Editor's Introduction: African Refugee History

Introduction

In Purity and Exile (1995a), Liisa Malkki's ethnography of Burundian Hutu refugees living in mid-1980s Tanzania, Malkki draws attention to a complex and paradoxical relationship between refugees and history. As Malkki argues, the global system of nation-states, composed of national governments, United Nations bodies, and humanitarian agencies, all present "the refugee" as a kind of victim, one who has been expelled from a national and natural "home." This point implies that "the refugee problem" is a recurring phenomenon that may be solved through proper management of this system, and without knowledge of specific histories that generate particular contexts of displacement. Most academic work in the interdisciplinary domain of refugee studies reproduces this managerial, ahistorical, and indeed, apolitical perspective.¹ Nevertheless, as Malkki's study demonstrates, historical knowledge—both in the sense of knowledge about the past and of knowledge about how people narrate the past in the present—may be immensely important for comprehending the dynamics within a given displaced community and for enabling displaced people to pursue their desired futures. From this standpoint, Malkki calls for a "radically historicizing" approach to refugees and displacement, an approach that "insists on acknowledging not only human suffering but also narrative authority, historical agency, and political memory" (Malkki 1996:398).²

In the twenty-five years since Malkki's foundational publication, scholars across the social sciences and humanities have developed overlapping critiques of humanitarian government, including the system for governing refugees, now often referred to as "the international refugee regime." Nevertheless, most of this critical literature does not address Malkki's central argument about history, refugees, and displacement. Focused on the manner in which humanitarian "biopolitics" allegedly strips people of the capacity to act politically, scholars often look past the political ambitions and historical subjectivities of refugees and others thought to have been so stripped.³ In the process, "the refugee" is reconstituted as a generic type, and displaced peoples' differing locations within, and responses to, the refugee regime become seemingly insignificant details.⁴ Little has changed in this regard since 2015, amid heightened public controversy over refugees in the European Union, the United States, and elsewhere. Although scholars have examined refugee issues with renewed vigor, they have focused far more attention on the biological needs of refugees and the biopolitics of refugee management than they have on unique refugee histories or on the historical construction of "the refugee."

Perhaps more striking than ahistorical studies of refugees among scholars broadly is the paucity of good historical work on refugees within the discipline of history itself. As Peter Gatrell observes in his monograph The Making of the Modern Refugee, there is a "general absence of refugees in historical scholarship" (Gatrell 2013:11; see also Gatrell 2016). Moreover, "the social history of population displacement in sub-Saharan Africa" is especially "uncultivated"—a striking point when one considers that, for the past sixty years, much of the world's refugee (not to mention internally displaced) population has lived in Africa, and that many refugees living in Europe and North America today have traveled there from Africa. Gatrell ventures several explanations for the current state of refugee historiography, including the observation that while refugees are discussed in the records of organizations that have administered them, refugee voices are highly constrained in these and other archives (Gatrell 2013:250; see also Malkki 1996). Beyond this point, it is worth noting that the nation, the still dominant framework of much historiography, tends to present human mobility according to a limited set of logics—logics that may offer little insight into the diverse motivations and interwoven histories that have compelled people to cross international borders.⁵ Moreover, African history, the sub-discipline that one might expect to historicize African refugees, has given relatively little attention to mass displacement since 1960, due, at least in part, to the logistical and political complexities of studying postcolonial history in many African contexts (Cooper 2002:xi–xii; Ellis 2002; Lee 2010, 2011). As a result, even scholarship which presents African refugees historically tends to render a global history of humanitarian interventions on behalf of refugees, offering much less...