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Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies
ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/wimm20
Deconstructing the Migrant/Refugee/Host Ternary
in Kigoma, Tanzania: Toward a Borderland Politics
of Solidarity and Reparation
Clayton Boeyink
To cite this article: Clayton Boeyink (2022): Deconstructing the Migrant/Refugee/Host Ternary in
Kigoma, Tanzania: Toward a Borderland Politics of Solidarity and Reparation, Journal of Immigrant
& Refugee Studies, DOI: 10.1080/15562948.2022.2050455
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/15562948.2022.2050455
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JOURNAL OF IMMIGRANT & REFUGEE STUDIES
Deconstructing the Migrant/Refugee/Host Ternary in Kigoma,
Tanzania: Toward a Borderland Politics of Solidarity and
Reparation
Clayton Boeyink
Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland
ABSTRACT
This article deconstructs the migrant/refugee/host ternary at the
Tanzania-Burundi borderlands of Kigoma region. I complicate migrant/ref-
ugee binary by presenting different trajectories and outcomes of Burundians
participating in agricultural systems surrounding refugee camps. This history
of migration and displacement is not new, however, but has been impelled
since the rise of European colonization. Though never refugees, Tanzanian
‘hosts’ share a history of internal displacement initiated during colonialism.
This host label obscures the diversity present in the region. Finally, I call
for borderland solidarity and postcolonial reparations for hosts to redress
the history of displacement and marginalization in the region.
I met Esther1 Nyarugusu refugee camp in Tanzania. She is legally classified as a Burundian
refugee, despite having a Tanzanian biological mother and spending most of her life in exile.
Esther’s father fled with hundreds of thousands from Burundi to Tanzania during the “selective
genocide” of Hutus in 1972 under Tutsi President Michel Micombero (Daley, 1989, pp. 338–339).
He eventually settled in Mishamo refugee settlement in Tanzania where he married Esther’s
Tanzanian mother who gave birth to Esther and her two brothers. Her father fled responsibility
immediately and their mother left them with an older Burundian woman two years later. Her
adopted mother took them back to Burundi in 1990 until 1994 when the first Hutu president,
Melchior Ndadaye was assassinated, and the civil war began.
Esther returned to Kigoma town in Tanzania with her cousins where she met her Burundian
husband. In 1997, police roundups and deportations in Kigoma forced them to relocate to
Mtendeli camp where they were discriminated against by neighbors for being “too Tanzanian”.
Esther recalled, “we found a very difficult life [in Mtendeli]. We were denied fetching water by
other refugees from northern provinces in Burundi.” In 1998, they migrated to Shinyanga region
in north-central Tanzania where her husband had previously worked and the police were not
as oppressive as in Kigoma. Cultivating without ownership of land became toilsome, and at
Esther’s insistence, they returned to her adopted family outside of Bujumbura in 2010—a decision
she would always regret.
They arrived in Burundi and again faced hostility from their neighbors. Her husband describes
this time bitterly: “I didn’t like that place. People there didn’t like newcomers—people like us
who came from Tanzania.” After six months they moved closer to the Tanzanian border with
many repatriated refugees like them who struggled to reintegrate without access to land and
livelihoods. They remained until 2015 when President Nkurunziza ran for a controversial third
term, which instigated a political crisis and widespread protests. The government responded
© 2022 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
CONTACT Clayton Boeyink cboeyink@ed.ac.uk Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland.
https://doi.org/10.1080/15562948.2022.2050455
KEYWORDS
Tanzania; binary; ternary;
borderland; migrants;
refugees; camps
2 C. BOEYINK
with crackdowns and renewed repression. Esther’s family and hundreds of others quickly took
the chance to return to Tanzania.
Francis Nyamnjoh would call Esther a “frontier being” who “straddle[s] myriad identity mar-
gins and constantly seek[s] to bridge various divides in the interest of the imperatives of living
interconnections, nuances and complexities made possible or exacerbated by the evidence of
mobilities and encounters” (2017, p. 124). Although legally Burundian, Esther has spent 30 of
her nearly 40 years living in Tanzanian villages, towns, and camps. She is conversant in Swahili
and four local languages. Her legal status is borne from unfortunate circumstances and rigid
bordering regimes, rather than any sense of belonging that Esther feels to a place. Her hybridity
leads to exclusion by Burundian and Tanzanian communities despite centuries of close cultural
affinities, trade, and migration long before colonialism. Her story intersects the narratives and
histories of many encamped, self-settled, and migratory Burundians in Tanzania who obscure
and collapse the arbitrary boundaries between migrant, refugee, and host common to
conflict-impacted borderlands. In this article, I argue that both sides of the Tanzanian-Burundian
borderland share a structural position of marginalization exacerbated by colonial and postcolonial
national projects and displacements. These shared traits and experiences are the basis to decon-
struct the migrant/refugee/host ternary,2 which subjugates frontier beings like Esther. Built onto
this analysis of the ternary, this article makes the policy recommendation that to ease tensions
among and mitigate the marginalization of various ternary actors, the international has the moral
obligation to deliver reparative aid spread equitably across the host community in the form of
cash grants.
A meandering analysis and methodology
This inquiry into the ternary has been a meandering process with thoughts and ideas visiting
me in whisps of vague ideas that I have struggled to make sense of since beginning research
in the Kigoma borderlands. The empirical data I present here was collected in fragments along-
side different qualitative research projects. My doctoral fieldwork occurred between March and
November 2017. However, I employ research assistants (RAs) who live in the camp and are paid
to conduct research and follow-up interviews and surveys to the present. This research passed
the University of Edinburgh’s Institutional Review Board, and all participants were informed and
verbally provided consent to participate in the research (due to incomplete literacy among this
population).
During PhD fieldwork I met Esther in Nyarugusu as part of the “financial diaries” method-
ology, which was inspired by the book Portfolios of the Poor (Collins et al., 2011). Our research
team collected financial data from 77 Congolese and Burundian households for a year. This
financial data is not presented here but through these methods, the RAs periodically return to
these same households to ask about their experiences of encampment and livelihood activities.
The case for a ternary solidarity and colonial reparations is assembled in five parts. The
financial diaries method revealed to me the extent of agricultural displacement economies sur-
rounding the camps, which is explored in part one, alongside contextual description of encamp-
ment in Tanzania. In October 2017, a Congolese financial diary interlocutor, Kisa, introduced
me to a Burundian migrant she had long employed. This man facilitated meetings with an
additional 28 Burundian migrant men and boys who were living and working near the camp.
After I left the camp, between August-November 2018, the RAs interviewed 16 Burundian
migrants, 40 camp resident land renters, and 13 Tanzanian landowners.
In these interviews, I learned how similar the characteristics were of many Burundian migrants
and refugees—introduced in part two—yet how divergent their migration trajectories and out-
comes have been. This speaks to the arbitrariness of the binary—the focus of this special issue.
I also picked up valuable information on the agricultural system and migrant/refugee/host rela-
tions through two UN research consultancies in 2018 which analyzed livelihood and agricultural
value-chains in camps and surrounding communities.
JOURNAL OF IMMIGRANT & REFUGEE STUDIES 3
The historical analysis of this article draws from secondary literature of the contested history
of the Great Lakes region of Central and East Africa from the precolonial era to the present.
These sources, featured in part three, ubiquitously speak to the deep cultural, trade, and migra-
tion connections of Burundians and Ha people (the largest ethnic group in western Tanzania)
and recalls the severe underdevelopment and stratification of present-day Burundi and Kigoma
by their respective colonial overseers. While Burundians are known for their multiple
“re-displacements” (Purdeková, 2017), Ha people have also experienced severe colonial and state
induced displacements.
As part of a different project examining mobility of camp residents, I carried out two rounds
of surveys with financial diaries households in May and August 2021. Despite these shared
histories of mobility and oppression, in speaking to Burundians and Ha individuals living near
the camp, I encountered prejudice, differentiation, and acute instances of conflict that currently
divide these borderland peoples. Part four analyses the solidification of postcolonial borders,
which has hardened perceived distinctions. In part five, I make the case for solidarity or “con-
viviality” (Brankamp & Daley, 2020; Nyamnjoh, 2017) accompanied by international reparations
for the underdevelopment of Burundi and western Tanzania since colonialism. To assess where
cash redress should be distributed, I deconstruct the “host community” as an analytic category.
“Displacement agriculture”
Esther joined nearly 250,000 Burundians who fled after 2015—most of whom had been
“re-displaced” in the 1993–2005 civil war (Purdeková, 2017). Some, like Esther, were thrice
displaced since the 1970s. The first arrivals were housed in Nyarugusu refugee camp, where it
doubled the 80,000 Congolese refugees who had been living there since its establishment in
1996. Those who fled later were accommodated in the repurposed camps, Nduta and Mtendeli
(Esther’s former residence). Nearly all who fled in 2015 were already poor in Burundi because
they failed to economically and socially reintegrate upon their last displacement. Many used the
2015 political crisis as a pretext to find more livelihoods in Tanzanian camps rather than purely
a fear of persecution (Schwartz, 2019), though that dread was present for many. Exacerbating
the situation, Tanzania has one of the strictest encampment policies in the world where refugees
are forced to live in camps with no freedom of movement to seek livelihoods outside the camp,
despite the country being known for its hospitality and “open door” policy under President
Julius Nyerere.3
Despite these restrictions, countless refugees illegally leave the camp daily to seek wages due
to the difficulties in raising capital to start businesses within the camp. The vast majority of
those leaving the camp do so as laborers on farmland in the abundant agricultural land sur-
rounding the three camps in the Kigoma region. Due to ample land availability, Tanzanians near
the camps rent part of their land to camp residents (primarily to the wealthier Congolese,
although some Burundians rent as well). Tanzanian landowners and land-renting refugees often
employ Burundian refugees to labor on these farms. What complicates this system further is
that Burundian labor migrants who seasonally travel to Kigoma are also employed by Tanzanian
landowners and refugee tenants. Despite this longstanding labor system, the late President John
Magufuli had been cracking down on livelihoods outside the camp to force Burundians to leave
the country. If refugees or migrants are caught by the police outside the camp, they either pay
a bribe with all their earnings or serve six months of jail time, which includes manual labor
and harsh prison conditions.4
As discussed further in the final section, there is a heterogeneity in how Tanzanian wealth
as well as how landowners treat laborers and renters. I heard many reports of exploitative wages
through leveraging the threat of police violence, however, I encountered instances of convivial
friendships borne of long-term economic engagement, free land allocations to refugees and
migrants, and even Tanzanians hiding and shielding Burundians and Congolese from military
searches (Boeyink, 2020, pp. 71–73).
4 C. BOEYINK
President Magufuli’s constriction of asylum has been an all-out assault on refugee livelihoods.
This has included the shutdown of a popular and effective World Food Programme (WFP) cash
transfer program (Boeyink, 2019); the closure of vital camp common market, the main center
of business shared by camp residents and nearby communities; and reports that Tanzanian and
Burundian Burundian security forces have kidnapped, ransomed, tortured, and forcibly returned
Burundian refugees (Boeyink & Falisse, 2021). These untenable conditions have prohibited Esther
and countless others from earning money in Nyarugusu. Compounding this, in the summer of
2021, Esther’s husband left her to be with a Tanzanian woman in Kigoma town and sold the
small plot of land that they owned in Burundi, which was her last tangible financial asset. This
massive setback led Esther to repatriate in August to Makamba near the Burundian to collect
repatriation money offered by the UN. Esther’s move even closer to the border, however, is
deepening her frontier ontology as she plans to start a cross-border cassava trade business upon
arrival.
The binary
Consistent with the authors of this special issue, people on the move within Africa do not neatly
fit migrant or refugee categories. The binary is blurred and needs contextualization. I briefly
highlight how access to land, familial structures, and past refugee experiences all interact to
shape whether people become encamped refugees or circular migrants.
Many of my interlocutors firmly identified as migrants rather than refugees. A group inter-
viewed in October 2018 came from northern provinces such as Gitega, Karuzi, Ngozi, or Kirundo.
Refugees (mostly Tutsi) from these provinces fled in higher numbers to Rwanda than Tanzania.
At the apogee of refugee numbers in 2018, those provinces each had less than 5% of all Burundian
refugees in Tanzania (UNHCR., 2018a) and higher proportions in Rwanda (UNHCR, 2018b).
Unlike the civil war, the 2015 crisis was mostly about the suppression of dissent and extreme
taxation. While violence occurred in the north of the country, these particular migrants were
not subject to it. As such, one 22-year-old man from Karuzi Province said, “I didn’t flee a war,
in fact, I like my country Burundi.” What brought them to Tanzania was the need for wages
not available in Burundi. Jean-Baptiste, a 26-year-old from Gitega explained, “I came to Tanzania
looking for life. There is not enough money in Burundi for labor. We are only paid BIR 5,000
(USD $2.56).”
I was initially confused by the presence of labor migrants near the camps. Why not accept
the free humanitarian housing and food but still cultivate as many refugees do? In October
2017, I met a group of laborers who came from Ruyigi Province, which borders Tanzania. Indeed,
Ruyigi registered nearly 40,000 refugees in Tanzania, or about 20% of the total population
(UNHCR., 2018a). Despite violence in Ruyigi, many could not afford the costs of displacement
to Tanzania. A man in this group explained, “we didn’t consider coming as refugees. We don’t
have enough money to take our family to camps. If we had money we would come.” Another
added, “we came here only seeking life and jobs. We are poor and can’t take our family because
we cannot afford the bodaboda [motorcycle] to cross the border. This way I can still see my
family.” This is consistent with Nicholas Van Hear (2004) who argues that it requires significant
financial and social capital to traverse borders during conflict.
For those I spoke with, poverty is the constant factor impelling movement to Tanzania. The
key difference between a migrant like Jean-Baptiste and a camp resident like Esther is the own-
ership of land. Both are displaced to Tanzania, but Jean-Baptiste and other migrants’ families
are grounded to the land that they still have access to, which most (repeat) refugees do not.
Migrant laborers face far worse conditions on the farm than camp-based laborers where they
must live in makeshift huts on the farmland or in the forests, exposing them to the weather
elements and police. Due to humanitarian aid, camp laborers can afford to take lower wages,
which has consequently lowered the wages for migrants. Moreover, life has gotten more difficult
for labor migrants under Magufuli. One migrant explained, “before there was some security and
JOURNAL OF IMMIGRANT & REFUGEE STUDIES 5
people cared for our labor, but now there is no security, and they can arrest you instead of
paying.” Because of the crackdown, he said he is considering moving onward to Uganda or
South Sudan.
Family structures also impact migration or asylum in different ways. A 30-year-old laborer
from Ngozi I met has long worked in Tanzania and has recently found a Tanzanian who pro-
vided room and board, which is atypical. Unlike others, however, he split his household up and
his wife and children live in the camp while he remains unregistered and periodically returns
to Burundi to check on their land. This leads to an ambiguousness if this family could be
considered migrants or refugees. Imani, a 48-year-old from Kirundo province, also planned to
strategically divide his household at an even greater distance, yet his plans went awry. He left
Burundi before the political crisis in 2014 to travel to South Africa where he could register as
a refugee and find higher wages. He paid somebody to take him there but only got as far as
the Rukwa region before the man vanished with his money. He was unable to complete his
journey but had no land to return to and by 2015 felt unsafe to return to Burundi amidst the
political crisis. Like others, Imani eschewed camp life because of his experience during the war
living in two different camps. He vowed never to live in a camp again. “I hate Tanzania”, he
hissed to me in distaste. Instead of rooting himself in a camp or Burundi, he travels across the
western regions of Kigoma, Rukwa, and Katavi seeking farm wages. Andre echoes this sentiment:
“I knew Tanzania is not a kind country because I’d been here until 2012 as a refugee and I saw
how they treated us then. I swore to never live in Tanzania as a refugee again”.
Finally, I met inverse scenarios where men who have been migrant laborers for most of their
lives, but amidst 2015 turmoil they noted people fleeing en masse and either felt trapped or
saw the strategic opportunity for material gain through encampment until things became safer
in Burundi. Esther’s story is also instructive of Tanzania’s bordering regime. She would prefer
to live as a migrant in Shinyanga like yesteryears, yet crackdowns on self-settled refugees/migrants
like her under Magufuli has displaced the possibility. Despite the precarity of agriculture in
Tanzania, one Ruyigi migrant explained that they migrate because “it is in our nature. We take
from our parents and their parents too.” This sentiment of mobility as inevitability is reflective
of the longue durée history of migration in the Great Lakes borderlands.
Kigoma borderlands: mobility, displacement, and underdevelopment
The Great Lakes, also known as the interlacustrine region, encompasses Rwanda, Burundi, and
stretches across parts of Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and north-western Tanzania.
These borderlands have shared cultures, religions, and linguistic features for centuries.5 I focus
on the area known as Buha, which borders Lake Tanganyika and Burundi and encompasses
most of present-day Kigoma. I argue that peoples on either side of the border have a history
of forced mobility before and during colonialism that cannot be untwined but which could be
recalled and recognized to foster a spirit of solidarity.
Tutsi (also called Batutsi or Tusi) people have long trickled out of what is modern Burundi
and Rwanda. Over the last four centuries, the Tutsi were drawn by the salt trade and displaced
by conflict, population growth and overcrowding, and environmental episodes of drought and
famine. This led to a “filling up” rather than invasion of places like Buha (Chrétien, 2003, pp.
145–146; Rockel, 2019, p. 247). Tutsi, estimated to be around 10-15% of Buha’s population during
colonialism (Brain, 1973, p. 43), brought the valuable assets of cattle, which were scarce in
agricultural Buha and gave them patronage and control over Ha peasants. The power in each
kingdom of Buha was held by the Tutsi mwami or king (baami is the plural form).
Some scholars argued the Tutsi were accepted in Buha due to religious and cultural affinities
and cattle-based patron-client relations (Gwassa & Mbwiliza, 1976). Others claim the Tutsi
“infiltrated” the land and brought a “caste structure” as “overlords” (Brain, 1973; Wayne, 2008).
More recent work by historian Michele Wagner downplays the cultural distinctness of Tutsi and
Ha, instead relating differentiation to class, geography, and ecology: “they were social class terms
6 C. BOEYINK
referring to ordinary people (Baha) and to those with an unusual ‘pedigree’ (Batutsi). Yet, in
all their polysemy, the two terms none the less refer, at a simple, everyday level, to lowlanders
and highlanders” (Wagner, 1996b, p. 177).
Without wading into this debate, two things are clear: First, there were plethora uniting
features across the border of the Malagarassi River. Wagner eloquently explains that precolonial
Buha and southern Burundi were “subregions of the same place. […] Spanning the river, house-
holds and families traded together, gathered in friendship and mutual aid, and united in marriage,
thereby bequeathing bonds of solidarity to future generation. The histories of Buha and [southern
Burundi] resonate together from the earliest memories recoverable in oral history into the
twentieth century” (Wagner, 1996a, p. 18). Moreover, Kirundi and Kiha languages are mutually
intelligible. Indeed, many people claim Hutu and Ha to be the same (Brain, 1973, p. 63; Weiskopf,
2011, p. 69)—although this sentiment is not shared all my Burundian interlocutors. Secondly,
while differences should not be glossed over, it is agreed by scholars that Buha and Urundi
societies were deeply unequal. These stratified class structures where power was held in Tutsi
elites’ hands was exacerbated and militarized under colonialism through indirect rule.
Locating and controlling labor was essential for extracting resources in all colonies, including
East Africa. German colonialists introduced sisal as the primary cash crop in Tanganyika and
developed railroad infrastructure to bring it to global markets. Western Tanganyika and Urundi
became essential labor reserves for sisal plantations, which left the development of these periph-
eries a colonial afterthought (Daley, 1989; Wayne, 2008).
In Tanganyika, taxation was the principal method for extracting labor. Taxes necessitated
people to seek wages eastward on large sisal plantations. Coercion and collection of taxes were
outsourced to Tutsi baami, who were given authority and militarized during British rule (Iliffe,
1979, p. 307; Wayne, 2008). Similarly, in Urundi, the Belgian colonialists disregarded the complex
social system that blurred ethnicity, class, and occupation and chose certain Tutsi as “natural”
rulers and consolidated power in their hands, which set in motion decades of extreme violence
that would follow decolonization.6 Baami enforced forced compulsory labor known as ubeletwa
(Daley, 1989), and when the British needed labor, they actively recruited those fleeing ubeletwa
in Urundi (Brankamp & Daley, 2020; Chaulia, 2003). Baami chieftains in Buha benefited from
the recruitment of Rundi migrants because they extracted taxes and tributes from these migrants
(Brain, 1973, p. 44).
Laborers from Buha and Urundi shared the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder on the sisal
plantation. They were often employed as the sisal-cutters—the most difficult and ill-regarded
work available. British officials in 1936 said “these jobs were so poorly paid that, in effect, a
[Ha] laborer who was employed on sisal estates earned less than he needed to live on” (Wayne,
2008, p. 326). These jobs paid for colonial taxes and bridewealth necessary for social status but
they often had to return to this difficult work after marriage (Iliffe, 1979, pp. 305–309). Iliffe
sums up the British’s low-regard of the Ha:
Between the wars the British sporadically attempted to establish cash crops in Buha, but depression prices
discouraged them and gradually the labour reservoir stereotype became fixed in British minds […] [T]he
local provincial commissioner said bluntly that Buha’s function was to supply labour (1979, p. 468).
The presence of tsetse fly in Buha exacerbated the already marginalized this labor reserve,
resulting in additional displacements and greater underdevelopment.
Buha displacements
The Tsetse fly was a major disruption across colonial Africa. The fly was often located in wooded
areas not fully developed for large-scale agriculture, which characterized lowland Buha. Tsetse
flies spread trypanosomiasis, known more famously as “sleeping sickness”. In the early colonial
years between 1896–1908, an estimated 700,000 Africans died in Uganda and modern DR Congo
(Weiskopf, 2011, p. 84). British colonialists spent huge sums of money at the time to research
JOURNAL OF IMMIGRANT & REFUGEE STUDIES 7
and contain sleeping sickness. In Tanganyika, the largest resettlement for sleeping sickness across
all the colonies occurred in lowland Buha between 1933 and 1941. During this time a quarter
of the Ha population—more than 65,000 people—were forcibly removed from their dispersed
homesteads into eleven “sleeping sickness concentrations” (Weiskopf, 2011, p. 5). While the
resettlements were designed as a public health intervention, they conveniently doubled as a way
of collecting additional tax revenue, forcing toilsome bush clearings, and instituting a more
concentrated lifestyle built around sedentary agricultural schemes, which was central to colonial
social engineering. Noncompliance was met with beatings, fines, additional labor conscription,
jail-time, and destroyed homes and crops (Weiskopf, 2011, pp. 190–206).
Ha people called these forced movements, ugwimo, which translates in Kiha to “chaos” or
“war” because most people lost access to salt mines, beehives, and game animals, which were
all primary sources of wealth and prestige (Weiskopf, 2011, pp. 127–149). The densely packed
settlements increased social tensions, forced undesired crops to be grown, and increased women’s
labor burdens. Congruent to the underdevelopment that resulted from Buha’s use as a labor
reserve, a British District Officer commented on the failure of development in the settlements,
which had no cattle or schools: “Practically nothing has been done to advance the welfare of
the Waha” (Weiskopf, 2011, pp. 209–210). Into the 1950s, technological breakthroughs made the
settlements less necessary and baami lost much of their power. However, independence brought
massive new displacements from neighboring countries and within Buha again.
Tanzanian independence did not spare the Ha from further displacement and underdevelop-
ment. Villagization was central to President Nyerere’s guiding philosophy of “African socialism”,
known as ujamaa, which translates to “familyhood”. Beginning as a voluntary initiative, however,
by the 1970s, with low uptake by rural populations, villagization became mandatory. Operation
Kigoma resettled more than 100,000 people into 129 ujamaa villages from 1972-1974 (Weiskopf,
2011, p. 6). Weiskopf argues that these displacements had similar logics and consequences as
the sleeping sickness resettlements where noncompliance was met by destruction of homes,
crops, and livestock (2011, pp. 284–291). Lal more broadly links the colonial and postcolonial
eras: “others experienced villagization as a violent disruption of their lives identify a fundamental
continuity between the colonial state and the post-colonial Tanzanian state in general, and dis-
miss the “politics” of ujamaa as another example of both state invasiveness and neglect” (2012,
p. 225). While the colonists inflamed class tensions and essentialized and differentiated “tribes”,
which led to mass conflicts and war, independence in Tanzania and Burundi hastened the ossi-
fication of the border and detached many borderland affinities fostered over centuries.
Dividing the borderlands
Presently, the separation between Burundians and Tanzanian Ha is stark and materially felt in
and around the camps. Indeed, Tanzanians nearby often describe Burundian refugees as “dirty”
(Brankamp & Daley, 2020, p. 117) or derogatorily as “tractors” who are valued only for their
famous work ethic of hard labor on farms (Malkki, 1995). This prejudice, combined with the
illegality of migrant and refugee labor, leads to incidents of nonpayment and the threat to report
laborers to the police if they respond, which many laborers reported to me. A significant inci-
dent occurred in April 2017, which many refugees often referred to. At the time there was a
large food ration reduction, which impelled more people to leave the camp to seek wages.
Tanzanian employers collectively decided to not pay them, which led to threats from the workers.
The employers responded violently with machetes, and I was told that 28 refugees sustained
injuries and one person was killed. While I spoke to Tanzanians and camp residents who have
formed bonds through empathy, friendship, mutually beneficial business, and intermarriage
(Daley et al., 2018), there is a greater sense of ambivalence at best, and enmity at worse, in my
discussions, despite the similar cultural histories between refugees and hosts. This is why some-
body like Esther feels safer to blend into Shinyanga and claim to be from Buha, rather than in
a Kigoma border town where she is unable to “invisibilize” (Boeyink, 2020; Daley et al., 2018).
8 C. BOEYINK
From the Burundians’ perspectives, only ten of the 29 financial diary households agreed that
Burundians and Ha people are “similar or the same”. The most common response was that “the
Waha have different customs, morals, and values”. Others said that if they were so similar then
they would not be mistreated as previously described. However, the most common response was
simply, “because Waha are Tanzanians and Warundi are Burundians”. Julien said, forcefully:
“relations between Waha and Warundi are not good because of the Tanzanian government. The
government hates refugees. It is impossible to make a good relationship with a group that is
hated by the government.” These incisive prognoses of state-sponsored nationalism as the problem
are borne out in the literature of post-independence Tanzania.
Prejudice and division between nations and nationalities on the borderlands did not occur
in a vacuum. President Nyerere was a committed pan-Africanist who supported dissidents fighting
white settler colonies in neighboring countries such as South Africa and Zimbabwe (Chaulia,
2003). He abolished the political salience of tribes and indirect rule established by the colonialists
(Lal, 2012). However, decolonization in Tanzania also injected a nationalistic sense of belonging,
which hardened the bordering and asylum regime. Brankamp and Daley argue: “Nyerere’s Tanzania
illustrated 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” (2020, p. 125). Ultimately, the Tanzanian nation-building project—and the
tragic and violent postcolonial failures of Tanzania’s north-westerly neighbors—significantly
disconnected the close cross-border connections in Buha and other border regions.
Jill Rosenthal recounts the colonial and decolonizing period in Ngara District, which borders
Rwanda and Burundi where Subi and Hangaza chiefdoms shared similar borderland cultural,
familial, and trade affinities. However, as in Kigoma, decolonization changed everything:
Ngarans came to identify as Tanzanians during the process of decolonization; a time when local political
identities congealed around internationally reified categorizations of the “refugee” and the “citizen”. It was
during this process that the border first became relevant to popular conceptions of identity in Ngara – as
Ngarans for the first time began to perceive of themselves as belonging within the Tanzanian nation-state,
rather than within Great Lakes region communities (2015, p. 262).
This essentialization cuts both ways, however. I often heard Nyarugusu residents speak of an
essentialized distrust of all Tanzanians rather than state actors or others who have wronged
them. However, the “hosts”, like refugees and all communities, are not a homogenous block.
Before proposing ways forward to repair borderland relationships, we must better understand
the make-up of the populations surrounding the camp including who the “winners” and “losers”
in their midst.
Who is the host community?
More than three decades ago, Robert Chambers warned that rural host communities of refugees
were “hidden losers” whose welfare was neglected due to aid focusing on refugee populations
(Chambers, 1986). Similarly, Aukot provocatively titled an article, “It is better to be a refugee
than a Turkana in Kakuma” (Aukot, 2003). I join others to contend that the very concept of
host community is a problematic because there is no such thing as one homogenous “host
community” and the “burden” of hosting refugees has not been shared by all.
The word “host” holds multiple meanings, which includes the act of hosting a guest; a living
organism hosting a parasite; or a person who has tissue or organs transplanted. How should
communities near refugee camps in Kigoma be perceived? Party planners? Parasite victims?
Organ recipients? A more apt question to ask is, “who in the community fits each definition of
host?” Cory Rodgers (2021), researching near Kakuma camp in Kenya, recognizes that there is
no essentialized “host community”. There are Turkana people with longstanding claims to the
area and non-Turkana Kenyans seeking humanitarian opportunities in the area. The same is
true in Kigoma. I have hitherto described the Ha, but there are also Sukuma pastoralists, Chaga
JOURNAL OF IMMIGRANT & REFUGEE STUDIES 9
businesspeople, and other ethnicities who migrate near the camps. Fiddian-Qasmiyeh further
blurs the refugee/host dichotomy by pointing to northern Uganda where “hybrid hosts” were
former IDPs who now host refugees. She also illuminates “refugee-hosts” in Lebanon. Here
long-term Palestinian refugees host Syrian refugees as well as Palestinians and Iraqis newly
displaced from Syria (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2016). Encompassing a broad history, the Ha have
similarly experienced displacement and underdevelopment alongside Burundians during the
colonial era.
Rodgers argues that people in host community experience differentiated impacts by the “bur-
den” and “benefits” of refugees and humanitarians. However, institutions like UNHCR and the
World Bank make “sweeping claims” about host community benefits to push their economic
agendas (Rodgers, 2021, p. 16). Conversely, the Tanzanian state characterizes refugees solely as
a burden needed to be expelled (Rudolf, 2019). In reality, the benefits from refugee camps in
Tanzania often are channeled to local leaders or wealthier businesspeople in Kigoma, which is
reminiscent of the enrichment of baami elite during colonialism.
For example, during a group discussion with business leaders of the Kibondo Chamber of
Commerce, a participant told me that amidst the most recent influx of Burundian refugees in
2015, “some of the businessmen and their leaders took their proposals to the District Commissioner
to allow refugees to stay in the previous camps because they could see profits like in those
previous years”. This concurs with Jansen and de Bruijne’s research in Kigoma where discussions
over locations of new camp sites, “had spurred competition among local leaders in the whole
region to host the new site, aiming to benefit from the socio-economic potential of the refugee
camp and its humanitarian entourage” (Jansen & de Bruijne, 2020, p. 675). In this discussion,
many described the benefits of living nearby Mtendeli and Nduta camps including larger markets
for their products and renting housing and agricultural land to NGO workers. One individual
benefited immensely by subcontracting the sale of natural gas canisters to a large NGO to be
distributed to camp residents. Yet even these beneficiaries bemoaned the awarding of construction
and infrastructural contracts to larger businesses from Dar es Salaam and elsewhere.
Interviews and workshops with other Tanzanians living closer to camps than the business-
persons took a different tenor. Whitaker (2002) contends there are “winners and losers” near
Tanzanian camp. Most of these discussants were struggling as subsistence farmers in the poorest
region in Tanzania. For some, renting land to refugees was more akin to an organ donation for
desperately needed cash. However, most often, the poorest without access to land (or whose
land was appropriated without compensation by the state or UN to make way for the camp) or
people whose crops have been stolen by refugees amidst food ration cuts are most adversely
affected by the presence of refugee camps. For them, refugees are described more like parasites
or burdens. This section brings to the fore that in Kigoma, despite inter-communal socio-economic
differences, Tanzanian nationalism unites these residents under the banner of the flag rather
than former interlacustrine regionalism. If nationalism is the cause of xenophobia and division
in this borderland, what, if anything, offers possible solutions?
Toward a politics of displacement solidarity and reparations
In the final section, I join with Brankamp and Daley (2020) who build on Francis Nyamnjoh’s
(2017) antidote that frontier beings such as Esther should not be excluded in the borderlands,
but rather be approached with a spirit of conviviality. This solidarity works toward fulfilling the
decolonial project of Nyerere in Tanzania, which has only occurred in starts and stops for ref-
ugees (Chaulia, 2003), yet currently seems so distant. Naturally, Nyarugusu residents and nearby
Tanzanians offer insightful and actionable solutions, which I incorporate into a call for reparative
justice through cash to host communities from the international community.
When I asked how to improve relations with their neighbors, many suggested sensitization
campaigns and meetings with local populations to counter stereotypes. They sought to appeal
to their sense of humanity. Some requested provision of charcoal so camp residents do not need
10 C. BOEYINK
to cut down trees outside the camp and further deplete forest cover near the camp, a common
grievance of hosts. I mentioned that the government shut down the camp market created by
UNHCR, which was hailed as a success of social and economic integration by all I spoke with.
Some people cited a reopening this market would ease conflict. However, the state’s logic to
close this market does not have the wellbeing of refugees or hosts in mind with this shutdown.
The state’s goal is to remove refugees from Tanzania out of loyalty to its alliance with Burundi
and due to a perceived lack of support and appreciation from international donors of their
burden (Boeyink & Falisse, 2021). Therefore, Nyarugusu resident, Jacques, recognizes that any
possibility of positive change fundamentally rests with the Tanzanian state: “The Tanzanian
government must change behaviors so that their people see their example. The government is
pushing us to return to Burundi and now they feel supported by the government to mistreat
Burundian refugees.” I argue that the international community—the predecessors and beneficiaries
of the colonizers—must include material inducements, with reparative language in order to the
change the government’s anti-refugee trajectory. Moreover, drawing from previous sections, which
illuminated the colonial underdevelopment and displacement of Buha, it is morally required
to do so.
I am not the first to call for reparations for refugees, though most scholars focus on the
three durable solutions for refugees: repatriation, resettlement, and local intuition (Bradley, 2013;
Souter, 2014). For Souter, it is important that “those morally responsible for harm” make amends
(2014, p. 182), although he makes no mention of the colonial histories which set into motion
the conditions for many postcolonial conflicts and displacement. E. Tendayi Achiume argues for
a general allowance of migration of former colonial and imperial subjects to the metropoles
(Achiume, 2019). While in agreement with this scholarship and advocacy, there is merit in
including hosts into this equation.
There is a tacitly understood duty by international donors to Kigoma region due to economic
marginalization and decades of hosting refugees. Currently, there is a USD $63 million inter-
vention known as Kigoma Joint Programme where 16 UN agencies are focusing on the envi-
ronment, youth and women, education, agriculture, health, and WASH (water, sanitation, and
hygiene) (United Nations Tanzania, 2019). There is not sufficient space to evaluate this program’s
efficacy, however, a similar initiative was implemented in Kigoma and Kagera from 2008–2011
and by their own evaluation flagged questions about who benefited from the program:
There was concern amongst some informants in the regions that the funded activities did not always
reflect the priorities of the districts. This was because some of the districts’ immediate priorities lay outside
what the programme could support […] Assessment of programme relevance also begs the question:
relevant for whom? (Zinyama & Mwisomba, 2011, p. 21)
Additionally, the high overhead costs of funding 16 UN organizations and their sub-contracting
partners means a diversion of benefits for the Kigoma hosts.
My counterproposal is relatively simple. In addition to continuing the care and maintenance
of the Kigoma refugee camps (including additional cooking fuel), the donor community should
recognize the burgeoning ‘new politics of distribution’ (Ferguson, 2015) amidst lack of wage
availability around Africa and the Global South and provide non-trivial one-off or time-limited
cash transfers to households within an agreed-upon distance from the three camps. This can
be linked to the existing infrastructure of the Tanzania Social Action Fund (TASAF) operating
in Kigoma, the government’s cash-based social safety net program, which WFP already has an
existing relationship with (WFP., 2021). This theoretically cuts out many of the UN intermedi-
aries and include the poorest households bearing the largest “burden” of hosting camps, which
breaks up the history unequal benefits in the host region. Moreover, channeling cash through
TASAF can score the ruling party CCM political equity in a region where opposition has enjoyed
some success.
Moreover, it would gesture to the Tanzanian state that they are supported and appreciated
for their continued housing of refugees. Indeed, previous promising efforts to liberally reform
JOURNAL OF IMMIGRANT & REFUGEE STUDIES 11
encampment policies were shut down by Magufuli citing the lack of financial support and rec-
ognition for their long history of hosting refugees (Rudolf, 2019). This cash infusion could could
be a tactic to negotiating an end to encampment and less restrictive migration agreements similar
to ECOWAS of West Africa, which would benefit Burundian labor migrants (Long, 2014). Beyond
a posture of appreciation to the central state, messaging should be clear locally in modern Buha
that the cash is redress for historical displacement and marginalization and would go to all
rather than aid workers and local elites, which is often the case of development projects.
Conclusion
Covering a wide historic range, this article details the constant mobility and shared cultures of
the peoples straddling the Kigoma borderlands. Like many complex displacement contexts, dis-
tinguishing people on the move as migrants or refugees is problematic. Esther and others share
characteristics of both migrants and refugees. It is a more complex task to add hosts into a
borderland ternary. This may seem like a conceptual stretch because after Tanzanian indepen-
dence and decolonization, borderland people identify to a nation rather than interlacustrine
trade, familial, and linguistic networks as they had for centuries. As Rosenthal claims, “when
Ngarans speak about what it means, and meant, to be Tanzanian they often posit that it means
not being Rwandan” (Rosenthal, 2015, p. 279). This is the same of Ha people vis-à-vis Burundian
migrants and refugees. Resultantly, Burundian refugees are facing pressure by the Tanzanian
state to repatriate and are running out of options. This has also constricted “displacement agri-
culture” near the Kigoma refugee camps (Boeyink, 2020), an opportune space for mutual exchange.
Despite the current exclusionary and nationalist atmosphere, I am arguing that both sides of
the border have been swept up by overlapping displacements, conflict, and inequality set in
motion by colonial violence.
Central to this marginalization were the colonial practices of indirect rule, which inflamed
ethnic tensions by placing arbitrarily power in the hands of Tutsi ruling classes in Urundi and
Buha, which were tasked with labor recruitment, conscription, and tax collection. This labor
exploitation displaced Rundi and Ha men to coastal sisal plantations where people they were
on the lowest social stratum and saw virtually no colonial investment in their homelands. It is
no coincidence that modern Burundi and Kigoma are some of the poorest areas in the world
today. Burundian post-independence conflicts led to massive refugee and IDP movements which
“entrenched displacement” causing severe distrust of the Burundian state (Purdeková, 2017).
Buha hosts also saw separate large-scale forced resettlements by the colonial and postcolonial
states to devastating effect.
What then is this link between present-day migrants, refugees, and hosts and coerced labor,
sleeping sickness, and villagization displacement episodes described above? The continuities of
these seemingly disparate events are present in the ongoing coloniality of migration control; the
impulse to separate, manipulate, and contain populations, which continued after colonialism
formally ended:
Instead of transforming the colonial modes of managing and hierarchizing noncitizens, many postcolonial
African states actually perpetuated parochial and racialized categories of mobility, despite at times exper-
imenting with progressive politics […] their current migration regimes suggest a continuing preoccupation
with the rigid categories of race, ethnicity, and belonging for managing mobile Africans (Brankamp &
Daley, 2020, p. 114)
Borderlands generally, and refugee camps specifically, are often the arenas where these exclusions
play out. Substantial reparative amends are a way to acknowledge the afterlives of colonialism,
which could be a launching point to foster a borderland solidarity that has been assaulted since
independence.
12 C. BOEYINK
Notes
1. All names used are pseudonyms to protect the identity and confidentiality of the informants.
2. For the sake of brevity, I refer the migrant/refugee binary and migrant/refugee/host ternary to “the binary”
and “the ternary”.
3. For a fuller history of asylum in Tanzania since colonialism see (Brankamp & Daley, 2020; Chaulia, 2003).
4. See Boeyink (2020) for a more in-depth study of this agricultural system.
5. See Chrétien (2003) and Newbury (2009) for a deeper history of these peoples and places.
6. For a more in-depth history of the violent colonial history in Ruanda-Urundi see Daley (2008); Mamdani
(2002); Newbury (1998).
Funding
This work was supported by the Leverhulme Trust.
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