended to ensure that refugees’ international protection and status are not revoked only for them to fall back into poverty, which could lead them back to aid dependency, which in turn could lead to poverty, conflict, and repeat displacement. This approach also betters the chance of refugees being naturalized in a third country through the improved burden-sharing mechanism. This option allows for the reduction of the refugee population in a country where they are largely concentrated.27 Whereas the DLI mechanism is used in supporting and managing refugees after they have been locally integrated to ensure a durable solution, the 4Rs instrument is used in the case of voluntary repatriation. Through this mechanism, after repatriation (the first R), refugees (now at this stage referred to as returnees) are helped to reintegrate into their home communities, after which they are rehabilitated, with all expected to lead to a successful reconstruction effort in the country of origin. As an integral part of the program, stakeholders are advised to include these four options in a comprehensive approach to finding durable solutions to the refugee crises. DAR operates on special funds through the commitment of donor communities as well as bilateral and multilateral development agencies such as the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), World Bank, UNICEF, the World Food Programme, the European Union’s Linking Relief, Rehabilitation and Development initiative, Danish Transitional Budget Line, Japan’s Peace Building Grant Aid and Trust Fund for Human Security, the G8 Action 27. The resettlement option is often taken up by the OECD countries with the capacity to accommodate this population within their socioeconomic paradigm. Leading this effort, usually, are Canada, Australia, Sweden, and the United States.

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Plan for Africa, the Norwegian Transitional Budget Line, and others. The 4Rs initiative has been employed in places such as Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka, Eritrea, and Afghanistan, with varying degrees of success. Since states remain the core stakeholders in this arrangement, they are encouraged to meet the protection needs of women and children by ratifying and implementing policies and guidelines protecting refugee women and children.28 These cumulated into the UNHCR Age, Gender, and Diversity Policy.29 The implementation of these instruments could help protect children and women against trafficking, smuggling, sexual exploitation, forced labor, armed struggle, kidnapping, and other heinous crimes that impede the operationalization of the frameworks for the implementation of the Agenda for Protection. With increases in mixed migration, which affects the acceptability of genuine asylum seekers by states, and the precarious journeys they often take along with other migrants along illegal routes, states are encouraged to strengthen their migration policies and bring refugee protection into their broader migration policies. All migrants in this system are to be handled humanely so as to ensure that their human dignity is protected. Through this system, cases of asylum seekers are to be determined expeditiously but efficiently, with room for appeal, so that those other illegal migrants are returned as soon as possible without violation of their rights. Conversely, to stem the tide of mixed and illegal migration and reduce the rate of frivolous asylum applications so that genuine asylum seekers can be easily processed, the framework provides information on legal migration options for economic migrants. All of these are strengthened by the UNHCR Ten-Point Plan of Action on Refugee Protection and Mixed Movements, first published in 2007.30 Through such arrangements as the provision of education and vocational training, refugees are provided with the opportunity to shift from dependency to self-reliance and contribute to the socioeconomic development of their host communities and country. In this manner, refugees are seen as agents of and not burdens to development, more so since their continued marginalization, as well as that of

2 8. Some of these conventions include the 2000 Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict; the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women and its 1999 Optional Protocol; the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child and Others Protecting the Rights of the Child against Sexual Exploitation, Armed Conflict; and the 2000 United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime and its Protocols. 29. UNHCR, “UNHCR Policy on Age.” 30. See UNHCR, “10-Point Plan in Action.”

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the communities that host them, impedes the success of any form of developmental programs and policies. As mentioned earlier, all of this came about at a time when it was becoming clear to stakeholders that a new path needed to be charted in the global governance of the refugee regime, as the crisis was becoming more complex with the emergence of new paradigms of displacement (for example, as a result of terrorism and the plethora of effects of climate change), weakened interagency mechanisms, and dwindling donor support vis-à-vis the rising refugee and forced displaced population cases31—all of which rendered the 1951 Convention increasingly outmoded. These initiatives weld together humanitarian, human rights, and development actors and structures to achieve their goals, which is the recognition of displaced persons as viable development agents. One cannot dismiss the influence of the Ugandan government’s Self-Reliance Strategy for Refugees (SRS) applied in the refugee-hosting areas in Moyo, Arua, and Adjumai districts, first introduced in 1999, and the Zambia Initiative (ZI) in Western Province in the development of the DAR. Since both were established on the old order, the emergence of DAR offered a new opportunity to broaden the operationality and effectiveness of these programs.32 In a bid to strengthen the integrated mechanism, DAR, and durable solutions, in 2010, the UNHCR, the World Bank, and the UNDP jointly initiated the Transitional Solutions Initiative in the same year that the World Bank launched its Global Programme on Forced Displacement.

Th e Politics of R efuge e M a nage m ent in A fr ica In spite of all these instruments, Tania Kaiser, quoting refugees, notes that “‘Refugees are termed as people who don’t understand, without rights and as just “mere” refugees.’ [The refugee woman] went on: ‘Refugees in Kiryandongo 31. The UNHCR has consistently lamented the disparity between the revenue at its disposal for the care and maintenance programs for refugees and the rising refugee population, so much so that even in years in which its revenue soared, meeting refugee demands has always remained daunting. See, for example, UNHCR Division of International Protection, “Refugee Protection.” 32. According to Malik and Jallow, “The programme is now being transitioned to move to a DAR programme, building upon the SRS but also seeking to avoid the pitfalls of the latter (e.g. poor engagement of development partners, limited integration into national development plans and district planning and budgeting systems, weak local capacity and poor connections with UNHCR country programme).” Jallow and Malik, “Handbook,” 24.

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Camp have no rights. They are dictated upon and decided for.’ Another man asserted, ‘there is no safe place in Uganda’, and complained that they had no freedom to try to find one. His criticism extended to UNHCR who, he said, treated the refugees like children.”33 For every action taken by the state, it should be remembered that in usual practice refugees are treated neither better than the citizens of the host state nor in any way that could be perceived to be to the detriment of the state’s national interest and security.34 Indeed, the legal instruments designed by states that govern this aspect of international relations are clear on these fundamentals.35 And here lies the beginning, or rather, the underlying predicament of refugees in Africa: How is the border of national interests drawn to meet the rights and protection of refugees? The truth of this is as historical as it is contemporary. Although, as Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso has rightly argued, “movement of people across extensive spaces and territories in Africa was generally normal and tolerated before the advent of the colonialists,” this was not without its human problem.36 Control and restriction of migration with the view of consolidating territorial power is not primarily a postcolonial reality spurred by the inherited identity of contemporary African states, as the argument goes.37 There are three factors that historically determined a state’s disposition toward refugees: first, their domestic politics; second, their national security; and third, the geopolitical demands of the time. For instance, whereas Ile-Ife, the acclaimed origin of the Yoruba people in Nigeria, welcomed Oyo migrants and others in Yorubaland fleeing for safety from the nineteenth-century disaster ravaging the region, two things changed this narrative in the later years. One was the congestion of the city and the dwindling fortune of its indigenous peoples, which was consequent upon the congestion, with both leading to dissenting voices and economic stress in the city. This led to the second part, the weakening state, which at this time was facing pressure from within and without. As such, Ile-Ife was under intense pressure to save itself and its numerous peoples from the nightmare that sent those refugees to its territories. With the people growing weary of their refugee-guests due to the general situation around them, the refugees were sent packing by the 1840s. Among other things, 3 3. Kaiser, “Participating in Development?,” 361. 3 4. See, for example, Nabuguzi, “Refugees and Politics in Uganda,” 1–33. 35. See, for example, the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and its 1967 Protocol, as well as the 1969 OAU Convention. 36. Yacob-Haliso, “Striving for Solutions,” 10. 37. Ibid.

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this led to the creation of Modakeke, which was made to reward Oyo refugees who had helped stabilize Ile-Ife politics around this time. Others found their ways back to other settlements before Ife itself was eventually ravaged in the second half of the century. In contrast, while Ile-Ife was decongesting its city at this time, other newly established towns such as Ibadan were attracting displaced persons due to the fact that they needed to populate their new settlements and make the best use of the labor of these migrants for their economic and political positioning in the geopolitics of the time. It was the same narrative in places such as Abeokuta, which was evolving into a formidable force in the region at the time. In short, small towns became big cities due to the displacement of that period, and this meant a great deal to the political leadership of those towns. The early post–World War II disposition of European states to refugees scattered across their borders as a result of the war vividly mirrors this. The refugees from communist countries in eastern Europe were favorably settled in western Europe and the United States and, in most cases, quickly integrated into society, as the naturalization/local integration option was considered more favorably than any other durable solution (such as repatriation) by the host countries of this time. This attitude is because these countries needed all the available hands they could find in rebuilding and reconstruction of their battered economies. By the time this was achieved and the need to protect their citizens, state, and geopolitical interests arose, there was a shift in attitudes, and they became proponents of repatriation as the best durable solution for refugees. The brutal effect of the colonial experience in this case reflects the pattern and the consequences of refugee crises, which began to be characterized by excessive cost-benefit calculations and strictive asylum practices. These conditions are tied to the increase in populations within modern states created by imperial powers. Since population seems not to be an asset for the rentier states that occupy much of modern Africa, as it cannot be put to use for the economic expansion of the states, the politics of managing refugees in the region has almost always been disadvantageous to them. This is more so when the feeling of brotherhood as expressed in the notion of Pan-Africanism lost its currency among these states, coupled with the economic crises that affected the region from the 1980s onward. As in the case of Ile-Ife, the moment this communal brotherhood collapsed, the limits of Ubuntu (i.e., a person is a person through another person, or rather, I am because you are), which formed the basis of the community acceptance of refugees at the time and Pan-Africanism at the

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state level, became clear.38 The codification of the basic principle of a common humanity in the UDHR, which formed the basis of the legal instruments that regulate the refugee regime and other human rights instruments, did not change the human propensity for the pursuit of self-interest. As such, adherence to the human rights instruments and the legal framework of the refugee regime remain tied to the specific circumstance of the receiving state and the aforementioned self-interest factor. In the context of the present configuration of African states, rights and justice are often seen as luxuries, and those who struggle are often poor, illiterate, and living at the margins of society. The situation is compounded for them when they suddenly find themselves displaced from their homes. Displacement strips them of whatever meager state protection they enjoyed and forces them into a context where they are clueless about their rights and privileges under their new refugee status. Even when they do understand their rights, the means are not often available to them, leaving them at the mercy of their host community and state in spite of the rights-based approach of the global and regional refugee regimes, which in recent times has been extended to a development-based approach. The socioeconomic and political environment of the host states creates this apparent contradiction. Poverty and underdevelopment are endemic in Africa, so it is no coincidence that forcibly displaced persons often seek refuge in states with equal or even worse political and economic situations than the ones they had fled.39 The economic crises and political developments that began in the 1980s soon met with the end of the Cold War, with both centripetal and centrifugal contexts leading to a change in attitudes of African states toward refugees. In the absence of the international politics of the Cold War, Africa’s geopolitical stock depleted greatly on the world stage, and its former stockbrokers have not been genuinely interested in finding new ways to proactively reengage and reinvest. They have simply ignored the need to reconceptualize the nature of their relationships with African states. By implication, many Western

38. Although the term Ubuntu originated in South Africa and illustrates the postapartheid reconstruction and reconciliation mode in the spirit of African communalism, its ideals had emerged before this time. It reflects the age-long principle and practice of African communalism. The limitation referred to above could be seen in the instance of the popular “Ghana must go” in Nigeria and the more recent xenophobic attacks in South Africa, among many other incidents. 39. See Karadawi, “Constraints on Assistance,” 537–47.

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nations lost their strategic interest in Africa. Others such as the United States maintained a rather anemic policy toward Africa. Hence, during the Clinton administration, one commentator noted that, “stripped of its Clintonian rhetorical veneer,” US policy toward Africa could be summarized thus: “extractive commercial, limited security and selective humanitarianism—remain the cardinal ordinances of US foreign policy towards the continent.”40 So, while African economies were witnessing a great depression under the supervision of the Bretton Woods Institutions and their stooges at the helm of government in Africa, the global attention that had brought about foreign aid, part of which was used in accommodating refugees, was also collapsing. The numbers of internally displaced persons (IDPs) also soared during this period in many African states41 due to various factors aggravated by post–Cold War politics, democratization and election crises, and other factors such as ethnic and religious crises. The burden then became too heavy for the states to bear, hence their reluctance to aid refugees.42 This created a major situation that called for African nations to take care of their own problems rather than look outward for solutions. The conditions of refugees worsened as a result, and instead of protecting them, states sometimes used them to further their ambitions and economic well-being. In its 2011–12 publication, which brings together its past experience and provides a review of its works in the millennium, the UNCHR observed that “in some contexts, host government officials may attach political or economic value to the continued presence of refugees and implicitly discouraged them from taking up solutions, even where available.”43 This is not unconnected to the international attention in aid and support that their continued stay often brings to the country. In other scenarios where this does not serve their purpose, states can violate the voluntary reparation clause protecting

4 0. Levitt, “Conflict Prevention,” 157; the quoted part of the excerpt was taken by Levitt from Alden, “From Neglect,” 368. 41. Giustiniani, “New Hopes.” 42. Speaking to the strain as related to the Liberian crisis, Bill Frelick observed, “What better metaphor for 1996 than the ‘Bulk Challenge’ that refugees represent to a largely uncaring world? Never was asylum more in doubt in more places than in 1996. Africa, which for decades stood as a shining example of solidarity and hospitality, retreated from fundamental principles. On both sides of the continent, the spirit of generosity withered. Some, such as the refugees aboard the Bulk Challenge, had doors of refuge slammed in their faces.” Frelick, “Year in Review,” 14, quoted in Agblorti, “Refugee Integration in Ghana,” 1. 43. UNHCR, State of the World’s Refugees, 12.

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refugees by forcefully removing them from their territory. This situation often constitutes another conundrum for the UNHCR to consider in its management of refugees. The post-2011 experience of the South Sudanese fleeing the crisis in the newly independent state is a good example of this dilemma. Ostensibly as a form of payback for the secession of the people from Sudan in 2011, the government of Sudan, who would not take proper care of this fleeing population, recognized them not as refugees but as “brothers and sisters.” By implication, the Sudanese government was telling the world that this forcibly displaced South Sudanese population remained part of its population and therefore had no issue with national protection to warrant international protection. With this designation, the UNHCR and other humanitarian bodies were restricted in their operations in Sudan. More particularly, the UNHCR was helpless in the matter of managing the refugee influx from South Sudan into Sudan until the government of Sudan changed its position in 2016.44 Before this time, the UNHCR could only work through the Sudanese Red Crescent Society and other NGOs and agencies that faced limited restrictions from the Sudanese government, while no part of the refugee legal rights and protection could be invoked on their behalf. Through the Refugee Coordination Model, the UNHCR made use of the activities of UNICEF, WHO, and World Food Programme in the White Nile State of Sudan to coordinate its work in support and assistance to the South Sudanese in Sudan. It is easy to locate instances of the politicization of refugees and other displaced persons as well as the militarization of refugee camps and instrumentalization of refugees as a political tool, in the course of studying refugee management in Africa. Gregory Mthembu-Salter described the militarization of refugees “as an umbrella term for a range of related activities, including the recruitment of refugees into military structures, the use of refugee or camp resources to support military action, and the continual involvement of refugees in the conflict of their homeland.”45 In some cases, as in the admission of the commanders of the Forces Armées Rwandaises, leaders of the Interahamwe Militia, and their followers as refugees in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and later, the acceptance of over three hundred Congolese soldiers by the Rwandan government in 2004, one could observe the common trend of violation of the civilian character of refugees as designed by the conventions, declarations, and protocols governing refugee affairs. Each of the 4 4. Baker and Elawad, “Independent Evaluation,” 5. 45. Mthembu-Salter, “Wheel Turns Again,” 181.

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abovementioned groups had committed some form of atrocity or the other. In the case of the first two, these atrocities amount to crimes against humanity; the latter had fought the UN Observer Mission in Congo under the leadership of Colonel Jules Mutebutsi before fleeing to Rwanda for protection. Now, there appears a contrasting development here when compared to that of the South Sudanese experience. Whereas the UNHCR had recognized the refugee status of displaced persons from South Sudan, which was apparent from the circumstance of their migration to Sudan, in the instance of Colonel Mutebutsi and his fighters, their refugee status was recognized by the Rwandan government but not by the UNHCR. The UNHCR had recognized the two militia groups from Rwanda who fled to the DRC during the Rwandan crisis as refugees in spite of the atrocities committed by these groups during the crisis, leading to the massacre of millions. These two groups would later collaborate in camps in the DRC to plan the invasion and recapture of Rwanda with the support of the DRC government. Since the Congolese government had shown support for rebel groups in its territory by equipping them and providing logistics as well as threatening the Tutsi population in the eastern part of the county with ethnic cleansing, the Rwandan government, with the support of the Ugandan government, also allied with a rebel group led by Désiré Kabila of the DRC to invade the country, leading to the fall of President Mobutu Sese Seko’s regime. Even with the ascension of Kabila as the president, the same cycle of using refugees as political tools continued in this region. For instance, with the eruption of a rift breaking the alliance among these forces, the Rwandan government would later give Colonel Mutebutsi and his boys ground to invade the DRC in 2005. The experience of refugees in this region also showed that refugees are not always secured in their camps, as seen in the massacre of 152 Banyamulenge refugees from the South Kivu town of Uviratium in the Gatumba refugee camp in Burundi.46 Uganda provides us with an example of a unique form of the political-economic dimensions that weigh heavily on the operationalization of the management and protective mechanism of the international refugee regime. Also located in the Great Lakes region, a region rife with refugee crises, Uganda alongside Tanzania and Zambia reportedly operates some of the best refugee policies on the continent.47 But the generosity of these countries does not preclude them from practices that defy the instruments of the international refugee regime. An example is the Ugandan government’s Self-Reliance Strategy for Refugees (SRS), which aimed 4 6. Ibid., 186. 47. Brosché and Nilsson, “Zambian Refugee,” 16.

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at the integration of refugee assistance services into district development and service delivery plans without the integration of refugees themselves.48 Here, it could be seen how Museveni’s government managed to convince the UNHCR to buy into its SRS program in 1999. It became clear to the latter in the subsequent years of program implementation that this was meant as a principle on which the rights of the affected refugees were to be trampled on which was legitimized by the state. More worrisome is the observation of Kaiser that the forced relocation of refugees to the West Nile region of the northern part of the country for the implementation of the SRS was the government’s strategy at drawing the attention of the international donor community, through the UNHCR, to the debilitating conditions of this region, which could hinder its SRS initiative.49 This way, the expected provisions of infrastructure and other developmental assistance from the international community to the region could boost the long-stagnant economy with concomitant effects on the image and political acceptability of the government in the region, where it had remained unpopular. This is, simply put, using the predicament of refugees to shore up political power and relevance. In the end, the whole idea of Uganda’s SRS cannot be rightly said to have been conceived with the good intent of managing and protecting refugees. The forced movement of the refugees to the northern part of the country, where they feared for their lives due to the ongoing instability that had led to the forced displacement of many Ugandan people in the region, violates refugee rights in the 1951 Convention and its 1967 Protocol, as well as the OAU Convention’s notion of the friendly and nonpolitical nature of asylum on the part of host states. This is aside from many of the rules of engagement broken by this development, including the right to freedom of movement and right to life of the refugees guaranteed under Article 26 of the 1951 Convention.50 More than anything else, this has always been the most flouted aspect of the guiding principles of the refugee regime. It remains to be seen, as scholars such as Meredith Hunter have concluded, how this program is meant to benefit those seeking refuge in Uganda and elsewhere or even, in the particular case of Uganda, to lead to the overall development of the human capacity in the northern region of the country where they have been forcefully settled, if their fundamental

4 8. UNHCR, “Development Assistance;” Krause, “Limitations of Development-Oriented Assistance.” 49. Kaiser, “Participating in Development?,” 363. 50. “Each Contracting State shall accord to refugees lawfully in its territory the right to choose their place of residence and to move freely within its territory subject to any regulations applicable to aliens generally in the same circumstances.”

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human rights and the rights particularly accorded them as refugees are not taken into consideration.51 The scope of DAR seeks greater resource allocation to create a conducive environment in refugee-producing states so as to prevent the recurrence of outflows and facilitate sustainable repatriation. It can be better understood from the three-item program of the UNHCR in partnership with the UNDP in Colombia. One of these items is the improvement of daily living conditions under which issues of land, housing, access to basic services, and local economic development are considered. This is followed by organizational/institutional strengthening, which encompasses community strengthening and local governance, and finally the protection of victims and their rights (i.e., the right to safe residence, integrity, liberty, dignity, reparation, and justice).52 All of these require guaranteeing refugees and returnees the rights accorded them by the international and regional instruments on refugees as well as several other global and regional instruments on human rights. But this is not always the case,53 even in the best-case scenario, as in the example of the Zambian government’s ZI, which sought to integrate refugees into their host communities and settle rifts between the two communities. Not only was the freedom of movement of refugees violated within this program; its impact was limited due to the immigration policy of the country, which made residence of a foreign national difficult. Although somewhat presumed in developmental programs and policies, refugees were hardly given the local integration or naturalization option of the durable solutions, as the Zambian government pursued mainly the repatriation option. By implication, whatever is done for refugees under the scope of ZI and, more broadly, DAR is bound to be reflective of this temporality. Moreover, refugees who decline the option of repatriation are not given any special status in the country but are considered as any other immigrant whose status is regulated on an expensive procedure of acquiring a work permit, which many refugees cannot afford. As one observer wrote, “In Zambia, foreigners and refugees are falling under the same regulations and this rule is for all foreigners, but this creates problems since no refugee has this kind of money or assets as in a computer or a house.”54 There is no way they could, because in spite of

5 1. Hunter, “Failure of Self-Reliance,” 1–47. 52. UNHCR, “Progress Update for Colombia.” 53. And here lies a thick field of problematics to be cleared for a meaningful lasting solution to the refugee and forced displacement crises. See, for example, Harild and Christensen, “Development Challenge,” 5. 5 4. De Lafferiere, “In Charge of JRS Peace,” 17.

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the self-reliance and integrative scheme to which the program belongs, the economic inclusion of refugees was restricted to the refugee camps and settlements, where they survived largely on subsistence farming, which hardly fed their household, let alone offered them economic, social, or political freedom. To this extent, and in the face of the benefits that the developmental approach to refugee management often brings to the host communities and the states in general, it is hard to argue against the possibility of national interest driving these policies, with little regard for the refugees whom these programs were purportedly designed to help. Nevertheless, refugees and displaced persons are not mere passive victims of the contradictions in these practices. According to B. Kenneth Wilson, “Study after study demonstrates the phenomenal ability with which refugees deploy their social networks, available resources and energies in order to carve out protection and a livelihood. They clearly aim—and to quite some degree succeed— to integrate themselves into local and regional social and economic systems as advantageously as possible.”55 The fact that they have become displaced does not preclude them from craving independence and the opportunity to own their lives, including their lifelong projects, a feeling that is characteristic of every human.

Th e R ecent Fu t u r e: Th e Ne w Yor k Decl a r ation a n d th e Globa l Com pact on R efuge e s Considering that the grant of asylum may place unduly heavy burdens on certain countries, and that a satisfactory solution of a problem of which the United Nations has recognized the international scope and nature cannot therefore be achieved without international co-operation. . . .56

If the foregoing sections demonstrate anything, it is that there has not been a shortage of global, regional, and national efforts in the design of sophisticated strategies intended to tackle many of the core challenges associated with refugee management and expanding protection and rights for the world’s everincreasing population of refugees and displaced persons. As refugee problems have expanded, so have the initiatives to manage them, often led globally by the UNHCR but also sometimes by regional, national, and local adaptation strategies on the ground. Experience and policy failure have spurred greater 5 5. B. Wilson, “Internally Displaced,” 10. 56. Preamble to the 1951 UN Convention on the Status of Refugees.

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attention to previously ignored nuances and dynamics in particular refugee situations. Politics and the cooperation of states, as we noted in the introduction to this chapter, remain important markers of the protection that becomes available to refugees all around the world and, not least so, to UNHCR refugees, in the context of underdevelopment, conflict, and protracted displacement situations. Unrelenting changes in global trends and in the political environment within which policies and strategies are to be applied have been significant mediators of success. This latter factor has existed from the very beginning of the postwar refugee regime when the emergent Cold War dynamics dictated the letter and spirit of the preeminent refugee convention, the 1951 UN Convention, and the institution created by the regime for its own ends, the UNHCR. Today, this is even more true. As global burden-sharing between the rich Global North and the impoverished Global South has mutated to burden-shifting, the cracks in the refugee regime have widened into gulfs with ever-larger numbers of refugees falling in between the cracks, lacking critical access to both protection and solutions. Close scrutiny of many of the global commitments to refugees discussed in this chapter that emerged since about the 2000s demonstrates the reluctance of many of the more well-off countries to dedicate resources to assisting the poorer countries hosting over 80 percent of refugees. This is manifested in three particular ways. First, while refugee numbers have risen to unprecedented levels, funding from the UNHCR’s donor nations has not kept up with the demonstrable need. Additionally, “63 per cent of the refugees under UNHCR’s responsibility reside in 10 countries, and 93 per cent of UNHCR’s funding is provided by 10 countries. This means that a very small proportion of the 193 UN Member States are shouldering the lion’s share of the responsibility.”57 Second, the practice of “earmarking” donor funding—that is, the donor specifying the exact programs or groups of refugees that their donations should be used to support—has resulted in African refugees being perpetually at the bottom of international priority lists for funding save for intermittent emergencies that catch the attention of the international media. Consistent funding of African refugee situations, especially protracted situations, is partly a casualty of earmarking of donor funding. And third, not only is donor funding for humanitarian programs for refugees inadequate, but the developed countries also remain very reluctant to accept more refugees for resettlement, another important aspect of burden- and responsibility- sharing. In fact, resettlement has diminished in the international order of durable solutions to such a point that this has 57. Türk, “Promise,” 577.

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become almost a ghost solution—hardly visible, unfeasible and unattainable by the vast majority of refugees, except by specific highly vulnerable refugees from particular locales who with their UNHCR caretakers together muster what may amount to almost supernatural powers to access. Hence, global burden and responsibility sharing for refugees have broken down utterly, negating the founding assumptions of the Refugee Convention, cited at the start of this section, that the recognition of disproportionate burden of refugees affecting some states would and should lead to greater international cooperation. This assumption was never adequately addressed in the refugee law, thereby creating a “normative gap” in the protection regime.58 Unfortunately, rhetoric and expressions of good intentions by states and other actors have far exceeded practical measures on the ground. Historically, states have prioritized their own interests over their obligations to cooperate on refugee protection. As a result, refugees around the world have suffered and continue to suffer untold hardships, many of them avoidable. For Africa refugees, who increasingly are in protracted situations due to the twin factors of unending conflicts and unending underdevelopment, life becomes more and more hopeless, as they can neither go back to prewar societies nor move forward into better lives. Many of these refugees are forced to remain on the move, leaving hopeless camps and unsafe cities in Africa and other parts of the developing world in search of better lives elsewhere, thereby joining the masses of mixed migrants moving across borders. Rather than contribute more to burden sharing, the developed countries of the West have sometimes used their powerful positions within the United Nations and as UNHCR donors to manipulate the global response to refugees in their favor. In a post-9/11 world, the rising global experiences of terrorism, mixed migration, so-called irregular migration, human smuggling or trafficking, and forced displacement of many types have become the new excuses for abandoning the world’s refugees to their fate. These matters were indeed given urgency in the sudden explosion of forced migrants in the wake of the “Arab Spring” conflicts in Libya, Syria, Yemen, and wars across Africa, from about 2011 onward, crossing the Mediterranean and seeking asylum in Europe. Faced with these perceived threats to their security and prosperity, and with the equal desire to pacify national populations with nativist and right-wing nationalist sentiments, world leaders have sought instead to extend their oversight of all aspects of the migration regime, including that of refugees, in order to limit the movement of people to their shores. In other words, rather than find ways 58. Türk and Dowd, “Protection Gaps”; Ineli-Ciger, “Global Compact,” 115–38.

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to help refugees live more productive lives in exile or to access safety in more stable countries, the Global North has increasingly focused its energies on supporting programs that mandate refugees to remain in untenable displacement situations in the developing regions of Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and South America, and on carefully blocking all the routes possible for the majority of the world’s refugees to seek their help, assistance and (re)settlement. “Fortress Europe” is the clearest example of this contemporary trend, erecting ever more physical and administrative barriers to asylum and asylum seekers and constantly passing new national and EU legislation and other bilateral and multilateral agreements to make it virtually impossible for refugees fleeing war and persecution from the South to find a place there. This is the international context within which the most recent global agreements related to refugee protection and the global governance of migration must be understood. On September 19, 2016, all 193 member states of the United Nations General Assembly unanimously agreed on the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants. In general, the New York Declaration consciously recognized migration as a feature of humanity and linked migration to development. It begins by invoking the diverse and multiple causes of human displacement, an important first step to defining who qualifies for international attention, for designing protection, and for finding effective solutions: “Since earliest times, humanity has been on the move. Some people move in search of new economic opportunities and horizons. Others move to escape armed conflict, poverty, food insecurity, persecution, terrorism, or human rights violations and abuses. Still others do so in response to the adverse effects of climate change, natural disasters (some of which may be linked to climate change), or other environmental factors. Many move, indeed, for a combination of these reasons.”59 The document reaffirmed commitment to the international refugee regime and its work and pledged greater commitment to the protection of refugees and people on the move. It expressed solidarity with people forced to flee, affirmed the shared burden and responsibility for refugee protection, pledged robust support for countries with large or protracted refugee situations, and agreed on working toward a comprehensive refugee response framework as well as two global compacts, one on refugees and another on safe, orderly, and regular migration. Out of the New York Declaration emerged the Comprehensive Refugee Response Framework (CRRF) and the GCR in 2018. Both the Declaration and the Compact are nonbinding international agreements, but the tremendous global consensus behind these documents confers 59. New York Declaration, para. 1.

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on them a respected status of comparable legal agreements. In a world still beholden to the notion of state sovereignty and with a United Nations General Assembly still structured on the principle of equality of states, the achievement of such consensus on a single issue (though an extremely complex one) must be viewed as a triumph. Indeed, the GCR notes that while it is a nonbinding document, “yet it represents the political will and ambition of the international community as a whole for strengthened cooperation and solidarity with refugees and affected host countries.”60 It must not be overlooked, though, that the nonbinding nature of the Compact was specifically mentioned in the document. This expresses the continuous suspicion with which states view the adoption of such agreements as having the possibility of imposing legal obligations, either immediately or in the future, and which they may not be ready to comply with. Nonetheless, the provisions in such agreements, if widely adhered to, do indeed eventually pass into customary international law and convention and will certainly moderate the behaviors of states one way or the other. The GCR is set out in four parts: the introduction, which contains the background, guiding principles, and objectives of the Compact; the CRRF, as set out in the New York Declaration; a Programme of Action detailing, first, arrangements for burden and responsibility sharing among states and other stakeholders, and, second, specific areas of refugee management in need of support; and mechanisms for follow-up and review. Based on the foundational principles of humanity and international solidarity and invoking the normative corpus of international human rights, refugee, and humanitarian law, the GCR has the following objectives: “(i) Ease pressures on host countries; (ii) enhance refugee self-reliance; (iii) expand access to third country solutions; and (iv) support conditions in countries of origin for return in safety and dignity. The global compact will seek to achieve these four interlinked and interdependent objectives through the mobilization of political will, a broadened base of support, and arrangements that facilitate more equitable, sustained and predictable contributions among States and other relevant stakeholders.”61 Evident throughout the document is the conscious attempt to provide a more comprehensive, interlinked, and coordinated response to, in particular, large refugee situations and protracted refugee situations, and to direct attention and resources to supporting the host governments (and, in some cases, the countries of origin) that bear the particular brunt of managing these situations.

6 0. Global Compact on Refugees, para. 4. 61. Ibid., para. 7.

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It is obvious that these types of commitments have the capability to build normative consensus that can turn around the refugee situation in Africa with both unending production of refugees and shrinking international support for the challenges that this situation has foisted on host states. The problem, indeed, has been less related to the deficiencies of international refugee law and the institutions around it and perhaps arguably has been more related to the application and implementation of the norms, letter, and principles of the existent regime. Political will, or rather the lack thereof, has been a significant obstacle to progress in refugee protection, which seems to have diminished over the decades, even as initiatives as discussed above in this chapter have proliferated. The answer “can be found in a more robust, comprehensive, and good-faith application of the tenets of protection”—which perhaps can begin to build with the momentum from the new Compact.62 At the heart of the GCR is the CRRF, which was already annexed to the New York Declaration and was test-run in fifteen countries around the world as part of the process of preparing the GCR, which was concluded two years later. Eight African countries were part of the pilot process, including Chad, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Somalia, Uganda, and Zambia, as well as the African Union as a regional body. The Framework promotes refugee selfreliance so they are better able to contribute in productive ways to their host communities and countries. It prioritizes strengthening host communities and countries so that they can build capacity, not just for hosting refugees but for the mutual development of their own citizens and refugees alongside each other in order to encourage the expansion of refugee rights and harmonious existence. It calls for the expansion of the capacity of countries of origin to enable refugees to return in safety and dignity when the time is right. Importantly, the Framework marshals the involvement of a wide range of actors, led nationally, and planning comprehensively to link protection with solutions, to make these objectives possible. Following this, the Compact describes what burden sharing would look like under this new dispensation and the forms of support necessary at each stage of refugee management from reception to search for solutions. The Compact advocates “timely, adequate and needs-driven humanitarian assistance, both for the emergency response and protracted situations, including predictable, flexible, unearmarked, and multiyear funding.”63 These measures, if well and truly implemented, would begin to revolutionize refugee protection and assistance. 6 2. Türk, “Promise,” 576. 63. GCR, para. 32.

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Fa r , bu t Not Fa r Enough: Ga ps in th e Globa l Com pact for R efuge e s And yet the GCR fell short of the high expectations that emerged from the consensus that shaped it, which took incalculable consultations, compromises, and cooperation to reach. Five particular shortcomings are discussed here: the definition of refugees, the causes of refugee outflows, the challenges of burden sharing, approach to gender and refugeehood, and refugee protection and solutions. With respect to the definition of refugees, the Compact retained a narrow definition of (1951) Convention refugees and failed to recognize the millions of IDPs, who currently outnumber Convention refugees by about 200 percent globally, as needing international protection. Similarly, it does not recognize other forcibly displaced persons such as those displaced from climate-change-induced disasters. It is difficult not to perceive this as the loss of a major opportunity to make the current definition of refugees more reflective of contemporary trends and anticipatory of growing problems for the future. With reference to recognition of the external causes of the current refugee crisis being experienced even more excruciatingly by countries of the Global South, the Compact (expectedly) neglects to correctly identify the powerful states of the Global North as being directly responsible or culpable for the conflicts, wars, and mass displacement in recent history. Says BS Chimni, “The major refugee outflows in recent years have been from Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria, all of which have been the objects of armed intervention or responsibility-to-protect efforts of Western States. These interventions, often driven by objectives such as regime change, have been a humanitarian disaster. In other words, it is very often external social forces and States which aggravate local conflicts through intervention that are responsible for the mass exodus of refugees.”64 In other words, the Compact continues the deafening silence in the extant global refugee and human rights instruments, and in the academic literature, on the role of external forces in the creation of refugee crises in the world. Preceding chapters in this book have carefully explained these dynamics in creating African refugees from Cameroon to the Central African Republic, Somalia, Sudan, and many other places in-between. With respect to burden sharing, while several new initiatives have been introduced, including Global Refugee Forums and national or regional Support Forums to make it easier to raise support for states hosting large and protracted 6 4. Chimni, “Global Compact,” 630.

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refugee situations, it is also hard not to interpret the document’s emphasis on assistance to host states as yet another gimmick (or it will be turned into one) by the wealthy Global North to keep refugees physically distant from their borders staying in the poor neighboring countries of the Global South, and to not have to directly see the issue as their own problem too. The fate of stranded asylum seekers in Europe and the many interstices between Europe and Africa are also not addressed. The Compact is deliberate in integrating, or more appropriately, mainstreaming, women’s and girls’ concerns throughout the issues discussed in the document. In taking this approach, it seems to continue the prevalent addwomen-and-stir approach that has not adequately taken cognizance of the need for gender equity beyond mere inclusion and equality concerns. It is African women, men, and children, who are often at the receiving end of global refugee policy, that will continue to suffer the disadvantages of an approach that does not carefully account for their historical and contextual positions. Regarding refugee protection and solutions, while the document does explore “complementary pathways for admission to third countries” and other local solutions beyond the three classic solutions, the point remains that it does not address the fact that permanent solutions are almost impossible in a world where mostly unresolved conflicts mean repatriation is impossible for most, and integration and resettlement remain at the whims of the countries with the power or opportunity to offer these.65 This is perhaps the greatest achievement of the Compact, though: it reaffirms and expands the commitment of a wide variety of actors to the existing international refugee regime and creates mechanisms to support its continued relevance. One major understated success of the global refugee regime is the very fact of its existence, persistence, and, indeed, expansion over the years since the end of World War II, a fact that has led to the development and concretization of certain basic refugee protection norms, customs, traditions, concepts, and practices. Considering that there is no similar migration regime,66 as states have traditionally resisted any attempt to impose international legal obligations on them in relation to the admission and treatment of other categories of migrants, the refugee regime is far ahead of the game. And yet, the regime has historically been dogged by its significant failure to end the scourge of forced displacement, tackle its root causes, take collective responsibility, and

6 5. Aleinikoff, “Unfinished Work,” 611–17. 6 6. Guild and Grant, “Migration Governance.”

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decisively deal with emerging dynamics unanticipated in the design of the 1951 UN Convention and its 1967 Protocol. If the GCR is to be impactful, it needs to meet these decades-old challenges and leap beyond them to embrace the future. Does it have the capacity to do so? The answer is unclear, because it does not go far enough on most of its stipulations, and yet, as is the case in the general domain of international relations, its impact can be significantly dictated by states practice and their willingness to either expansively or restrictively interpret the letter and spirit of the Declaration and the Compact.

Conclusion Refugees still struggle to exercise their freedom of movement and choice, which are fundamental to the rights and privileges accorded them by the various international and regional conventions discussed in this chapter. This sad reality reflects the too-common excesses from key stakeholders who are responsible for the management of refugees choosing national interest over international obligation. Although states constitute the most powerful entity among stakeholders, intergovernmental organizations (in particular, the UNHCR) often have the leverage of access to funds for refugees, which some African states more often than not receive and use to shore up their political legitimacy to the detriment of better refugee management. In addition to this, as the link between the state and the international community on refugee matters and given that refugee matters are a global concern with the ability to undermine the international standing of a negligent state, the UNHCR has become a formidable entity in these power relations. Regardless, states ultimately still exert sovereign authority. Therefore, whatever policies or programs are introduced by the UNHCR to better the refugee regime, the nation-state remains the key to the actualization of these initiatives. To address this dynamic, some recommendations from the Addis Ababa Document on Refugees and Forced Population Displacements in Africa are pertinent. Participants concluded that for effective measures of containing refugee and displacement crises in Africa, states and other relevant stakeholders must consider and indeed prioritize “decisive national and international measures to create stable, viable and progressive societies.”67 In other words, the best practice cannot be how refugees are managed and protected, because

67. “Addis Ababa Document.”

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this will always come with a cost unbearable for refugees, but how the situation that caused their displacement is altogether prevented. And where the prevention fails in the face of increasing mixed migration and state apathy, Erika Feller concluded that the objective should not be “to prevent movement, but to manage better the many sensitive issues at stake, including national security and identity, social harmony, and economic progress, in a manner which protects individual rights and state interests, promotes a proper sharing of responsibilities and maximizes the benefits that migration of all sorts can bring to host societies.”68 While these areas could be said to have been addressed in the context of the refugee regime in Africa, including engagement with the economic and political benefits of refugees, as the foregoing has shown, none of these has been maximized to benefit both the refugees and their host communities or has resulted in truly durable solutions.

68. Feller, “Asylum, Migration and Refugee Protection,” 509.

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DURABLE SOLUTIONS AND THE CRISIS OF DEVELOPMENT

Introduction The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, acting under the authority of the General Assembly, shall assume the function of providing international protection . . . to refugees who fall within the scope of the present Statute and of seeking permanent solutions for the problem of refugees by assisting Governments and . . . private organizations to facilitate the voluntary repatriation of such refugees, or their assimilation within new national communities. (chap. 1, para. 1, Statute of the UNHCR, 1950)1

Embedded in the 1950 Statute that created the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) was the double mandate to provide international protection to refugees and seek “permanent solutions” to their problems. The latter are often referred to as “durable solutions” in refugee management, state practice, and academic literature. Ironically, the use of the term solutions has contributed over the years to the perception of refugees as “problems” to be “solved,” prejudicing what may be considered a natural human impulse to flee danger and seek safety. “Durable solutions” refers to all the measures taken to permanently end refugee status for persons under international protection, ideally either after the cause of their flight from their homeland has been resolved or when refugees are able to access citizenship status, rights, and responsibilities through other means. The same statute identifies three ways by which this can happen: through voluntary repatriation or through 1. United Nations, “Statute.”

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their assimilation or naturalization in another state, traditionally either their host state (local integration) or a third country offering asylum (resettlement). These three measures have been widely referred to as the “classic” durable solutions, which encompass all other initiatives that states and the UNHCR may devise to achieve the same objective of ending refugee status and returning former refugees to citizenship. States are central to the entire idea of durable solutions. This is so in two particular ways. First, a refugee is considered to have achieved a durable solution when they recover their citizenship of a state—whether the state of origin or first asylum or a third country of resettlement. Each of the three classic solutions restores the individual’s relationship with a sovereign nation-state, a relationship often deemed to be natural.2 This requirement is consistent with Western political theory by which the state is an entity with both compulsory and total jurisdiction. In Aristotelian thought, a person is human only within the state—only a god or a beast may exist outside the formal and total coverage of state power. Hence, a refugee only fully retrieves their humanity in the return to citizenship within a nation. The second important sense in which the state is central is in the repeated emphasis within the UNHCR Statute of the need for cooperation of states with the organization for it to be able to carry out its mandate. The Statute makes clear the influence that states must have on this process, either as a collective (the UN General Assembly, for instance) or as individual governments, and their leading role in what durable solutions to apply. But the central role that states play in finding durable solutions is a double-edged sword, as we see in this chapter and indeed throughout this book. Durable solutions do not emerge from a vacuum. In light of the current principles of the international refugee regime, they are meant to be formed from years of careful and consistent integrated policies and programs on a relief-developmental continuum. This way, what determines the durability of a durable solution has more to do with the preparedness of stakeholders for the postexile period of displaced persons. This entails the scope, operationalization, and effectiveness of refugee management and protection. The UNHCR has, no doubt, made tremendous efforts in these areas, but due to factors that often overwhelm its operations, it has lagged in achieving successful durable solutions for refugees. State actors hold the key to unlocking any meaningful doors of refugee management and protection. Due to the geopolitical context in Africa and given that all management issues are inherently political, the UNHCR faces many great obstacles in these state actors. In a bid to balance 2. Hammond, This Place Will Become Home; Malkki, Purity and Exile.

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politics and the humanitarian-moral ideals of the international refugee regime, the latter often suffer. Moreover, in spite of the oft-assumed communal inclination of Africans, there is a certain irony in state-society relations that have so often featured states ready to exploit the vulnerability of members of society. This is even more so with regard to refugees living at the margins who have few means of accessing justice and expressing their rights. Ultimately, for many state actors, these populations constitute a political unit only to be exploited and ignored. The UNHCR, in the face of protracted refugee crises, has been caught in the dilemma of achieving the objectives of the initiatives and programs discussed in the preceding chapter in the face of inadequate funding vis-à-vis the burgeoning cases of forced displacement.3 This is coupled with donor lethargy, which brought about the refugee regime of the 1990s that shifted to reliefemergency aid humanitarianism (care and maintenance) at the expense of a developmental-humanitarian (self-reliance) strategy. In what appears to have made the situation worse, refugees and displaced persons as well as their host communities are placed at the margins of the global refugee regime with their voices unheard and unrepresented in decision-making processes, implementation, and feedback measures. This not only compounds the problems faced by refugees and their hosts but also aggravates the challenges of the entire regime. The evidence of this is the increasing numbers of protracted refugee situations and the doubtful success of the so-called classic durable solutions. This is in spite of the increased number of agencies engaged in refugee assistance and protection, from 20 in 1960 to 122 in 1981, and possibly in their thousands in recent years.4 Bearing in mind that development and security are essential to an enduring solution to refugee crises, the following section examines the twin phenomena in Africa to reflect on the full scope of the concerns that drive the refugee regime in Africa, particularly as related to the operationalization of durable solutions.

De v elopm ent, Secu r it y, a n d Per sistent R efuge e Cr ise s in A fr ica It is a trite fact, if not a cliché, to repeat here that Africa is faced with the challenge of underdevelopment caused by myriads of problems too complex to be understood from a single perspective. Nevertheless, closer to understanding 3 . See UNHCR, “Overview of the Refugee Situation,” 9–10. 4. Bulcha, Flight and Integration, 22.

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this complex matrix is the idea of a prebendal society, which characterizes virtually all the states in the region. From all that it represents, a prebendal state speaks to the politics of governance anchored on a rentier system of consumption as opposed to production and innovation.5 Prebendal societies encourage planning based on short-term gains for the few at the detriment of the long-term gains for the entire society. The state and the political elites see the society as wells of resources—human and otherwise—and their estate of exploitation. And society sees the state for what it is and, for this reason, positions itself as a farm of exploitation insofar as it is able to eat the crumbs.6 To this extent, both the society and the state work at cross-purposes in the process of nation building. Simply put, nation-building efforts and means are sacrificed for cynical interests. A former general in the Nigerian army, Ishola Williams, put the prebendal image in succinct terms when he described one of the military regimes in Nigeria as “a government of the contractors, by the contractors, for the contractors.”7 This is no less true in other parts of Africa where both the leadership and followership work to share the “national cake,” to the detriment of the national project. The vast majority of the population of these states, who are either unemployed or underemployed, engage in the informal sector of the economy and depend solely on the redistribution of resources from Fennel’s seven categories of individuals with better access to the patronage loop: political leaders, traditional and religious leaders, government officials, international corporations (employees, owners, and shareholders), national corporations (employees, owners, and shareholders), the diaspora, and the professions (lawyers, accountants, security services, and judiciary).8 Meanwhile, the whole idea of development is directly proportional to the detail of planning, organization of skills, prudent mobilization of resources, and a pragmatic consistency in execution. M. Romesh Singh explained it as the rational process of organizing and carrying out conceived and staffed programs or projects, while John Harris pictured it as “such ideas as ‘unfolding’, ‘growth,’ ‘the fuller working out of the details of anything,’ and bringing out the potential that is latent in something (as in the case of an image that is latent within the chemicals coating a piece of old-fashioned film that must be ‘developed’ in order to be revealed).”9 Harris’s 5 . See Adebanwi and Obadare, Democracy and Prebendalism. 6. See Akinrinade, “Society under Pressure.” 7. Williams, “Nigeria,” 10. 8. Ibid. 9. Singh, Tribal Development, 1; Harris, “Development Theories,” 35; more or less, the same argument was echoed by Berendsen et al., Asian Tigers, African Lions.

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description appears to appeal quite well to the aesthetic form of development, which invariably finds its way within the art of the culture of people. Development, then, is not a destination but a continuous process of engagement between human and material resources. Indeed, this is a difficult task to achieve. Hence, it requires both short- and long-term planning with realistic foresight. Consistency and pragmatism are paramount to this process and therefore are often designed to be insulated from the cynical politics of an administration. This consistency is often tied to the strength of technocrats through an efficient institutional bureaucracy. Contrary to technocratic bureaucracies, nothing is too trivial or too important not to be politicized in Africa, and the mobilization of resources for the common good of society is often lost on the radar of governance. As if to extend the colonial domination of the region, the post-independence governments, led by national figures that fought against imperial oppression and autocracy, continued with the brutality of the colonial regimes in crushing dissenting voices in the state. Since the early period of independence, there have been massive violations of human rights as the autocratic tendencies of the indigenous governments burgeoned. The supervision of the colonial project by independent African governments danced these states back to the tune of neocolonization and persistent underdevelopment. The autocratic style adopted by states could be said to have been necessary to develop countries and prevent avenues for foreign interference or disruption while these new states engaged in programs of cultural solidification and realistic development policies, but this was not the case. Poverty levels did not decline, as states promised they would, but increased astronomically as the years passed; the integrated railways were neither well maintained nor improved upon to aid markets as the colonial governments did for themselves; and health centers, schools, and other colonially instituted projects of necessity that had aided the colonial exploitation of the states’ resources were handled with cluelessness. Interstate and intraregional economic ties were almost nonexistent; development was thus impeded as the postindependence governments failed to redirect the colonial markets to their advantage. In lieu of strong economic ties, there were strong intra- and interstate forms of conflict. For instance, after independence, in East Africa, Kenya quickly descended into regional rivalry and conflict, particularly over boundaries with Uganda,10 as Senegal and Mauritania were facing it out in the West. Chad, Ethiopia, Libya, and others were also on this campaign of chaos at various 10. Oduntan, “Africa’s Border Disputes.”

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times. Intrastate conflict was ubiquitous, all mouthing the idea of justice.11 The situation in these countries, and the manner in which issues of governance were handled, suggests leadership misconception that traded foreign oppression of the people for indigenous oppression, justified based on their indigenous affiliation. It is worth mentioning that the debacle of development and attendant crisis of insecurity were due not to the particular features of professed democracy but to the inability of states to transform this misconception into meaningful policies of integration of the diverse groups within their inherited borders. They also failed to foster internal economies, as seen in many examples of former colonial states that combined force and repression with successful development policies, particularly in Southeast Asia.12 Rather, through their proclivity as reflected in their actions and inactions, African countries spent more on the importation of arms and ammunitions since independence than they did on other germane areas that concern the development and security of the region, such as food security, education, technology, industry, employment opportunities, health, and so much more. This was the position of Adebayo Adedeji, a former chief executive officer of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, who noted that about US$60 billion was estimated as the total cost of importation of arms to Africa just within five years in the 1980s, more than double the estimate for other third-world regions in the same period, put at US$28.9 billion; and this figure is minimal in light of subsequent events in Africa after this period.13 The huge proportion of the revenue consumed by the purchase of arms and ammunitions has not led to a more secure environment, where in spite of the shortage of developmental projects, the people of Africa can live peacefully without any threat to their lives and humble means of livelihood. If anything, the spike in the revenue going into arms and ammunitions became equivalent to the spike in the cases of instability and turmoil in the region, leaving many innocent lives at risk. Now, the people have no security, and governments are not concerned about their livelihood through human capacity development projects or their fundamental human rights. Accordingly, virtually all studies on conflict and security, particularly as they relate to ethno-religious and other politically related crises, show trends that suggest a malfunctional social cohesion pattern in these states, systemically nurtured by the political establishments that gain from such occurrences of division and conflict via looting of the state treasury and 1 1. Thomas and Falola, Secession and Separatist Conflict, 2. 12. See, for example, Berendsen et al., Asian Tigers, African Lions. 13. Adedeji, Comprehending and Mastering African Conflicts, xvi.

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perpetual poverty of the people whom they have conditioned to be manipulated for cynical purposes.14 This is not in any way a statement of exoneration or justification of foreign interventionism in Africa and its impact on the dimensions of conflict in the region; rather, this is part of the context by which we understand the emergence of modern refugee crises and attendant solutions. Foreign interventionism in Africa has always taken its toll on the dollarworshipping leaders in the region, and like foreign aid and foreign direct investments, it is another means through which the political elites gain from the instability in the region.15 In his study of the relationship between the rich and the poor, which he explained in light of North-South relations in global affairs, Graham Hancock, at the risk of being misconstrued as a nihilist, concluded on the historical fact that the rich always gets richer on the poverty of the poor by way of pretending to attend to their needs: “One can get quite rich attending to the poor.”16 While the rich and industrialized North got richer at the expense of the impoverished and dependent economies of the South, the elites in the South sought to take advantage of their own poor masses rather than channeling their energy into policies to break this North-South imperial yoke.17 At any rate, the direct intervention of the international community in the resolution of violent conflicts in Africa is often limited to cessation of hostilities. This limit is, in most cases, evident in its often-displayed ignorance of the complexities of such crises on the one hand, and the level at which the belligerents are willing to compromise and achieve lasting peace on the other. Indeed, Adedeji further opines, “As far as the international community is concerned, cessation of hostilities amounts to peace and by brokering a formal agreement between the warring parties it expects sustainability to follow more or less automatically. When this doesn’t happen, there is disillusionment, and Africa is classified as a basket case.”18 In the absence of the expected compromise for the common good of the state to attain peace and promote nation-building and development, Michael Crowder relates the situation to 14. This much is understood from several extant works on corporate responsibility, conflict and security, and conflict resolution in Africa. Adeyinka Adebayo noted that “in some African states the drift toward anarchy and lawlessness (usually spearheaded by the authorities) has proceeded unabated.” Ibid. See also Ministry of Cooperation and Integration in Africa (the Presidency), African Union; Amaeshi et al., “Corporate Social Responsibility in Nigeria.” 15. Decker and Osunlakin, “Rodney, Development and Africa,” 16. 16. Hancock, Lords of Poverty, 234. 17. See, for example, Nult, “Kenyan Development Experience.” 18. Adedeji, Comprehending and Mastering African Conflicts.

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“a permanent Mezzogiorno for which there is little, if any hope.”19 In a scenario where this comes up, the state becomes a carcass on which the hawks and vultures of the West and the East alike feed for their own well-being and sustenance. If you cannot have or maintain peace in the bid toward economic security, you can at least have and maintain exploitation by the ones interested in what you are fighting for. This has been the situation of conflicts in Africa. Therefore, as a resource-rich region with a diversity of cultures and peoples, the whole range of precarious situations in the region are mostly executed by the connivance of states, governments, and foreign actors, leading to the outflow of multi-billion-dollar revenues from the states to their benefit and the nurturing of violence and instability due to increasing rates of inequality, marginality, and exclusion in the polity.20 It is in this view that violent conflicts in Africa have been referred to, over time, as war against self. The situation is even more complex and perplexing when one considers state-citizen relations, which have deteriorated to the lowest ebb of distrust, neglect, and constitutional derision.21 To this extent, the absence of institutional capacity, overarching inequality, and perpetual poverty are tripartite features of the crises in African states. These three factors at the same time are influenced by the conflicting identities and interests stemming from the diversity of the peoples and cultures within the states; weak institutional response to health, educational, and justice challenges, leading to lack of faith in the system; favoritism and nepotism in all dimensions; marginality; human rights violations; corruption, and malfeasance; and further features of government without governance. Thelma Awori, a former assistant administrator and director at the United Nations Development Programme, took this further by stating that the consequence of these crises, which are ultimately the crisis of underdevelopment in Africa, “inflicts human suffering through death, destruction of homes and livelihoods, constant displacement and insecurity.”22 She continued, “Violent conflict disrupts the process of production, creates conditions for pillage of the countries resources and diverts their application from development purposes to servicing war.”23 Bringing together the humanistic perspective on conflict and security in Africa, Dapo Adelugba noted that the common feature often leading to conflict in Africa is situated within the inability of states and institutions to assure 1 9. Ibid. 2 0. See also Mayah et al., “Inequality in Nigeria,” 9–10. 21. See, for example, Adebanwi and Obadare, Encountering the Nigerian State. 22. Awori, cited in Adedeji, Comprehending and Mastering African Conflicts, xiii. 23. Ibid.

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conditions for safe and peaceful human life, which has diminished human capacity development in the state as well as caused the failure of the state and the society to establish social values such as trust, dialogue, and tolerance.24 This is worsened by the lethargy of the people to adhere to laws and rules of the state as a result of government attitude. Meanwhile, the militarization of security in Africa, which has become the traditional response of successive governments, irrespective of the system of government, has brought more hardship to the state than the peace, resolution, and development these were ostensibly intended to attain through the militaristic approach. Following this argument, Adelugba rightly noted that it is important for the state to take preventive measures on security, in lieu of militarized responsive measure that only escalates the situation. Adelugba and other scholars concluded that there is a need for aesthetic and ethical imperatives for national security in Africa that require the establishment of vital normative foundations that interlink the ideas of action, vision, purpose, responsibility, and justice, as well as their impact on the security problems of Africa.25 The aesthetic and ethical features enunciated in the study above reside in the need for a definitive description of the nationhood of a state with the composite position of each element in the alliance. This way, methods, frameworks, and strategies by the state and its agencies toward attaining harmony are well designed within the aesthetic and ethical limit conceived and expressed by the state. Conflict could be regarded as a call for better and workable governance values. Philip Ogo Ujomu described it as “a call for humanity to take fuller control of its own situation and to come to a realization of the dialectics of auto-integration and auto-rectification.”26 This relates to the report of the United Nations secretary-general to the United Nations session in 1998 on the nature, dynamics, effects, and possible way forward from the plethora of violent conflicts in the region. The report, titled “The Causes of Conflict and the Promotion of Durable Peace and Sustainable Development in Africa,” was predicated on the fact that “peace and conflict cannot be deliberated in isolation of each other.”27 In other words, to achieve peace is the assurance of good governance and attendant development; the contrary is the manifestation of violent conflicts as experienced in different parts of Africa. From South Sudan to Somalia, Mali to Nigeria, Cameroon to the 2 4. Adelugba, “Introduction,” 2–3. 25. Ibid. 2 6. Ujomu, “Bounds of Security Theorizing,” 6. 27. Annan, quoted by Awori, in Adedeji, Comprehending and Mastering African Conflicts, xiii.

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Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burundi to Libya, and others, it remains to be seen how this call is being responded to in Africa. Meanwhile, in his analysis on the peculiarity and exigency of political stability to the success of the ethos, philosophy, and goals of the African Union, Sam Oyovbaire argues that despite the abolition of the slave trade and of colonization in Africa, the continent is still tied to “all manner of inhumanity, exploitation and expropriation of its land, other natural and mineral resources” and in the process degrades its environment.28 The stake that the material reality of different groups within a polity has on the conflict and security prospect of a state is quite enormous and portends overwhelming effects on all other considerations, including economic security. Economic security itself is a major security mechanism that a state could use to achieve political stability, national cohesion, and sustainable development. Anthony I. Asiwaju defines this as the “absence of threat of severe deprivation of economic welfare.”29 At the local, national, or international level, the rise and spread of conflict subsist mostly on the need for economic security by the belligerent factions. The question, however, is how deep this goes into the fabric of the society and not just for the benefit of the few elites, as in the current crisis in South Sudan. Whatever it is, a former military chief in Nigeria, Lawrence Onoja, concluded that the “tension, crises and even wars are component parts of our daily existence. . . . To worsen matters, mankind has acquired enough weapons to destroy our planet-Earth, more than twenty times.”30 What is more, it should be recalled that what brought us to the discussion on security and development is the fact that both are essential to the workability of any form of durable solution arrived at a time for a given refugee situation. If anything, the situation as seen so far has shown that these interwoven essentials are manifested in an abysmal manner in most parts of Africa. Moreover, conflict, war, and strife in Africa, like in other places, are subjected to several personal and ideological considerations from different circles.31 This is reflected in the absence of a consensus on the transculturally valid norm in assessing the aesthetics of this phenomenon; without any clear and firm criteria of differentiation but value preferences, Adda B. Bozeman explains that some violent conflicts are “justified” and others proclaimed “unjust.”32 2 8. Oyovbaire, “Political Stability,” 37. 29. Asiwaju, “Challenges of Regional Integration,” 45. 30. Onoja, Peace-Keeping and International Security, xv. 31. For more on this, see Thomas and Falola, Secession and Separatist Conflict. 32. Bozeman, Conflict in Africa, 13.

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Regardless of the various perspectives on the subject, violence negatively impacts vulnerable civilians, who often end up as refugees or internally displaced persons (IDPs). Ironically, some civilians are loyal or sympathetic to one or the other of the factions, and in most cases, it is only after the crisis that they realize that the violent conflict had little or nothing to do with their own well-being. They often become disillusioned with the state, as it cannot provide them safe spaces to thrive. The basic point here is that, as the following would further show, there can be no durable solutions to the refugee and forced displacement crisis in Africa without addressing the fundamentals of governance, development, and security on the continent.

Probl e ms in A pply ing Du r a bl e Solu tions in A fr ica All of these issues have consequences for the durability of any solution adopted for refugee situations in Africa. For example, the Development Assistance for Refugees (DAR) initiative was meant to “facilitate self-reliance for refugees and prepare them for durable solutions, and contribute to poverty eradication in refugee-hosting areas.”33 But poverty eradication solutions must pay close attention to the intricacies of development and security, as enunciated above. This in turn demands commitment and pragmatic recodification of the present morphology of states in Africa. How can poverty be eradicated among refugees in countries that themselves wallow in poverty, with political schemes that serve elites and other obnoxious business interests?34 Indeed, “achieving durable solutions is a gradual, complex and often long-term process that involves addressing human rights, humanitarian, development, reconstruction and peace building challenges.”35 To be sure of how complex and long-term this process is, it is worth mentioning that a durable solution is not attained because a group of refugees is repatriated to their home country, resettled in a third country, or naturalized in a host country. A durable solution to a refugee situation is attained only when displaced persons are no longer in need of specific assistance and protection because of their displacement, while they are equipped, like everyone else in society, to exercise their fundamental human rights, which include the right to work and earn a dignified living, freedom of movement, freedom to reside in any part of the country of their choice, freedom 3 3. Jallow and Malik, “Handbook,” vi. 3 4. See also Crisp, “No Solutions in Sight,” 2. 35. Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, “Durable Solutions,” 3.

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of association, and many other rights important to their livelihood and recognition of their personhood, without discrimination related to their displacement. In addition, the United Nations Inter-Agency Standing Committee Framework on IDPs, also applicable in a refugee situation, states that:36 • The primary responsibility for the achievement of durable solutions lies with the state. • National and international actors from the humanitarian and development sector have a complementary role to play and should be given rapid and unimpeded access to IDPs. • IDPs’ needs, rights, and legitimate interests should be the primary consideration and should guide all laws and policies on internal displacement. • IDPs, to make an informed and voluntary choice about their settlement options, should be respected as to their right to participate in the planning and management of strategies and programs that facilitate durable solutions. • IDPs should not be discriminated against on the basis of their displacement or their race, religion, gender, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, disability, age, marital and family status, nationality, or other status. • A community-based approach should be adopted that addresses the needs of both IDPs and their hosts, which in turn reduces the risk of tensions arising and facilitates (re)integration. Thus, the assumptions on which durable solutions are predicated appear to be more of an illusion in Africa, as they speak to the rudiments of good governance. The above implicitly requires African governments to present refugees and displaced persons, the victims of state actions and inactions, with opportunities that were not available to them before their displacement. For one, there would not have been displacement in the first place had the above mechanisms for achieving a durable solution been part of the rituals of governance. Expecting states to toe this line toward resettling and restoring national protection for displaced persons is like asking states to pay reparations to them for their losses. To give these privileges to refugees and displaced persons is to extend the same to the rest of the society if such efforts are to achieve their purpose. These are essentially life necessities needed by all, which can only speak to inclusive government and responsive institutions that ensure good practices 36. Ibid.

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via pragmatic policies and good governance structure.37 This stands in obvious contrast to the prevailing culture of governance in the region. Historically, this situation boils down at such a juncture to the economic crises of the 1980s; the cynical handshakes between African leaders and the Bretton Woods institutions, which exacerbated the situation; increased strife and economic strain in many African states; and the eventual end of the Cold War. This is not to say that the political economy of the region before this time was like El Dorado, but together, all of this not only increased the range and rate of forced displacement but also dictated and shaped how the refugee regime in Africa was responded to by both African states and their foreign partners. All these have affected the implementation of the three main durable solutions, as we discuss below. Repatriation

The conditions upon which repatriation is negotiated are not always reliable, leaving refugees with a deep feeling of distrust for the international refugee regime and its coordination by the UNHCR. Sometimes refugees are repatriated without their individual consent; other times repatriation efforts are embarked on by refugees themselves, referred to as “spontaneous return,” even in the face of official opposition, though this often results in long and incomplete self-repatriation movements.38 Spontaneous return is often the case when refugees find it increasingly hard to survive under the conditions in which they are placed in their host country. They would rather take pride in the ashes of their homes than endure the humiliation of their personhood under “international protection” while in exile. States, on the other hand, engage in forced repatriation when the burden of hosting refugees bites harder and there is evident lethargy of the international community with respect to the particular refugee caseload. Considering this, they can count on the support of this community for repatriation even when the ground for such is not clear in the refugee-producing state. It needs no telling that there cannot be any durable solution in a repatriation effort if the root causes of the refugee flow have yet to be apprehended. But in some cases, the political calculations of the regime do not allow for this to be ascertained before repatriation and the cessation clause are invoked. This was the plight of the Ethiopian refugees repatriated from Djibouti, where they had fled for refuge, by their host country and the UNHCR in 1983. According to Mekuria Bulcha, these Ethiopian refugees

3 7. See Addo, “Refugees’ Expectations,” for more on this. 38. B. Wilson, “Internally Displaced,” 24.

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were moving simultaneously in two directions on the same route: “While in 1983 the UNHCR was repatriating Ethiopian refugees from Djibouti, other Ethiopians were fleeing to the same country and other neighbouring states in masses. Furthermore, many of those who were repatriated fled again to Djibouti and other countries finding the situation both economically and politically insecure.”39 Both Chadian and Ugandan refugees experienced similar confusion around this same period because the change of government in these states did not guarantee the safety of refugees upon return.40 Also, in 1995, the UNHCR encouraged the Mauritanian refugees, forcibly displaced by their government because of their ethnicity and political control, to return home at a time when their government was not willing to recognize their citizenship; yet the attainment of citizenship is noted as the first step toward expunging their refugee status.41 How a durable solution was hoped to be achieved in the examples above remains more a political rhetoric than one founded on a humanitarian-moral ground. Going by the 4Rs process, repatriation is carried out, but the reintegration, rehabilitation, and reconstruction mechanisms of the process are apparently forfeited in such a scenario, leaving refugees with the prospect of a second and possibly cyclical displacement. Many refugee-producing situations in Africa are as complex as finding the solutions. Hence, the UNHCR and other stakeholders choose to focus on the symptoms of forced displacement rather than the root causes. For instance, it was noted in a 2014 UNHCR document that “due to their heightened visibility, emergencies attract the greater part of attention and resources, with comparatively less available to support the pursuit of solutions.”42 The repatriation mechanism for achieving a durable solution is paramount to the idea of transitional justice, which is at the base of the other three Rs in the repatriation process. Transitional justice is an institutional—judicial and nonjudicial— measure to grant justice to returnees whose rights were violated during the refugee-producing incidents, “through individual prosecution, reparations, truth-seeking, institutional reform, vetting and dismissals or a combination thereof.”43 All of these follow through the reintegration, rehabilitation, and 39. Bulcha, Flight and Integration, 23–24. 4 0. Niels Harild and Asger Christenson, among other scholars, have equally reached the conclusion in their work that the end of a conflict or a change of government does not necessarily guarantee a safe return and lasting solution for a forced displacement crisis. See Harild and Christenson, “Development Challenge,” 1–8. 41. Fresia, “Performing Repatriation?,” 16. 42. UNHCR, “Overview of the Refugee Situation,” 1. 43. UN, “Report of the Secretary-General,” quoted in Fresia, “Performing Repatriation?,” 2.

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reconstruction stages of an ideal repatriation process. According to Marion Fresia, refugees construct a politico-humanitarian narrative to seek a transitional and local interpretation of justice.44 However, as seen in the case of Mauritanian returnees, this is often a daunting task with a very limited chance of materializing—the government was booted out by a military junta that interpreted justice according to the Islamic injunction of total forgiveness and reconciliation in lieu of justice through a special court that the government it toppled had promised to institute, and this torpedoed the just order of things imagined by many of the returnees. The irony of these durable solution options (except the resettlement option, which is often taken by developed countries with the capacity to accommodate refugees) is that, generally, the citizens of the states where refugees are repatriated, naturalized, or integrated are also on the move in large numbers out of the region, for a better means of survival. What this implies for the refugee regime, particularly its durable solutions, is that the measure of development needed in these states for a lasting solution to the refugee and forced displacement crises is not present. In the absence of this, one could consider future forced displacement as a likely possibility following the insecurity generated from myriads of effects of underdevelopment, unemployment, underemployment, injustice, different forms of favoritism, official malfeasance, and marginalization.45 The unparalleled link between sustainable development and sustainable solutions to forced displacement informed the inclusion of displaced persons in the 2004 amendments to the Common Country Assessment and the UN Development Assistance Framework, which in turn led to the consideration of durable solutions for displaced persons in the work of the UN Country Teams. But the materialization of the benefit of this to the regime in Africa is as likely as a camel passing through the eye of a needle. Mixed migration is today a major issue in debates on migration, as the situation has led to a spike in occurrence of migrations across informal routes,46 like the refugees in figure 15.1 making their way to Libya, and possibly to try to cross into Europe from there. Migrants often lament the hopelessness of the situation they are fleeing at home that is worth the high risk of death along these illegal routes. And it is within this situation that the international refugee regime hopes to repatriate and reintegrate refugees successfully with several packages that are apparently illusionary or at best excessive luxury to be given on the part of the states in this climate. 4 4. Ibid., 16. 45. See also Falola, “Nigeria in the Global Context.” 4 6. See, for example, AFP, “Libya Rescues 129 Migrants.”

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Figure 15.1. Refugees in the Cha region of Borkou on the way to Libya. Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chad_2017 _Region_Borkou_refugees_on_the_way_to_Libya_DSC3136.jpg.

In a recent study conducted by the Nigerian office of the UNHCR, 85.9 percent of Nigerian returnees from Cameroon between January 1, 2019, and April 30, 2020, met their houses completely damaged, 7.39 percent partially damaged, and only 0.41 percent of the over twenty thousand returnees met their houses intact.47 It remains to be seen how this typical situation of an African state can allow for rational thought on the plight of this returnee population. The government is faced with several security challenges, and the economy is in a coma, while available resources are carted into the private treasuries of government officials and political elites. To worsen the situation, either as returnees or IDPs, forcibly displaced persons usually occupy the peripheral space of states. Development, security, and state presence are largely missing; they are marginalized and vulnerable. In the particular case of the Nigerian returnees from Cameroon, this population is from the core conflict-affected states in the country. Meanwhile, the UNHCR has recorded drops in the population of refugees since the start of the current millennium due to “successful” repatriation programs and reductions in the number of pre-2000s-type large-scale violent conflicts in Africa. This notwithstanding, in more than half of these cases of return, forced displacement is still imminent, implying that the increase in 47. UNHCR, “Nigeria Spontaneous Refugees Returnees.”

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the number of IDPs and other migrant, and shortfall in refugee numbers, are caused by the decision of the potential refugees to either join the ranks of IDPs or of other migrants for survival. This also implies that backflows to another country have not been ubiquitous in this matter because of the IDP camp option. Therefore, many of the repatriated Sudanese, Burundian, Congolese, Malian, Somali, and Nigerian refugees and others in the present millennium have joined the rising IDP population for security, sociocultural, political, and economic reasons and thereby worsen the poverty level of these areas as well as their development progress. This is far from what the durable solutions framework was intended to achieve. The foregoing was outlined in the 2014 UNHCR review of the refugee situation in Africa, where four barriers were highlighted that cause the failure of durable solutions with development implications in Africa: 1. Rights to land, property, and houses that belonged to the displaced are in many return situations contested, or the assets of the returnees have been taken over by others. 2. Livelihoods are disrupted or dependent on humanitarian aid, and livelihood rehabilitation is critical if solutions to displacement are to become sustainable, both if the displaced return home and if they have to integrate elsewhere. 3. Delivery of services such as security, education, and health along with basic infrastructure is frequently inadequate or absent both in places of exile and upon return. 4. Accountable and responsive governance and rule of law are often weak (particularly at the local level), government capacity is limited, its legitimacy is damaged, and social capital at the community level is impaired.48 Due to destruction of properties, limited economic opportunities, insecurity, and the absence or failure of transitional justice mechanisms, returnees are deprived of socioeconomic and political integration in their country of origin. As such, it is not always a just order but a new order of adaption for these returnees.49 Besides, refugees in protracted situations are of less concern to the global refugee regime due primarily to the disparities in the population of

4 8. UNHCR, “Overview of the Refugee Situation.” 49. Micah M. Trapp even went further to show that this goes beyond those repatriated to those naturalized or resettled due to individuals’ idea of “home” and “homecoming.” Trapp, “Already in America”; see also Brun and Fabos, “Making Homes in Limbo?”

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persons of concern and available resources, as refugees get urgent, emergency attention due to the visibility of the circumstance. This visibility is equal to the media attention given to these situations. Considering the magnitude of protracted refugee situations in Africa, before many of these refugees are eventually repatriated, they must have suffered neglect and massive violation of their rights in their host countries. According to that UNHCR review, “Recently, the adequacy, timeliness, and predictability of food availability for refugees have come under increased pressure. In at least 50 sites in nine African countries, WFP was forced to cut food rations up to 60 per cent, affecting 800,000 refugees. As of mid-June 2014, one-third of refugees relying on food assistance had been affected, with most experiencing over 50 per cent cut in their rations.”50 In the face of increasing neglect by the international community, it is expected that by the time they are returned to their country of displacement, they are left to complete the repatriation process on their own.51 This leads to backflows, spikes in IDP population, onward migration, or continued limbo in a state of uncertainty. Local Integration

Although the local integration option of the durable solutions is not commonly applicable, especially in the African context, the governments of Tanzania and Uganda before the mid-1990s operated a generous refugee regime that made local integration and the attainment of citizenship easier.52 The political and economic reality of the 1990s not only changed this integrative attitude; it led to harsher conditions for persons seeking asylum in these countries, while their stay depended on their political capital. Economic growth during this period was abysmal compared to the level of population growth. This disproportionate experience brought about pressure on the economies of these states, with effects on unemployment, standard of living, and life expectancy, thereby putting pressure on the available infrastructure such as schools, roads, and health-care facilities. In the face of these increasing shortages and shrinking opportunities, which are enough grounds for breeding xenophobic inclination in the people of these states, the number of persons forcibly displaced from their homes and seeking refuge elsewhere spiked in Africa. This further undermined the local integration option throughout Africa from the 1990s.53 50. Ibid. 51. See, for example, Harild and Christenson, “Development,” 3–4. 52. Brosché and Nilsson, “Zambian Refugee Policy Security,” 16. 53. To this effect, host countries act at cross-purposes with the global legal instruments governing the international refugee regime. See Okello, “1969 OAU Convention,” 70.

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The tough immigration policies adopted by the Zambian government noted elsewhere in this book are a good example of how the local integration model remains difficult in Africa. The dwindling interest in and growing infeasibility of the local integration option are not happening in isolation. Instead, they reflect a global trend, which, after the post–World War II reconstruction in Europe, basically rendered this option a “non-solution.”54 The UNHCR drastically reduced its African budget for local integration from 94 percent in 1970 to 20 percent in 1982, while 60 percent of its African budget for that year was allocated to care and maintenance. This forced African states toward repatriation as the only alternative to finding a durable solution to the refugee situations in the region. Even then, the repatriation efforts are often clouded by politics as returnees are faced with the challenges of reintegration, rehabilitation, and reconstruction, a situation that might lead to backflow of refugees or further forced migration elsewhere. Although the UNHCR in its policy statement on seeking permanent solutions to global refugee crisis was clear on the social, humanitarian, and apolitical pursuit of its responsibilities, the political reality and implications of the entire global refugee regime are not lost on scholars and policy makers.55 Among other conclusions that speak to this, consider the view of Meredith Hunter concerning the refugee Self-Reliance Strategy (SRS), which is fundamental to the DAR program that has been part of the durable solutions regime: “Linking refugee assistance with development policy, the UNHCR’s promotion of refugee self-reliance was devised as a low-cost option of capturing the interest of donors who are increasingly focused on long-term development, while simultaneously assisting refugees to meet their own needs.”56 Certainly, the promotion of self-reliance for refugees did not evolve entirely from a moral or humanitarian standpoint. It is a calculation of financial prudence rather than one of the benefits it offers refugees. This is evident in the manner in which the policy has been approached over time, as seen in the previous chapter, and in the sociopolitical milieu that birthed the idea. How can refugees be self-reliant without being integrated into the society to the extent of having economic, social, and political rights, which are guaranteed by the international refugee legal instruments? The fact that the SRS, like other initiatives for the protection and management of refugees, has its trajectory in the evolution of the global refugee regime, which itself developed from the needs of 5 4. “NGO Statement on Local Integration,” quoted in Fielden, “Local Integration,” 1. 55. UNHCR, “Statute,” 6. 56. Hunter, “Failure of Self-Reliance,” 2.

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western European countries after the Second World War, makes it susceptible to the political machinations of states and their institutions. Therefore, when it was politically convenient and economically savvy for the postwar reconstruction efforts of western European states, they promoted the local integration option, which would provide them with easy access to the labor, investments, and general human resources needed for the time. In the case where repatriation had to be the option, they emphasized its voluntariness, ostensibly to protect refugees from the communist regime in the Soviet Union.57 These options were silent weapons of the Cold War to endear the West to the subjects of states in the Eastern bloc.58 In all, the strategy and considerations were made in the bid for superiority during the Cold War. As noted in the previous chapter, this attention shifted with the end of the Cold War when the refugee regime began to be guided by de facto acts that suited the particular circumstance and time, as opposed to the legal instruments guiding the regime. Not only were refugees repatriated against their will, but these countries tightened their immigration policies as they began to promote repatriation as a core element of the durable solution options. Together with the global refugee institutions they control, particularly the UNHCR, they focused only on refugee care and maintenance, since in their new logic, refugees are ultimately to be repatriated to their country of origin in the shortest possible time. The manner in which refugees and displaced persons manage their affairs in their camps reflects the limitations of the assistance programs vis-à-vis their policy instruments and resources to address the needs of refugees adequately. Consequently, Jock Baker and Iman M. Elawad wrote in their report on the refugee situation in Sudan that “other assistance, including WFP-supplied food aid, was provided via blanket distributions. Beneficiaries were found to be selling relief assistance to raise money to purchase food and non-food items, pay for medical expenses, and meet other basic needs.”59 SRS came into the refugee management arena from the 2000s when this logic proved to be illusionary in the face of burgeoning protracted refugee crises around the continent and owing to the cost of managing refugees living on relief and handouts. If anything, implicitly in its current theoretical position, the UNHCR hands over the full weight of the political aspect of refugee management, which drives the entire refugee system, and its implications, to 5 7. Beers, “Book Review,” 81. 58. In this vein, generous immigration policies of nations such as the United States were applied in order to favor persons fleeing any of the communist states. 59. Baker and Elawad, “Independent Evaluation of the UNHCR,” 6.

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state parties whose victims it was established to protect. Given this power, it is not uncommon to see states responding to the refugee situation based purely on political calculations, to the detriment of the humanitarian and moral underpinning of the global refugee regime within which they are legally obligated to act. Since the time they gained their political independence, African states have not refrained from the political calculations that have punctuated the trajectory of the refugee regime. At first, this was driven by the Pan-African ideal that drove the national interests and policies of African states. This served as the harbinger of the solidarity measure that informed the compliance of the newly independent states with the liberal, moral, and humanitarian theoretical frame of the international refugee regime as proclaimed by the UNHCR. As Pan-Africanism declined, nationalism and political-economic self-interest became the measure of compliance of states, acts that further damaged the refugee regime in the region and exacerbated protracted refugee situations. In this way, the political aspect of refugee management has come to dominate considerations within the global refugee regime that champions repatriation as the most viable option of the durable solutions. Understandably, the UNHCR is only a supervisory agency and has had to shape its actions in line with the disposition and commitment of other major stakeholders, at the top of which are the states, who are meant to create the foundation and environment for refugee policy implementation. Nonetheless, refugees can enjoy the rights accorded them by various international treaties and protocols only if given the opportunity to explore local integration as a durable solution. The general expectation for durable solutions through the local integration model is that there must be a legal guarantee of the rights enjoyed by other members of the host state to the refugees. Furthermore, refugees in the process of local integration must be afforded economic integration that guarantees a sustainable livelihood. And lastly, refugees must be able to participate and contribute to the social life of the host country through sociocultural integration without fear of discrimination. All of these rights must be commensurate with the height and limit of access to these rights by other members of the host country, because the ultimate goal of the durable solution is to transform displaced persons from the space of victimhood and abnormality to a just order and the normal. Two problems are inherent in this process. For one, the absence of these considerations for the restoration of human dignity of refugees, prior to consideration of any of the durable solution options, defies the letter of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees, and other international human rights laws, declarations, and protocols. Be

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that as it may, the defilement of these legal instruments has been the norm within the contemporary global refugee regime. The UNHCR cannot preach the temporality of refugees by promoting the repatriation option and expect states to accord refugees the assistance and protection guaranteed them by those legal instruments. This is because, when correctly followed through, the legal protection instruments push local integration to the forefront of durable solution options by creating the context for the naturalization of refugees and making room for the provisions on which they could reestablish normal lives.60 Yet, implementation often creates a different context for the suspension of basic aspects of living, such as sustainable livelihoods, until after any “durable solution” is achieved. Therefore, by withholding their level of compliance to the legal instruments on which the international refugee regime is predicated, states are preparing refugees for their return to the country of origin through the repatriation option. The local integration option, as in the provision of assistance and protection of refugees to achieve full rights, is a political step that takes a well-organized and developed society, free of ethnic strife or political instability. This is because the government may be unable to give what it does not have or may not be willing to give what it can to protect the local integration efforts of refugees. Nevertheless, this option has been explored on some occasions in some African states for various reasons, including diplomatic, economic, and political benefits. Among these states are Angola, Ghana, Guinea, Liberia, Namibia, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Uganda. Not surprisingly, none of these states could provide the complete range of rights for refugees to be successfully integrated into their societies. This is despite the fact that virtually all of the local integration efforts took place long after the repatriation and resettlement of the larger population of the refugees in other countries. Those that were then integrated were only a tiny proportion, remnants of this process, who for one reason or the other had decided to stay in the country of asylum.61 These reasons could be a result of their cultural affiliation with the local population, economic interest in the host country, frailty due to health challenges, vulnerability as a child, disablement, marriage to the locals, or the desire to remain where they have found a sustainable livelihood. 6 0. The 1951 Convention, for instance, gave refugees the right to work and earn a decent living like every other member of the host state. It accorded them the right to access courts to seek justice and in other matters, just as it prohibits their discrimination in whatever guise. This way, they are to have access to the same treatment as other members of the host states. See UNHCR, “1951 Convention.” 61. Fielden, “Local Integration,” 17–20.

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Like every other member of society, they are usually left to fend for themselves with little or no special protection and support. As Samuel K. M. Agblorti observed in his study, there is a huge gap between state policies (particularly in the area of local integration) and actions, and therefore, “normalization can take decades or, in some cases, remain elusive indefinitely.”62 According to this study, it is a common scenario in the refugee regime in Africa to find governments that, out of diplomatic niceties, embraced the integration option for particular refugees without providing details of how this would be implemented. Implementation of policy is made more difficult as many states do not ensure that their policy commitments match the reality on the ground, and any effort at pushing for action is often resisted. The question to be asked is the extent to which these states are supporting the “remnant” refugees in their local integration efforts through the Development through Local Integration (DLI) program, for example. Outside of the DLI (that is, the instrument through which the regime was designed to respond to the development needs of transiting refugees in an official naturalization process), many refugees have already integrated themselves into the local society. This might also contribute to the lethargy of states to match policies with actions, considering the number of self-integrated refugees in most host countries in Africa without government aid. Moreover, these states are aware that many of their own citizens are in the same or even worse limbo within the country or outside. In fact, many of the states granting refugees local integration support are themselves refugee-producing states. Additionally, many citizens live in abject poverty and are as vulnerable as any refugee, even without living in IDP camps. Forced displacement and vulnerability due to the lack of basic life necessities have become part of the common daily life experience of people in these states. In the development equation, if any of this population at the margins were to be considered and their political values weighed, that of the nationals would always come first. Fear of the response of nationals at the margins to the implementation of special integrative measures for refugees with the potential of putting refugees ahead of them, combined with the security threat it allegedly poses, also contribute to the setback.63 Resettlement

Although refugees in resettlement programs are faced with a potentially more desirable durable solution, they are not without their own challenges. It has 6 2. Agblorti, “Refugee Integration in Ghana,” 2. 63. Ibid., 1–23.

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been earlier noted that the resettlement option of the durable solutions represents an elastic burden-sharing instrument by which Global North countries such as Canada, Germany, the United States, Australia, and Sweden take up the charge to cushion the effect of forced displacement on third-world countries where such cases are on the rise by admitting refugees to be naturalized citizens. The major feature of resettlement in the current international refugee regime is its nonavailability to most refugees who need it. States keep lowering their annual quotas (the number of refugees they are willing to accept), preferring that most refugees stay in their home regions in the Global South, thereby burden shifting rather than burden sharing or responsibility sharing. In the United States, Minnesota has the highest percentage of immigrants who are refugees, with other states such as New York, South Dakota, Iowa, Nebraska, Tennessee, and Texas hosting quite a number too. As Dianna J. Shady and Katherine Fennelly showed in their study of Somali and South Sudanese refugees in the United States, more than anything, African migrant-refugees in resettlement programs are faced with the challenge of acculturation, which makes it difficult for them to fully integrate into their new environment.64 Even when they do, the racialization of their skin color marks them as the Other. Often, the problem of integration is status or identity driven, as it turns on the religious affiliation of the individual versus the dominant religion of the community of residence, the educational background, and the ability to communicate in the local language. The limits of all of these determine the limits of socialization and ability to integrate. The case of Somali and South Sudanese refugees in Faribault, Minnesota, is a good example of the complexity of integration after resettlement. Whereas the Somalis had difficulty integrating into the Christian-dominated town due to their Islamic affiliation, very limited educational background, and difficulty communicating in English, this was less the case for their South Sudanese counterparts, who were predominantly Lutheran Christians and, by consequence, received special help from members of the Lutheran Church, including the establishment of a Special Sudanese Ministry Day Care Center.65 These factors, including the availability of housing, also determine where they settle, because (religion aside) these factors contribute to refugees’ ability to earn a living in the area in which they are resettled. Considering the cultural differences between them and their host community, it is not uncommon to find these migrants having issues with the latter, especially on family composition 6 4. Shady and Fennelly, “Comparison of the Integration Experiences.” 65. Shady and Fennelly, “Comparison of the Integration Experiences,” 36.

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Figure 15.2. Sahrawi refugees, a “forgotten” refugee crisis in the Algerian Desert, which has lasted over a generation, with no permanent solutions in sight. EU DG ECHO, https://www.flickr.com/photos/69583224@N05/6773866736. Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The _Sahrawi_refugees_%E2%80%93_a_forgotten_crisis_in_the_Algerian _desert_(6).jpg.

and the ethics of living in an apartment. All of these factors limit the initial success of the resettlement option.

Th e Globa l Com pact for R efuge e s a n d th e Fu t u r e of Du r a bl e Solu tions The previous chapter on refugee protection and management outlined the intended objectives of the New York Declaration on Refugees and Migrants made by the UN General Assembly in 2016 and the Global Compact for Refugees

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that resulted from those efforts, which was agreed in 2018.66 Here, we turn to its implications for resolving problems associated with the application of durable solutions for African refugees, many of whom like the Sahrawis in figure 15.2, see no solutions in sight even after a generation in exile. One of the primary objectives of the Compact, as stated in its paragraph 7, is the commitment to expand refugees’ access to durable solutions and provide support to various categories of states involved. It grounds this focus on solutions on specific considerations for a holistic approach: (a) the principal importance of eliminating the root causes of refugee flows as the ultimate means to permanent solutions for refugees; (b) necessity of devoting significant international effort to promoting and monitoring human rights and development of states, as well as the prevention and resolution of conflicts as means towards (a) above; (c) planning for solutions from the outset of a refugee emergency, rather than waiting for protraction to set in; (d) greater predictability; (e) engagement of a wider range of actors; and finally, (f) the specific mix of solutions should be anchored on an assessment of i) the specific context; ii) the absorption capacity; iii) level of development, and iv) demographic situation of the countries involved.67 The Compact refers to the three “traditional” solutions of repatriation, local integration, and resettlement but also offers additional and commendable solutions, including what it calls “local solutions” and “comprehensive pathways for admission to third countries.”68 For the traditional solutions, the Compact recommends actions that would enhance the rights of refugees to return to their origin country in safety and dignity, as well as rights necessary for them to survive and live in dignity in their places of exile. Furthermore, the Compact enunciates the broad and specific actions that states must take either on behalf of themselves or on behalf of other states: for states to ensure the capacity of origin countries to receive and reabsorb returnee refugees; for host states to perform a range of roles from providing short- and medium-term

6 6. United Nations, “Report.” 67. Ibid., paras. 85 and 86. 68. Ibid., para. 85.

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solutions to providing citizenship as part of the integration processes; and for third countries to make resettlement available, expand places offered annually, and remove barriers, uncertainty, and incoherence in and enable greater access overall to the resettlement process. The Compact includes certain steps under the recommendations for “local solutions” and “comprehensive pathways for admission to third countries,” in addition to the traditional durable solutions. This echoes calls for “mediumterm” solutions that refugee scholars have made over the years.69 “Other local solutions” are clarified in paragraph 100 of the Compact to refer to solutions outside local integration that host states may offer to refugees who cannot access the classic and longer-term durable solutions. These may include interim legal stay, measures to facilitate the socioeconomic inclusion of refugees in their host communities, necessary documentation and residence permits, and unbiased access to other durable solutions that may become available during refugees’ stay. It is a sad commentary on the current state of refugee rights that these measures needed to be identified and stated in the Compact, indicating the poor state in which refugees have existed in the majority of host countries around the world, living without necessary documentation, rights, and enabling environments and routinely experiencing persistent discrimination and marginalization, making their lives unbearable and their situations untenable. The “complementary pathways for admission to third countries” is designed as a complement to the resettlement solution in particular. Again, the necessity of including this in the Compact signals the ineffectiveness of the existent system in providing protection and solutions to refugees who need them the most. Complementary pathways therefore are to enable “more systematic, organized, sustainable and gender responsive . . . protection safeguards” in the process of eventually accessing resettlement, “with a view to increasing significantly their availability and predictability.”70 The suggested measures include referral procedures for family unification; establishment of private or community sponsorship, in addition to the regular government resettlement programs; humanitarian visas; humanitarian corridors and other humanitarian admission programs; gender-equitable educational opportunities through grants and scholarships; student visas; and opportunities for labor mobility for highly skilled refugees in countries with commensurate need for such skills. A close look at these processes gives one a picture of the many points at which refugees are currently being discriminated against in states’ treatment of 6 9. Yacob-Haliso, “Intersectionality and Durable Solutions”; Loescher, “UNHCR at Fifty.” 70. Global Compact, paras. 94 and 95.

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refugees’ asylum claims. In mixed migration movements especially, the above are some of the motivating factors for refugee movement out of their countries of first asylum toward the Global North in search of better opportunities preferable to the despair of interminable living in camps. Were these opportunities to be mainstreamed into regular protection measures, it is expected that the numbers crossing the Mediterranean to Europe, for example, should decrease. It has also been argued by Refugee Studies scholars and activists that if resettlement worked like it should from the beginning of the refugee regime and if states followed through on the suggestion to share the global population of refugees among themselves—albeit a utopian-like suggestion in today’s world of ultranationalism and xenophobia—by now, the global refugee problem would have been greatly diminished, if not completely solved.71 The UNHCR Assistant Commissioner for Protection, Volker Türk, indicates that the piloting of the Comprehensive Refugee Response Framework, part of the New York Declaration, which led to the Global Compact, already recorded some success in several African countries: • The African Union, Djibouti and Ethiopia adopted new legislation or policies for refugees’ socio-economic inclusion; • Chad took the official decision to convert all refugee schools to government public schools, and further enrolled refugee teachers in government teacher training colleges; • The Ethiopia Economic Opportunities Program and the Ethiopian government’s Roadmap has included refugees in employment opportunities, earmarking at least 30 percent of 100,000 such opportunities for refugees alone; • Ethiopia has revised its Vital Events and Registration order to grant refugees full access to the country’s civil registration system on the same basis as nationals; • Djibouti’s new law abandons its compulsory encampment policy and grants wider rights to refugees.72 These are early days to assess the import and consequence of some of these preliminary but significant advancements toward expanded solutions for African refugees wherever they may be found. The prospects remain mitigated however by the noneradication of the internal and external root causes of refugee production, the lack of political will by the rich states, and underdevelopment of the majority of Global South states, which means they must often direct their 7 1. Aleinikoff, “Unfinished Work.” 72. Türk, “Promise.”

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puny efforts to their own citizens ahead of refugees, as already noted in this chapter. It is unclear how much implementation of the measures proposed in the Compact will be possible without a fundamental restructuring of the global economy, the international political system, and the marginalizing refugee regime that these have birthed.

Conclusion Durable solutions are intended to bring refugees back to the national and human rights order of things even though the international refugee regime is intended, at least in theory, to provide the latter. Refugees are not always equal, and this inequality is principally a function of their identity and the context from which they come. When positioned rightly, a refugee could informally integrate in the local community, resettle in a third country, or reintegrate into their country of origin; and when this does not work as expected, the regime is faced with “residual case-loads” of those whose identities are “officially” in crisis to the regime.73 Thus, many of those with the “solutions” are challenged by a crisis stemming from the political nature of refugee management regimes. With this in mind, it is important that assistance to refugees be based on identified clusters of needs and not blanket relief and maintenance programs that are not immediate to their survival as refugees or in transition, as seen in the instance noted above where refugees sold the so-called relief materials for their needs. This is even in the case where such assistance is forthcoming because, as shown above, protracted crises are the bane of humanitarian aid and assistance. And insofar as the refugee regime remains this way, refugees and displaced persons in protracted situations are prone to facing neglect and destitution when not properly managed. Effective early response at the emergency stage, which often receives short attention, should cushion the effect on this population. Beyond this, the most feasible way out of this crisis is not to have one in the first place. Conflict prevention measures need to be strengthened at the global, regional, and subregional levels. None of the durable solution options is durable when it does not represent the interests of the state responsible for the execution of the agreements, policies, and declarations, as well as those of the refugees in camps and their host community. Finding this balance has been the core problem in the whole of the international refugee regime, evident in the imbalance between theory (legal instruments, policy statements, and programs) and practice. As scholars such as James Souter have argued, the 73. See Crisp, “No Solutions in Sight,” 4.

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international refugee regime needs to push for a durable solution for forcibly displaced persons as a form of reparation paid on the side of the government and other parties responsible for their forced displacement.74 The UNHCR could even be given the leeway to incur debt on behalf of such a government, so as to ensure that its forcibly displaced nationals are aided in their search for justice. This could go a long way to cushion the revenue shortfalls that often challenge the national regime. Generating revenue shortages from this procedure also serves the transitional justice goal that seeks to restore a just order. Many refugees could forget about the prosecution of their predators in a conflict-induced displacement situation for sociocultural reasons, but not their livelihood. However, one must quickly note the obstacle that such an idea is bound to encounter among state actors. In noting this, there seems to be no need to look any further than the debacle between the United States and the International Criminal Court in recent times. Surely, going by experience and in light of the above, one can say a state is simply a powerful entity with a geopolitical sphere of influence, consisting of different nations in most cases, and controlled by a cluster of powerful rhetoric and persons who detest their actions catching up with them. Where states continue to pursue elites’ selfinterested purposes, refugee solutions will remain elusive.

74. See Souter, “Durable Solutions as Reparation.”

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HOME, RETURN, AND POSTRELOCATION

Introduction The unresolved refugee situations plaguing the international community hold the potential to destabilize the collective progress of the world. The awareness of the imminent danger that they pose compelled governments, nongovernmental agencies, and various other stakeholders to take important steps toward addressing these challenges. The product of these efforts is represented by the policies of resettlement, local integration, repatriation, and conflict resolution strategies intended to help refugees move beyond their displacement experience. More than ever, refugees and displaced persons are facing a host of challenges in returning, relocating, or integrating into their origin or host country. The question of identity is one that confronts refugees and displaced persons in their efforts to relocate. Home is often central to one’s identity, and in the psychology of refugees and displaced persons, attachments to the cultural, emotional, and social experience of home make for complex dynamics. Refugees and displaced persons’ identity is also bound up in their experiences in host countries, and protracted stays may have deepened these relationships, thereby further complicating resettlement, relocation, and return. Although the problems associated with displacement can be complex even beyond questions of policy, the fact that the conditions and treatment in host countries can push or pull refugees cannot be overstated. The severity of this entanglement is reflected in the overstretched patience and delayed reactions of policy makers to the immediate welfare of the refugees. The integration of refugees into their country of relocation is multidimensional and psychologically taxing. Central to relocation is the ability of the

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refugee to be culturally integrated and politically recognized in their “new” environment. The impact of relocation on individual refugees hinges on complex factors, including age, gender, (dis)ability, length of displacement, experience in the host country, experience of violence, and so on.1 This chapter attempts to place within the proper context the postrelocation experiences of former refugees, their situation after their long journeys, and how these are reflected in their economic and sociopolitical culture in the periods after they have returned or resettled. The refugees’ return to countries of origin as well as resettlement or integration elsewhere impacts people, environment, and the government, with the transformations or regressions that accompany these processes. Having shed the status of refugees that before their relocation or integration had the connotation of being burdens to their host country, it is expected that their transition from one country to another will influence different aspects of their existence. This is the subject of this chapter.

I dentit y a n d Hom e People become refugees in situations of emergencies such as war and ecological devastation. When issues that push refugees and displaced persons to abandon their status as citizens do not subside, they face harassment and neglect in their destinations, causing them to yearn for a homecoming that may not happen. Inadequate reintegration policies have always been one of the challenges that face returnees. And accompanying these policy failures is the fact that refugees face a destabilization of the concept of home. The sense of attachment to a country of origin that an average citizen has is undermined as they cope with the experience of fleeing and then returning. Since many African refugees have spent a considerable time in exile, away from their countries of origin, they have often been detached from the customary activities and realities of the place they left, further hindering their opportunities to cope with reintegration. Although some difficulties in the process of repatriation and (re)integration are expected, the magnitude of problems, from economic survival to insecurity, that they are now confronted with often substantially exceeds a refugee’s expectations. This may be in addition to the receiving government’s indifference or inability to fulfill promises made to them to entice their return. This is therefore a problem that challenges the concepts of identity and home in postrelocation situations. What refugees used to see or understand as home has changed, and these new realities often challenge old ideas and attachments they may have had to their home. 1. Yacob-Haliso, “Forging Home.”

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Policy makers and humanitarian actors always emphasize the need for the return of refugees and displaced persons to the country of origin. Refugees present some economic and financial burdens to their host countries, given the reality that the host countries are also faced with the burden of catering to their own populations. Refugees and displaced persons’ sense of identity straddles an affinity for their countries of origin and their host countries, especially when they have been in protracted refugee situations, and is synonymous with contemporary struggles of state identity. Despite these realities, however, many refugees still desire to return to the country of origin. This compels an inquiry into the idea of home conceptualized by the refugees. The conception of home differs from one refugee to another, as home is sometimes conceived as the spatial setting locatable within a fixed environment and other times portrayed as an imaginary location that signifies an individual’s life patterns. As the individuals are displaced, so too is their conception of home, which travels between their places of origin, their host countries, and their places of final relocation. The ascription of human rights to refugees further adds color to the conception of home even from the perspective of the refugees themselves. Government efforts to facilitate the return of refugees have been inadequate, as the economic conditions of returnees are often unstable, giving returnees serious doubt as to the wisdom of return. When the Ogaden War displaced Ethiopians at the eastern border of the country, many settled in Djibouti even before its independence. People fled because cultural irredentists wanted to take in people with whom they claimed genetic ties. Somali irredentists were convinced of their shared ties with the people of eastern Ethiopia, as this had long been central to their ideas of home and cultural identity.2 The war revealed one of the tragedies that came with the colonial demarcation of boundaries. The refugees fleeing the Ogaden War have had familial connections to the northern part of Somalia, the eastern part of Ethiopia, and some areas that would eventually become Djibouti. Whereas the war exposed the complexities of ethnolinguistic rivalries, it further highlighted the different conceptions and erratic processes of identity, or home, generally. The new territory of migration (future Djibouti) combined two ethnic groups—that is, the Issa ethnic group (making up approximately 60 percent of the population) and the Afars (about 40 percent).3

2. West African Non-governmental Organizations Refugees and Internally Displaced Persons Network, “Promoting Social and Economic Rights.” 3. Ibid.

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This form of state reorganization and resettlement underscores the mountainous challenge facing concepts of home. Djibouti became a theater of blood because of the forced repatriation of the Issa into the country, with disregard for other ethnic groups in the space. To these refugees, their perception of home was conditioned by the available realities of spatial dialectics. Those within Ethiopian territory faced the wars by the irredentist Somalis, who share similar culture and backgrounds with those who were migrating to Djibouti. However, their identity was scattered across what were now different countries as demarcated by the colonialists. What those refugees conceived as home now infringed on the Afar minority group, who felt threatened by these migrations, which they saw as invasion. Refugees are often faced with the problem of spatial separation from their cultural families, and the reception of Ethiopian refugees and migrants displaced by the Ogaden War raises questions about the viability of colonial state formations. Integration threatens the identity and sense of home of a minority group facing an influx of migrants and refugees that might change the political trajectory of their country. Although refugees were confined to camps and often relied on illegal employment, many were compelled to flee the country to be with their families after spending some years in Djibouti. The effect of this can be seen in the psychological destabilization of the refugees whose conception of home is resident in the two countries, Ethiopia and then Djibouti. The forced returnees were reunited with their families at home, whereas those who were still stuck in Djibouti were seen as foreigners despite sharing cultural and historical antecedents with the Issa ethnic group in Djibouti. What they therefore considered as home was made unstable by circumstances beyond their control. The migration of eastern Ethiopians into Djibouti became monitored and restricted, leading to the deportation of those considered to have come into the country illegally. Refugees who have not spent much time in their exile often retain a strong yearning for home. When separated from family, they often want to return to their country of origin as soon as possible. Staying in the known environment that they are used to and making their economic and other decisions without being under pressure gives them more peace of mind. However, when they are forced to flee, they become exposed to an unpredictable environment where the locals are often distrustful of refugees. For example, Cameroonians that fled their country to other neighboring countries such as Nigeria sought succor in their host countries before returning to their country of origin. Many refugees were separatist activists who demanded secession from the state identity

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enforced by the colonialists.4 Cameroon has English- and French-speaking citizens who have different cultural backgrounds. The quest for separation has therefore led to a collision of interest between the groups and the government, which endangered their safety and caused them to flee the country. In the case of refugees returned from Nigeria to Cameroon, a group of women were the first to be repatriated to their country.5 The refugees were discontented with the idea of being detached from their loved ones, and so they voluntarily agreed to return in the hope of being reunited with their people. Their example highlights a basic truth about refugees and their feelings about exile: home is the most desirable destination in the immediate aftermath of displacement. Among refugees and displaced persons, the number of years spent in exile can be decisive in shaping the concept of home. In situations where the conflicts that led to the displacement persist for long periods, children are born as refugees, mature as refugees, and begin to create a new generation, all while in exile. These offspring have a sense of home quite different from that of their parents and the generation that initially fled their unsettled environment. For vast numbers of refugees everywhere, the availability of peace is their determinant of home. When there is sufficient and long-lasting peace, they are convinced that they are at home. However, peace can sometimes be a very complex phenomenon, as the challenges facing refugees on their return can be daunting. They are often faced with continuous struggles for financial independence and survival. Their inability to attain a peaceful atmosphere before dislocation may be their most constant challenge, and this again challenges any stable notion of home they may have had. For these refugees, their return is often a mixture of frustration and a temporary reprieve from challenges. Their displacement has done severe damage to their economic well-being. While they were trying to escape the war-torn environment, many refugees and displaced persons were dispossessed of their economic resources, which often included farmlands, houses, and livestock, and their inability to recuperate their losses contributes to the woes they are confronted with in their postrelocation experiences. As mentioned, the restoration of peace is cardinal to the definition of home for most returnees. Returnees’ access to human rights and basic amenities are often motivating factors of their interest to return home. This is undergirded by a certainty that their government will see to the establishment of a peaceful atmosphere, which will 4 . UNHCR, “After Years in Exile.” 5. VOA, “Cameroon Receives Asylum-Seekers.”

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help them in the process of reintegration. Many have spent years away, and their journey back to their country of origin will be facilitated by the provision of necessary amenities that can aid good living. The UNHCR has done a commendable job in seeking to ensure that the lives of the refugees become “normal” after their repatriation, but all these efforts are helpful only to the extent that they provide immediate and long-term support to returnees. Otherwise, their postreturn experiences are usually marred by challenges that sometimes bring devastating results and in some cases are life-threatening. Reconciliation can mean many different things to refugees. In the Namibian case, reunion with their “home” meant going beyond giving physical aid to displaced individuals. It was considered an opportunity to revive the importance of their ancestral systems in contemporary politics. Those displaced within the axis of Southern Africa and some parts of East Africa experienced what can be described as sadistic colonization by the white settlers who forcefully took their lands. The people of these places were exposed to dire economic and political consequences as a result, and their livelihoods were taken away by the expansionism of the colonizers. Namibians were victims of the South African hegemonic agenda that dislodged them from their environment because of the precious resources in their lands. The application of apartheid policies of South Africa in Namibia led to the displacement of many citizens. The forceful suppression of the Namibians attracted a matching resistance, but this propelled the South African government to apply even more force against the Namibians. As a result, a large number of Namibians became displaced and needed urgent protection. They fled to Angola and Zambia at the height of the internal conflicts in those countries. These two neighboring countries became the preferred destinations for Namibian refugees from the 1970s to the succeeding decades. These refugees, however, found unsuitable conditions for making a new home in their destination and therefore were constantly troubled by their inability to have the home they desired. Their various countries of asylum (for example, Angola and Zambia) could only provide them with palliative support and sympathy but lacked the conditions to encourage permanent settlement where displaced people could make a new home for themselves. As a result, many of the displaced Namibians remained umbilically connected to their country of origin and nursed dreams of returning peacefully to their ancestral home. Although the people were generally welcomed into their various places of refuge, they were not able to accept these countries as their home. Their proximity to their country also offered them the opportunity to interact freely with those who were within Namibia and therefore reinforced their interest to be permanently reconnected to their home.

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Belongingne ss a n d Hom e in Postr elocation Di a l ectics As the phenomenon of migration attracts increased attention in scholarship, some academics and writers have attempted to reconstruct ideas and images of refugees in relation to belongingness and conceptions of “home.” Cultural identities are not so easily undermined by the physical separation brought by colonialism. Identities perforate countries and their semantic boundaries. Throughout our discussion so far, we have established that culture is not bound by spatial restrictions; people maintain an attachment to a place long after they have been displaced from it. This, however, does not diminish the argument that physical locations play vital roles in the preservation of culture. For instance, the Yoruba, whose intimacy with their home is tied to ancestral artifacts and treasures, which invariably influence their culture and its application, reflect the connectivity of geographical places and culture. In spite of this, some aspects of human culture are transferable and in fact mobile. Human mobility has been the most certain reality after change itself. In other words, humans are naturally predisposed to migration. Disasters and the causes of displacement do not automatically disrupt a person’s identity. Even when a people mix with others, their identity is not always blended. African identities, for example, persisted across the borders created by colonial governments. They are separable. This is validated by the types of culture and identities available in America: Caucasian, Hispanic, African, and Native American, among very many others, for example. In Africa, the situation remains the same, both before and after the demarcation of the continent into different countries. As such, homeness and belongingness are at the heart of contemporary issues and debates because of the capacity they have for revealing cultural identities. It is apparent that cultures, or perhaps identities, are crisscrossed in moving from one colonial country to the other. Therefore, it is very common among nations formulated by colonialists to find people of different ethnocultural groups dispersed in various countries, as we saw in the case of the Issa ethnic group in Ethiopia, Somalia, and then Djibouti at the same time. The flexibility of identity in Africa is neither denied nor constrained by geographical specificity. This brings us back to the idea of home and identity in relation to mobility occasioned by displacement. People who flee from their countries do not automatically lose their belongingness in the process of resettlement or integration into a host country. Fixing human identity, especially Africans under geographical components, resulted from the complexity of identity and space

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construction that was done by the Europeans. Problems arose from the imposition of a European conception of the “nation-state” on African peoples who had other systems of organization. A Yoruba person is geographically located in neighboring countries of Nigeria, Benin, Togo, and Ghana, and as far away as Sierra Leone or The Gambia. In all these examples, they all share similar cultural understandings. Do we therefore say they are different groups because they are separated by national borders? To answer in the affirmative means one is constructing physical boundaries as the determinant of their identity. To answer in the negative, however, would undermine the reality of the national identity imposed by their colonial overlords. The latter answer can also be controversial. For example, Yoruba people are bonded by unique ideology that can be traced to their epistemological grounding. However, variations in ideology are anticipated given that geographical experience can necessitate changes, which may not be mutual in other areas. Having all these available complexities in mind, one can understand why the solution offered to refugees and migrants, manifesting in their home return or relocation, would continue to be met with some disappointment or little encouragement. Variation in years spent away always has different impacts on refugees’ and displaced persons’ ideas and perceptions of home. For example, Libya has been at war for the past five years and counting. Sudan, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Central African Republic, and others have experienced wars that reconfigured their national identities. In these cases, the process of reintegration and the ability to realize homeness can be particularly overstretched. For example, refugees and displaced persons who have spent ten to twenty years in their places of exile are bound to experience a longer process of identity reunification or of cultural oscillation, fusion, or integration with their people when they eventually return home. This has the potential to undermine their familial connections, which often bind them to their cultural roots. They can feel attached to their geographical and sometimes cultural milieu yet demonstrate no sense of emotional attachment. There exist various interpretations of belongingness that would assist in the understanding of how belonging relates to home returns of refugees. As discussed, a person’s conception of home is fluid and depends on their experiences with displacement, as people are disposed to feel at home where their security and safety are not under threat. In U. Uffe Hedetoft’s conception of belongingness, “belonging” is a concrete, innocent, almost pristine notion, closely interwoven with and imbricated in the notion of “home.” In fact, our home

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is where we belong, territorially and culturally, where “our own” community is, where our family, friends and acquaintances reside, where we have root, and where we long to return to when we are elsewhere in the world. In this sense, belonging, [. . .] is a notion replete with concreteness, sensuality, organicist meaning and romantic images. It is a foundational existential, “thick” notion. In the ways that it circumscribes feelings of “homeness,” it is also a significant determinant of individual “identity,” that elusive but still real psychological state of feeling “in sync with” oneself under given external conditions. Most importantly, “home” and “belonging,” thus conceived, carry affective rather than cognitive meaning; the indicative and simplistic statement above, “home is where we belong,” really means “home is where we feel we belong.”6

These definitions of home and belongingness are mutually reinforcing, but both definitions have shortcomings. In spite of this, we should understand that one belongs to a place where one can call home as the definition of home answers the question of identity and belongingness. It is not home when it does not engage one’s feelings or guarantee one’s succor. The question of the territorial aspects of belongingness is closely related to the physical space where people can lay claim to or share their emotional dynamics as families. To belong to a community of people is to share their cultural characteristics. Members of the same society who also belong to the same culture enjoy a mutual understanding of how to exclude those they consider alien or those that do not share their cultural characteristics. It is on this basis that the migrants and refugees who traveled from Somalia to Ethiopia and up to Djibouti knew that they had a better chance of settlement when they got to their destination of migration, Djibouti. Thus, shared common identity has been one of the reasons why the refugees and displaced persons from various states may be easily integrated when they get to their destinations. A Fulbe (Fulani) migrant from Nigeria will have little challenge settling in Chad, Niger, or Libya, three of the countries where they share similar cultural identity and affinity. Of course, the place of physical location would perhaps find its way into this argument. However, we are careful to locate place as where they would find relative peace in their process of integration. However, the elongation of their time in the “alien” country or community could lead them to be given an “alien” status because of the perception that they are too culturally distant to adapt to the emergent realities of their home. Therefore, 6. Hedetoft, Discourses and Images.

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the belongingness of refugees to their home is open to further debate. The fact that their presence is underwritten within the place they identified as home speaks volumes about postrelocation dialectics. For the returnees of migratory journeys in Africa, their process of thorough reintegration often requires sustained presence in their countries of origin after the issues that led to their displacement have been resolved. Returnees to drought-ridden areas, however, have different realities, as their return to their home is made unsure because of unreliable climactic conditions. And when their hope of returning has been dashed, their definition of home must be revised. The northern part of Nigeria has been engulfed in conflict since 2009 by an insurgency perpetrated by the Boko Haram terrorist group. This has led to serial displacement of citizens. Through the unceasing strife, many have found their safety compromised and therefore needed to pursue relocation to other parts of the country, while some have traveled to neighboring countries. The northeast of Nigeria has therefore produced lots of different refugees whose destabilization of political and social life is continuously affecting their identity. The war that has taken over the place has spanned years and experienced different interventions and government responses. Over the years, the dislocated citizens of the country have been encouraged to retrace their steps back to the country after there was considerable confidence that the government had won the campaign against the terrorists. The emotional attachment to the concept of home as demonstrated by the Nigerian refugees in Cameroon confirms the assumption generated around belongingness and homeness. Despite spending about six years in the host country, the refugees did not consider their permanent settlement in the country, perhaps because they, like other displaced individuals, have strongly connected their understanding of home to a concrete image of a physical location in Nigeria. Going back would also give them the opportunity for economic livelihoods or social reintegration, as they had been excluded from the government plans and schemes meant for the Cameroonians. In other words, their refugee status, expressed in the policy statements of the country, clarifies their “alien” identity and therefore influences their total development. Hedetoft’s final statement where he concludes that a “home is where we feel we belong” may be critically interrogated. The conclusion undermines the reception tendency of the host whom we might “feel” at home with because of the emotional connection shared for some time. A very good example can be seen in the treatment of African Americans in America, who are still the victims of racial profiling. While these people consider the American environment as the only place where they feel they belong, large segments of the white population

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do not share this sentiment. Therefore, belongingness can be difficult, and the conception of home can be broader than ordinarily thought. In our understanding or conception of home and belongingness, we must appreciate the agency of both parties, the migrant/returnee and the host/stayee, where one’s feeling that one belongs to a particular identity must receive similar opinions from the society to which one says one belongs. Thus, the Nigerian refugees in Cameroon did not feel an attachment to the Cameroonian society, and that country did not share an opposite opinion. Hence, one provides the expectedly temporary status of refugees, and the other accepts the proposition. All these dynamics are important issues around refugee (re)settlement and (re)integration in contemporary Africa. The narrative of returnees reveals the plausibility of emotional transition of identity that straddles the origin of refugees and their migrant destinations. In the case of Nigerian refugees who have spent over six years in Cameroon, it is probable that they are already being enmeshed in the customs and culture of the Cameroonians, who in the ordinary sense would have family and cultural neighbors of the refugees among them. However, their location in Cameroon does not in any way represent their emotional roots that they identify. They do not belong to the place, even though they already have an establishment in the country. Family is a useful social institution that constructs the image of self and identity, the binding force of culture and the custodian of memorable events that arouse the emotions of members when evoked. As we have explained, familyhood is both imaginary and concrete. Even when members of the same family flee in the same direction in cases of emergencies, their physical image of home will always be a factor of concern while in exile. One may expect them to forget the activities of the past (home) and continue in their new environment. However, this is not usually what happens.

I m pov er ish m ent a n d U ne m ploy m ent The challenges that confront returned refugees are enormous. For returnees, adjusting to the dynamics of the country they fled is often difficult. People flee without warning, which makes it more difficult for them to arrange for their economic transition. When they find themselves in displacement, they tend to become burdens to their host countries, and some of them even engage in activities that are capable of disrupting the peace of their host countries. This in some cases triggers counterreactions from the host country when they feel threatened by the activities of refugees. It has generated xenophobic thinking in South Africa, and it has created malice in other places. Therefore, refugees

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and displaced persons are plagued by many environmental challenges and social pressures that greet them in postrelocation situations. The situation of returnees is filled with various difficulties such as unemployment, gender vulnerability, and ecological struggles, and these increase the burdens of the returned refugees. Humanitarian organizations have attempted to address these challenges. Refugees and displaced persons are usually conditioned to make do with uncomfortable situations in their host destinations. Within Africa, there are various countries that have been financially colonized to the extent of having weak structures to support the citizens, much less support refugees and displaced persons. In countries like this, displaced persons are faced with daunting challenges that threaten their existence and survival, hence the need for durable solutions. The UNHCR seeks to facilitate the return, local integration, or resettlement of refugees and considers these steps as very important for the reduction of traumatic experiences. The clause of “voluntariness” of repatriation was stipulated in refugee policy because it was likely that forced repatriates would have horrible experiences, which may trigger repeated migration. Sadly, these conditions have not stemmed the tide of challenges that confront refugees. As returnees, they may have slimmer chances of reintegration into their countries of origin, as they might have been alienated by the methods and styles of living acquired while in exile. Local integration in the host country, however, is increasingly difficult because of the limited capacity for economic advancement that could sustain refugees. Confronted by these uncertainties, the concept of home becomes aggravatingly difficult to attain, especially among the burdened refugees. When fleeing war-torn zones, many refugees and displaced persons become separated from their families or lose them to sudden death. In such situations, relocation places greater burdens on the refugees. The eventual economic conditions of refugees and displaced persons who are relocated can be very disheartening. Traumatized by the experience of war that dislodged their economic growth, they find an additional issue with integrating, resettling, or reintegrating as expected. When we consider voluntary repatriation, which is included in the legal obligations for managing refugees, it becomes apparent that the policy constructs a fluid conception of home. The reason is that it gives an opportunity for migrants to compare their countries of origin with their host countries to determine which one to have as home. The experience of refugees from Mauritania reveals the kind of situations that surround people who are returned and reintegrated into their country of origin. There are many returnee refugees in the country that have to manage

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with menial jobs provided by their government. Mauritania, however, has functioned below average in the production of opportunities for the repatriated people to work and earn a decent living. The deprivation of this opportunity is associated with the country’s limited wealth to create an enabling environment where they can improve their living conditions. This has necessitated returnees creating opportunities for themselves and earning from their acquired skills. They are usually self-employed because they were compelled to consider better alternatives when help from the government was not forthcoming. It is apparent that the situation of returnees in Mauritania also had political dimensions to it. Generally, the government had not considered the full reintegration needs of the refugees, and this continues to constitute a great challenge for returnees in the country. Since the government appears to be incapable of rendering the needed political assistance, the UNHCR collaborated with similar organizations that were interested in tackling the challenges of Mauritanian returnees. The Lutheran World Federation—the only collaborative partner of the UNHCR in Mauritania—was enlisted in April 1999 to address the challenges that face returnees in the country. They implemented an emergency response plan for the people to reduce the burden of living and to offer fresh opportunities to contribute to the economic development of the country. The Lutheran World Federation also provided microcredit facilities for the returnees so that they can compete with others and increase their own financial status. Mauritanian refugees are spread across Senegal and Mali in surprising numbers, but there have been efforts by international agencies to repatriate them to their country of origin. The journey, however, is marred by challenges, as these demographics find much difficulty in settling back home. Some Mauritanian returnees have been displaced for long periods and have settled in their country of first asylum, Senegal, for decades. They have given birth to children, and these children understand Senegal as their home. The process of reintegration is therefore more difficult. Despite the many efforts of different organizations to ensure that the displaced Mauritanians enjoy basic life amenities, their chance of benefiting from the UNHCR’s reintegration programs is very slim because of their long-term alienation from their home country. Having spent years in their country of first asylum, they have been detached from the activities of their country of origin. However, they are still interested in returning there when given the chance. The UNHCR is engaged in promoting the repatriation of millions of refugees in Africa. Recently, in 2019, the Joint Refugee Return and Reintegration Plan made commendable progress in facilitating the repatriation of Burundian

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refugees from neighboring countries where the bulk of them sought safety during conflict.7 For returnees, the long sociopolitical conflict experienced in the country has made it economically difficult to enjoy basic human comforts. The deteriorating economic conditions of Burundians added to the pitiful condition of the country’s financial outlook. Being at the lower levels of economic survival, Burundi is incapable of meeting the basic demands of most of its citizens. Despite this reality, Burundi has recorded significant numbers of returnee refugees who are targeted for reintegration programs. The indices of poverty that grip the economy of the country are perhaps limitless. This situation notwithstanding, the level at which the Joint Refugee Return and Reintegration Plan has recorded numbers of repatriated refugees makes it necessary to consider the economic situation that awaits them back home. It is estimated that a larger number of these refugees have been relocated to Makamba, Kirundo, Ruyigi, Muyinga, Cankuzo, and Rutana, among others.8 What is disturbing about this development is that these places represent the areas of the country experiencing severe economic underdevelopment. The economic stagnation of these places signals problems of economic sustenance for these returnee refugees. They are also susceptible to environmental challenges of desertification and drought, the depth of which further threatens their financial crisis. For a country that relies on agriculture as the most reliable economic mainstay, the detachment of refugees from the land and the environmental changes are twin problems that work against the economic reestablishment of returnees. Essentially, the situation suggests that returnees will face another round of economic disempowerment and impoverishment because of their limited opportunities for making significant changes to their financial situation. Although there are contributions from notable organizations to assist the returnees, the fact that such assistance is prone to encountering delays, is unavailable, or is inaccessible makes their reintegration more difficult. In 2018, almost sixty thousand refugees were assisted to return to their home base. What was further perplexing was that many returnees met their properties, both housing and land, either destroyed or occupied illegally. They have been mandated by this situation to live among friends and family members, and this has aggravated their already delicate condition. Without a doubt, the life of these persons became further traumatized by the fact that they are helpless in their return situations. 7. UNHCR, “Joint Refugee Plan.” 8. Ibid.

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Postr elocation Tr a nsfor m ation Refugees have the capacity to enhance development in places they call home. Generally, it is expected that the country of first asylum provides relatively fair accommodation for them to settle down and try to relive their home experience and enjoy peace. Although displacement across the African continent is regularly interspersed with economic and social challenges that may hinder the access of refugees to good living conditions, the fact remains that migration, especially when it is not conflict or disaster related, is expected to have some impact on home communities. There is also the conception that refugee return has the potential to bring transformation back home, especially if former refugees are successfully reintegrated in their countries of origin. This orientation is borne out of the understanding that refugees would have acquired experience and exposure in exile that would be useful to transform their environment back home. Transformations are calculated to be the end product of migrations because all migrants are exposed to different cultures, education, and mindsets, all of which would benefit them in shaping ideas that would enable them to change their environment when they return. Inspired by this, we cannot disregard the fact that refugees and displaced persons may not be expected to inspire transformations because of certain conditions. Refugees and displaced persons who fled the country because of the urgency of wars are given refugee status in their country of first asylum and therefore are confined to specific areas where their experience cannot be compared to that of the regular citizens of that country. The reason for this is primarily economic. The second reason may be related to security or politics. It is economic because the host countries sometimes face economic challenges themselves and may be incapable of providing the comfortable lifestyle to which the refugees might have been accustomed. Sometimes it can be about safety because of the complex integration process involved in relocation. Coupled with the language barrier in most cases, the problem of acculturation makes it difficult for refugees to be centrally integrated in the community of settlement. For those whose experiences reflect this, the project of reintegration can actually be an attempt at emotional and cultural reunification. Expecting them to make significant contributions to the economy of their countries of origin after return can be especially difficult. In the case of unsettled refugees and displaced persons, their troubled mindset is inappropriate for growth of any kind. Refugees of this nature are traumatized and live in continuous despair. Their divided mindset makes it particularly difficult to concentrate on human

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and social development. Their thoughts of abused family members, lost children, and endangered elders, among other experiences, ravage their minds and make it difficult to lead normal lives. Women most of all are exposed to severe danger because of their emotional investment in the welfare of family members and other relatives. They are close to the children, and their emotional stability is often affected by their children’s well-being. When they are faced with challenges on these scores, they become psychologically troubled and without peace of mind, troubled mindsets that are unsuitable for contemplating the ideas and values that can bring development. When these persons are reunited with family and community, the success of integration is determined by the conditions of home. As seen in the case of Namibians whose land was stolen, their emotional and ancestral connection to these land portions haunted them when they were dispossessed of these inherited properties. In the case of forced repatriation, returnees’ impact can be muted. For example, the victims of xenophobic attacks in South Africa may contribute to the economy of their countries of origin upon their return, but the process of making these changes and impacts can take some time. Their potential to enhance development notwithstanding, they equally have existential problems that border on their lives. This is usually because their relocation was forced, and this makes it difficult to settle in their countries of relocation. Most of these refugees were forced to abandon their business activities in their host countries in an emergency. Businesses are attacked and crushed when the citizens of the country become uncontrollably enraged over unsubstantiated suspicions against the refugees and other migrants. The memory of this situation haunts the refugees. In the case of people faced with this challenge, making significant economic development or transformation when they return home can be difficult. The conditions of refugees are also influenced by the nature of transnational networks and internal political underpinnings. Coordination of refugees and displaced persons is usually given secondary attention because of undisclosed political calculations and strategic maneuverings that transpire between countries. Sudanese refugees in the Central African Republic or the Ethiopian migrants and refugees in Djibouti were faced with unfriendly policies and reactions from these governments because of the inherent tensions that have historically marred the relationship between them. This reveals why those entrapped in another country in their search for a better atmosphere that would enhance peace and contribute to their economic sustenance are sometimes met with utter disappointment upon return. Making notable contributions to their country of origin’s economic development can be extremely difficult. An extended stay in their country of asylum often does not add significant

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value to help them contribute to their country’s progress when they return. For these people, then, postrelocation realities remain the same. In countries where wars are unabated, the exercise of repatriating refugees is futile, as it would further crash their efforts to face the future. Mutual suspicion always lingers in areas where the tense atmosphere persists. Returnees are therefore confronted with the uncertainty of living, which in the long run makes them nurse weary feelings about their society, as they feel continuously unsettled and are haunted by the thought of other tensions ravaging them again. For these reasons, transformations are very difficult to bring about in relation to the return and relocation of the refugees. This is one reason why African refugees over the last few decades have not been able to record impressive transformations of their parent societies. Added to the political and environmental challenges is the issue of the binary definitions of home. Many refugees understand home in binary terms. Home is two-sided, straddling comfortably between two or more geographical locations. Their concentration is therefore divided mostly along the line of their country of origin and their host country. We now consider instances of reunification of refugees with their countries of origin and examine how far they inspired transformations of any kind—social, economic, and political. Take for instance the case of Liberian returnees. The Liberian civil war created unfavorable conditions that displaced hundreds of thousands of people. The extended conflict had unquantifiable and unpredictable consequences for the country. Apart from it being unable to address administrative challenges, it pushed the country further away from necessary economic development, leading many of its citizens to find refuge in nearby countries. As a result, the refugees from Liberia were dispersed across countries such as Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Guinea, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and the rest of West Africa in their urgent need for safety and relative peace, while others ended up in the US. The spillover effect of the wars in Liberia made it uncomfortable for the traumatized Liberians to find solace in their neighboring countries. Their unanticipated displacement in the bigger sense affected their ideation of home, identity, and their humanity generally. The experience of returnee Liberian women has been documented, and it has been revealed that refugees usually faced certain psychological setbacks on returning to their countries of origin.9 They were taken aback by the continued violence that prevailed in their country. To them, relocation was not an advisable step, as that would further

9. Boateng and Hilton, “First Home Visit.”

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put their lives in danger. Although many in the Buduburam Refugee Camp in Ghana faced death-defying challenges while there, they seemingly felt better there than being repatriated to Liberia. Complications arise, though, from the continuous demands of those refugees who wanted to go back home in their quest to be reunified with their families, either dead or alive. The umbilical cord uniting Africans is strong, which makes them perceive home in a different context than many other people of the world. Some refugees indicated that they would derive a little satisfaction in knowing about the status of their loved ones left behind during the wars. They were prepared to live with the reality of their existence. In situations where their family members left in the process of flight into exile were alive, they would be guided by that knowledge, and it would stimulate their relationship with their country of origin. If otherwise, they would forget their roots. Therefore, when we talk about transformations after relocations, we are constrained by a number of important factors that should be considered when measuring the contributions of returnees to the developmental process after reintegration. The case of the Liberian women in Ghanaian refugee camps who were mentioned above gives some insight into this. The women who returned faced more psychological problems that made it very difficult to settle down or get involved in activities that would improve the economic trajectory of the country. Only knowing contradictory news about their country of origin, many of them chose to embark on the journey for reunification with their people. However, instability still ravaged the country, and it was unsafe for habitation in some parts. Internal struggles persisted and therefore became an impediment to the establishment of progressive institutions or transformative projects. Humanitarian agencies were responsible for the welfare of many refugees in exile, but humanitarian assistance was halted in their calculation that its stoppage would encourage mass exodus of refugees back to their countries of origin. This, however, achieved an undesirable and ineffective result. The abandonment of the refugees provoked them to be creative in their survival, even when their creativity yielded minimal results. The unsettled atmosphere notwithstanding, the Liberian returnees continued to experience poverty and lack of access to education and to basic amenities. All these did not become solved automatically because they were reunited with their “home.” Rather, it would constitute another foundation for the destruction of existing affinity to their countries of origin. Transformations are possible only in situations where individuals have added substantial value to themselves while in exile. The absence of value means that their chances of economic or political development are limited. It is obvious that the refugees

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stuck in the Buduburam Refugee Camp lost value that could be employed as their instrument for combating exigent challenges upon return. They realized that the environment in their country of origin was not supportive of their ideas and neither was it viable for long-term settlement. The fact of insecurity tormented them and compelled them to go back to their refugee camp in Ghana. Therefore, the situation of the country was a revelation that their exilic situation would remain yet longer. In this case, those refugees have ideologically different conceptions of home, as they had to pursue how they would be integrated into their country of first asylum, despite their nostalgia about home. To make economic contributions to their country of origin is difficult for people from countries that do not provide needed basic protection and support for the refugees to even contribute toward development. As such, the conditions of the refugees after repatriation are patently discouraging. Many returned refugees felt dispirited about the situation and became embittered by the reality of their incapacity after return. Rather than attempting to engage in transformational activities, they felt the need to go back to their camps, where they had a comparative advantage. There are also repatriated Nigerians who could not enjoy a stable and peaceful environment, as activities of terrorist groups continued to disturb the peace. Similarly, many African countries that became war-torn and produced refugees still face similar challenges, which makes it difficult for refugees and displaced persons to return and restart their lives.

Ch a ll enge s of A dj ustm ent The reintegration of refugees in their country of origin involves a complex process by which former exiles regain their legal rights as citizens and acclimatize with the political, social, and economic environment of their country. In some cases, proper rehabilitation is necessary for full integration of refugees back into their countries of origin. Steps like this are necessary because the exposure of the refugees and displaced persons to different cultural, environmental, and political atmospheres has influenced their perception about home and community. What used to be home to them has been rendered a mere geographical heritage with little or no particular emotional attachment. The understanding of home may be more psychological than it is physical, and home as conceived by them has been shattered and dismantled, making it difficult to link their mental understanding of home to any physical relationship. Given the interest of various parties—the UNHCR, host and origin states, and the international community—in repatriating refugees to their countries of

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origin, it is necessary to consider additional complexities of migration before true reintegration can actually happen. Apart from the fact that the project of reintegration requires sufficient time, adjustment often depends on factors such as economy, security, and politics. Apart from the physical challenge of adjustment that confronts refugees and displaced persons in their process of reintegration, they are usually confronted with the problem of psychological response to their “new” home. For refugees and displaced persons who have spent decades outside of their environment, the postwar experience definitely varies from the prewar period. The bitterness of war and conflict does not end when the fighting stops. Often, returnees must struggle to reconcile with communities that were once hostile to them. Political affairs will be dictated by these realities, and the eventual results are reflected in the postwar policies adopted in these places. During the civil war in Nigeria, people of particular ethnicities were hunted so much that the lives of those who resided outside of their own ethnic communities were the target of threats and violence. For the maltreated groups, it was very tough reintegrating themselves among their people or in the same environment in the postwar period. Even when there are efforts to make them forget the activities that led to the displacement of some groups in situations like this, the fact remains that the scar sustained always demands time to heal, lengthening the process of reintegration. While it is difficult for some to be reintegrated immediately, it is not impossible that others adjust quickly. What remains fundamental, therefore, is that reintegration involves complex processes after an individual has experienced decades-long detachment from their environment. Movement has been seen to remain one of the immaterial processes of growth that leads to change in individuals or nations. These changes affect the ways people conduct themselves. When reintegration is considered, the conditions of refugees’ and displaced persons’ offspring who were not involved in the first generation of displacement are also to be considered. They are usually faced with the possibility of reorienting their minds to entirely different environments. Apart from their disconnection from the cultural system of their home countries, they have been raised with ideas and sometimes languages of different cultures. It is usually difficult for these people to overcome the challenges of adjustment. It was the difficulty in adjustment that necessitated the backflow of the Liberian women to a refugee camp where they are less taken care of. Similar issues could be found among refugees in Namibia, Angola, Sudan, and other African countries. The process of adaptation must consider the sensitivity of returnees’ culture and its propensity to encounter cultural and ideological differences when they

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get into the new setting. Home, as asserted by some scholars, may not be fixed to physical location, because culture is mobile, fluid, and disposed to flexibility; however, the dependency on the people as the indexes of exchanging cultural information validates the place of physical home.10

Postr elocation a n d R e settl e m ent The experiences after resettlement to a third, usually developed, country can be different from those after repatriation to the country of origin. The postrelocation experience of resettled Sudanese in Canada indicates that the challenge of adjustment can be far greater than imagined. Their country was ravaged by incessant militia conflicts between warring ethnic groups. The protracted tensions led to the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Sudanese who fled the war-torn country in search of emergency safety and security. When some of them resettled in Canada, the cultural and ideological differences of the country determined their behavioral change. Many times, the refugees felt entrapped in a state of limbo, and their lack of social ability to influence their activities affected their relationship with Canadians and even with one another.11 The cultural understandings of Africans that were transported with the former refugees finding resettlement in Canada varied from those of their hosts and sometimes clashed. For example, the social structure of Africans allows for the participation of extended family in affairs that threaten the relationship of a couple. In other words, Africans reject instant divorce when issues are not beyond what family members can resolve. Except in the case where the reason is medical, Africans build their social structures in ways that allow for conflict resolution for communal togetherness and development. The interdependency is part and parcel of their culture. A broken home is seen as a recipe for broken children and psychologically divided offspring, which in their calculation can cause social breakdown. Therefore, immediate attention is given to issues that have the potential to lead to this cultural degeneration. However, the reality of Canada does not reconcile with this and does not recognize it as a sound basis for family structure or societal units. Therefore, family issues that would have attracted the intervention of family members back in Sudan were instead reported to agencies of the Canadian government, who in their misevaluation of the people’s social conception were pursuing their own methods of social 1 0. Malkki, “National Geographic.” 11. Simich et al., “Providing Social Support.”

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tranquility. As such, resettled refugees with family issues there underwent a troubled process in their postrelocation efforts, and many abandoned or broke up their families. The period of adjustment was also very difficult because the emotional support rendered freely at home was missing. Back home, elderly people consider young couples as inexperienced and needing their constant attention for moral upbringing. The elderly males take custody of the husbands to equip them with knowledge of the societal conception of marriage and responsibility, especially that their union is considered a microcosm of the larger community that not only must be carefully handled but also must reflect values and mores that are accepted and recognized among the members of society. Women are not excluded, as the brides are given similar information and knowledge by the elderly women who are carrying out their social responsibility. In the absence of such institutions in the Canadian environment where the refugees were resettled, they were confronted with greater challenges of full integration. In essence, the mental, social, physical, and emotional configurations of the refugees need to be considered or taken care of if their integration process is to achieve the predetermined end. This process does not include only those resettled in different environments; it also applies to refugees whose reintegration is done in their origin countries. A number of refugees who have achieved economic success in their destinations are still unsuccessful emotionally and mentally in that they find difficulty in resettling in their new environment.

Tr a nsition of Geogr a ph y a n d th e I m mobi lit y of Cu lt u r e It is instructive to understand that the migratory journey is a transition in geography but not necessarily in culture. Equally important in the process of understanding this is to deconstruct the concept of culture especially as used in this context. Culture is identity and represents itself even in an unconscious state of its agency. This means that people exhibit their cultural properties among members of the same identity group or across it, and their activities involving speech, food, dressing patterns, and moral perception are determined by the culture they belong to. Transition in geography therefore signals a switch of cultural programming from one spatial or physical setting to another. When a people are displaced by emergencies, they move away from the zone of their culture that permits them to approach life in certain predetermined ways and must accommodate the alien culture of their host destinations. In other words,

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people who leave their geographical areas are meant to conform with the cultural dictates of their new environment. To understand this, we may recall the condition of Sudanese refugees in Canada who reacted to Canadian family culture by abandoning their homes because of the divergent understandings of family cohesion in Africa and Canada. Cases such as this attest to the fact that humans are conditioned to transit geographically, at least when faced with circumstances beyond their control, but have difficulty in abandoning the totality of their country’s culture because it has occupied an inseparable position in the anatomy of their consciousness. This means that when they have moved geographically away from their environment, their culture moves with them in a relationship of complementarity and not separation. Therefore, when they get to their destinations, their judgment, perception, and relationship with others are subconsciously dictated by their immersed cultural material even without their conscious knowledge. To maintain their mental health in the new places, therefore, they consciously seek to integrate the country’s fundamental principles so as to at least enjoy the basic rules designed to govern the place. In fact, the immobility of human culture perhaps goes beyond the description of language acquisition. In the case of acquiring a language, for the native speakers, it is absorbed automatically without struggling for it. However, a second-language speaker exerts great effort to master the language. Despite this process, second-language speakers do not transfer the learned language to their children automatically; they have to learn it too, unless they are raised in that linguistic environment. In the case of culture and identity, the trait is transferrable almost as though identity formation is genetic. The craving of the succeeding generations of refugees to visit their “home” confirms this argument. It makes the discussion of identity more nuanced than perceived by many scholars. From the younger generations of Greek Americans who embarked on a journey of home return to those of African Americans who sought to relocate to Africa, their cases are demonstrative of transited geography but immobile culture.12 They have been baptized to accept their grandparents’ culture as their identity, hence their consistent and unrepressed demonstration of nostalgia. In their process of rediscovering their identity, most of them are liable to remain in their parent countries or reject settling there. What remains incontestable, however, is their connection to those places, which further places a responsibility on researchers to consider the transcendence of culture as human identity beyond their physical location. When migrants and refugees are properly resettled, the 12. See Christou, “American Dreams and European Nightmares.”

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only cultural instrument that they are exposed to is their transferred legacy, as departing from that could provoke devastating consequences. Thus, displaced Africans continue to accept the status of refugees conferred on them in the migrant environment, seeking the appropriate time when they will be reintegrated with their people. Sharing the same identity does not mean their relocation experience is smooth. Rather, it establishes the simple reality that connection between members of the same identity can be difficult to deconstruct and reconstruct. For the displaced Tuaregs in southwest Libya, Mali, Burkina Faso, and the northwestern part of Nigeria, the geographic division orchestrated by the colonialists does not affect the stability of their culture. While they are influenced by the emerging challenges of war, desertification, and drought, they have remained with their culture, their identity. Therefore, the idea that home is spatially bound does not usually occur to them. Their home is better realized as dwelling within them and not the other way around. Another example of the immobility of culture is the Fulani engagement in livestock, in nomadic businesses. In fact, they are usually susceptible to relocation because of the nature of their business, yet their culture is fine-tuned in such a way that their current geography does not significantly influence their cultural norms and practices. In Africa, being the continent that houses a considerable number of refugees in the contemporary period, the dialectics of refugees shows that relocations usually do not border on the people’s identities. They are perhaps reinforced by it. In situations where they are inclined to be reintegrated with their people or other destinations, their simulation process can be long, but that does not neutralize the place of their culture in determining their worldview.

Conclusion The displacement of Africans persists in the contemporary period because of the unceasing violence and threatening circumstances. Since the colonial period, people have never stopped experiencing internal struggles and conflicts that result in displacement, making it extremely difficult for them to attach physical or geographical locations to their understanding of identity. It is not that they do not have physical locations that they can call home; what is difficult for them is their inability to arrive at a sustainable sense of home using their migratory propensity as the determining factor. They move from place to place across the continent, yet they do not achieve the status of the citizens of those destinations of migration. Their eventual realities in their places of return,

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(re)settlement, and postrelocation have been given sufficient attention, giving the opportunity for additional work and research to continue in that regard. There have been refugees and displaced persons who were happy to relocate to their country of origin after long-term displacement. Equally, there are those who decide to stay in their host countries because of personal reasons such as economic success there, intermarriage, and the like. As a result of this, we have considered the fluid nature of home, especially when it is related to the physical locations of people. Home has been deconstructed because of the rampant displacement of people in the contemporary African world. Refugees and displaced persons who were dislodged from their countries of origin have children in some cases, and thus this demographic is strictly defamiliarized with the conception of home that has to do with geographical location. They find home in the place of their exile because it provides relative peace and succor. Images of their geographical home haunt them and continuously condition their perception of it. These refugees and displaced persons place premium value on their lives, and thus the required sacrifice is to update their definition of home. In the cases where they are repatriated, further challenges confront the returned refugees who had been incapacitated by their lack of access to financial support. In most cases, they are abandoned upon return. They are therefore faced with the need to establish businesses that can earn them their daily bread. Such returnees are exposed to unfavorable conditions that can set them up for another traumatic experience. Without economic power, returned refugees are exposed to more serious danger. This leads to the question of transformation. Is it usually possible for returned refugees to inspire any worthwhile contribution that can lead to the transformation of their countries of origin? More studies need to be conducted on this subject, especially in African locations. Except when measured on their moral properties or attitudinal changes, one can hardly conclude that returned migrants and refugees bring transformation of great proportions to their country of origin. This remains constant because of the difficulty in making substantial contributions when there is no financial structure to aid that. Thus, the incentive for the relocated refugees is their reunification with the members of their society with whom they share familial connections. Amid all these, the returnee refugees are confronted with the challenge of adjustment in their country of origin. In most cases, the physical destruction that takes place in their country of origin wreaks great psychological havoc on them that makes it extremely difficult to adapt to the environment. The reintegration process of these refugees is therefore complex. A corresponding challenge is the question

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of their belongingness and homeness. While we understand how difficult it is for refugees to allocate their definition of home to their migratory journey, they equally feel attached to their countries of origin in a way that is difficult to understand. In any case, the issues facing refugees and displaced persons in postrelocation are pressing and require unbiased evaluation. In the displaced persons’ narratives or refugees’ experiences, realities are constructed differently in relation to their experiences and the peculiarity of their migrations.

Part V

CONCLUSION

seventeen

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CITIZENSHIP, RIGHTS, AND DEVELOPMENT

Introduction This book has argued that the roots of African refugees’ positions, conditions, and trajectories lie in national, regional, and global developments as well as in personal and social factors. The foregoing chapters have situated this study in the context of global Refugee Studies from various interdisciplinary perspectives, demonstrating that there are yet many aspects of the study of African refugees to be fully explored and theorized. Importantly, this book has unpacked many of the root causes and immediate propellants of the contemporary African refugee phenomenon. The focus throughout has been on refugees as subjects and agents, their lives and livelihoods, and their interaction with the various national and international systems that constrain them. In this concluding section, we discuss ways to tackle the African refugee crisis by addressing both root causes and current conditions. In this first part of two concluding chapters, we turn our attention to the fundamental issue of who a refugee is as a person stripped of national citizenship, and particularly the question of how to understand and address the specific African developmental conditions that have produced millions of citizens-turned-aliens. Citizenship and development are two complementary ideas. Just as the former is the driver and yet the unrestricted beneficiary of the latter, the composition and nature of one affects the reality of the other. As modern concepts, they gained prominence in African discourses in the postindependence period. During the colonial period, the “citizen” was merely known as a “colonial subject.” This speaks to the continuity of the society because before then, due to the many nation-states and languages, the linguistic equivalent of a citizen

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then was known in different tongues. Traditionally among the Yoruba, this was known as the onílé (native), while others were called àlejò (alien/stranger). Not everyone in the society carried the former identity. As in the modern states, prior to the colonial period, responsible àlejò were assisted in their settlement efforts. An àlejò could also become an onílé after years of toiling, exhibiting a sense of responsibility, and socioeconomic progress. Nonetheless, similar to modern practice, this trajectory might never be forgotten but saved for future reference at the appropriate time. Regardless, the implications of being an àlejò in precolonial Yorubaland varied substantially vis-à-vis the noncitizen of the modern state, owing to the socioeconomic and political reconfiguration of society during the colonial period. Altogether this idea that the modern state now refers to as citizenship is a powerful tool in expressing one’s dignity and exercising all conceivable human rights, which are well represented in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and other international legal instruments, within a sovereign geographical entity.1 This became an all-important idea in trying to understand the context of the 1980s following the increasing failure of independent African states. The hope for independence of African states from colonial domination brought about renewed optimism for Africans who thought this would lead to economic prosperity, development, and respect for human rights. Given how Africans lived under colonial rule, they thought they had seen the worst, as they were deprived of all the foregoing. In retrospect, the independence handed over to the nationalists-turned-politicians in Africa was illusory. The independence they secured brought new terrors, which even made some nostalgic for colonial rule. Older people often recall the “good old days” they lived in while growing up: the availability of food, strong monetary and purchasing value of currency, job opportunities, low inflation rates, and the like. Yet these “good old days” appear to even be more illusionary than the political independence attained. In the same spirit with Nkrumah, African nationalist leaders sought first the “political kingdom,” thinking that “all else would be added to [it].”2 But to their surprise, the political realm was not really the problem; it was the economy as well as the social form that ran the colonies. Historically, a political kingdom can be neither formed nor sustained without economic and territorial security. Put differently, the economy and security control politics because politics is 1 . For a critique of this system, see Beers, “Book Review,” 82. 2. Nkrumah, Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah, cited in Mazrui, “Nkrumah: The Leninist Czar,” 12.

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about power, and these two provide power in immeasurable ways. The colonial powers began to leave their colonies, having succeeded in the economic and social subjugation of the states they had created not for the benefit of the people but as a socioeconomic and consequently political extension of their colonial powers and territories. The socioeconomic structure was never negotiated in the independence bargain because it constitutes the most knotty and integral part of the colonial estate.3 Not even the efforts to reorder the economic path through several privatization and indigenization policies after independence changed the narrative.4 The economy was, for instance, British; the government, Westminster or American; the school curriculum, Western; and the people, British Africans.5 The case of the Nigerian elite nationalists was peculiar in that these elites representing the three dominant ethnic groups deceived or cajoled, if you like, themselves into proclaiming the country independent. To some extent, this came with the hope of ethnic glorification over others in the largest African country, Nigeria. A common ground could not be reached among them before they agreed on independence. Some nationalists had already rejected an earlier move for independence supposedly until practicable, which implies until their own region was prepared. This could have been a plus if the preparation had been meant to serve the national project in terms of healthy competition and not sectarian sentiment. Instead, they took power and tried their best to outperform the colonial powers in their brutality, deceit, and exploitation in a bid to sustain the ideology of the colonial state. Independence in Nigeria and other former British colonies was one in which the country was bought as a nation but sold as a fragmented estate of exploitation. Political elites soon danced along this route when they later realized this, and indeed, they have been serving this purpose well ever since. Evidently, this is a quintessential scenario in which many independent African states found themselves upon gaining the political kingdom due to what could be fairly attributed to the limit of their experience as well as the administrative and political exposure of the nationalist leaders. This chapter explores the effects of this trajectory on contemporary African states. Since preceding chapters have addressed the myriad impacts of this on African refugees, this chapter focuses on analyzing and offering solutions to the foundational problems of citizenship, rights, and development in Africa.

3 . See Ochieng, “Post-colonial State,” 264. 4. Nult, “Kenyan Development Experience,” 103. 5. For more, see Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks.

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Th e State, Citizenship, a n d R ights Over the years, the ideas of state, citizenship, and rights and their relation to development and governance have increasingly gained the attention of scholars from different fields. In light of this, these terms have been subjected to extensive theoretical and empirical scrutiny. These endeavors have brought about a vast array of literature and consequently an archive of theories, ideas, and analogies on these interrelated topics. For instance, scholars have argued on the proper conceptual lens between the idea of the state and a political system through which society could be studied. This debate is divided between the statist and systems theorists, with the statists arguing for the state approach and the systems theorists in support of the political system approach. But whether we adopt a system or statist approach, what is in question in the debates is the social relations among the forces of production in a given geographical entity. Understanding this illuminates both the state and the political system. Common trends in these relations, particularly as they enhance humanity, reveal the norm, as opposed to the aberration and pervert manifestation of a given entity. On the other hand, common trends in these relations that dwarf the promotion of humanity are considered areas in which the general notion of the relations between these forces needed improvement, hence the idea of political development. These relations are important to the composition of the state visà-vis the political system, economic formation, and social forms. Moreover, one still gets to know how the people conceive and view their states in this process. There are also numerous postulations about the idea of a state. Whereas the Marxist functionalists view it as an instrument of capitalist class interests, state-centered theorists see it as a “discrete social fact,” a clearly bounded institution that is distinct from “society,” acting “as a unitary and autonomous actor that possesses the supreme authority to regulate populations within its territory.”6 In bringing to force these elements, power and social control come to separate the state from the society. Assuredly, in either the Marxist functionalist or state-centered postulation, the understanding that people have about their state is shaped by their everyday experiences in the state and with state bureaucracies.7 Of the three principal sets of institutions that embody the power and aura of the state—political, social, and economic institutions— the political institutions are the most formidable and often design the nature of the others. In their varying degrees of representation, members of these 6 . Sharma and Gupta, “Introduction,” 8. 7. Ibid., 9.

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sovereign entities, who in some cases (as in Africa) are the state personified, also have their own narrative about the state. Whereas people relate their experience and view of the state from their engagements with the state bureaucracy and their everyday living experience, state representatives and elites relate theirs from their engagement with the system that holds the state institutions, as well as their relations with society. The state then becomes both an abstract and a real entity of systems that are held accountable for the condition of society. The state is indicted in the everyday experience of the people, even in the most casual instances, because of the reproduction of the nature of its institutions in these dynamics. There is no question that a nation is built not by chance but with consistent action and vision of members of the society toward the national project.8 The implication of this is the response of the led and the leaders in the polity, as in their relationship pattern and the governing ideology. Those who occupy the political leadership of any state are seldom trusted or in good confidence of the led. However, the extent to which this plays out in each nation is also relative. There is a clear difference between, say, the experience and expectations of an Australian citizen in Australia who is disgruntled with the state and one of relatively the same social status in Uganda with grievances toward the state. In this evolves the identity and reputation of a state. Likewise, the nation-building efforts of a state are predominantly related to politics of interests. The United States justice system might not be perfect, but the state has managed to carve a liberal, humanitarian, and democratic image for itself, though this image is also vigorously contested by various segments of society and interests. Yet, in contrast, the Burundian justice system is colored by the elite interests, and the state has managed to characterize an identity of instability, poverty, and very low human capacity development. As previously mentioned, citizenship is a powerful tool that offers a sense of entitlement to holders. Because of this, access to citizenship and its benefits has become a major global issue.9 In most cases, when people protest or pressure the state to meet their demands, they are expressing the rights of their full membership in the state. What is more, being a member of a state with this status is important because the nation-state remains the only entity through which the UDHR and other international human rights legal instruments and guiding principles are fully activated.

8. See Falola, Humanities in Africa; Falola, Toyin Falola Reader. 9. See, for instance, Jones, Birthright Citizens.

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According to scholars in conflict studies and governance, people pick up arms to express their displeasure with a system or operating structure of the state.10 This is often noted as an expression of citizens seeing no diplomatic alternative in their quest to redress grievances. It often comes to this in many parts of the world because international society itself is controlled by an elite system:11 powerful nations set the standard for the weaker ones, the elites set the standard for society, powerful nations feed on the poverty of the lesser ones, and the elites in the lesser nations thrive on the poverty of the generality of the society. Hence, Larry Diamond correctly posits that “the oldest and most enduring story of human political life is this: the strong exploit and abuse the weak. Those who wield political power use it to extract wealth from the powerless.”12 Contrary to the notion that only the Global North benefits from treaties and agreements with African states, Africans also benefit from such deals, albeit at different levels. While the former, at least in the relative implication, represents and benefits human development capacity for their societies, the latter simply represents and benefits the privileged few and their cronies. Hence, the “alliance” against African development is only an alliance against the masses that bear the brunt of such self-serving leadership in Africa and their thieving foreign partners.13 Their common tool against the common man is their organizational ability and divide-and-rule strategies, both of which the manipulated masses lack. Because they control what constitutes the “truth” in society and have the power to rally the people around their truth, which indeed consists of myths developed or capitalized on for political ends, they exhibit a great deal of influence on the composition and nature of state and society. Therefore, social identities are explicitly constructed to serve these purposes, particularly race and ethnicity, in this instance. At the global level, racism is the instrument of the divide-and-rule system of the elites, while at the national level, it devolves to ethnicity. Both are instruments of division used by elites to strengthen their base of support and justify their actions. In the end, it is all about the elites’ interests. This notwithstanding, the extent to which these interests connect to the society and promote the image of the state depends on the viability of the relations between the state (the political elites) and the society (the people). This implies that the nature of the social contract 10. See Adelugba and Ujomu, Rethinking Security; Bozeman, Conflict in Africa; Horowitz, Ethnic Groups. 11. See Hancock, Lords of Poverty. 12. Diamond, “Foreword,” vii. 13. Decker and Osunlakin, “Rodney,” 13–30.

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between the political leaders and the people determines the manner in which their interest will be represented in the elite consideration. This speaks to the fact that the elites always wish to retain their status and position in society and are ready to preserve whatever system makes this possible. They can even fake defeat or champion revolution only for cosmetic changes that still serve their purpose in the end.14 For instance, a German political leader, while protecting the state’s elite culture and expectations, has his eyes on his constituency because of the intricacies of the social contract between them, which can be sustained only when managed fairly. On the other hand, a Gambian political leader has only one constituency to consider so as to sustain his social contract with the people—this is the elite constituency, because the poor have no choice, but the “big man” does.15 The “big men” in the ethnographical morphology of these states own the choice of the people with their wealth and networks. Consequently, they decide their vote and manipulate their sociopolitical ability. The elites in Western climes feed on the knowledge of their past to prepare for the current events and control the future of their societies so as to fulfill their part of the social contract that will allow them to retain their positions, while the elites in Africa tend to feed more on the ignorance of their society. In this instance, an elite could commit a crime in, say, the United States’ justice system and get locked up but could commit the same crime in Nigeria or Kenya without raising any dust.16 In such a scenario, the social contract between the leaders and the led in one context is based more overtly on primitive, mythical, and patronage political culture, while the other is premised on knowledge, opinion, and public performance—all of which might not necessarily be rational or mutually exclusive rationales. There is a cultural angle to this as well. This emerged around the 1500s when “Black” labor was needed in imperial plantations in the West and the transatlantic slave trade began to take its form. In a bid to push society toward the idea of enslaving and considering some set of people as lesser humans due to their color, despite being contrary to biblical teachings that Europeans were familiar with at the time, a hierarchy of humans was developed, and what was expected of them was classified. Hence emerged the white race, which was supposedly meant to rule and have the spoils of the world, and the black race, which was consigned to serve the white and eat the crumbs. To establish this erroneous ideological manipulation, the elites who 14. From Sudan to South Sudan, Egypt to Gambia, Nigeria to Tanzania, and so on, this has been proved right over and again. For a more conceptual understanding of this, see Cohen, Politics of Elite Culture. 15. For more, see Kalu, Yacob-Haliso, and Falola, Africa’s Big Men. 16. See, for instance, Daniel, “Halliburton $185M Bribery Scandal.”

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created this story and the ones to sustain it after them had to create a certain standard of societal conditions for their population. To this extent, this constituency is part and parcel of the elite ideology governing the realm. It was this powerful, racist, template that was brought into the colonial rule that lasted decades in many parts of the world, particularly Africa. Various African leaders studied this ideology all through their educational life in Western academic institutions, and when it was time for independence, many were put to power by the same ideology. This measure makes democracy thrive relatively well in these states because the elites have limited access to the peoples’ “choice,” as they have been defined as people with special rights, human dignity, and superior blood. With this in mind, they tend to disrespect the people’s rights and dignity in their dealings.17 As it stands today, no sub-Saharan African state has an alternative narrative to this, which forms its national ideology and consciousness. To this extent, one could agree with scholars such as Okwudiba Nnoli about the role of the mode of incorporation of Africa into the world economy in the sixteenth century and the peripheral position it occupies.18 If an election did not go as expected for a political party in one clime, it indicates the people are moving their support base for a variety of reasons, from loss of jobs to inflation and other socioeconomic considerations. In the other, where Africa belongs, it is because the political elites in that area have shifted their base or betrayed the candidate. All these social structures tell on the state, its identity, and its reputation in the international community.19 A state is not a state when it cannot protect the economic, political, and social security of its citizens. Of course, this can only be in the relative sense, which is why no state is immune to protests and dissenting voices.20 The point, however, remains that the condition of the social relations that construct the social contract between the leaders and the led determines the composition of the society as well as the manner in which dissenting voices channel their grievances. When taken to the extreme, owing to the infeasibility of moderate and diplomatic means, the agitations, as shown all along in this study, often lead to loss of lives and forcibly displaced populations whose option is limited to being protected by ambitious international legal instruments.21 As refugees or internally displaced persons 17. Together with the novel coronavirus pandemic of 2020, for instance, the European Union is in the crisis of Brexit, the latter caused by respect for the people’s choice. 18. Nnoli, “Short History of Nigeria Underdevelopment.” 19. Decker, Matrix of Inherited Identity. 2 0. See, for instance, Gee, Counterpower. 21. See the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, its 1967 Protocol, and the 1969 OAU Convention.

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Figure 17.1. “Waiting for resettlement is not the only option and salvation a refugee has.” When given rights and opportunities, refugees can solve their own problems and contribute to their host community, even while staying on the continent. Gilbert Ngongo is a Congolese refugee living in Rwanda whose entrepreneurial abilities established Sea Food Ltd., a very successful company that now employs many other refugees. Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gilbert _Ngongo,_Congolese_Refugee_in_Rwanda_and_CEO_of_Seafood_Ltd.jpg.

(IDPs), they are faced with more complicated challenges of marginalization, human rights abuses, failure of their state, and the myth of the protection of the international refugee regime. This has been the fate of well over twenty million forcibly displaced persons housed in different camps and restricted spaces throughout Africa, some of whom became displaced not even by violent conflicts but due to long-term neglect by the state.22 These refugees often take their fate in their own hands, for good, like those pictured in figure 17.1, or for ill. It is important to mention here that, in every society, especially where there is an unequal distribution of wealth resulting from unequal access to opportunities, there are always at least two differential citizenship levels: the upper class and the lower/under class. Whereas the former has access to all that the state has to offer and even has the power to shape what the state has to offer, including the legal rights and privileges, whatever the latter has access to is distorted 22. See Executive Committee of the High Commissioner’s Programme, “Update of UNHCR Operations,” 1; Essoungou, “Africa’s Displaced People.” See also Alexander Bett’s notion of “survival migration,” in Betts, Survival Migration.

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and adulterated by the instrument of “chance”; not even their franchise right is exempt from this reality. With the power to influence what the state has to offer, the former is seen to operate above the law of the land, and by operating under a distorted space, the latter is seen living outside the rule of law but by the rule of chance. Altogether, the rule of law in such a setting becomes mere rhetoric, as the rule of man, the powerful men, prevails. This way, as has been argued so far in this book, the poor and vulnerable in society have always been the pawns for the accumulation of wealth and power by the elite. In any case, to be poor and ignorant is to be vulnerable to the political machinations of the powerful and of state forces. Being poor and without a socioeconomic network for decent living and survival is enough to deprive many of their rights in the modern state driven by extreme capitalism. It becomes worse when such populations are forcibly driven out of their homes and lands due to insecurity of one form or another, to reside in other places where they rely on international protection because their state will not or cannot guarantee them this. Indeed, they are not expected to be treated better than second-class citizens of these places who live at the margins, in whatever form. More often than not, their fundamental human rights are equally replaced with the political interest of the political actors in their place of asylum, sometimes cloaked in the image of national interest. The view of a Mauritanian refugee is instructive here: We want to return with our dignity. Because there, it is as if we are not important. If we go back home, the government will not respect us. Or the one who does not respect you and who does not recognize you for who you are can bring you some problems. This is what stops us from returning home. We want that the government knows who we are, we want to have our place and our rank in Mauritania. If your land was taken, it should be given back to you. If your herds were taken, the value of what you lost should be given back to you. But the one who thinks you do not have any importance and is not ready to welcome you back home in a proper way, will never give you back what you have lost.23

The first enemy of the state is the people, and the foremost foe of the people is the state, in Africa. More than anything, the people become the enemy of the state when they think they know more than those in government and act based on this to demand their rights and a better society. The state becomes the enemy of the people by the fact that the people are always suspicious of the state. The state in response to its “enemies” mobilizes and unleashes its security apparatus 23. Fresia, “Performing Repatriation?,” 13.

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on the very people it swore to protect. As the late iconic Pan-Africanist and Afro-beat musician Fela Anikulapo Kuti once said, in this process the state brings “sorrows, tears and blood” to the people. Truly, the “irreducible feature of any state is that it exercises a legitimate monopoly on the use of force,” but there is nothing legitimate about an action that violates the rights of citizens of a state.24 In the face of such state lawlessness, the people also go rogue as they attempt to protect these rights. The legitimacy of state violence then becomes a license for anarchy. The height of the animosity between the state and the society is often reached when the latter makes demands on the former as they affect their well-being and represent their interests. Violent eruptions then surface as the manifestation of failed expectations of the people in the state after a long period of endurance within which the animosity breeds over time. This escalates with the state’s application of coercive measures. At any rate, African states’ militaries have fought fewer external wars since independence, aside from their involvement in peacekeeping missions, vis-à-vis the internal.25 This is even more so in recent times. Whether these internal military operations are within their authority or not, the states’ militaries treat the people like the enemy of the state, especially in cases of peaceful protest. As Archie Mafeje puts it, they act as if in enemy territory.26 This is true not only of militaries but also of all other security structures of these states. Yet the instruments and weapons used in dehumanizing the people are funded by the taxpayers, who, in some cases, are deprived of food and other essentials because they have to pay taxes. This is the case in the face of a disproportionate tax payment regime. Hence, there is a consistency to how the social contract between the state and the people breaks down. Speaking to how this environment has molded the media profession in Nigeria, Ayo Olukotun painted this concise picture that reflects the response of civil society in Africa: “Whether this phenomenon is viewed as a transition from a prebendal to a predatory state . . . , the rise of a felonious state . . . , a police state . . . , or as a shadow state . . . that is employed both as a terror machine and as a vehicle for the personal appropriation of state resources, the unfailing motif is that of an increasingly insurgent media, which, in the crucible of repression, were forced to develop quasimilitary tactics to oppose the harshly authoritarian state.”27 In this instance then, civil society and the 2 4. Diamond, “Foreword,” x. 25. Mafeje, “Beast and Icon,” 105. 2 6. Ibid. 27. Olukotun, “State as Undertaker,” 155.

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media are shaped in the image of the repressive regimes that they contest, as they seek countermeasures to dislodge the brutality of the state against its own people.

Citizenship, Secu r it y, a n d De v elopm ent The first constitutional question a state has to answer is how to ensure the security of its subjects, both physically and economically. The state slips into anarchy if this is not adequately attended to. Africa has produced more forcibly displaced persons than any other region in the world28 principally because of the consistent slip into anarchy as states have failed to address both physical and human security questions appropriately. The United Nations Human Development Index, released yearly to rate the performance of states in the area of general economic development and human capacity development, has always put African states, particularly in the sub-Saharan Africa region, at the nadir of the ladder. The ranking is usually divided into four sections: very high human development, high human development, medium human development, and low human development. In the most recent report (2019), all the countries in the sub-Saharan part of Africa, aside from Botswana and Gabon, which ranked among countries with high human development, are represented in the medium to low ranks, with the lowest of them sharing the unpopular latter place with war-torn countries such as Syria.29 The so-called giant of Africa, Nigeria, with the largest economy and population on the continent, and the richest in terms of human and mineral resources, sits contentedly at number 158, a six-step drop from its 152 ranking in 2015 and the same spot in the previous year, 2018.30 In contrast, war-torn Syria, Libya and Iraq, the politically unstable Palestine, and tiny states with few resources such as Cape Verde, Mauritania, and others all fare better than this. Since the conclusions in the reports are often premised primarily on the peoples’ access to health, education, and economic opportunities, all of which tell on life expectancy ratio, standard of living, the justice system, and many others, one can conclude that the level of inequality is higher in Africa than in any other region of the world. Inequality of access to opportunities and resources in a plural society made up of primordial sects breeds animosity, retards development, and ultimately breeds sectarianism. It was the late Imam Musa Al-Sadr, a former Shia leader 2 8. See Rwelamira, “Some Reflections,” 156–58. 29. See UNDP, Human Development Report 2019, 22–25. 30. Jahan et al., “Overview,” 28–30.

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from Lebanon, who, in his struggle for peace in the state, expressed that “sect is a blessing, but sectarianism is a curse.”31 His submission is based on the fact that all nations are built from a diversity of cultures and peoples, but when the diversity becomes an issue of acceptance and rejection, marginalization and exclusion, and other factors with socioeconomic and political implications, it becomes a clog in the wheel of societal progress. As it turns out, politics in postcolonial African states came to be centralized and dominated by ethnic patronage. The suspicion of one group dominating others influenced postcolonial African politics.32 Still building on the mechanisms that were set for another purpose—imperial and colonial benefits—postindependence governments in Africa became even more autocratic, and unlike their predecessors, who at least had superiors to report to in London, Paris, and elsewhere, postindependence African governments were above the state, and neither accountability nor transparency featured in governance.33 The disdain the colonial administrators had for the populace, neglecting their peculiar needs and yearnings for personal progress, continued to a large extent. Even though the people were ruled by their own kinsmen with the same history and color, they felt no succor in their political independence. Some scholars have explained this with reference to the development model adopted by these states after independence. From the 1960s, several schools of development theories began to emerge to explain the path to development for newly independent states. The argument is that African states went with the modernization school, which, among other things, not only promoted the repression of dissenting voices but also intensified the division between the elites and the masses.34 In other words, the elitist bearing of the modernization theory encouraged the rise of dictatorial states characterized by massive socioeconomic inequality, dependent economies, poverty, and general crises of development in Africa. Nonetheless, it is pertinent to note that modernization theory was a tool of the Western powers to promote a laissez-faire state in Africa, and not all independent African states were in favor with the Western countries at this time. Yet, virtually all of them exhibited the elitist-dictatorial tendencies encouraged by modernization theory. This speaks to the truth that theories and policies have little impact on Africa, and the actions and inactions 31. Imam Musa Al-Sadr, quoted by his brother, Raed Sharaf Al-Din, in El Binni, “Imam and the Colonel.” 32. Thomas and Falola, Secession and Separatist. 33. Chiliswa, Strengthening Bottom-Up Social Accountability. 34. Bernstein, “Modernization Theory.”

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of states, though mimicking particular development models, lack objective and rational factors of development to sustain these. In a stark similarity with the colonial state and authenticating the fact that the independence of the states was simply a transfer of the colonial instrument of exploitation from foreign powers to domestic ones, the ethnic composition of the state has been perpetually manipulated by elites to achieve their goals. This is used to gain and sustain political power, which often amounts to nothing for the people, not even those from the same ethnic composition as the political elites. It is further compounded by failed policies, shrinking economic opportunities, and demagoguery campaigns that often intensify the feelings of marginalization, neglect, and exploitation among the populace.35 The gap between the state and the people is further widened, leaving the nation-building effort unfulfilled. All of this invariably returns to the question of accountability and transparency needed for effective governance and responsive institutions.36 Hence, this has been a major issue in the continuous trend of violent conflicts in Africa. As noted, due to their peculiar nature, once they emerge, these conflicts are too complex to be resolved without conscious, consistent monitoring and belligerents’ commitment to peace. Most often than not, societal development is then seen being sacrificed for short-term gains of the few. This brings about policy inconsistency and failure. In this way, Ghana and Taiwan, for instance, could roll out the same policies in response to the same problems and still have different results. When all these are situated within the context of development, its various descriptions and connotations, the state is well situated beneath the expectations. Hassan M. El-Shamy reached the conclusion that “the more integrated and united a society is, the higher the potentials for development and vice versa.”37 As Nicholas Stern, a former chief economist at the World Bank, describes development, it is a fundamental change in economic structures, the movement of resources out of agriculture to services and industry, international movement of labor, and transformations in trade and technology.38 As a dynamic and fluid process, development requires consistent configuration and reconfiguration of the state polity and structure in actions deemed proactive or actively responsive, as the circumstance might be, and prudent to the tune of the time. Be that as it may, development is first and foremost conceived within a framework,39 3 5. See, for example, Achieng, “Important Issues.” 36. See Mutiso, “Championing Financial Reporting,” 13–22. 37. El-Shamy, “Folklore Data Banks,” 1. 38. Bourguignon and Pereira da Silva, Impact of Economic Policies, xiii. 39. Makhan, Introduction to Social Anthropology, 175.

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which must subscribe to the yearnings of the people who are at the center of this course as drivers and beneficiaries. Jha Makhan explains it as the process that stands for transformation of society,40 in all its forms, and not for the advancement of the privileged few who are considered the most consistent beneficiaries of development frameworks, particularly in Africa.41 Adequate attention to detail and consistent planning and execution are all vital in these reflections. As a cluster of rent-seeking states, Africa is faced with conflicting interests: one that represents a privileged minority and one that puts the society at the core of considerations. To this extent, it becomes a herculean task for these states to successfully manage any developmental policy or program because this requires long-term planning and consistency, while on the contrary, their cynical interests are covered in shortterm considerations. Talking about preparedness, in its 2019 report, the United Nations Development Programme explained that “climate crisis and sweeping technological change” would have great effect in influencing the progress and pattern of human development in the twenty-first century; yet, none of the states in Africa seems to be equipped or prepared for any of these imminent future events.42 Although Africa contributes very little of the toxic substances that pollute and deplete the environment and cause climate change, it is many times more prone to the effects than other regions of the world. Whereas its contribution to the crisis is limited owing to its management of primitivity and limited industries, the effect is not unrelated to industrialization and technological advancement. In this way, we see the cause of an event becoming the solution. While those who contribute more to this damage have the technological facilities and means to cushion the effect of climate crisis, the lesser ones have little or nothing to fall back on. Breaking this down further, yearly heat waves are getting hotter, and not every home in Africa is connected to a national electricity grid; even fewer people have air conditioners installed in their homes or drive a car fitted with same. The majority work in the informal sector, working long hours at least six days a week, right under the sting of the sun. During the time to rest, they are still faced with heat waves and can only pray for rain. Fertile lands become barren, and great lakes turn to desert. Increasing cases of land encroachment inducing violence, low food production, and much more, without the technological 4 0. Ibid. 41. Indeed, some scholars are often skeptical of development concepts and theories, as they consider them dubious and often channeled toward monopolistic and imperialist ends. Consider, for instance, Udoka, “History and the Challenge,” 73. 42. UNDP, Human Development Report 2019, iii.

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preparedness to address them, are clear paths to a state of anarchy. Health, justice, education, and other necessities are expensive, if they are available at all in this region. As such, in the face of increasing competition for shrinking opportunities, ordinary people fall ill and are deprived of access to even modest health care. Those with access are faced with another challenge, which is the effectiveness and the efficiency of the services they receive in the few existing structures. The local herbal alternatives remain unexplored in spite of the proven records of the efficacy of their products and viability for further scientific explorations. The current of research, science, and technology is abysmally low.43 In the face of all this, by 2050, Africa is projected to harbor half of the world population, together with the largest concentration of youth population.44 As one swings between pessimism and optimism, one can begin to imagine, endlessly, what this implies for the future of the region and its many peoples in light of shrinking economic opportunities, marginalization, and massive inequality. Signally, economic development amounts to nothing without impact on these areas of human development, all of which culminate into economic and human insecurity in the state. This explains why many statistical reports on development and economies of African states often fail ethnographic tests.45 The intrigues of development in Africa indicate that societies that have not moved to the realm of modern technology in processing and advancing economic, environmental, and sociocultural relations are, by default, at the mercy of cultures that have engaged this path. The abundance of resources—human and environmental—becomes a worthy currency for a developed society only with adequate attention to technological, artistic, cultural, economic, and political transformation that can provide comfort and a sense of pride to the populace. E. A. Boateng explained that, “owing to the greatly superior economic and

4 3. See Adesina, “Global Trends,” 1. 4 4. United Nations, Department of Social and Economic Affairs, “World Population.” 45. Take the economy of Nigeria, for instance. The Nigerian economy does not need to go into recession before the people experience inflation and shortage of funds; neither does the economy need to go into depression before the population go depressed. When the economic curve enters these points, the uninformed only think of it as a norm and adjust. Either in or out of recession, the person on the street can’t relate the difference between their daily living and a lifelong project. Likewise, if Nigeria’s emergence as the largest economy in Africa, and other positive statistics between 2013 and 2014, had a positive impact on the economic security of the society, the then-president, Goodluck Jonathan, could have won his 2015 reelection bid, which he did not. These scenarios succinctly explain the difference between economic development and human security.

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technological advantages which the developed nations enjoy, they are still in a position to determine or even to dictate to a large extent, the economic fortunes of the developing nations which depend on them for the very things, such as capital goods, technical know-how and entrepreneurial skills, which they need in order to modernise and upgrade their fragile economies.”46 This is essential to note because by the time African states finally find themselves on the harsher side of the effects of climate change and future events, their fragile structures are hampered by protracted violent conflicts and forcibly displaced peoples, when not well managed. Resorting to violent conflict for the expression of grievances is a way of bringing the other party to the realization of the lethal force of the dissenters. Violent conflict drags on and peace efforts collapse as either or both belligerents continuously make efforts to gain leverage during negotiations.47 And where the negotiations do not conform with their idea of peace, they simply withdraw, crippling the entire peace effort. Significantly, in times of armed conflicts, the loser has always been determined before lasting peace can take place from the bargains across the table. Losing in this context is primarily in the psychological sense of who gets what ration of demands—that is, the extent to which both interests that propelled the crisis were captured in the peace deal. This comes with a human cost that no management structure could be efficient enough to respond to. In light of the foregoing, Vusi Gumede wrote that without “thought leadership, thought liberation, and critical consciousness,” all of which he opined to be instrumental to an effective preparation of African states for the next century, the next century will also remain a narrative of a state of primitivity and will be lost just like the current one.48 Indeed, the development challenges of African states are as complex as the responses they require. If anything, as earlier mentioned, the ruling elites and their foreign counterparts feed fat on the twenty-first century woes. Their salaries, allowances, pensions, and all are sustained by the collective wealth and sweat of the people. While they sleep on bloated stomachs, the people feeding them sleep on deflated bellies. At the end of it all, the people are asked to sacrifice and bear with their government. Often, what follows this is state terror. This system, like any other, needs influence and power, the type that only legitimacy confers on the leadership of a state. This can be produced only through two means: public performance or coercion. African 4 6. E. Boateng, Political Geography of Africa, 78. 47. This is the clog in the wheel of present peace efforts in Libya. It could be seen in the Sudanese and South Sudanese crises, as well as many others. 4 8. Gumede, “Exploring Thought Leadership.”

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states have since been exploring the latter option. The docility of the people therefore serves them well, while their activism is seen as an inconvenience that needs to be paralyzed. In this process, they destroy the health, educational, and justice systems of society, with an already bleeding economy. So far, states do not experience meaningful development in this kind of environment. The needed preparation to set the twenty-second century into favorable motion for Africa, as outlined by Gumede, calls for a complete round of sociocultural and political revitalization, as they touch on issues deep inside the social fabric.49 Indeed, at the base of all progressive society, cultural revitalization among the population plays a key role in mobilizing them toward a common purpose that will reflect the peculiarity of their conditions and the peculiar model toward development. This is more so as the source of inspiration for development is embedded in the art of a culture.50 In light of the rise of new economic powerhouses, especially in Southeast Asia, this has become a historical truth of development discourse, as opposed to the universality that often characterized the tune of the so-called development experts before what they referred to as the “Asian miracle.” Miracle it was indeed, because the rise of these countries was beyond their assumed capacity. Therefore, through references from different arguments that have clouded development discourse since the 1940s, ranging between the importance of state, market, people, and institutions, John Harris, among other scholars, has drawn a note of caution that development experts should avoid the temptation of consensus on development patterns, as the reality of theories only work with social and cultural conditions of states at any given time.51 Circumstance and time are critically important in development discourse. Since the advent of new sovereign states in world politics, particularly after World War II, development has been a major point of discourse among scholars and experts in economics, political science, history, sociology, and other related fields. Particularly from the 1980s, development economists started considering the comparison of developed and underdeveloped states to ascertain why some states are rich while others are poor.52 These comparative studies are mainly conducted in the projection of states with similar trajectories and somewhat similar morphologies. While development is not a static reality and underdevelopment has no definite panacea in the form of a developmental 4 9. See Osunlakin, “Educational System.” 50. See Isola, “Making Culture Memorable.” 51. Harris, “Development Theories,” 35. 52. See for example, Berendsen et al., Asian Tigers and African Lions.

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model, it is instructive to note that the role of political leadership is sacrosanct. Political will and adequate commitment of the state to developmental plans and strategies, as well as respect for such institutions responsible for the planning and execution, are irreplaceable harbingers of development, regardless of the system of government. For instance, the colonial period was a long period—though in most cases less than a century—of fundamental shift in the structure and nature of colonized states in Africa and elsewhere. Nonetheless, as Adu Boahen would argue, “in some respects, the impact of colonialism was deep and certainly destined to affect the future course of events, but in others, it was not.”53 In other words, while the deeply debilitating effects of colonialism are not in doubt here, this explanation alone does not account for the current lack of development of African states. Rather, the political actors and decision makers in the postcolonial states, led by the political elites who make the decisions, must also be blamed for the continued backward conditions of African states. Indeed, these political elites were themselves also products of the twisted colonial enterprise in many ways. Colonialism bequeathed some vestiges of European modernity, although this was a double-edged sword. Nonetheless, it encouraged local production in Africa that fed industries in Europe with needed raw materials, provided railway systems and several road networks that linked production to the dispatch centers (usually the urban centers), enhanced communication through its installed communication systems, and constructed and regulated schools and health-care facilities, among other biopolitical projects with effects on the social structure of the colonies.54 This way, from Mombasa to Kisumu on Lake Victoria and from Nairobi to Thika and Konza to Magadi, among others in Kenya, railways were constructed to move goods from the interiors to the terminals.55 This invariably facilitated the urbanization process of these major areas as settlements of different groups of people increasingly migrated there for economic opportunities. No sooner had these countries gained independence than these structures began to deteriorate. The railways could neither be maintained nor new roads constructed to enhance the economic activities of the states. When the roads are constructed or the railways reinvigorated, they are not necessarily with feasible economic concerns but cynical political 5 3. Boahen, quoted in Akurang-Parry, “In Memoriam.” 5 4. See, for example, Sorrenson, Origins of European Settlement; Ochieng and Maxon, Economic History of Kenya. 55. Mwaruvie, “Kenya’s ‘Forgotten’ Engineer”; Kinuthia, “Potential Impact of Railway Infrastructure.”

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calculations. Worse still, more than half a century after independence, these infrastructures are still being maintained and constructed by foreign technologies, capital, and personnel. The former governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria and former Emir of Kano, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, painted this picture clearly when he noted, We have Governors. . . . They go to China and spend one month on a tour, and what do they come back with, MoU on debts. China will lend you $1.8bn to build light rail. This light rail will be done by the rail workers from China, the trains will come from China. The labour comes from China the driver is Chinese. At the end of the day, what do you benefit from it? Your citizen will ride on a train and when you ride on a train, in northern Nigeria, in a state like Kano or Katsina, where are you going to? You are not going to an industrial estate to work. You are not going to school. You are not going to the farm. You borrow money from China to invest in trains so that your citizens can ride on them and go for weddings and naming ceremonies.56

This certainly is a poignant indictment of political leadership in Africa. In addition to this, the schools began to deteriorate in standard and physical structures. This later created the scenario whereby the educational system is not directed at the needs of society, as it remains within the colonial curriculum, hence the consistently huge dichotomy between the town and the gown in these independent states.57 On the other hand, one consistent aspect of descriptions and conceptions of development is that they suggest self-visions, goals, and targets saddled by well-conceived objectives, ideology, and philosophy within a group of people and of which the entirety of the group is convinced. This conviction is beyond the whims of a leader, because it is anchored by institutions, as it promotes a national dream, sets a template within which the people act, and generates an emotional sense of attachment between the individual and the state. Development then remains an illusionary pursuit when it becomes the personal or private conviction of a self-serving leader, especially in a democratic milieu where the mobilization front of the state is ignorance. Putting this into consideration, Peter Lewis argued that uncovering the latent value placed within development efforts is based “upon politically negotiated institutions.”58 This

56. Emir Muhammadu Sanusi II, keynote speech at KADIVEST 2.0, Kaduna, April 5, 2017, quoted in Usman, “Emir Sanusi.” 57. Osunlakin, “Educational System,” 52. 58. Lewis, quoted in Tirtosudarmo, “Technocracy and the Institutionalization,” 131.

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is more so considering the preponderance of the political institution in the development strides of a state and its ability to act as a potential albatross on other institutions of the state. Another explanation that fits within the development discourse is the reputation of the state, stemming from how the state is perceived by other states and nonstate actors. A case in point here is the issue of aid and the operation of donor agencies in the state. Bernard Berendsen and Roel Van der Veen put the difference between developing and developed countries at the level in which the latter has moved its economy beyond “aid-based” support and programs.59 In actuality, the former remains an aid recipient not necessarily because of economic shortages or lack of resources to tailor its development path without recourse to “organized alms-begging” but because, in addition to their rentier economies, they constitute another avenue for easy dollar inflow and fertile ground for entrenching malfeasance on a prebendal scale that characterizes these states.60 A former minister of external affairs in Nigeria, Professor Bolaji Akinyemi, therefore asked the question: “How can you describe as poor a country which spent a total of N1.18 trillion (about $7.4 billion) on the importation of toothpicks, fish, milk, textiles, rice and furniture between 2014 and May 2015?” This is more so when one considers that in the same period, “fish imports gulped $1.39 billion while milk and rice imports accounted for $1.33 billion and $51 million respectively,” and within the first five months of the year from which these statistics emerged, “fish importation accounted for $374.04 million; rice$220.3 million; toothpick-$1.32 million; milk–$375.67 million; furniture-$20.39 million and textiles which accounted for $6.49 million.”61 The country has many waters that could provide fish in their different types and sizes, but the state has stifled the atmosphere in which the people are to cultivate these economic opportunities. In fact, the politics between the Nigerian state and its Niger Delta region, where fishing used to be their preoccupation, offers a very informative example of state-society relations in Africa. In protecting the interests of foreign investors (namely, the multinational oil corporations), which is linked to their pecuniary interests, the Nigerian state has sealed the termination of all other economic activities in this region aside from crude oil exploration. The companies are encouraged by the state to abandon 5 9. Berendsen and Van der Veen, “Tracking Development,” 4. 6 0. Larry Diamond described foreign aid in this context as a “good enough source of external rents to fuel a prebendal system.” Diamond, “Foreword,” x. 61. Akinyemi, Nigerian Exceptionalism, 2–9. 62. See Amaeshi et al., “Corporate Social Responsibility,” for more on these dynamics.

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their corporate social responsibilities in this region for the sake of maximizing their profits.62 The more the companies make profit, the more their stooges anchoring the state affairs fill their own pockets. As it stands today, the ordinary person in this region is left with no water to fish, land to cultivate, or clean air to breathe. The water they drink, like the air they breathe, is contaminated by toxic waste from the crude oil extractive activities of the multinational oil corporations, and they are left starving as they cannot produce their own food and are left with no economic means. Together with their environment, they are left miserable, without health-care facilities, schools, and other basic life necessities. When they talk about the level of injustice and marginality they face, they articulate a state of terror as the region continues to produce the dollars with which the ammunitions and training of the state’s security structures dispersed to repress them are facilitated. Of course, the region continues to provide more than 90 percent of the nation’s foreign earnings. The people are simply not in the picture of the state’s considerations. It is worth mentioning, however, that, taken from the experience of farmers in other regions of the fertile state, even without the degradation of their environment, the people of this region might not be able to explore the riches of their environment to their full potentials given the low presence of technological input and government support that need to go into these activities. Simply put, with the combined forces of archaic technologies and abysmal government support, farmers and other local producers in Nigeria, as in other African countries, lack the capacity to feed the entire country without shortages, and worse still, they are disadvantaged in the competitive global market space. The foregoing argument is made clearer when one compares the accumulation of the amount collected in aid by Africa states and the accumulation of illicit financial outflow from these states to several parts of the world.63 Petty and grand crime, violent crisis, and other issues cannot but set in this kind of situation as the people strive to make their paths in this web of lawlessness and uncertainty. Thus, the latter height that characterizes a developed state, as mentioned, can be made possible only via the ability of these countries to escape the trap of resource curse, rentier state, patronage, and prebendal system as they pursue a relatively self-reliant economy through accountability and technological advancement.64 This makes the development path of African states even more

6 3. On the subject of illicit financial flows, see, for example, Kamga, Illicit Financial Flows. 6 4. See, for instance, Falola, “Technology, Culture and Society.”

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daunting considering that this would require the Gumede kind of societal characterization and political leadership. This in turn principally entails the sociocultural revitalization of the state; and the revitalization of the state would invariably lead to the deposition of the undue privileges enjoyed by the current set of political elites in Africa.65 The deposition of these privileges might well imply the deposition of the current composition of the elites. Yet, it is general knowledge that, elite or not, humans are averse to any idea that appears to have the ingredients of displacing them from their status, particularly status that gives them access to power, not even for the idea of a common good, without staging a thorough fight. Expressing his concern on this, a former governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Professor Charles Soludo, argued, “My sense is that not many people in Nigeria, including those in government, fully appreciated the extent of system collapse. In many instances, it has been akin to rebuilding a society from the scratch. Make no mistake about it: in the older order, some people (especially rent-seekers) made a lot of money and profited from the disorder. To make progress, this class either has to be uprooted, displaced or compensated to give way. Either way, they were not going to give up without a fight.”66 The challenge of development and citizenship in Africa can thus be summed up as the problem of bridging the interests of the elites and the masses to reflect a vibrant state of equal representation and full citizenship.

Conclusion Several efforts have been made at the regional and subregional levels in Africa to widen violent conflict prevention mechanisms. As seen in the rise of forced displacement populations in the region, these efforts have not yielded results. Perhaps more needs to be done in this respect. It is relevant to mention here the case of the Mo Ibrahim Award, which promotes and encourages good governance and leadership in Africa. Similarly, there is a need for the African Union to expand its monitoring mechanism such that African leaders that have shown genuine support and promoted the letters of conventions, treaties, and declarations aimed at managing forced displacement, especially through preventive mechanisms, are appropriately recognized and honored. To some extent, this could ensure that other African leaders have something more to aspire to other than political power at the national level. Significantly, the fourth paragraph of the Kampala Declaration under the heading “On Prevention of Forced 6 5. For a detailed account of these undue privileges, see Akinyemi, Nigerian Exceptionalism. 6 6. Soludo, “Can Nigeria Be the China,” 11–12.

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Displacement in Africa,” like other notables therein, has the power to influence a new era of good governance, responsive leadership, and effective institutions if properly followed through by the states. In this paragraph, states noted, We undertake to fast track entry into force of the African Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance, and, as soon as it enters into force, agree to take measures to promulgate national laws and review existing laws with a view to addressing gaps and strengthening mechanisms for their implementation, including lifting reservations deposited on certain of the provisions in these treaties and conventions. We undertake to develop by 2015, national strategies for the full implementation of the African Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance including by aligning relevant national legislation and strengthening national institutions charged with democratization and electoral processes.67

Drawing from several submissions on the forgoing and the refugee crisis in Africa, there is a need for the African Union to constantly seek mechanisms to strengthen the development of people-oriented governance, and its conflict early warning systems. A close execution of this is a sure way for appropriate expansion of its human rights monitoring, human rights and humanitarian law promotion, election and political transition monitoring, and management of arms proliferation in the whole of the region. Fifty years after the 1969 OAU Refugee Convention, the African Union designated 2019 as the Year of Refugees, Returnees, and IDPs in commemoration of this historic feat. However, as attested to by several UNHCR and academic reports, the refugee crisis is expected to worsen with the current condition of states in this region.

67. African Union, “Kampala Declaration.”

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THE FUTURE Ending Africa’s Refugee Crisis

Introduction Technological advancements since the 1950s, especially the revolutionary achievements in information technology, have given more credence to Marshall McLuhan’s concept of the “global village.” With the advent of the internet, mobile phones, twenty-four-hour cable television, and social media, the world is kept abreast of happenings around the globe, often as they are unfolding. This has meant a steady stream of pictures depicting conflict-torn societies, famine-plagued villages, and a seemingly unending throng of people fleeing the scourge that is conflict, hunger, persecution, human rights violations, and death flashing across our screens. More recently, aired visual stories of people engaging in brazen acts of desperation such as crossing over hundreds of miles of desert and open seas in rickety vehicles and dangerously overcrowded boats while exposed to the harsh elements, people smugglers, kidnapping, death, and numerous other forms of danger just to make it to places of perceived economic viability are becoming commonplace. Those who make it in most cases are then held in unsanitary makeshift camps or prison-like detention centers, awaiting processing, which may take months or end in eventual deportation, especially when asylum status is denied. This and other such stories are circulated with such regularity that it becomes impossible for any region of the world to feign ignorance of the magnitude of the global refugee and displacement crisis. This crisis affects (directly or indirectly) every region of the globe, though Africa (the Central African Republic, South Sudan, Libya, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Somalia, Burundi, and Nigeria) and the Middle East (Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen) have been the recent theater

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of events. This massive flight of people across continents, the huge number of displaced populations, and the issues associated with its economic and sociopolitical implications—both real and imaginary—for host communities, including their care, maintenance, or safe return, feature in national and international agendas.1 Complicating matters is the relative ease with which conflicts crop up around the world, feeding an already overbloated and unresolved situation. Therefore, there is no gainsaying the need to develop lasting mechanisms, institutional bodies, and effective policies to address this persistent challenge. In concluding our book, based on our reflections on some of the main points in the preceding chapters and a review of the solutions already on the table, we offer our own closing statement. The refugee crisis continues today. The UNHCR Global Appeal 2020–2021: Regional Summaries / West and Central Africa estimates that there are about 5 million refugees in the subregion, with another 3.7 million being internally displaced persons.2 This closing chapter focuses on our own specific suggestions for finally resolving Africa’s refugee conundrum, from protracted refugee situations to refugee economies, access to human rights and social services, employment, security, access to durable solutions, funding for refugee programs, and attention to vulnerable populations.

Se v en A dditiona l Sugge stions As discussed previously, the various agencies responsible for finding refugee solutions at the global and regional levels have done quite a lot to alleviate refugee suffering, but not enough to institute permanent solutions capable of stemming the increasing numbers of refugees in Africa. The international refugee regime is overwhelmed by the unprecedented refugee crises and is yet poorly equipped to address either the causes or the consequences of the problem. The instruments over the years have been improved on through either readjustments or the introduction of new regimes, but issues of adherence, coverage, logistics, and funding still undermine these efforts. This is especially true in the challenges facing the UNHCR, the continent’s biggest player in refugee management, particularly those of funding and logistical demands. In the preceding chapter, we have focused on the role of states as major players in proving refugees and their own citizens with rights, full citizenship, and development in order to tackle African problems holistically. As we close this book, we offer seven additional suggestions for addressing these challenges. 1. Loescher, Beyond Charity, vi. 2. UNHCR, UNHCR Global Appeal,” 69.

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Penalties for Human Rights Abuses and War Crimes

The best strategy toward bringing an end to refugee crises in Africa remains focusing on the root causes and not just treating symptoms. Defending the rule of law, equality before the law, individual and group liberties, and other inalienable human rights is one sure way of ensuring a conflict-free Africa. And a conflict-free Africa is a refugee-free Africa. In this case, international organizations and agencies as well as their regional counterparts have to step up their intervention efforts, invoking the emergent norm of a “responsibility to protect”—in the interest of conflict-affected people, not that of powerful states. The existing legal framework adopted by organizations such as the United Nations, the UNHCR, and the AU needs to be updated to reflect current realities. Since the preexisting deterrent measures seem to be lax enough for conflict to emerge as the most common recourse to settling disputes in Africa, it is obvious that more needs to be put in place to make conflict bad business for all. For one, there should be internationally binding laws and procedures that check the conduct of multinational corporations in their host communities and prescribe strict penalties for erring parties. These business enterprises have often been implicated in conflicts, driven by interests in the continent’s vast natural economic resources and by the continued neocolonial strivings of the European overlords of most African states. Second, there should be a global consensus on countries with records of human rights abuses (including failure to deal with gender-based violence) being subjected to strategic socioeconomic sanctions (trade embargoes, higher tariffs, and the like). And any country found in breach should be compelled to pay heavy fines and reparations as a deterrent measure to all parties involved. This strategy has been effective in other places for weakening brutal dictatorships, to take the example of the global movement to boycott South African products during the apartheid years, which put tremendous international political and economic pressure on that government and contributed to its demise. Third, individuals (authority figures or otherwise) covertly or overtly involved in the abuse of human rights should be tried and punished severely and swiftly without fear or favor. For this measure to enjoy the support of African peoples and leaders, individuals and political leaders similarly complicit in human rights abuses in other parts of the world must also be seen to be under the same procedures of investigation and, ultimately, punishment. This has been a major setback to these efforts, emphasizing the need to restructure global political power more equitably. Lastly, the perpetration of crimes leading to the mass loss of human lives should be made a universal disqualifier for gaining asylum status. While

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this principle already exists, some states continue to violate it by receiving and protecting such perpetrators, thereby enabling the continuation of war crimes and crimes against humanity. There must be sanctions from the international community when states are found to be in violation of this principle. Stronger International and Regional Cooperation (Burden and Responsibility Sharing)

The nature of refugee management is such that it cannot be said to be the responsibility of just the country of their origin or the countries of asylum. Conventionally, refugees are defined as wards of the international system that takes on the responsibility for their protection when their own states fail them. Refugees move, and when they do, it amounts to a transfer of responsibilities and other challenges that come with their presence, from one country, region, and continent to another. The very nature of the phenomenon demands the cooperation of all vested parties pooling resources and making concessions if any lasting solution is to be found. And in a time when asylum and resettlement countries feel that the socioeconomic and political costs of dealing with refugee issues have become too high, traditional hospitality has been replaced with intolerance and restrictive policies, a situation that has not helped refugees’ plight. Unfortunately, as women remain disproportionately left behind in protracted refugee situations, these challenges affect them the most, and solutions must also recognize the gender sensitivity of the situation. Therefore, the need for renewed efforts among states toward working together to share this responsibility cannot be overemphasized. Internationally, the wealthy industrialized countries must show better commitment in their financial contributions to international refugee aid, especially for developing countries. They cannot afford to continue to wait until said refugees are at their borders. The refugee issue cannot continually be handled merely as a humanitarian, charitable affair. Though they evoke humanitarian concerns, refugee origins are mainly political, and even the agencies involved in managing the crisis depend on wider political and diplomatic decisions taken by states, regional and subregional organizations, and international organizations to manage conflicts and reintegrate refugees and other displaced persons.3 The prevalent practice of “earmarking” donor funds—that is, stipulating and limiting the use of funds donated for specific groups or emergencies— also has to be jettisoned. Donors are encouraged to contribute to a pool of

3. Loescher, Beyond Charity, 12.

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funds that would be judiciously administered by the responsible UN agencies to reach the worst and most urgent humanitarian crises, many of which are often in Africa but are perpetually neglected by donor interest. Regionally, governments need to develop a humanitarian consensus and show willingness to work jointly with others toward finding permanent solutions to the refugee crisis. Regional bodies such as the AU need to step up in rallying support for the refugee cause. The existing legal framework for refugee protection should be updated to include current realities and ensure, through an implementation of strict penalties, that member states adhere to its guidelines on refugee protection and accommodation. They should make more effort to sensitize their citizens to the importance of accommodating refugees as a matter of common humanity and brotherhood. While it may be practically difficult to extricate politics from asylum, it is necessary to still recommend that the politicization of asylum needs to be discouraged, particularly when it leads to a debilitation of what should be a humanitarian act on which many lives depend. Ultimately, international cooperation should be aimed at eliminating the proliferation of camps and the existence of the category of “refugee” worldwide. Richer states must go beyond donating money and agree to a system of physically admitting many more refugees for settlement. If more states are involved in taking in refugees for permanent resettlement, the relative burden of each will be greatly reduced or even become nonexistent. Greater Investment in Education

The future success of Africa lies to a large extent in its ability to hone the talents and skills of its ever-growing youth population. This, combined with the rise of automation and other technological advancements, emphasizes the need for updated skill sets. Therefore, even the existing educational systems need to be updated for Africa to keep up with the advances in a constantly evolving digital age and thereby prepare its youth for the future. Education is critical for development and helps lay the foundations for social well-being, economic growth and security, gender equality, and peace. An uneducated population is an unaware, uninformed, and gullible population. It can easily be converted to cannon fodder for mischief makers and, in an increasingly technological world, is more a liability than an asset. That Africa has the highest number of out-of-school children is hardly a coincidence. A region with such history of conflict can argue that it has not had enough peacetime to either have kids in school or recover enough to develop infrastructure that can support a viable education system. It is also with little surprise that said region seems to come last when comparing global indices for development.

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With titles such as “highest poverty rate” and “highest percentage of refugees and internally displaced people,” the region is obviously struggling under the weight of an absence of vibrant ideas that can set it free from its legacies and set it on a path to political and socioeconomic success. Any attempt at a permanent solution to the refugee question in Africa must be approached from the angle of the causes of forced displacement. Otherwise, actions taken would always be in reaction to events and would have to be sustained until such a time as conflict exits human society. If one-third of children between the ages of twelve and fourteen are out of school, and 60 percent of those between the ages of fifteen and seventeen are not in school,4 then these youth will become ready tools of conflict who think they do not have anything to lose. Therefore, having these young people properly engaged in one educational activity or another (practical knowledge or vocational training for adults and basic reading and writing skills for the children), both in refugee settlements and camps and elsewhere, would help with refugee self-sufficiency. Girls’ education should be seen as a priority in refugee education schemes, as this has tremendous potential to mitigate other particular gender-influenced harms that girls and women face, including gender-based violence, sexual exploitation and abuse, early or forced marriage, and so on. Additionally, the improvement of education as a solution to the refugee crisis must interlink access to education with quality of education provided. Quality without access would result in exclusion and inequality, while access without quality would limit potential, which defeats the effort. Self-Sufficiency for All Refugees

Once refugee status is determined and protection needs are being addressed, refugees may need support in finding solutions that would enable them to be progressively less aid-dependent pending the realization of longer-term solutions. It is impractical to have a population sitting idly in camps while funds are raised for their sustenance on an indefinite basis—that is, expending efforts on protracted relief operations at the expense of permanent solutions. Traditional durable solutions—resettlement, local integration, and repatriation—are becoming increasingly difficult to achieve due to the international community’s preoccupation with extended relief practices, which make up most of the resources made available to refugees. Other factors such as the population explosion of the twenty-first century and the attendant economic 4. UNESCO, “Education in Africa.”

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difficulties; poverty and instability in first-asylum countries, which encourage xenophobic attacks; and the unwillingness of refugees to return to home countries with unstable socioeconomic and political conditions have contributed to the complexity of finding truly durable refugee solutions. While millions of Africa’s uprooted people live in organized settlements and camps, large numbers, also in millions, are outside UNHCR or government camps and settlements and have settled among local populations, including in urban areas, where they try to find employment and share education, health, and other social services meant for nationals. Taking this into consideration, aid programs should be designed primarily to assist host countries or origin countries with the burden. If aid is to reach all refugees, whether in camps or outside camps, assistance must be directed at host communities, origin countries receiving returnees, and refugees themselves. And this should be accompanied by a shift in emphasis of assistance away from short-term emergency relief toward long-term development assistance. These issues were recently taken up and embedded in the Global Compact for Refugees of 2018. While the intention to increase these kinds of support to host and origin countries has been agreed on, it remains to be seen how well this will be implemented by states and other members of the international community. Refugees, having survived major upheavals, are often quite driven and very receptive to development initiatives that would improve their lot. They also arrive in their new locations with skills, work experience, and personal resourcefulness that if properly harnessed can have a huge impact on economic growth. They constitute a ready supply of labor requiring proper channeling and strategic investment to develop a system that is beneficial both to them and to their host communities. Therefore, one way to ensure that refugees become selfreliant, is for host countries to be compensated for their sacrifices while attempts are also made to have them donate, with some compensation, idle farmlands where available, for refugee use. Such lands when secured can be cultivated and the produce sold at special fairs or markets by the refugees, as we discuss further below. Through education and training initiatives, especially at camps, refugees can also engage in creative employment such as sewing, artwork production, carpentry, and other services delivered at said special markets. In the same vein, access to quality preprofessional, professional, and skills training is vital for advancing refugees’ prospects for self-sufficiency. Not all refugees are farmers or originally from rural areas in their home countries, and even when they are, they may exercise the right to seek economic advancement in other ways. Beyond the education of children and refugee youth, all refugees should have access to the acquisition of technical and professional skills, in

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fields as varied as masonry, fashion design, information technology, finance, and law. These programs should be delivered in a gender-equitable manner and grant equal access for women and men to the sources of livelihood, as well as equip women and girls to meet the requirements to succeed. They must be tailored to preparing refugees to contribute meaningfully to their host environment or to their return or resettlement communities. As global trends rapidly advance, African refugees need not be tethered perpetually to a regressive notion of the kinds of education and skills that they should have access to in the twenty-first century. Gil Loescher suggests another way for refugees to become self-reliant.5 He believes that international assistance must provide resources in a way that enables refugees and locals alike to participate and contribute to national economic output. To accomplish this, he posits that directing development funds to local communities to improve their infrastructure and their employment possibilities, in order to meet the new demands created by refugee influx, presents refugees in a better light, as assets rather than liabilities. Furthermore, deploying local organizations that have a better understanding of local needs and opportunities would be more productive and cost effective. However, he concedes that this “developmental perspective” might not work in all scenarios, as political, social, and security factors often dominate in forming national attitudes in some regions. Refugee self-reliance ultimately depends on three factors: first, it involves facilitating better perception and reception; second, providing the necessary training required to handle a vocation; and third, making available the resources required to practice their vocation and an outlet for service or sale, distribution, and compensation. A better perception of refugees can influence integration. Where there are no cultural similarities to facilitate this process, the developmental strategy comes in handy. Fast-Tracking the Industrial Development of the Agricultural Sector

The agricultural sector of sub-Saharan Africa, the region with the highest concentration of refugees in the world, is the least mechanized in the world. Conventional economic development models maintain that agriculture remains the starting point for wider economic development and poverty reduction, particularly in countries where the majority of the population work in that sector. It is estimated that tractors are used on only 10 percent of land currently cultivated in sub-Saharan Africa, compared to 35 percent in South Asia, 5. Ibid.

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50 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean, and 60 percent in the Middle East and North Africa. The slow adoption of agricultural machinery in subSaharan Africa is one of the reasons for its slow pace toward achieving food security while leaving it with the highest prevalence of undernourished people worldwide. Agricultural mechanization is a strong tool for development and is especially useful in creating the surplus that would support areas suffering from the effects of climate change, such as droughts and famine, and discourage migration and internal displacement on that account. The opportunities in the agricultural sector are limitless. Even in exile, agriculture could form part of broader strategies for improving refugee livelihoods and managing large refugee populations. While not all refugees come from agrarian backgrounds, and other strategies could be designed for refugee professionals in other fields, the fact remains that a large part of the continent continues to depend on agriculture for subsistence. Considering also that African women have always contributed to agricultural production and output, up to 80 percent in some African societies, the possibilities of engaging the millions of refugee women alongside men in modern agricultural programs cannot be overemphasized. When mechanization programs are accompanied by training and extension services, it improves employment prospects. As a solution, it would go a long way in easing tensions in host countries if refugee populations were gainfully engaged in such productive activities. Instead of having such large populations sit idle and fed, the UNHCR in cooperation with the host governments can make some land available, invest in agricultural machinery, and have them grow crops. The proceeds from such ventures would help refugees be self-sufficient, keep them gainfully employed, and help change the perception that they are an economic burden. States need to overcome their hesitation to provide such impactful solutions as these due to their fear that such programs would be abused; rather, integral systems should be designed to eliminate the minimal possibility of such an occurrence. The West and African Economic Progress

Whereas certain Western decision makers assume the asylum problem can be successfully solved through stricter eligibility requirements or stronger immigration control, this would only result in massive numbers of refugees stranded at their borders seeking an alternative way in. Rather, the focus should be on preventive policies, which should be geared toward greater protection of refugees outside the West and addressing the underlying causes of refugee movements. Conflicts often begin as differing and competing interests before they assume violent forms. While each region of the world has its needs and challenges,

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some regions have justified achieving their own goals to the detriment of others by deploying principles such as “survival of the fittest” and ideological jargon such as “capitalism” and “fascism” to explain away acts of savagery and brigandage. This behavior has led to lopsided economic prosperity in favor of the so-called developed world, which has developed mechanisms to continuously plunder the wealth of the so-called underdeveloped world, turning it into an arena where less powerful interests must fight to the death for the last scraps. This has left a huge population of young people in the less-developed countries with bleak prospects, jobless and stranded in an economic underclass, which is forcing them to seek better prospects in the glittering, capitalist, rich cities of the “developed” world. And this is where, as interests sometimes do, those of both worlds converge. The real refugee “problem” is that political, economic, and security conditions in the home country are in such bad shape that citizens are compelled to leave. Unequal rates of population and economic growth between countries of the North and South are also creating migrant population pressures that are beyond politically tolerable levels in Europe. In North Africa, the demographic projections put the populations of Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, and Mauritania (the five states of the Maghreb) at a total of 127 million and that of Egypt at 100 million by 2025.6 Coupled with the outcome of the Arab Spring and other migrant populations from the sub-Saharan region, Europe will continue to face onslaught after onslaught and waves upon waves of refugees if no lasting solution is found for developing the right conditions for keeping many more Africans in Africa. It is left for the international community (especially Europe and North America) to decide if it is ready to continue to take responsibility for the blowback from both the financial schemes of its multinational corporations and its own economic foreign policies, which have continued to disturb the socioeconomic and political stability of African countries, turning them into refugee incubation centers and reservations. As it stands, the continent loses more money to the West each year than it receives in aid, investments, and remittances. Globalization, economic trade, and information systems are set up to shortchange African countries—from unfair intellectual property laws to trade deals that force African countries to open up their markets to the surplus production of the rich West, destroying local agriculture and manufacturing in the process. These are part of the reasons why the world has refugees and why there exists a refugee crisis in Africa today. The West must do some soul searching. 6. Ibid., 166.

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Recentering Pan-African Ideals

On the African front, there has been an awareness of the need for Africa to shake off neocolonial and postcolonial ties, as demonstrated by the chief sentiments that gave life to the Pan-African ideals and principles, an Africa harmonized and working for its own best interests. But, as history has shown, the collective African spirit has been lulled by a profit-driven system that glorifies individualistic pursuit of wealth and material success. This system has had the dual effects of derailing pre- and post-1960s pro-Africa movements and redirecting the focus and ambitions of the African youth elsewhere, while Western interests continue to pillage and plunder the continent’s vast resources. Indeed, the culpability of African leadership in its current developmental woes has been addressed in the preceding chapter on citizenship and development in Africa. The prevailing sentiment among many African youth today is that getting money is all that matters, and Africa’s fortunes can never be recovered from the abyss, which actually is mostly the outcome of international financial treachery. For these youth, the focus now is on the wealthy glittering capitals of the West, where seemingly limitless opportunities await those brave enough to seek and grab them. Thus, Western propaganda in Africa has been bought and swallowed, hook, line, and sinker—but Africa must divest of it. Unfortunately, African youth burdened by issues ranging from illiteracy to daily survival struggles are little concerned with such lofty ideals as “Make Africa Great Again.” Appreciating that Africa’s youth hold the key to its complete liberation is the first step in achieving said goal. Africa’s young people must be equipped through education, a comprehensive knowledge of their own history that puts the world as well as their place in it in perspective, and be fitted with other scientific and technological knowledge that they require to bring ideas to reality. Proper reorientation and education are required to purge the African youth of the ingrained ideals of Western capitalism of placing self above all else, because the task of rebuilding Africa is a collective one. Therefore, reinvigorating Pan-African sentiments by introducing them from the lowest levels of education is one solution. Other solutions would rest on developing continental pride. Here, continental organizations such as the AU can contribute by promoting the establishment and respect for regional trade arrangements, complementary African foreign economic policies, and the unsuitability of war as a means of resolving disagreements. The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), which came into effect in January 2021, is a major step toward achieving the economic dreams of a Pan-African future. With political stability and economic prosperity, the divisive influences can be muted and a united front formed. This would

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inspire the question of the existence of an African identity, one that is devoid of external definitions and is a product of self-awareness. With these in place, even the cold hearts of African collaborators with Western exploiters might thaw enough for pure African sentiments to take root. The greatest impact of the Pan-African ideal would be if African Union efforts moved beyond the current stage of near-stagnation toward the realization of the dreams of the founding fathers and mothers for a single political union. The creation of the African Continental Free Trade Area must be fully and uniformly implemented across the continent and quickly evolve into a proper economic and political union, one in which Africa becomes a continent without internal borders and with freedom of movement for all its peoples. Once this is achieved, African refugees will cease to exist in Africa.

Th e Fu t u r e of A fr ica w ithou t R efuge e s What would a future without refugees in Africa look like? Projecting the future of the African continent in the absence of widespread dispersal of refugees in and outside of the continent would mean picturing a chain of events that remove superpowers’ interjection in the African system. For a start, the indiscriminate Western demarcation and formation of territories is considered one of the predominant reasons for internal conflict, leading to violence and the displacement of people that followed it. In a way, the escalation of war can be stemmed if not entirely subsided if this is reversed. By talking of reversal, we are not suggesting that Europeans should reembark on their colonial journey in Africa to restart the process of nation-state making in a way that would respect geographical and cultural configurations in the structuring of society. Rather, we are proposing that African countries engage in dialogue. Engaging in dialogue has the potential to create an avenue where aggrieved parties would consciously renegotiate their union or the spatial arrangements bequeathed by the colonialists. This would perhaps necessitate that they strike a common ground where mutual understanding would prevail over suspicion. It is important because this would provide the necessary avenue to rebuild the damaged images of the past that have deepened the outrageous relationship between and among different groups. This dialogue should be multilevel and engage regional and subregional organizations such as the African Union, the Southern African Development Community, the Economic Community of West African States, and so on, as well as other stakeholders such as nongovernmental organizations, civil society organizations, African business enterprises, and others.

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One of the reasons for the degeneration of peace is the separatist movements that characterize many African countries. From Cameroon to Ethiopia, Libya, Nigeria, and various other African countries, the agitation for self-rule persists. People get entirely destabilized when they are affected by wars of secession, and the fact that they must seek refuge whenever these wars surface is evidence that they have been overwhelmed by such emergencies. In a geographical environment where people are not susceptible to intimidation because of the fear of external invasion over issues that concern land and resources, people will direct their energy toward the production of the materials needed for collective advancement. The opposite is the case when they are continuously ravaged by the tensions and intimidation that come from strictures and conflicts. When wars are reduced, the numbers of refugees to be produced will be progressively minimal. It is therefore logical to accept that the end of wars would lead to the reduction of refugees in Africa, and this in turn would lead to the promotion of peace in the community. Without negating the understanding that wars are the product of internal conflicts that generate hostility as well as external interference, the cancellation of these practices would lead to the production of peace in its infinite capacity. Political corruption entrenched in the poor distribution of resources and power stifles development and serves as a recipe for violence and instability. The lopsided policies that create further economic distance between the elites and the masses constitute another reason for the escalation of struggles and conflicts capable of displacing people when these events become unmanageable. Despite the relative economic success recorded in Africa during the 1970s and 1980s, there were inadequate transformative ideas in place to push the continent to greater heights. While other countries of the world were seriously committed to developmental projects and increasing their Human Development Index, African countries were lavishing their income on frivolities, particularly their political elites, sinking their future into the abyss of penury. The opportunity for Africa to stand tall alongside other continents dissolved at the end of the twentieth century and therefore forced countries of the continent to seek financial rescue from international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The resort to the neoliberal economic policies of the Bretton Woods institutions tremendously weakened the economic system of these states and placed it on a dangerously low level compared to the other countries of the world. These debts became Africa’s Achilles heels, as it became a perpetually debt-servicing continent instead of adding value to itself and growing developmentally.

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The inequality created from the lack of proper management of wealth has been the genesis of internal unrest among the people. The masses got entirely separated from the elites who had access to their commonwealth. This created a lopsided social arrangement where the powerful became exceedingly powerful and the less powerful became dispensable. This imbalance deepened the outrageous relationship that was in existence and forced the middle class to scavenge for the little they could grab from the political elites, leaving the poor masses at the extreme end of the social ladder. It was not long before those affected by this arrangement became reactive to every single event. Their reactions are demonstrated in their availability to be used as agents of destabilization in political engagement, criminal activities, and peace-disrupting events in their environment. Therefore, in situations where people engage in any violence, they usually become the immediate victims of such struggles and strife, as they are not buoyant and economically vibrant enough to navigate the conflict arena. As such, they become displaced when the effect of such altercations cannot be contained. These conditions pave the way for the escalation of conflicts, and conflicts make displacement inevitable. When these root causes of violence and disruption are prevented, the production of refugees in Africa will decline. All these reasons are a chain of interactive excuses for destabilization. When there is political corruption, it creates an imbalanced society, and the effects of this are in turn reflected in the desperation of the masses to make a living and their resolution to get this using whatever means available. When situations spiral out of control, people are forced to flee in their search for safety and security. To create an African future free of refugees, the political class of the continent must understand how their policies contribute to the production of refugees. Their inability to concentrate on projects that create economic growth and development has been the root cause of the yawning gap that exists between the elites and the poor. By assuming that the dependence of the masses on the elites would create a generation that would appreciate working hard, the political class is institutionalizing a morally reprehensible orientation that allows inequity to thrive. It is time to reverse these trends if a future without refugees is to be contemplated. An African future without refugees will encourage the free movement of Africans between the countries of the continent. The fact that Africans still suspect one another from one country to another remains the basis for their fractured relationships, making it difficult to trust others. When this becomes settled, there should be additional policies to grant free movements within the continent, possibly through reconfiguring borders and territorial agreements between governments. In such a way, there would be the development

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of strategic alliances among countries that would enable them to aid countries that are lagging in development. A future where peace would prevail demands a synergy of countries to view the future using a similar lens. Even in situations where natural disasters are the causes behind the people’s displacement, it is usually because of governments’ lack of proactiveness and projections into the future that enhance the possibility of displacement. Climate change, for example, is a product of various chains of events such as the lack of policies to curb the emissions of carbon into the atmosphere as well as social intransigence coming from the masses. While actions leading to these problems can be contained from the beginning, the inability to do it leads to unbearable consequences, making people susceptible to displacement. Responsible African governments will also have the influence to pressure the countries of the Global North at multilateral and bilateral forums to take more decisive action to curb their dangerous carbon emissions and mitigate the climate impact consequences for poorer African countries. The gateway to an African future without refugees requires ensuring that the citizens are keenly engaged in developmental activities that would enable their deserved economic growth and promote the continent in every sphere. The recent trend in Africa’s engagement of external countries to build their infrastructure is a very reliable way to disrobe the African citizens of their human dignity. Apart from adding to their problems of economic decapitation, it is also preventing them from showcasing their potential. This creates civil disappointment and could have devastating consequences for the ways in which citizens perceive their countries. It shreds their patriotism because they disinvest their trust and support for the collective growth of the country. Without finding means to address situations such as this, people are bound to take migration as their alternative way to finding economic independence. A number of African youths who engage in criminal activity or questionable behavior are those whose talents are not appreciated. When the remedial situations outlined above are enhanced, it gives room for full and productive citizenship. People would be interested in adding value to their societies through the provision of their manpower to solving problems of insecurity, social decadence, and political challenges that serve as hindrances to development. Forcibly displaced people do not migrate for the fun of it. They usually leave their home because they want relative peace, economic stability, and social security. It is vital that African governments provide environments that will enhance their financial freedom and provide the basic amenities that will answer their demands. Achieving peace in the continent is possible and sustainable when the factors that brought about the dislocation of peace and tranquility are eliminated and the continent restored. Continental Africa and its

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islands would therefore be structured on communal principles where attention focused on the development of their countries and citizens would correspond to that found in other places. And thus, Africa’s journey to greatness would be fasttracked, because refugee politics would have been defeated. A future without refugees would be most promising.

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INDEX

abduction, 16, 263, 335 Achebe, Chinua, 313, 562 Adams, Walter, 32, 330, 533, 534 Adelugba, Dapo, 442, 443, 498, 534, 572 Adepoju, Aderanti, 13, 54, 132, 158, 172, 183, 219, 253, 260, 261, 264, 534 Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi, 55, 313, 535 AfCFTA (African Continental Free Trade Area), 527 African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, 83, 99, 102, 330 African Hope School, 367 African National Congress, 216 African Union, xxxviii, 13, 56, 83, 95, 96, 99, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 113, 116, 117, 120, 179, 224, 241, 330, 353, 430, 441, 444, 462, 515, 516, 528, 533, 535, 537, 545, 551, 557, 560, 563, 564, 568, 576, 580 Afghanistan, xxiii, 47, 56, 415, 431, 517 Agblorti, Samuel K. M., 420, 457, 535 AGDM (Age, Gender and Diversity Mainstreaming Strategy), 329 Akinyemi, Bolaji, 513, 515, 536 Aksum, 133 Algerian refugees, 13, 173, 174, 284 Algerian War of Independence, 170, 173 Al-Shabaab terrorists, 9, 222 Angola, 8, 13, 64, 72, 93, 171, 172, 177, 178, 180, 189, 192, 193, 200, 203, 204, 207, 230, 231,

260, 267, 281, 313, 329, 456, 470, 484, 538, 545, 551, 554, 560, 570, 573 Annan, Kofi, 104, 443 anticolonial struggles, 13, 169, 172, 177, 180 apartheid, 8, 73, 112, 120, 132, 171, 216, 227, 258, 292, 296, 470, 519 Arab Spring, xxiv, 67, 196, 427, 526 Arendt, Hannah, 33, 316, 537 Asia Minor, 32 ATRCW (African Training and Research Centre for Women), 312, 319, 330, 331, 574 AU (African Union), 56, 96, 100, 101, 105, 118, 119, 330, 352, 404, 405, 519, 521, 527, 535 Australia, 9, 78, 284, 294, 347, 362, 363, 371, 414, 458, 497, 540, 543, 546, 564, 565, 582 Awori, Thelma, 442 Barre, Siad, 7 Beattie, Margaret, 398, 538 Benin, 133, 137, 212, 280, 472, 569 Benue-Plateau, 100 Berlin Conference, xxvi, 144, 146, 152 Bernard, William S., 43, 513, 538, 539 Berry, W. John, 361, 539 Betts, Alexander, 54, 64, 552 Biafra, 153, 171, 186, 226, 313, 549 Boahen, Adu, 511, 536, 579 Boko Haram, xxxvii, 62, 99, 117, 118, 220, 384, 474, 552

583

584

I n de x

Bornu, 133 Botswana, 64, 94, 179, 504, 565 Bourguiba, Habib, 174, 175 Bozeman, Adda B., 444, 498, 540 Bozizé, François, 209 BPEAR (Bureau for the Placement and Education of African Refugees), 96 Brazil, 9, 550 Bretton Woods Institutions, 409, 420 Buduburam refugee camp, 272, 273, 482, 483 Bulgaria, 32 Burkina Faso, 154, 212, 229, 234, 488, 536, 541, 564 Burundi, 7, 8, 10, 56, 59, 61, 62, 68, 74, 94, 117, 121, 154, 192, 216, 253, 261, 296, 329, 381, 409, 422, 444, 478, 517, 569

CIA, 153, 191, 543 Clinton administration, 420 Cold War, xxx, 34, 35, 37, 83, 86, 99, 143, 172, 173, 189, 191, 192, 207, 316, 323, 404, 409, 419, 420, 426, 447, 454, 548, 557, 579 Collier, Paul, 183, 208, 538, 543 colonialism, xxx, 11, 131, 133, 136, 139, 150, 152, 154, 156, 161, 162, 165, 166, 168, 170, 172, 173, 175, 181, 188, 189, 214, 217, 226, 318, 471, 511, 550 Côte d’Ivoire, xxxix creative arts, 379, 386, 387, 388, 389, 391, 398, 399 criminalization, 291, 295, 296 Crisp, Jeff, 54, 56, 246, 301, 562 Crowder, Michael, 441

Cabral, Amílcar, 133, 176, 535, 546 Caetano, Marcello, 175, 176 Cambodia, 385, 549 Cameroon, xxxix, 62, 74, 95, 117, 154, 210, 219, 260, 329, 431, 443, 450, 469, 474, 475, 529, 576, 579 Canada, 9, 10, 30, 76, 328, 359, 373, 414, 458, 485, 487, 538, 548, 568, 570 capitalism, 92, 141, 502, 526, 527 CAR government, 210 Carlin, James L., 9, 10, 350, 541 Cartagena Declaration (of 1984), 6, 84, 97, 107, 112, 550, 576 Carthage, 133 CCAR (Coordinating Committee on Assistance to Refugees), 96 Central African Republic, 10, 15, 46, 59, 61, 82, 154, 183, 184, 193, 208, 210, 212, 251, 252, 259, 280, 329, 431, 472, 480, 517, 548, 552, 553, 558, 578 Chad, xxxix, 17, 62, 74, 100, 108, 117, 171, 183, 184, 210, 219, 227, 259, 260, 339, 430, 439, 450, 462, 473, 536, 578 Chambers, Robert, 247 Chatty, Dawn, 31, 33, 542 Chimni, Bhupinder S., 31, 32, 33, 35, 38, 41, 55, 431, 542 Chirac, Jacques, 213 Christianity, 146, 147, 148, 149, 185, 543 Christians, 146, 149, 458

Dadaab, 9, 61, 273, 370, 576 DAR programme (Development Assistance for Refugees), 412, 414, 416, 424, 445, 453, 554, 575 Darfur war, 185 David Lynch Foundation, 76, 544 DDR (Demobilization and Reintegration), 104 de Waal, Alex, 182 Deng, Francis, 101, 224 desertification, 99, 100, 227, 228, 229, 230, 231, 233, 235, 240, 296, 478, 488 Diamond, Larry, 498, 513 diaspora, 36, 40, 69, 239, 314, 345, 391, 438 Dieudonné Kolingba, General André, 209 Djibouti, 23, 61, 69, 297, 304, 305, 430, 447, 448, 462, 467, 468, 471, 473, 480 Djotodia, Michel, 209 DLI (Development through Local Integration), 412, 414, 457 DRC (Democratic Republic of the Congo), 7, 8, 10, 15, 22, 59, 60, 62, 68, 72, 82, 102, 122, 153, 178, 184, 189, 190, 192, 193, 198, 206, 207, 208, 210, 220, 221, 225, 238, 254, 259, 260, 261, 421, 422 DTA (Declaration on Territorial Asylum), 113, 114 DTM (The Displacement Tracking Matrix), 220, 221, 222, 223

I n de x East, Jean F., 264, 338, 364, 550 ECOWAS (Economic Community of West African States), 56, 70, 195, 404, 405, 556 Egypt, 67, 68, 74, 85, 184, 197, 366, 367, 499, 526, 546 El Salvador, 320 Emecheta, Buchi, 313 Eritrea, xxxix, 7, 13, 69, 74, 137, 138, 171, 183, 263, 281, 415, 555 Eritrean refugees, 305 Ethiopia, xxiv, xxxix, 7, 15, 23, 46, 60, 69, 74, 82, 83, 105, 137, 138, 142, 143, 171, 183, 184, 188, 204, 225, 232, 237, 239, 260, 271, 287, 302, 329, 375, 430, 439, 462, 467, 468, 471, 472, 473, 529, 541, 550, 563 EU (European Union), 56, 119, 339, 428, 459 Eyadema, Etienne Gnassingbe, 212 Falola, iii, xxxv, xl, xli, 81, 133, 135, 136, 137, 440, 444, 449, 497, 499, 505, 514, 533, 540, 547, 552, 555, 599, 563, 570, 581, 583 Farah, Nuruddin, 313 First Congo War, 207 First Sudanese Civil War, 182, 183 Forbes Martin, Susan, 54, 325 Forced Migration, 12, 30, 33, 38, 39, 54, 63, 66, 135, 246, 257, 260, 272, 314, 327, 539, 540, 542, 543, 544, 546, 547, 548, 551, 556, 560, 563, 567, 568, 571 France, 78, 85, 164, 173, 174, 175, 192, 208, 209, 211, 212, 213, 214, 537, 538, 556, 570 FRELIMO (Mozambique Liberation Front), 179, 180 Fulani, 12, 152, 229, 232, 233, 473, 488 Gabon, 504 Garang, John, 183 gender, xxvii, xxxviii, 8, 15, 16, 26, 45, 55, 73, 77, 118, 180, 188, 251, 263, 264, 265, 307, 308, 311, 312, 314, 315, 316, 317, 318, 319, 320, 323, 324, 326, 327, 328, 329, 330, 332, 334, 342, 346, 347, 350, 363, 365, 374, 382, 411, 431, 432, 446, 461, 466, 476, 519, 520, 521, 522, 524, 577 Ghaddafi, Mu'ammar, 196, 197 Ghana, xxxv, xxxvii, xxxix, 71, 74, 95, 133, 144, 157, 160, 162, 167, 169, 237, 239, 272, 273,

585

305, 307, 313, 326, 419, 420, 456, 457, 472, 481, 482, 483, 494, 506, 533, 534, 535, 540, 561 Global Compact for Refugees, xxxii, 459, 523 Global North, xxv, 39, 51, 54, 67, 79, 83, 139, 197, 199, 284, 426, 428, 431, 432, 458, 462, 498, 531 Global South, 38, 39, 51, 52, 53, 55, 197, 316, 317, 318, 327, 407, 413, 426, 431, 432, 458, 462 global village, 26, 517 Good, Jennifer, 385 Gorman, Robert, 54 Grahl-Madsen, Atle, 34, 549 Grandi, Filippo, 4 Grassineau, Dominique, 78, 549 Greece, 32, 68, 342, 365 Grossman, Kurt R., 33, 570 Guatemala, 320 Guinea-Bissau, 13, 171, 172, 175, 176, 177, 280, 545, 551, 557, 564 Gumede, Vusi, 509, 510, 515, 549 Guterres, Antonio, 4, 82, 107, 301, 405, 550 Haffejee, Badiah, 264, 338, 364 Hammond, Laura, 54 Harrell-Bond, Barbara, 30, 53, 54 Harris, John, 438, 510 Hathaway, James, 36, 38, 63, 550 HIV, 337 Horn of Africa, 13, 14, 23, 66, 70, 83, 122, 218, 225, 305, 558 Huillery, Elise, 213, 551 Human displacement, 3 Human Rights Watch report, 299, 300, 368 Hutu, 8, 60, 62, 152, 154, 207, 381, 390, 397, 557 IASC (UN Inter-Agency Standing Committee), 392 IDP Protection, 117 IDPs (internally displaced persons), xxx, 60, 65, 82, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 108, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 125, 126, 175, 185, 204, 208, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225, 231, 237, 239, 241, 283, 292, 296, 355, 356, 357, 407, 420, 431, 445, 446, 450, 451, 501, 516, 533, 548 Ikwuyatum, Godwin, 139, 157, 552 Ile-Ife, 417, 418

586

I n de x

IMF (International Monetary Fund), 199, 200, 201, 561 India, 37, 39, 316, 342, 365, 550 Indian-Pakistani war, 9 Inkatha, 216 International Monetary Fund, 9, 10, 199, 529, 553 IOM (International Organization for Migration), 56, 68, 70, 553, 564 Iraq, 50, 56, 85, 367, 431, 504, 517 Islam, 48, 146, 147, 148, 196, 363, 364 Islamic law, 78 Issa, 467, 468, 471 Italy, xxiv, 68, 71, 76, 85, 192 Jacobsen, Karen, 123, 246, 248, 251, 262, 266, 267, 268, 269, 272, 273, 539, 543, 554, 562 Jászi, Oscar, 42, 554 Kabila, Laurent Desire, 207, 422 Kagan, Michael, 285 Kaiser, Tania, 105, 416, 417, 423, 555 Kakuma, 9, 273, 554 Kalisa, Chantal, 384, 385, 388, 389, 391, 396, 397, 555 Kampala Convention, xxx, 83, 99, 101, 102, 103, 106, 116, 118, 119, 125, 126, 224, 225, 283, 330, 535, 545, 548, 553, 558 Kampala Declaration on Refugees, 83, 535 Kenya, 9, 23, 54, 60, 61, 62, 64, 68, 69, 74, 121, 140, 148, 152, 158, 167, 171, 184, 204, 205, 206, 219, 237, 239, 286, 300, 302, 305, 312, 370, 430, 439, 499, 511, 541, 554, 561, 562, 569, 573, 575, 576 Khmer Rouge rule, 385 Kibreab, Gaim, 54, 246, 275, 555 King Jaja of Opobo, 144, 150, 162 king of Dahomey, 144 King of Opobo, 144 Kongo, 133, 178 Kush, 133 Kuti, Fela Anikulapo, 503 Lake Chad region, 100 Lake Victoria, 511 Lesotho, 68, 204, 267, 280 LGBTQ+, xiv, xxix, 52, 58, 73, 74, 75, 80, 308

Liberia, 7, 58, 71, 74, 135, 171, 189, 193, 194, 195, 198, 200, 227, 329, 344, 456, 481, 482, 548, 559, 560, 566, 578, 581 Libya, xxiv, xxxvii, 59, 67, 68, 71, 72, 74, 182, 196, 197, 200, 225, 302, 329, 342, 365, 427, 431, 439, 444, 449, 450, 472, 473, 488, 504, 509, 517, 526, 529, 535, 556, 578, 579 Loescher, Gil, 21, 22, 23, 24, 34, 173, 174, 316, 461, 518, 520, 524, 544, 546, 547, 548, 552, 557, 571 Lunda, 133 Lutheran World Federation, 477 Madagascar, 13, 204, 206 Mafeje, Archie, 503, 557 Makhan, Jha, 506, 507, 557 Malawi, 15, 73, 74, 180, 206, 215, 281, 334, 335, 374, 544, 582 Mali, 68, 133, 154, 165, 212, 227, 229, 233, 237, 259, 311, 443, 477, 488, 564, 579 Malkki, Liisa H., 33, 36, 44, 54, 123, 436, 485, 557 Marfleet, Philip, 31, 33, 542, 558 marginalization, 117, 138, 147, 181, 194, 216, 315, 326, 350, 361, 415, 461, 501, 505, 506, 508 Mauritania, 7, 73, 74, 105, 186, 187, 280, 439, 476, 477, 502, 504, 548 Mazrui, Ali, 189, 557 McCain, Lindsey, 383, 394, 395, 397, 559 Meda, Lawrence, 355, 559 MENA (Middle East and North Africa), 4, 59 mental illness, 344 Mexico, 72, 318 Millennium Development Goals, 411 Milner, James, 54, 245 Mixed migration, 62, 449 Moore, Brett, 254, 560 Morocco, xxiv, xxxix, 13, 68, 74, 171, 173, 174, 186, 187, 284, 526 Mozambique, 7, 8, 13, 15, 68, 93, 156, 171, 172, 179, 180, 198, 215, 267, 313, 347, 348, 349, 544, 545, 548, 551, 554, 560, 570, 580 Mthembu-Salter, Gregory, 190, 421, 560 Mutebutsi, Colonel Jules, 422 Mutongu, Z. B., 266, 541 Myanmar, 47, 50, 567

I n de x Nabuguzi, Emmanuel, 408, 417, 561 Nakivale refugee settlement, 394 Namibia, 7, 22, 74, 171, 260, 281, 330, 456, 470, 484 Nana Olomu, 145 Nansen, Fridtjof, 84, 89 NATO, 196, 197 Nazi Germany, 316, 384 Neocolonial Economy, 210 New York Declaration, 425, 428, 429, 430, 459, 462 New Zealand, 47, 48 Newton, Isaac, 165 Niger, xxii, xxiv, xxxix, 12, 15, 62, 68, 99, 117, 144, 157, 227, 280, 311, 352, 473, 513, 533, 545 Niger Delta region, 144, 513 Nigeria, xxiv, xxxv, xxxvi, xxxvii, xxxviii, xxxix, 7, 10, 15, 17, 18, 61, 62, 70, 71, 73, 74, 93, 95, 99, 100, 117, 118, 133, 137, 147, 152, 153, 154, 156, 157, 160, 163, 167, 169, 171, 185, 186, 200, 203, 218, 219, 220, 226, 227, 229, 232, 237, 239, 259, 281, 305, 313, 326, 356, 357, 384, 417, 419, 438, 441, 442, 443, 444, 449, 450, 456, 468, 469, 472, 473, 474, 481, 484, 488, 495, 499, 500, 504, 508, 512, 513, 514, 515, 517, 529, 533, 534, 535, 536, 537, 544, 545, 547, 552, 553, 558, 561, 562, 563, 564, 566, 569, 571, 576, 579, 580 Nkrumah, Kwame, 494, 558, 561 Nnoli, Okwudiba, 137, 500, 561, 562 Norwegian Refugee Council, 56, 553 Nyanduga, Bahame Tom Mukirya, 97, 533, 562 Nyerere, Julius, 179 OAU (Organisation of African Unity), 6, 21, 41, 42, 53, 81, 82, 83, 84, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 100, 101, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 118, 121, 125, 258, 283, 285, 293, 330, 405, 417, 423, 452, 500, 516, 556, 558, 562, 563, 567, 576 Ogaden War, 467, 468 OHCHR (Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights), 68 Olukotun, Ayo, 503, 563 Onoja, Lawrence, 444

587

Oxford Refugee Studies Centre, 53 Oyo refugees, 418 Oyovbaire, Sam, 444 Pan-African ideology, 257 Pan-Africanism, 256, 257, 418, 455 Peake, Cyrus H., 32, 33, 564 Peisker, Val Colic, 363, 543 Polisario Front, 187 Portugal, 175, 176, 177, 192, 551, 557 Portuguese territories, 112 post–Cold War, 35 postcolonial, 10, 11, 13, 42, 69, 112, 131, 132, 135, 136, 145, 165, 170, 171, 172, 181, 186, 188, 189, 193, 197, 198, 206, 207, 217, 218, 226, 227, 312, 315, 316, 417, 505, 511, 527 Powles, Julia, 58, 565 PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), 75, 76, 80, 346, 361, 368, 374, 538, 556 Qatar, 196 Quran, 357 racism, xxvi, 36, 363, 365, 382 Randell, Janet, 398, 538 rape, 16, 75, 104, 118, 263, 264, 332, 335, 336, 342, 344, 349, 356, 360, 361, 384 Rapley, Mark, 346, 571 Refugee Studies, 16, 28, 29, 30, 31, 33, 34, 35, 37, 38, 39, 41, 44, 45, 47, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 63, 78, 79, 80, 132, 134, 170, 246, 314, 462, 493, 538, 539, 540, 542, 547, 548, 550, 551, 552, 554, 555, 557, 558, 565, 566, 569, 571, 582 Rehn, Elisabeth, 262, 263, 337, 566 RMMS (Regional Mixed Migration Secretariat), 66, 70, 566 Roberts, Chief Justice, 49, 357, 562, 570 Ruanda, 152 Rwamatwara, Egide, 260 Rwanda, xii, xxiii, xxxix, 7, 8, 20, 56, 60, 62, 94, 95, 121, 154, 183, 192, 193, 200, 201, 207, 250, 251, 260, 263, 268, 281, 331, 332, 344, 345, 346, 371, 381, 384, 389, 390, 391, 397, 422, 430, 501, 542, 558, 560, 570, 574 Rwandese refugees, 122, 123, 293

588

I n de x

SADF (the South African Defence Force), 267 SADR (Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic), 186, 187 Sahara, 13, 67, 171, 186, 187, 228, 232, 233, 329, 536, 549, 551, 560 Sahel of Africa, 228, 235 Sahrawi refugees, 187, 459 Said, Edward, 138 Sakakini, 367 Salazar, Antonio de Oliveira, 175, 176 Samaddar, Ranabir, 57 Samba-Panza, Catherine, 209 Sankara, Thomas, 212 Schacher, Yael, 49, 50, 568 Schaffer, H. Loveness, 331, 332, 334, 335, 336, 337, 340, 343, 344, 349, 350, 568 Schmidt, Georg, 149, 569 Seleka, 209, 259 Sembene, Ousmane, 313 Senegal, xxxix, 13, 62, 71, 74, 94, 95, 153, 164, 176, 232, 280, 439, 477 Sennar, 133 sexual exploitation, 16, 263, 264, 328, 329, 333, 415, 522 SGBV (Sexual and Gender Based Violence against Refugees), 329 Sierra Leone, 7, 71, 74, 135, 154, 193, 227, 281, 329, 415, 472, 481, 578 Simpson, John Hope, 32, 42, 569 Sirleaf, Ellen Johnson, 262, 566 Six-Day War, 34 Snyder, Margaret, 317, 318, 569 Sokoto Caliphate, 145 Soludo, Charles, 515 Somalia, 7, 8, 15, 23, 61, 68, 69, 73, 74, 122, 142, 143, 189, 206, 215, 219, 222, 223, 229, 260, 273, 287, 335, 336, 349, 408, 430, 431, 443, 467, 471, 472, 473, 517, 553, 560, 577 Sommers, Marc, 275, 355, 360, 361, 370, 371, 569 Songhai, 133 South Africa, xxiii, xxxix, 8, 39, 54, 60, 61, 62, 64, 68, 69, 73, 75, 112, 120, 140, 141, 149, 164, 180, 181, 192, 214, 215, 216, 227, 237, 239, 258, 260, 277, 286, 292, 296, 305, 313, 329, 343, 355, 365, 368, 372, 389, 419, 470, 475, 480,

534, 539, 543, 544, 550, 552, 555, 556, 559, 560, 564, 568, 580 South Sudan, 10, 153, 171, 181, 210, 421, 499, 570 Southern Rhodesia, 93, 143 Soviet Union, 50, 142, 143, 176, 191, 316, 454 SPLM (Sudanese Peoples Liberation Movement), 183, 184 SRS (Self-Reliance Strategy for Refugees), 416, 422, 423, 453, 454 State failure, 188 Stein, Barry N., 31, 53, 54, 570 Stewart, Miriam, 76, 77, 568, 570 Sudan, xii, xxiii, xxiv, xxxvii, xxxix, 7, 9, 10, 15, 47, 53, 59, 60, 62, 68, 69, 73, 74, 95, 102, 146, 153, 171, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 193, 206, 210, 221, 222, 225, 226, 232, 249, 260, 267, 287, 296, 302, 329, 331, 339, 370, 375, 421, 422, 431, 443, 444, 454, 472, 484, 485, 499, 517, 537, 538, 541, 543, 545, 553, 555, 559, 570, 577, 579 Sufi Brotherhood, 197 Sunni Muslims, 146 Switzerland, 20, 85, 533, 540, 557, 560, 563, 575, 581 Syria, 46, 47, 48, 67, 71, 302, 427, 431, 504, 517, 543, 573 Syrian refugees, 9, 45, 46, 47, 49 Taiwan, 506 Tanzania, 8, 13, 60, 62, 64, 69, 74, 83, 94, 121, 122, 123, 179, 180, 181, 192, 215, 254, 280, 356, 370, 371, 372, 409, 422, 452, 456, 499, 537, 556, 557, 567, 569, 580 Tarta-kower, Arieh, 33 terrorism, 48, 71, 99, 100, 104, 108, 117, 219, 222, 227, 233, 313, 342, 363, 364, 384, 416, 427, 428 Thomas, F. C., 212, 363, 371, 372, 375, 377, 440, 444, 505, 551, 570 Tilbury, Farida, 340, 346, 347, 348, 571 Tiv people, 12 Tomasi, Silvano M., 31, 53, 570 Touadéra, Faustin-Archange, 209 Touré, Sékou, 211 trafficking, 58, 70, 104, 118, 263, 264, 268, 415 Trump, Donald, 48, 49, 50, 72, 538, 555, 561

I n de x Tuaregs, 157, 159, 488 Tunda, Kitenge Fabrice, 261, 571 Tunisia, 13, 68, 74, 173, 174, 175, 284, 287, 526, 540, 567 Turkey, 47, 196 Turton, David, 30, 314, 571 Tutsi, 60, 62, 152, 154, 381, 384, 390, 391, 422 Twa, 152 UDHR (the Universal Declaration of Human Rights), 84, 97, 99, 101, 105, 106, 107, 405, 419, 494, 497, 573 Uganda, 15, 39, 46, 54, 60, 61, 62, 69, 74, 95, 101, 102, 109, 123, 149, 154, 171, 183, 184, 192, 193, 207, 215, 237, 249, 254, 260, 270, 280, 286, 296, 300, 329, 381, 383, 390, 394, 395, 396, 397, 408, 417, 422, 423, 430, 439, 452, 456, 497, 542, 546, 555, 556, 558, 559, 561, 563, 570, 575 Ugandan refugee crisis, 53 UN Development Assistance Framework, 410, 449 UNCTs (United Nations Country Teams), 410, 411, 413, 572 UNDAF (UN Development Assistance Framework), 410, 411, 412 UNDG (United Nations Development Group), 406, 407, 572 UNESCO, 53, 140, 319, 411, 522, 574, 579, 581 UNGA (United Nations GeneralAssembly), 21, 22, 319, 321, 574 UNHCR (UN High Commissioner for Refugees), xii, xiv, xxiii, xxviii, xxxi, xxxii, xxxix, 3, 4, 7, 8, 10, 12, 13, 14, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 26, 34, 35, 38, 39, 45, 46, 47, 53, 55, 56, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 66, 67, 68, 70, 79, 81, 82, 83, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 93, 94, 95, 96, 100, 102, 107, 108, 109, 115, 117, 121, 123, 124, 173, 174, 183, 184, 190, 199, 210, 216, 245, 258, 260, 263, 275, 276, 279, 283, 284, 285, 286, 287, 288, 293, 297, 298, 299, 300, 301, 302, 303, 304, 305, 306, 310, 311, 315, 316, 317, 320, 321, 322, 323, 324, 325, 328, 329, 338, 342, 343, 344, 345, 351, 353, 358, 365, 366, 367, 376, 386, 387, 392, 404, 405, 406, 407, 409, 410, 411, 412, 413, 415,

589

416, 417, 420, 421, 422, 423, 424, 425, 426, 427, 433, 435, 436, 437, 447, 448, 450, 451, 452, 453, 454, 455, 456, 461, 462, 464, 469, 470, 476, 477, 478, 483, 501, 516, 518, 519, 523, 525, 535, 537, 542, 543, 544, 546, 547, 549, 550, 552, 554, 556, 557, 561, 562, 563, 564, 565, 567, 573, 574, 575, 576, 577, 578, 580 UNICEF (United Nations Fund for Children), 56, 68, 281, 354, 369, 411, 414, 421, 572, 580 UNITA, 177, 178 United Kingdom, 51, 342, 365 United Nations, 20, 21, 40, 41, 45, 55, 59, 68, 71, 81, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 89, 90, 91, 92, 95, 96, 97, 99, 101, 104, 106, 107, 114, 173, 174, 176, 192, 196, 208, 224, 231, 245, 287, 311, 312, 317, 318, 319, 321, 322, 323, 326, 330, 352, 353, 354, 355, 386, 392, 403, 404, 406, 409, 410, 414, 415, 425, 427, 428, 429, 435, 440, 442, 443, 446, 460, 504, 507, 508, 535, 536, 543, 544, 551, 554, 562, 563, 566, 572, 573, 574, 576, 577, 578, 579 United States of America, 9, 21, 31, 34, 35, 36, 39, 46, 48, 49, 50, 70, 71, 72, 82, 85, 92, 142, 143, 172, 174, 184, 185, 191, 192, 196, 197, 199, 209, 261, 328, 338, 341, 342, 346, 364, 365, 373, 375, 376, 382, 414, 418, 420, 440, 454, 458, 464, 481, 497, 499, 536, 548, 558, 569, 571, 579 UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East), 90 UNSC (UN Security Council), 108, 319, 328, 330, 578 urban refugees, 17, 275, 276, 282, 284, 285, 286, 287, 289, 291, 295, 298, 299, 300, 301, 302, 303, 308, 310, 328, 395 urbanization, 155, 157, 158, 159, 160, 276, 279, 280, 281, 282, 511 Urundi, 152 USSR, 191 Uzoigwe, G. N., 140, 141, 579 Venezuela, 47, 85 Vernant, Jacques, 33, 43, 579

590

I n de x

violence, 3, 5, 6, 10, 13, 16, 18, 25, 26, 36, 40, 41, 45, 50, 58, 59, 60, 71, 72, 73, 81, 88, 101, 102, 112, 114, 118, 123, 132, 143, 156, 170, 176, 178, 179, 180, 188, 191, 192, 193, 209, 210, 215, 216, 218, 221, 222, 224, 225, 226, 227, 228, 237, 240, 245, 251, 259, 260, 262, 263, 264, 265, 266, 267, 268, 269, 282, 287, 291, 295, 296, 297, 300, 308, 309, 312, 313, 316, 318, 320, 321, 323, 328, 331, 332, 333, 334, 335, 340, 345, 346, 348, 349, 350, 356, 357, 360, 361, 368, 370, 379, 381, 382, 383, 384, 385, 386, 388, 389, 390, 396, 397, 399, 442, 445, 466, 481, 484, 488, 503, 507, 519, 522, 528, 529, 530, 548, 549, 578 Waters, Tony, 409 WHO (World Health Organization), 387, 392, 411, 421, 580 WID (Women in Development), 326, 327 Williams, Ishola, 438 World Bank, 199, 200, 201, 326, 358, 414, 416, 506, 529, 538, 540, 541, 543, 570, 579 World Food Programme, 260, 270, 414, 421 World War I, 31, 84, 91, 92, 188, 207, 316 World War II, 6, 9, 19, 33, 43, 47, 51, 81, 83, 84, 92, 93, 175, 182, 315, 316, 418, 432, 453, 454, 510, 541, 565

xenophobia, 5, 18, 19, 33, 37, 38, 75, 120, 121, 214, 215, 216, 217, 269, 276, 277, 292, 293, 342, 365, 366, 419, 452, 475, 480, 523, 557, 559, 568 Yacob-Haliso, Olajumoke, 57, 58, 81, 82, 95, 98, 133, 137, 152, 171, 201, 262, 263, 266, 293, 312, 314, 327, 328, 331, 332, 344, 417, 461, 466, 499, 533, 540, 552, 555, 557, 559, 563, 581, 582, 583 Yaméogo, Maurice, 212 Yemen, 66, 67, 70, 302, 427, 517 Yoruba, 137, 154, 326, 417, 471, 472, 494, 563, 564 Yorubaland, 137, 417, 494 Zaire, 94, 178, 183, 226, 249, 260, 261, 409, 544 Zambia, 13, 53, 74, 155, 178, 180, 181, 225, 249, 281, 285, 286, 302, 336, 337, 416, 422, 424, 430, 470, 542, 550, 569 Zetter, Roger, 29, 31, 37, 38, 40, 170, 413, 540, 582 ZI (Zambia Initiative), 416, 424 Zimbabwe, 68, 74, 133, 140, 154, 158, 180, 200, 235, 260, 281, 313, 540, 542, 544, 561

Toyin Falola is Distinguished Teaching Professor and Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin. Professor Falola is author/editor of over one hundred and fifty books on African history, politics, and society and the recipient of sixteen honorary doctorates from around the world, as well as more than thirty lifetime achievement awards. He is at the moment working on various aspects of African knowledge systems, including his recently published book Decolonizing African Studies, and Decolonizing African Knowledge: Autoethnography and African Epistemologies. Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso is Associate Professor in the Department of African and African American Studies at Brandeis University, and co-Chair of the Feminist Theory and Gender Studies (FTGS) Section of the International Studies Association (2020–23). Two decades of field research and publications on African refugees and women’s issues have earned her multiple grants and fellowships including from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, and the University for Peace Africa Program, among others. Dr. Yacob-Haliso’s most recent books include the three-volume Palgrave Handbook of African Women’s Studies and African Indigenous Knowledges in a Postcolonial World.