The Perils of Belonging: Autochthony, Citizenship, and Exclusion in Africa and Europe (review)

African villagers who invent a tradition of funerals in an ancestral village and European urbanites who deny Muslims the right to belong seem to share an increasingly globalized concept: “autochthony,” the idea that people are linked to soil. Anthropologists will not be surprised to learn that globalization reinforces the local, and that people claim identities that are regarded as having deeper roots than the nation. However, in The Perils of Belonging Peter Geschiere gives this relation a fascinating new perspective by comparing the uses and misuses of “autochthony” in Africa and Europe. He understands autochthony as a means to claim and maintain a virtually irrefutable and primordial right to membership. Being born on a certain soil is seen by different actors in Europe and Africa alike as the ultimate reason for belonging. At the same time, it serves to exclude supposed outsiders and foreigners—regardless of their nationality.

The first chapter constructs a genealogy of the concept of autochthony that links Athenian ideas of citizenship to Martin Heidegger’s (1989) idea of Bodenständigkeit, and French colonial constructions of the autochtonie to today’s globalized world. Geschiere shows that the connection with soil, which the term’s etymology implies, serves to support certain groups’ claims to privileged access to resources in different political contexts. Examples from Cameroon, being informed by the author’s long fieldwork experiences, constitute the most fascinating part of this book. Cameroonian politics are the author’s starting point for analyzing his African examples of the social and political importance of autochthony. Geschiere describes how, in the decades after independence Cameroon’s President Ahmadou Ahidjo followed a rigid policy of nation-building, in which referring to ethnic origin was considered politically incorrect, and the unity of the Cameroonian people was stressed instead. His successor Paul Biya, however, reacted to the introduction of multi-party elections in the early 1990s with an ethnicization of policy. However, when the winds of democratic change began to blow after the end of the Cold War, Biya accepted the establishment of a multiparty system. At the same time, he encouraged regional associations to take part in political debate—under the pretext of protecting local minorities from “immigrants” native to other regions of Cameroon. This change of policies remains pertinent to this day because it responds to the question of who “really” belongs to a particular region and can thus claim certain rights. As a striking example regarding the influence of discourses of regional belonging on global institutions like the Catholic Church, Geschiere presents the story of the nomination of a Western Cameroonian for Archbishop in the South of the country. As a result, “indigenous” clerics participated in massive protests. The Vatican reacted by appointing a cleric from the South as Bishop in Western Cameroon. Geschiere describes other factors that support the growing success of autochthony, including the new emphasis on “decentralization” by donor countries and development organizations—whose support of civil society groups and distrust of the state leads to an enforcement of local groups—and a stress of localized forms of belonging. Geschiere discusses a number of other factors contributing towards the trend of autochthony, including constitutions, forest law, associations, funerals, etc.

Other African examples for the success of autochthony as a model of belonging, include the Ivory Coast, where, especially under the regime of Laurent Gbagbo, the concept of autochthony was put into practice by launching the “National Operation of Identification” in 2001, during which people had to identify their villages of origin. Those, who could not claim a village of origin, were considered to be immigrants and lost their citizenship, including the right to purchase land and to vote. The so-called “young patriots,” a violent youth gang supporting Gbagbo, turned into the armed force of this campaign of ivoirité and acted against “foreigners,” which included not only immigrants from neighboring countries but also citizens from the northern Ivory Coast. Northerners reacted accordingly, attacking Gbagbo’s supporters. The violence...