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Migration and Society: Advances in Research 3 (2020): 113–129 © e Authors
doi:10.3167/arms.2020.030110
Laborers, Migrants, Refugees
Managing Belonging, Bodies, and Mobility
in (Post)Colonial Kenya and Tanzania
Hanno Brankamp and Patricia Daley
䡲 ABSTRACT: is article examines the ways in which both colonial and postcolonial
migration regimes in Kenya and Tanzania have reproduced forms of di erential gov-
ernance toward the mobilities of particular African bodies. While there has been a
growing interest in the institutional discrimination and “othering” of migrants in or in
transit to Europe, comparable dynamics in the global South have received less scholarly
attention. e article traces the enduring governmental di erentiation, racialization,
and management of labor migrants and refugees in Kenya and Tanzania. It argues that
analyses of contemporary policies of migration management are incomplete without
a structured appreciation of the historical trajectories of migration control, which are
inseparably linked to notions of colon iality and related constructions of (un)pro table
African bodies. It concludes by recognizing the limits of controlling Africans on the
move and points toward the inevitable emergence of social conditions in which conviv-
iality and potentiality prevail.
䡲 KEYWORDS: bodies, coloniality, Kenya, migrants, mobility, racialization, refugees,
Tanzania
Introduction
Movements of people from Africa to Europe have dominated mainstream media headlines and
political discourses in recent decades. Migration ows between African societies have received
considerably less attention, despite being much larger in scale and at least as consequential for
politics on the continent. Likewise, debates about restrictive migration policies, eroding asylum
rights, and forti cations along the borderlands of Europe, Australia, and North America (Jones
2017) have concealed the fact that migration within Africa has o en been met with similar
and ever-expanding institutional measures of regulation, control, and containment from the
colonial period until today. East Africa in particular has been at the center of ebbs and ows of
numerous migration movements that, during the 1990s, reached a peak through the forced dis-
placement of hundreds of thousands from Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC),
Ethiopia, Sudan, Rwanda, and Burundi into neighboring countries, in particular Kenya and
Tanzania. By 2000, Tanzania was hosting around 702,000 refugees and asylum seekers, while
Kenya was home to over 219,000 (UNHCR 2004). Since then, Kenya’s refugee population has
soared to 490,000, while 337,000 remain in Tanzania today.1
114 䡲 Hanno Brankamp and Patricia Daley
Colonially de ned borders had long-lasting e ects on these contemporary movements.
Despite being o en closely related to the citizens of their countries of asylum—through shared
culture, identity, and language—displaced people were automatically classi ed as nonciti-
zens, “aliens,” and foreign “others” (Daley 2013). Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez argues that
this “dichotomy between citizens and migrants is embedded in a racializing logic produced
within social relations shaped by the enduring e ects of colonial epistemic power” (2018: 25).
Although the a ere ects of empire may indeed be most noticeable in the encounters of black
and brown migrants with white immigration bureaucracies that regulate and monitor their
circulation in the global North (Browne 2015; Mayblin 2017; Wardle and Obermuller 2019),
many state institutions and migration policies in Africa are anything but free from such dis-
crimination, racialization, and systemic exclusion. Tayyab Mahmud contends that living with
the specter of the migrant “is to live with desires and anxieties of the state and the nation. It is
also to live with the heritage and genealogies of empire and imperialism” (1997: 633). Instead of
transforming the colonial modes of managing and hierarchizing noncitizens, many postcolo-
nial African states actually perpetuated parochial and racialized categories of mobility, despite
at times experimenting with progressive politics. Even though Tanzania and Kenya have gone
through temporary periods of “open door policies” toward refugees, exiles, and labor migrants
(Chaulia 2003; Verdirame and Harrell-Bond 2005), their current migration regimes suggest a
continuing preoccupation with the rigid categories of race, ethnicity, and belonging for manag-
ing mobile Africans. In August 2018, Kenya’s Department of Immigration Services launched a
new hotline for national citizens to report “suspicious foreigners” in an orchestrated attempt to
crack down on “illegal immigration” (Muraya 2018). Half a year later, Tanzanian state author-
ities conducted house-to-house searches for “illegal aliens” in the country’s western regions,
bordering the DRC, Rwanda, Burundi, and Uganda, and further announced a comprehensive
“veri cation” of citizenship for local residents in the months that followed (Karashani 2019).
In recent years, both countries have experienced a notable surge in popular and, not least,
government-led anti-refugee rhetoric that has o en adopted a racialized and colonial language
that positions migrants in opposition to a more “civilized” host state. Refugees, asylum seekers,
and other migrants are on the one hand typically held responsible for environmental degra-
dation, spreading diseases, and overstretching local infrastructure (Aminzade 2013: 305), or
fostering political instability and terrorism on the other (Mwangi 2019; Brankamp 2020). How-
ever, such popular fears and resentments in the two countries are embedded in, and inextricably
linked to, longer histories of state institutions di erentiating between more or less desirable
migrant bodies along similar lines. In this article we therefore o er a critical analysis of the
(post)colonial migration regimes in Kenya and Tanzania, and trace enduring processes of di er-
ential valuation of human worth, economic bene ts, and racialization that have been part and
parcel of government policies in the colonial and postcolonial periods. Migration regimes are
not simply “formal expression[s] of collectively determined objectives concerning the regula-
tion of the movement of people” (Cornelissen 2009: 355), but also encompass certain legal and
discursive productions of migrants as either unproductive, perilous, or pro table subjects. As
Cassandra Veney notes, migration regimes in the two neighboring countries are especially note-
worthy, because they share a history of British colonial rule, both transitioned into postcolonial
one-party states, yet chose diverging developmental paths a er independence (2007: 2). Edward
Mogire observes that their respective geostrategic location has rendered understanding the
migration dynamics in the two countries more urgent (2009: 16). However, unlike many other
countries in the region, Kenya and Tanzania have experienced long stretches of relative politi-
cal stability and have therefore mostly received rather than generated refugees, asylum seekers,
Laborers, Migrants, Refugees 䡲 115
or migrants themselves. Most recently, this has given more impetus to institutional e orts for
identifying and monitoring Africans on the move by capturing their biometrical data under
the guise of “enhancing” migration management and “empowering” migrants themselves (IOM
2018). e Kenyan and Tanzanian governments have been actively soliciting funds and exper-
tise from donors and agencies, such as the International Organization for Migration (IOM)
and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), to reiterate aspirations
of “orderly” global migration and tailor their enforcement capacities to coping with bodies that
are deemed irregular, illegitimate, or simply “out of place.” We argue that this recent prolifera-
tion of border technologies in Africa, which rely on the “machine-readable body” (Ploeg and
Sprenkels 2011), are but the latest stage in longer histories of di erential migration governance
on the continent that continue to impact which bodies are expected (and allowed) to be mobile
while others are not. Since formal colonial rule, Africa has been coded as a “racially identi ed
space” (Ford 1994: 1845) to which Africans should ideally be con ned. However, even within
the continent itself, movements of colonized subjects were geographically restricted through
governmental delineations of reserves, estates, frontiers, colonial territories, and corridors. is
ordering of Africans through racial and ethnic classi cations, and the xing of them to both
imperial spheres of in uence and ethnic territories, denied their right to have multiple identi-
ties and to choose their autonomous mobility and place of dwelling (Weitzberg 2017). No such
restrictions were placed on bodies racialized as white, who could explore, conquer, and, above
all, move unimpededly. e administrative bifurcation of colonial African states into a civic
and a customary domain (Mamdani 1996) was precisely about authorizing or denying this very
mobility to the colonized. Colonial biopolitics dictated that nonwhite bodies only move at the
behest of capital, colonial authorities, and certainly never on their own volition.
is article builds on previous scholarly assertions of the need to analyze postcolonial histo-
ries of migration and asylum regimes in order to make sense of continuities in the present (Mar-
eet 2007; Mayblin 2017; Toš ić and Lems 2019). is is particularly crucial for work on refugees
and forced migration, in which “history has always been notable by its absence” (Mar eet 2007:
136). Focusing on Kenya and Tanzania, we contend that a number of contemporary laws and
institutions that organize land, ethnic territoriality, migration, and asylum in fact perpetuate
colonial legacies of di erential mobility, though o en in modi ed form. e rst section hence
traces the management of labor migrations in colonial and postcolonial Kenya and Tanzania,
emphasizing the capitalist political economy that determined the (un)desirability of certain
kinds of Africans moving between territories. e second section expands this discussion to
refugees and displaced people seeking asylum in neighboring countries, but who are also mon-
itored, excluded, and securitized as dangerous, racialized subjects in need of spatial xation.
e third section draws on Francis Nyamnjoh’s (2013, 2017) critique of dominant approaches to
studying African migrations and points out the limits of controlling migration on the continent
and the emergence of more convivial social worlds that found precedence in Tanzania’s endur-
ing support for African liberation ghters between 1963 and 1994.
Contributing to literature on migration and mobility in Africa (Bakewell and Jónsson
2013; Bakewell and Landau 2018; Nyamnjoh 2013), this article o ers a concrete analysis of
migration regimes in Kenya and Tanzania that combine ethnoterritorial notions of citizen-
ship, national security concerns, and policies of global migration governance, all of which
ultimately perpetuate colonial dispositions of race, territory, and graduated mobility. It con-
cludes that studies of contemporary migration in Africa should be attentive to the coloniality
of contemporary policies and practices and should seek solutions that draw from Africans’
histories of conviviality.
116 䡲 Hanno Brankamp and Patricia Daley
African Bodies as Labor: Labor Migration
in the Colonial and Postcolonial Eras
Our analysis of colonial and postcolonial labor regimes in Tanzania and Kenya demonstrates
how colonial conceptions and management of African bodies as labor has crucially informed
postcolonial understandings of belonging and mobility. We contend that colonial views on the
need to make “out-of-place” Africans productive equally permeates contemporary discourses
about refugee economies and the utilization of refugee labor (see Betts et al. 2016; see also
Farah, this volume). Colonial authorities utilized racialized and ethnicized ideologies to cate-
gorize African people according to their propensity for di erent types of labor, especially their
ability to perform more arduous, harmful, and militaristic tasks in the service of empire. e
legacies of colonial regulations and policies, aimed at instituting tightly controlled migrant
labor regimes and managing African presence in spaces deemed “non-native,” continue to
reverberate with postcolonial policies and political discourses. Colonial labor controls drew
on the racialized myth of the “lazy” (unproductive and idle) “native” who had to be forced out
of “his” lethargy. Individualized wage labor was thus understood as a powerful tool to break
especially African men from what were seen as “primitive” kinship ties and social solidari-
ties (Orde-Browne 1946). During the 1920s, colonial authorities in the Tanganyika Territory2
introduced legislation that targeted men who were deemed “unproductive.” e 1923 Destitute
Persons Ordinance thereby rede ned who was considered destitute in the eyes of the colonial
state—“any person without employment and unable to show that he has visible and su cient
means of subsistence”—and compelled them to either nd employment or face imprisonment
and forced labor on behalf of the state. Mobilizing Africans to work in colonial enterprises
thus led to the emergence of further bureaucratic di erentiations between so-called resident
natives, non-natives, and foreigners.3 e introduction of identity documentations aided this
categorization process and enabled employers to manage African workers, but it ultimately
had broader societal implications, including the proliferation of Eurocentric naming patterns
or the hardening of ethnic territorial boundaries. Despite imposed colonial regulations, Afri-
cans o en remained agential in the migration process and instrumentally used the categori-
zation of racialized laboring bodies to navigate employment, both within and across colonial
borders.
Kenya and Tanzania had slightly di erent histories of managing circulations of labor and
ideas of belonging. Land in colonial Tanganyika was relatively plentiful and the population den-
sity low, creating a greater reliance on attracting an African labor force from both residents of
the area as well as neighboring colonial territories. Labor used on the plantations in Kenya,
however, was largely sourced from Africans who had previously been displaced from their land
and forced into overcrowded reserves, thus creating a “pool of cheap labour” for the white settler
economy (Overton 1990: 163). is alienation of land from the local African communities, and
their reconstruction as mere “squatters” on Kenya’s European-owned farms, made the colony’s
labor regime more punitive than in Tanzania, where many workers were imported into the area
without having prior claims to the land they tilled. Kenya’s Master and Servants Ordinance
of 1906 introduced restrictive labor laws that bene ted European employers through limiting
their responsibility toward African workers, while leaving the employees with few protections
of their own. For the colonial establishment, “labour at a ‘primitive’ stage of development was
thought to require ‘primitive’ forms of labour law” (Anderson 2000: 461). e Resident Native
(Squatters) Ordinance of 1918 further entrenched tenant duties of African populations working
on European-occupied land and penalized failures to provide labor in accordance with existing
legislation. e Employment of Natives Law, which included a series of seven ordinances passed
Laborers, Migrants, Refugees 䡲 117
between 1910 and 1920, further speci ed the terms of labor contracts, usually to the detriment
of the African employees.
A er World War II, a new registration system was introduced that required every adult Afri-
can male to carry a certi cate stamped by the employer, containing information on the person’s
“name, father, district, tribe, location sublocation, group, clan, circumcision age, date, signature
of o cial issuing with place for empowers’ signature and ngerprints of all ten ngers” (Orde-
Browne 1946: 150). e increasingly draconian nature of these laws contributed to no small
extent to the rise of the Land and Freedom Army (so-called Mau Mau) during the 1950s (Ber-
man 1990). Migrants from other colonial territories settled in Kenya’s main city of Nairobi, but
it is not known exactly how many plantation workers were from outside the colony. e short-
age of labor during the 1940s, as settlers increased production as part of the war e ort, saw tea
plantations in Kenya requesting permission to recruit labor from Ruanda-Urundi (present-day
Rwanda and Burundi) (Orde-Browne 1946).
Labor migration in the whole of East Africa was extensive during the colonial period. Audrey
Richards’s (1952) study of migrants in Buganda (present-day Uganda) identi ed workers who
came from modern-day Burundi and Rwanda, Tanzania, the Congo, Sudan, and Kenya to work
for African farmers as well as European and Asian enterprises, and draws on a 1948 survey that
counted foreign workers from 21 ethnic groups. e colonial demarcation of “ethnic territories”
xed African subjects in place, but since control of labor was intrinsic to the development of
commodity production, labor scarcity meant that the colonial authorities sought to mobilize
Africans (largely men) for either forced labor or as regular wage laborers, while controlling the
ow and direction of these di erent migrations. Governmental mechanisms, including punitive
hut and poll tax cash exactions as well as forced recruitment for the construction of roads and
administrative buildings, also led to a growth of voluntary movements and direct enrollment of
men to work in mines and on settler plantations. Nonetheless, Africans o en avoided colonial
recruiters and migrated independently.
Labor departments were established and regulations on recruitment and employment
conditions were implemented to provide a steady and stable labor force to mines and settler
plantations. In Tanganyika, Joe Lugalla (1989: 147) notes that Pass laws were introduced for
every African (over 18 years) in 1913, requiring them “to have a special card which speci ed
his or her engagement locality.” Various Masters and Servants Ordinances from 1923 to 1931
governed the recruitment, employment, and conditions of workers. In 1926, the Tanganyika
administration set up a labor department speci cally to recruit labor for government work and
for the sisal and cotton estates. In some parts of the territory labor recruitment had begun as
early as 1907 for work on caravans and in railway construction. Laurent Sago (1983) notes that
in the Buha area of western Tanganyika local chiefs were instrumental in persuading villagers
to migrate. From the 1930s to the 1960s the Waha were among the most prominent migrant
labor groups (Sago 1983). A er the depression of the 1930s the colonial authorities saw only
active labor recruiting as solving the problem of wage labor scarcity. e formation of SILABU
(Labour Bureau of the Tanganyika Sisal Growers Association) in 1944 and later the Labour
Supply Corporation signi ed a deliberate attempt to capture labor, especially what was termed
“distance labor.”
Long-distance migration between colonial states was common, as people ed forced labor
regimes, but also sought work to pay taxes. In Tanganyika, migrants from Belgian (Rwanda
and Burundi) and Portuguese (Mozambique) territories formed the most common group of
“distance labor” and were provided with free housing. Ethnic and racial stereotyping and hierar-
chies meant that workers were de ned by their aptitude for hard work. e Hutus from Burundi
were stigmatized as “dirty” but also hard workers who could do the most arduous tasks on
118 䡲 Hanno Brankamp and Patricia Daley
plantations. Hutus escaping racial stereotyping in Belgian colonial trusteeships found that these
representations followed them into British colonial territories.
From the 1920s, “distance labor” from Ruanda-Urundi contributed signi cantly to the labor
market in Tanganyika, Uganda, and the Belgian Congo. In 1935, 50 percent of the 2,361 work-
ers recruited in the Kigoma area of Tanganyika were from Belgian territory (Western Province,
Annual Report, 1942). However, the exact magnitude of the labor force migrating to Tanganyika
was di cult to determine due to the uncontrolled nature of the ow and confusion with locals
from the same ethnic group that straddled the border region. By 1946 the demand for labor
led the colonial labor advisor Major G. St. J. Orde-Browne to recommend the channeling of
migrants from Ruanda-Urundi into well-de ned routes, and their maintenance for two weeks
in reception camps with medical facilities. Reception centers were already established at the
main crossing points into Uganda. is was achieved with the cooperation of the Belgian colo-
nial authorities (Manpower Committee 1951). By 1955 labor recruiters from British territories
were actively engaged in Ruanda-Urundi. By 1950, the Belgians estimated that over 675,000
migrants from Belgian territory were in Uganda and Tanganyika, of which 157,000 were in
Tanganyika (UN Trusteeship Council 1950). Between the 1948 -1957 census years the Barundi
recorded the highest percentage increase (35.3) of any group in Tanganyika. e sisal estates of
Tanga, Coast, and Dar es Salaam districts were the main destinations.
From the 1920s to the 1960s, the sisal industry was the largest employer in Tanganyika, with
over 386,000 workers in 1956, of which 52,000 were from other territories (Guillebaud 1958).
Men were contracted for speci ed tasks or periods of employment, o en 18 months to three
years, and were expected to return to their home once the contract ended. is system, known
as Kipande (piecework), was harsh. Working conditions on the estates were generally poor and
resulted in high labor turnover and absenteeism. Workers were penalized and subjected to nes,
corporal punishment, or imprisonment if they failed to complete their contracts. Under such
terms of employment, desertion was the most popular form of resistance (Raikes 1978).
A er Tanganyika’s independence in 1961, the sisal plantations continued to be the major
employer of immigrant labor. However, the collapse in the price of sisal, mechanization, stabiliza-
tion of the workforce, and immigration restrictions e ectively reduced migrant labor. e social-
ist ideology of the independent Tanzanian state had an adverse impact on the wage labor market,
such that by the 1967 census, the Barundi population in Tanzania had declined to 114,605 (Egero
1979). As Philip Raikes (1978: 288) points out, the postcolonial state “o cially disapproved” of
labor hiring, as being “inconsistent with its policies.” Even in the 1980s, the working conditions
of the migrants from Rwanda and Burundi appeared to have improved very little since the 1920s.
Raikes (1978) notes that Banyarwanda and Barundi, who were normally denied access to land in
Tanzania due to fear of them settling permanently because of land shortages in their countries of
origin, were among the worst paid and most badly treated labor force in the country.
Little information is available on the settlement and social integration of labor migrants into
host societies in the region except the research carried out by Richards (1952) in the former king-
dom of Buganda in Uganda. In Buganda ethnic hierarchization placed migrants from Rwanda
and Burundi at the bottom of the social order. In Tanganyika, the colonial state attempted to
improve conditions on sisal plantations so that workers could settle, but to no avail. As the
workers were predominantly young men, they did sometimes settle in the territory and gained
citizenship at independence. ese migrants virtually merged into the host population. Recent
contestations over citizenship of people considered Tanzanian tend to target the descendants of
colonial labor migrants.
In the postcolonial period, gender di erences did not play a signi cant role in Kenya and
Tanzania’s approach to migrant labor, except with respect to women’s marital status. During the
Laborers, Migrants, Refugees 䡲 119
colonial period, while recruitment focused on men, wives migrating with husbands were seen
as a way of stabilizing the workforce at its destination. Single women (unmarried and widowed)
were discouraged from migrating, but many ed patriarchal control in rural areas, moving to
cities independently. Despite single women in towns being labeled prostitutes, these women
were able to become traders and shop/bar owners—providing services for men (Stitcher 1982).
Using accusations of prostitution to control women’s mobility was another practice that per-
sisted well beyond the ending of formal colonial rule.
African mobility was encouraged only to colonial spaces of capital accumulation. Colonial
authorities also attempted to control African migration to urban centers, where African men
were needed for menial roles within the colonial urban economy. In 1944, the colonial state
in Tanganyika enacted the Townships (Removal of Undesirable Persons) Ordinance, which
empowered colonial district commissioners “to remove (via a ‘Removal Order’) undesirable
persons in the town area under [their] jurisdiction” (Lugalla 1989: 134). From that time and well
into the independence period, unemployed men were rounded up and returned to rural areas
in both Kenya and Tanzania (Lugalla 1989; Stitcher 1982). In addition, Tanzania introduced a
series of acts to address “idle” citizens. In 1976, the government launched Operation Kila Mtu
Afanye Kazi, and Tanzania’s Human Resource Deployment Act of 1983 (popularly known as
the Nguvu Kazi Act) empowered authorities to register all employees and to round up unem-
ployed men in Dar es Salaam and repatriate them to rural areas. e imposition of economic
liberalization in the 1980s and 1990s and the subsequent growth in unemployment and the size
of the urban poor made it di cult for states to distinguish between the economic situation of
long-term residents and recent rural-to-urban migrants. Consequently, forced repatriation was
not politically feasible amid a decline in states’ control over the labor force.
e formation of the East African Community in 1999 and the adoption of its Common
Market Protocol in 2010 indicated a coordinated e ort by postcolonial states to enable and fur-
ther manage labor migration within the region. Articles 7, 9, and 10 of the protocol provide for
the movement of persons, travel documents, and the free movement of workers, respectively.
In terms of migrant workers Burundians remain the largest group within the region, and Kenya
and Uganda are the two major destinations for international migrants (IOM 2017). Admittedly,
the out-migration from Burundi re ects the political instability in the state since the 2015 elec-
tions and the country’s dire economic situation. While some of these migrants could be clas-
si ed as refugees, the international community’s use of the term “mixed migrations” serves to
include the variety of reasons for which people migrate.
Colonial Bodies “Out of Place”: Refugees, Exiles, and Empire
Contemporary refugee regimes in Tanzania and Kenya have emerged from overlapping legacies
of colonial laws and regulatory frameworks, international and regional legislations introduced
a er independence, and the more recent national politics of mobility, each of which displayed a
noticeable concern for closely managing the belonging, bodies, and (im)mobilities of Africans
on the move. While the British colonial authorities sought to control labor migration through
a mixture of force, incentivization, and deterrence, refugees and asylum seekers posed an even
more serious challenge for governmental regulation and a colonial will-to-order, because of the
per se uncontrolled and involuntary nature of their migration.
Europe’s colonial expansion in Africa was among the main driving forces behind large-scale
displacements, both within and across colonial boundaries (Gatrell 2013: 226). Although popu-
lations who would today be legally classi ed as “refugees” historically entered Kenya and Tanza-
120 䡲 Hanno Brankamp and Patricia Daley
nia, it was not until the postwar period in the 1940s that their position began to be increasingly
codi ed in law. e dispersal of Polish refugees across Tanganyika, Kenya, and Uganda a er
1942, for instance, precipitated racialized anxieties for the British authorities, which tried to
spatially segregate white arrivals from the African residents around them (Piotrowski 2007).
British Tanganyika’s Defence Regulations Act of 1946 and the Refugee (Control) and (Expul-
sion) Ordinance No. 3 of 1949 were therefore aimed primarily at governing refugees of Euro-
pean origin who had found temporary asylum in the region. e rst gave the colonial governor
sweeping powers to expel refugees from Tanganyika’s territory, while the second centered on
restricting the movement of foreign exiles domestically. Article 7 of the Defence Regulations
Act de ned a refugee as a “person who entered any part of East Africa during the war in pur-
suance of an arrangement made by any government in East Africa for the reception of persons
evacuated from war areas, and has been permitted to enter the territory, without observance of
the immigration laws.” It was thereby o cially stipulated for the rst time that refugees had to
reside in designated areas, and the administrative post of “camp commandant” was established
speci cally for their management and spatial control. It was not long until this was again put to
the test with the arrival of Tutsi refugees following their political oppression in Rwanda in 1959
(Long 2012).
Colonial Kenya had no speci c legislation pertaining to refugees, although the British colo-
nial authorities instead passed a number of laws that could restrict the movements of “resi-
dent” and “nonresident” Africans, which included those who would in retrospect qualify as
“refugees.” e 1925 Vagrancy Ordinance generally impeded the free movement of African
populations in the territory, while the 1948 Immigration (Control) Ordinance was speci cally
aimed at managing the in-migration from other colonies and codifying the conditions of their
formal residency in the colony of Kenya. In the wake of Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935,
British Kenya faced an unprecedented in ux of Ethiopians eeing the con ict, who were rst
discouraged from entering Kenyan territory—and delegitimized as “deserters” and renegade
“tribesmen”—before eventually being allowed entry and subsequently housed in camps near
the town of Isiolo (Shadle 2019; Wilkin 1980). In addition, Kenya received substantial numbers
of displaced populations from Rwanda and Burundi throughout the 1920s and 1950s, as well as
from Sudan a er the 1955 mutiny and during the ensuing Anyanya war (Otunnu 1994; Verdi-
rame and Harrell-Bond 2005: 2). What transpired through these parallel colonial histories of
managing displacement was the notion that not all refugees were the same in the eyes of the
colonial state, and there was a keen interest in a ording considerable mobility to some bodies,
but not others. Banishment and isolation in distant parts of the colonial territory had always
been part of the standard colonial practice of dealing with African subjects who resisted or
threatened the colonial order. Kenyan Mau Mau ghters, for example, were sent to the remotest
part of southwestern Tanzania (now the Katavi region). As Uma Kothari and Rorden Wilkin-
son (2010: 1400) note—writing about the Seychelles as a place for political exiles—“exiling was
used as a technique of colonial rule.” An inversion of this policy toward colonial dissenters was
the containment of incoming refugees along the margins of colonial territories. In German
and later British Tanganyika, the authorities were opposed to the idea of admitting Africans
from neighboring colonies seeking refuge, unless they could simultaneously be exploited as
laborers. Permissions (or denials) to move were issued exclusively at the behest of the colonial
government, which always weighed the imagined attributes of certain ethnicized identities as
industrious or idle, potential economic burdens or gains, humanitarian responsibilities, and
the potential harm caused to the prevailing political order. Even a er political independence,
the Kenyan and Tanzanian states would, to a large extent, retain this institutional aspiration of
ordering racialized bodies in space.
Laborers, Migrants, Refugees 䡲 121
Managing “Foreign” Africans: Refugees and Exiles
in Postcolonial Kenya and Tanzania
British colonial legislation laid down the basic tenets of the respective future national laws deal-
ing with immigration, dissidents, and refugees (Ayok 1985). Independent Tanzania passed a
series of acts between 1965 and 1969—the Extraditions Act (1965), Tanzania Statutes (1965),
and the Fugitive O enders Act (1969)—all of which had a bearing on the rights and obligations
of refugees and asylum seekers. e main feature of the 1966 Refugees (Control) Act was to
enable the Tanzanian state to impose a blanket classi cation of entire designated populations
as “refugees” and had a provision for enforcing “settlement lock-ups and the custody of persons
therein” as a matter of public security. is act remained in force until it was superseded by the
1998 Refugees Act, which, although containing some progressive changes and dispensing of
the explicit term “control” in its title, continued to champion equally restrictive and prohibitive
clauses.
Kenya and Tanzania’s acceptance of the colonial borders a er independence—and both
states’ advancement of nation-building projects—necessitated the reinforcement of distinctions
between “resident” and “foreign” Africans, which were being increasingly expressed through the
language of citizenship. e criteria for citizenship were contested, as both countries had hosted
migrant laborers, political exiles, and refugees at di erent times throughout the colonial period
and were multiracial societies with numerous ethnic groups straddling the political boundaries.
Citizenship determination varied across postcolonial Africa and was either based on residency
in the respective territory at the time of colonial partition or independence, descent (belonging
to a recognized ethnic group in the colony), or naturalization a er a speci ed period of lawful
residency. Political manipulation and emerging clientelism further cemented binary distinc-
tions between supposed “strangers” and “natives,” “immigrants” and “autochthones,” “outsiders”
and “authentic” citizens (Dorman et al. 2007; Geschiere 2009).
is was even further complicated by existing colonial racialized categorizations that, for
instance, classi ed Kenya’s ethnic Somalis as “non-natives,” despite their demonstrable presence
in the northern areas of the country for decades, even centuries (Weitzberg 2017). Somali claims
to citizenship in the country remained ambiguous at best, and were further complicated by
successive in uxes of Somali refugees from outside Kenya’s territory during the 1990s (Scharrer
2018). Brennan notes accordingly that Tanzania’s colonial legal code was imbued with pater-
nalistic notions of supposedly protecting a “native” population against encroachments from
“foreigners.” But the categories of “native” and “non-native” themselves were all but self-evident,
and urban Indian, Arab, and Somali populations were alternatingly classi ed as either (Brennan
2012: 24–25). Colonial preoccupations with uncontrolled mobilities and ambiguous belonging
of populations were carried over into the postcolonial states, a ecting especially refugees, forced
migrants, and precarious citizens. In the 1970s, Tanzania enacted discriminatory land laws that
were based on a similar colonial-era divide between “indigenous” and “nonindigenous” citizens
(Aminzade 2013: 3). e un nished “business” of citizenship was therefore deeply entangled
with colonial power relations and ethnoracial identities, and remained an “incomplete legal
project” (Brennan 2012: 22) whose exclusionary e ects were felt most severely by refugees and
asylum seekers.
Political uncertainty in the wake of decolonization caused renewed concern among “West-
ern” observers and their African allies, who feared the possibility of dissidents forming alliances
with communist groups. is inconvenient reality shaped attitudes toward African refugees in
particular and had to be speedily addressed through internationally recognized legal conven-
tions to monitor, control, and direct their movements and thus prevent such alignments. In
122 䡲 Hanno Brankamp and Patricia Daley
September 1969, the Organization of African Unity (OAU) therefore adopted its Convention
Governing Speci c Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa, which was a composite of the United
Nations 1951 Refugee Convention and recommendations of the 1967 protocol, with recognition
of Africa-speci c causes of ight that included external aggression, occupation, and foreign
domination (Ayok 1985; OAU 1969). e UN provided a technical advisor and further support
in dra ing the OAU Convention.
By channeling the question of refugee settlement through the UN, a multilateral solution
could be nanced and executed in the overarching interests of maintaining the international
political order in the face of potential crisis situations caused by refugee displacement (Met-
cla e 1967, cited in Brooks and El-Ayouty 1970: 76). Many postcolonial African governments
even favored a situation in which African mobilities would be controlled again through exter-
nal institutions that o en relied on the backing of former colonial powers. In a speech to the
1967 United Nations conference on refugees, Diallo Telli, the rst secretary-general of the OAU,
described refugees as an international problem, because of “the potential threats it holds to sta-
bility, peace and security in Africa and the world.”
e internationalization of Africa’s emerging “refugee question” contributed to the conti-
nent’s displaced no longer being able to move undetected between neighboring states. UNHCR’s
humanitarian aid thus became a tool to control African refugee mobility. e rather ambiguous
activities of the United Nations on the continent o en provided “obscure moral support for lib-
eration, while at the same time pursuing programs which encourage a posture of rehabilitation
with the promise of a new life, serving free Africa, and not the cause of the liberation for which
they seek support” (Metcla e 1967, cited in Brooks and El-Ayouty 1970: 74). Reliance on aid
from Europe and North America meant that independent African states had to largely adopt
solutions to displacement that their former colonial powers favored. e OAU was encouraged
to recognize the speci city of African refugee situations, where physical disasters like drought,
ood, famine, disease, or poverty caused people to cross international borders.
Kenya rati ed the UN Refugee Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees in 1966 as
well as the OAU Convention in 1969, and included a rst form of refugee status recognition as
“Class M” entry permits under the Immigration Act of 1967 (Maina 2016). But the veneer of
progressiveness in the OAU’s refugee de nition did not obscure its more restrictive codes on
freedom of movement and restricting political rights of refugees. is was articulated through
the convention’s principal “distinction between a refugee who seeks a peaceful and normal life
and a person eeing his country for the sole purpose of fomenting subversion from outside,”
which e ectively opened the door for state repression. Kenya and Tanzania’s refugee policies
tended to re ect the prevailing political ideology of each host state and their alignments in the
international arena. A number of bilateral and multilateral agreements on the control of refu-
gees and dissidents between neighboring East African countries have a ected the continuing
safety of displaced communities in Kenya and Tanzania, who could then be forcibly repatriated
on the grounds of political opposition activities. Refugees were vulnerable to instability and
political change within their country of asylum, as successive governments o en had di er-
ent attitudes to the same refugee group. Economic crisis reinforced this scapegoating, and
refugees began to be labeled as economic saboteurs, rendering their positions increasingly
precarious.
Since the 1990s, the management of refugee mobility in Kenya and Tanzania has taken an
unparalleled turn toward using notions of “security.” While cumulative arrivals of displaced
populations have always invoked an imaginary of excess and threat during and a er colonial
times—describing refugee movements as “incursions” or “invasions” (Sequeira 1939)—the new
security paradigm was concerned with the spectre of “terrorism.” is was a clear continuation
Laborers, Migrants, Refugees 䡲 123
of popular perceptions of unsolicited African migrants as “destabilizing” in uences during the
1980s. en, colonial territoriality was upheld as a safeguard of postcolonial state power, while
forced migration seemed to empirically question the “identity containers” that Africa’s nation
builders sought to create. While this exclusion was rooted in colonial di erentiations between
desirable (authorized and for labor) and undesirable (unauthorized and without public revenue)
cross-border mobilities, displacement between independent states reignited fears of “foreign”
African bodies that would misuse the safety of exile in order to launch armed struggles against
governments in their countries of origin, making them “refugee warriors” (Zolberg et al. 1989:
275)—a term for rebel movements or the military wings of political parties that evokes primi-
tivity and atavism, and which, in so doing, delegitimizes their insurgencies.
e sheer magnitude of cross-border displacements during the 1990s, and the adverse e ects
of previous structural adjustment on state capacities (Loescher and Milner 2004; Veney 2007),
galvanized the Kenyan and Tanzanian governments into pursuing more hard-line policies
toward hosting refugees. Kenya introduced counterterror measures that focused disproportion-
ately on Somali refugees, who were singled out as particularly prone to religious extremism,
while South Sudanese refugees were perceived as generally troublesome or “unruly” (Hyndman
2000; Mwangi 2019). In a similar vein, Burundians in Tanzania were depicted either as “lazy”
populations who would put strains on the national budget, or as a h column made up of vio-
lent insurgents in the midst of a peace-loving host nation (Malkki 1995).
e latest iteration of di erentially governing migrant mobilities across the region are inter-
nationally funded projects for biometric borders and refugee monitoring systems. Not least with
respect to the ethnoracialized nature of aid and mobility management, Katja Jacobsen notes that
the comprehensive rolling out of “humanitarian refugee biometrics has rendered new domains
of life intervenable” (2017: 545). Once again, this raises the spectre of di erential valuation of
African bodies and the decision to immobilize some while enabling the conditional movement
of others. Kenya and Tanzania have been at the forefront of these attempts to create a “modern”
migration regime that is regulated, veri able, institutionally legible, and ultimately caters to the
political needs of states and intergovernmental agencies, including the IOM and UNHCR. In
conjunction with Ethiopia, the two countries are, at the time of writing, spearheading a regional
scheme as part of the European Union (EU)/IOM Joint Initiative in the Horn of Africa that is
designed to curb “irregular” migration ows along their shared borders and further along the
transit route to South Africa. is illustrates the continuing preoccupation of the Kenyan and
Tanzanian governments, and their nancial backers in international agencies, with managing
the circulation and presence of African bodies “out of place.” As the next section will highlight,
however, this is not an inevitability, and there are viable alternatives to the politics of contain-
ment and control in Africa.
e Limits of Control: Conviviality and Potentiality
Colonial categorizations of Africans as belonging and not belonging have shaped both Kenyan
and Tanzanian policies toward (im)migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees. Like their colonial
predecessors, many independent African states have continuously sought to control the mobil-
ity of citizens and noncitizens within their territories. In this section, however, we explore alter-
natives to (post)colonial legacies of exclusion that nd precedence in the histories of the two
countries. In contrast to the binary assumptions that underpin narrow postcolonial approaches
to migration and asylum in Kenya and Tanzania, Nyamnjoh reminds us that “being an insider
or an outsider is always work in progress, is permanently subject to renegotiation and is best
124 䡲 Hanno Brankamp and Patricia Daley
understood as relational and situational” (2013: 654; see also Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, this volume).
Rather than seeking to ossify the parochial nature of contemporary migration regimes in the
two countries, we wish to understand this renegotiation over time through the emergence of
conviviality and solidarity.
With ethnic groups and “kinship” ties frequently straddling colonially imposed borders,
many postcolonial African states have had di culty controlling organic cross-border mobility.
Instead, lived experiences on the continent are interwoven with notions of ux at the territo-
rial and symbolic “frontiers” that empirically question the compartmentalization of Africans
into contained units of belonging and reimagine them as what Nyamnjoh (2017: 258) terms
“frontier beings.” He notes that “frontier Africans . . . straddle myriad identity margins and
constantly seek to bridge various divides in the interest of the imperatives of living intercon-
nections, nuances and complexities made possible or exacerbated by the evidence of mobili-
ties and encounters.” As opposed to reinforcing colonial binaries at the border, this position
involves “experimenting with multiple layered and shi ing identities” (ibid.: 264). In fact,
under colonialism and for most of the postcolonial period, ordinary people living in the region
had a more nuanced approach to dealing with “foreigners” than their respective states, not least
through the incorporation of strangers without kinship ties into precolonial societies (Kopyto
1987). e e ects of colonialism on attitudes to “strangers” o en hark back to how laboring
bodies were di erentiated or positioned in the colonial ethnic hierarchies and economy. In
Tanzania, even though people on plantations stigmatized Burundian workers, in the border
regions they were o en even indistinguishable from local Waha communities, and their pro-
nunciation of certain Kiswahili words became a common way of detecting who was brought up
speaking French (Daley et al. 2018). In Kenya, di erences between ethnic groups were likewise
increasingly cast in the language of noncitizenship, hence depicting conationals derogatively
as “immigrants” (Jenkins 2012). When humanitarian actors sought to distinguish refugees in
Kenya and Tanzania from local citizens, with the help of a draconian state machinery, mobility
in the respective borderlands was further securitized and previously cosmopolitan communi-
ties fractured.
Nyamnjoh (2017) contends that essentializing claims to belonging are at odds with reali-
ties on the continent, and criticizes scholarship on Africa that focuses on bounded forms of
rootedness in a national heartland rather than on wider solidarities and convivial relationships
(see Malkki 1992). Research has inadvertently legitimized state policies that seek to strengthen
the relationship between national territory and identity, subliminally fueling calls to “root out”
foreigners and xenophobic attacks against Africans from other parts of the continent. We argue
that research on migration in Africa needs to reconceptualize migration as a decidedly political
act and deploy concepts that recognize the common humanity of Africans.
States on the continent have already demonstrated this empirical possibility in the 1960s
through the actions of the OAU Liberation Committee, which spearheaded liberation struggles
in African territories that were still under colonial and white minority rule. e Liberation
Committee was made up of nine states and had its base in Dar es Salaam. In a challenge to the
international community and prevailing norms of noninterference, Tanzania allowed liberation
movements from South Africa, Namibia, and Mozambique to maintain military bases within its
territory. Despite what was sometimes dismissed as a draconian refugee law, Tanzania’s stance
on freedom ghters from colonial and white-dominated regimes was progressive. Support for
subversive mobilities of African liberation was also embodied in the 1967 Arusha Declaration,
which espoused a quasi-socialist doctrine based on the principles of equality, majority rule,
and human rights. A committed pan-Africanist, President Julius Nyerere, in his address to the
ruling party’s national conference of 1967, declared:
Laborers, Migrants, Refugees 䡲 125
e total liberation of Africa must be a continuing concern of every independent African
state . . . e freedom that we seek must be for the peoples of Africa without distinction of
race, colour or religion. Racialist minority governments cannot be acknowledged because
they are a negation of the very basis of our existence. Co-existence is impossible; for if the
African peoples of South Africa and Rhodesia have no human right to govern themselves,
then what is the basis of Tanzania’s existence, of Zambia’s, of Kenya’s, and so on? (Nyerere
1974: 374)
During Nyerere’s presidency (1963–1985), Tanzania lent its support to various southern African
liberation movements, including the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO), Zim-
babwe African National Union (ZANU), South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO),
African National Congress (ANC), and the Pan-African Congress (PAC). In contrast to con-
temporary expectations of public resentment toward migration, this was actually popular with
Tanzanians themselves. African states like Tanzania have always feared that discourses on liber-
ation and the struggles against imperialism, colonialism, and racism may place the focus rmly
on the internal contradictions within their own society. Consequently, independent states were
more reluctant to criticize injustices in African-dominated countries. Nyerere’s Tanzania illus-
trated the contradictions of a state that sought to promote human dignity and rights within
spaces of white minority rule, while repatriating dissidents to African-dominated regimes like
Kenya and Burundi. e return of approaches that recognize the solidarities of African peoples
would mean breaking away from Eurocentric understandings of belonging and accepting that
alternatives reside in the everyday potentialities of African societies.
Nyamnjoh employs the concept of conviviality to suggest alternative ways of being and
belonging that are not antagonistic, exclusive, or violent. Conviviality, he explains, “depict[s]
diversity, tolerance, trust, equality, inclusiveness, cohabitation, coexistence, mutual accommo-
dation, interaction, interdependence, getting along, generosity, hospitality, congeniality, fes-
tivity, civility and privileging peace over con ict, among other forms of sociality” (Nyamnjoh
2017: 264). In this spirit, he calls for convivial scholarship that challenges exclusionary ideas
surrounding the mobility of Africans. Considering Tanzania’s historical experience of support-
ing subversive mobilities in southern Africa, there exists a potential for reimagining African
social worlds as driven by solidarity and association rather than a coloniality that views ethnic
identities as immutable and posits that Africans should be xed “in their place.” While the pros-
pect of greater freedom of movement, as adopted in the East African Common Market Protocol,
may indicate new ways of viewing migration in postcolonial Africa, it again emphasizes the
di erential valuation of African bodies as labor, some of which are highly skilled and desirable
while others are not.
Conclusion
In this article we have argued that considering long-term sociohistorical trajectories is essential
to understand contemporary hegemonic approaches to migration in Africa. Such perspectives
reveal the colonial dispositions of dominant conceptualizations of migration as well as current
policies and practices. Using the cases of labor migrants and refugees in Kenya and Tanzania,
we showed how the colonial state perennially constructed African bodies that could legally only
move as “labor” and how refugees became conscripted into a social category that excluded them
from the body politic of the postcolonial nation-state. Colonial and postcolonial African states
adopted policies to govern migration movements largely in accordance with Eurocentric frame-
works, but with international and regional security concerns in mind. A system of di erential
126 䡲 Hanno Brankamp and Patricia Daley
mobility under colonialism was seamlessly carried into the postcolonial era with the advent of
ostensibly “new” security challenges that included terrorism, uncontrolled border crossings and
solidarities, and the enduring violability of domestic citizenship regimes. Biometric technology
and border controls are modern responses to markedly old problems that governments on the
continent have faced when trying to seek international allies for reinforcing parochial visions
of belonging and mobility. With haunting parallels to colonial administration, under which
docile labor migrants were valued to a degree that unauthorized and forced migrants were not,
contemporary refugees in Kenya, Tanzania, and elsewhere throughout the global South are por-
trayed as only redeemable in public discourse through their reimagination as working, and
therefore pro table, bodies.
Finally, we contend that at times African states have been able to transcend external priorities
by developing and implementing policies that challenged white domination on the continent.
Because freedom, decolonization, and independence were o en conceptualized as recapturing
the state from people racialized as white, Africa’s political elites were not able to perceive how
white supremacist and Eurocentric thought had permeated and structured their understanding
of mobility in their own societies. is led to the development and reproduction of policies that
were counter to African everyday realities and that denied liberty and autonomous decision
making to the majority of people. Drawing on Nyamnjoh, we make a case for convivial schol-
arship that recognizes the pluralities and cosmopolitanism in the ways in which African lives
are lived.
䡲 HANNO BRANKAMP is Lecturer in Human Geography in the Department of Geography at
King’s College London. His research focuses primarily on humanitarianism, forced migra-
tion, camp geographies, violence and policing in Africa.
䡲 PATRICIA DALEY is Professor of the Human Geography of Africa at the School of Geography
and the Environment, University of Oxford. She has researched and published widely on
migration, political violence, and humanitarianism in Africa. She recently co-edited with
Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh e Routledge Handbook of South-South Relations.
䡲 NOTES
1. UNHCR Global Focus country pages for Kenya and Tanzania, reporting. See unhcr.org.
2. e colonial Tanganyika territory existed from 1916 until 1961 within the boundaries of present-day
mainland Tanzania. A er 1946, it was administered by the United Kingdom as a United Nations
Trust Territory.
3. In the British colonial hierarchy, black African subjects from within a particular colonial territory
were considered “resident natives”, while other colonial populations of non-African origin—who
hailed from other parts of the Empire—were accordingly labelled as “resident non-natives.”
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