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28 1 Pushing Frontiers The Social Organization of Mobility “Mobility in its ubiquity is fundamental to any understanding of African social life,” write Mirjam de Bruijn, Rijk van Dijk, and Dick Foeken in their introduction to a volume aptly entitled Mobile Africa.1 They prefer to speak of mobility rather than migration because, they argue, the latter usually implies notions of linear and unidirectional movement, a more or less definitive change of residence, and such dichotomies as home and abroad, the rural and the urban, and so forth. Ultimately, the term “migration” often carries with it an idea of rupture in society, while, in reality, in many African societies, “not being mobile may be the anomaly.” As De Bruijn, van Dijk, and Foeken suggest, we should regard mobility, in its manifold forms, not as a result of “social disarray,” but rather as integral, vital “part of life and of making a livelihood.”2 In a similar vein, Igor Kopytoff’s earlier work presents a model of the “internal African frontier” that is premised on the assumption that African populations are continually on the move. Criticizing colonial (as well as postcolonial) stereotypes of Africa as “a continent mired in timeless immobility,” Kopytoff argues that African societies were usually rather recent creations, forged by frontiersmen of various origins who met in open, less densely populated spaces between, or on the peripheries of, existing “metropolitan societies,” as he calls established and often more hierarchically organized polities. Attracting followers from among kin, friends, clients, as well as occasionally slaves, and building on cultural traditions from their places of origin, the frontiersmen would construct new social orders “in the midst of an effective institutional vacuum.” African histories, Kopytoff asserts, were “filled with the movement Pushing Frontiers | 29 of the disgruntled, the victimized, the exiled, the refugees, the losers in internecine struggles, the adventurous, and the ambitious.” In brief, Africa was a “frontier continent ,” characterized by population movements of various kinds and dimensions, ranging from long-distance displacements triggered by famines, civil wars, or other disasters to less dramatic mobility on a smaller scale due to family quarrels or lack of fertile farmland.3 It is for this reason that studying the internal dynamics and strategies of mobility as well as how the dynamics and strategies of different groups affect each other—the themes of this chapter—is so important. One may question whether Kopytoff’s model fits the entire continent and whether its assumption of a self-sustaining perpetual cycle of fission and fusion of “metropolitan ” and “frontier” societies does not ignore long-term historical shifts in population densities and the availability of land as well as major political developments connected, for instance, to the slave trade. However, the model of the “interstitial frontier” and a focus on mobility certainly help to understand the social dynamics of the Black Volta region. This region’s inhabitants indeed were, and still are, continually on the move. Partly, mobility was driven by the imperatives of an economy based on hunting and shifting cultivation, which made the continuous opening of fresh land a necessity. Partly, people moved in order to break away from pressing family conflicts or quarrels in the village, or to escape the expansionist desires of neighboring chiefdoms or the attacks of slave raiders. Further, some people were adventurous and keen to explore farther afield, to improve their livelihood as well as their social position, becoming household heads and leaders of new settlements. During the colonial period, movements were often motivated by the desire to cross the international border in order to escape the exigencies of forced labor, or punishments meted out by harsh chiefs. More recently, the need to deal with increasing land scarcity has become ever more pressing. Forms and strategies of mobility in the Black Volta region, as in other parts of Africa, have been manifold, in precolonial times as well as today, ranging from longdistance journeys “without return” to circular migration and small-scale movements in the vicinity, when, for instance, farmers create new villages out of what were initially bush fields and thus gradually push the settlement frontier into the surrounding bush. Furthermore, these larger movements involving changes of residence have always been complemented by (sometimes preceded, and sometimes followed by) mobility on a smaller scale connected with visiting near and distant markets, marrying men or women from farther afield, pilgrimage to powerful shrines or healers, and so forth.4 What is fascinating, however, are the notable differences in the patterns of...

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