Refugee status and political activities have morphed from mutually constitutive categories in the period of anticolonial struggles to binaries in post-independence Africa. The fluid categorizations of the anticolonial era are in contrast to contemporary categorizations of refugees that preclude political activities and replace them with an apolitical, humanitarian refugee profile. This shift in interpretation of terminologies is in response to postcolonial geopolitics.
Many colonies in Africa attained independence through negotiated settlements. However, several others engaged in armed liberation struggles, for example, Kenya, Namibia, South Africa, Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), and the Portuguese colonies of Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau, Mozambique, and São Tomé and Príncipe. Newly independent states provided liberation movements with bases on their territories and political, military, intellectual, ideological, material, and moral support. In West Africa, Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, a notable pan-Africanist, declared in his Independence Day speech in 1957, “Our independence is meaningless unless it is linked up with the total liberation of the African continent.” In East Africa, Julius Nyerere and Jomo Kenyatta, the first presidents of independent Tanzania and Kenya respectively, showed similar commitment to Pan-Africanism and anticolonialism by hosting refugees fleeing armed struggles in Southern Africa. Tanzania hosted the Organization of African Unity Liberation Committee supported anticolonial resistance and liberation movements. President Nyerere supported them for “challenging injustices of empire and apartheid” and declared, “I train freedom fighters”. He encouraged Tanzanians living around liberation movement camps to welcome these movements and their freedom fighters and also protect them from agents of colonial governments. Support also came from many other countries on the continent including Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Algeria. The latter provided sanctuary to representatives of liberation movements such as Nelson Mandela of the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa.
In Southern Africa, civilians collaborated with liberation movements and their military wings by providing them with food, information and logistical support, which enabled civilians to easily transition into combatants. Some of the civilians who fled across the borders were political activists working against the colonial governments. They continued doing so from the safety of their host countries and blurred the line between civilians and freedom fighters. Botswana, Tanzania, and Zambia, which attained independence in the 1960s, formed the Frontline States, a loose coalition aimed at ending colonial rule in Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, and Southern Rhodesia. The Frontline States hosted in the same camps civilians, politicians, political activists, military leaders, and combatants from countries that were still under colonial rule. They were supported by Lesotho, Malawi, and Swaziland (Eswatini).
Zambia and Tanzania hosted military bases for Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO), Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA) and Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA) forces. The Rhodesian government reacted to the hosting of liberation movements and refugees from Southern Rhodesia by launching armed attacks, air raids and bombings on Frontline States such as Zambia, Botswana, and Angola. After its independence in 1975, Mozambique joined the Frontline States and supported the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa and hosted refugees and combatants from the yet-to-be liberated Southern Rhodesia, providing them with humanitarian and military logistical support. The Rhodesian forces reacted by bombing Nyadzonia in August 1976, Chimoio in November 1977 and Tembue in November 1977 — camps in Mozambique that hosted civilians, politicians, military commanders, trainees, and combatants from Southern Rhodesia. As the combatants waged war in their countries of origin, they depended on civilian support in line with guerrilla warfare, which portrayed civilians as the water in which the fish (combatants) swam.
The OAU Refugee Convention: Subversion and Liberation
The 1969 Organization of African Unity (OAU), now African Union (AU) Refugee Convention explicitly anchored its definition of a refugee in the political upheavals and violence generated by colonization and anticolonial struggles. It defined refugees as people fleeing events stemming from “external aggression, occupation, [and] foreign domination” (article 1.2). This definition undergirded the open-door refugee policies whose approach to humanitarianism was couched in the political zeitgeist of 1960s Africa’s anticolonialism, Pan-Africanism, and African solidarity. The newly independent states essentially suspended the OAU Refugee Convention’s subversion clause and encouraged and supported resistance to colonization in the yet-to-be-independent parts of the continent by providing various kinds of support and hosting Africans who fled the violent backlash generated by this resistance. This seamless support made the distinction between refugees on the one hand and political activists and combatants on the other tenuous. It was politically incoherent and illogical for the newly independent states to support anticolonial struggles and simultaneously deny asylum to refugees generated by these struggles.
Refugee camps doubled as military training centers accommodating civilians, politicians, military trainees, and combatants. The presence of different categories of people in the camps reflected the mutually accommodating interpretation of categories by both the inhabitants of the camps and the host governments. Some of the civilians in the camps actively participated in politics while the military trainees and combatants were refugees who could not live in their countries of origin because of fear of persecution by the colonial regimes. The spaces these people occupied were refugee and military training camps rolled into one while the residents straddled the civilian/combatant and humanitarian/political binaries. As such, the humanitarian reasons for the presence of civilians in the camps coexisted with their political and military activities while the political and military activities of the trainees and combatants was intertwined with their humanitarian needs. Political and military acts that were categorized as subversion by the colonial governments were categorized as acts of liberation by the liberation movements and their supporters who included host countries. Indeed, the intertwinement of liberation movements and refugees was illustrated by the Tanzanian government’s granting of permission to FRELIMO to manage “contingent sovereignty” and operate a proto-state for Mozambican refugees and other exiles in Tanzania.
De-politicizing Binary Categorizations in Post-independence Africa
Independence ushered in a new era of refugee hosting which replaced mutual accommodation and inclusivity with separation of humanitarian and political categories. There was a notable shift from continental solidarity to nationalized indifference to refugees. Pan-Africanism took a back seat as the struggle for Africa’s liberation was replaced by inward-looking political ideologies, especially after the departure from political office of the so-called founding fathers of independent Africa. The racialized colonizing “Other” of the anticolonial period was replaced by civil and transborder conflicts pitting Africans against each other. This entailed a corresponding shift in perception of the enemy, leading to more stringent refugee policies that are more concerned about maintaining good relations and avoiding diplomatic spats with neighbors than with showing solidarity with citizens’ struggles in post-independence Africa. Kenya and Tanzania illustrate this as shown below. Host countries that had unambiguously supported political activities among the refugees in the camps and tolerated retaliation by colonial regimes as a necessary sacrifice redefined such activities as subversion and refugee status as apolitical. There was a notable shift from flexible approaches to accommodation of refugees to stringent encampment policies with a few exceptions such as South Africa which does not encamp refugees.
The post-independence period in Africa saw the transformation of refugees from freedom fighters and an economic asset to an economic liability and a security threat. At the present moment, refugees’ involvement in political and military activities is deemed subversive and can lead to deportation. Whereas combatants fighting for liberation were regarded as heroes, people who portray themselves as fighting to liberate their countries from oppressive post-independence regimes are labeled as rebels, militias, and/or terrorists and castigated for destabilizing their countries. Countries that provide to rebel movements the same support that was provided to liberation fighters are equally condemned in the post-independence geopolitical context as Rwanda’s alleged support to M23 rebels in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) shows. African leaders and the AU, unlike the continent’s founding fathers who formed the OAU, are infamous for showing solidarity with oppressive regimes rather than with citizens’ aspirations in politically troubled countries on the continent. They frame refugees as a problem instead of framing the oppressive regimes that generate these refugees as the problem. This demonstrates a clear shift from the stance during the era of anticolonial struggles. An example is the ANC in South Africa’s steadfast support for Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front (ZANU PF) in Zimbabwe in the name of solidarity between liberation movements at the same time that the ANC treats as a problem Zimbabwean migrants and refugees who have fled ZANU PF rule.
There have been numerous cases of countries blocking asylum seekers from crossing borders, deporting refugees, and imposing stringent measures to stop political and military activities among refugees. Starting in the late 1980s, Kenya’s refugee policy underwent a radical shift which resulted in forced repatriation of Ugandan and Rwandan refugees. In November 2006, Kenya sealed off Dadaab refugee camp following reports that the Somali militant group, Islamic Courts Union (now al Shabaab), was recruiting and training people in the camp. Kenya went on to block entry by Somali asylum seekers who were trying to cross the border in January 2007. Tanzania pursues a policy of noninterference in the internal affairs of independent African states. It took an unequivocal stance against refugees from the newly independent states of Rwanda and Burundi attacking their countries of origin. Tanzania did not extend the label of freedom fighters it had extended to politically active anticolonial era refugees to politically active Rwandan refugees in Ngara district in western Tanzania fighting the post-independence government in Rwanda. It instead sought to deter these refugees’ military attacks on their country of origin. Tanzania closed its border with Burundi in 1993 and with Rwanda in 1994 to deter entry by refugees from both countries. The latest example on this is that of Egypt’s mass arrests and deportations of Sudanese asylum seekers whom it sees as a burden amid an economic crisis.
Temporal Evolution of Categories
Categories are sensitive to temporal geopolitical transformations. The anticolonial support for liberation movements has been replaced by condemnation of political and military activities seeking to topple post-independence governments and separation of refugee status from political activities. The stand-off between DRC and Rwanda clearly shows that supporting or being suspected of supporting rebel movements in another African country often courts infamy unlike during the period of anticolonial struggles when such support was extolled. As continental integration continues to be a buzzword in Africa, non-interference in the internal affairs of AU Member States has become the principle guiding continental geopolitics. The outcomes of such an approach are visible in the depoliticization of refugee status in contrast to acknowledgement of its inherently political nature during the anticolonial struggles. The continent can restore refugees’ political agency by acknowledging that refugees have as much relevance to finding solutions to conflicts in their countries as they did during the era of anticolonial struggles. This would entail the AU showing solidarity with Africans seeking freedom rather than with oppressive regimes, just as the OAU did.