Colonial Divisions Research Articles

Holding Hands at the Heart of Empire

In 1905, people from the different corners of the Danish empire held hands at the colonial exhibition (Dansk Koloniudstilling (Grønland og Dansk Vestindien) samt udstilling fra Island og Færøerne) in Tivoli, Copenhagen. This article uncovers colonial relations of the past by analysing photographs from a scrapbook presumably created by the main organ- iser of the exhibition, Emma Gad. The photographs show participants interacting at the exhibition, and the article asks: What kind of conversations about this forgotten past are made possible by these photographs? How can these photographs be used to reflect upon the ways ideas of race, whiteness, civilization, nationality, and empire have operated in the colonial encounters facilitated at the Tivoli exhibition? The article seeks to answer these questions with a particular attention to the role of the Faroe Islands in order to counter the fact that the country is routinely relegated to the margins of discussions on colonialism. At first glance, the scrapbook photographs visualise unlikely community and friendships between participants. Yet placing the participants’ intimate contact within their geopoliti- cal context revealed these photographs’ imbrication within colonial divisions of space and the racialised hierarchies at the foundation of the colonial exhibition and indeed of the Dan- ish imperial project at large.

Who Must Lead Decoloniality: A Practical Theological Interrogation on the Possible Qualification to Lead Decolonisation: A South African Study

The quest for decolonisation and Africanisation of higher education in South African higher educational institutions has reached an uncompromising stage, since colonial divisions between the natives and the colonisers are still evident in the education system. This was also demonstrated by the “#FeesMustFall” campaign, which closed the majority of South African universities in 2015. Since then, decolonisation has kept scholars, academics and researchers busy in search of appropriate responses to the quest, but decolonial projects seem to be very slow. One of the reasons is that those in the leadership of the projects may be using delaying tactics for their colonial benefits. This article questions who should lead in the projects of Africanisation and decolonisation. The author is convinced that this question cannot be avoided if Africanisation and decolonisation must take speed. Reversal of colonial inequalities (including in educational spheres) is of paramount importance for the life of the colonised in general. It is an important demand that the correct or capable and informed leaders are identified and equipped to take the lead with the project. To this effect, this article makes a few practical theological suggestions. This research is interdisciplinary in nature since it starts with decolonisation, and continues with theology—particularly practical theology. These two disciplines are engaging the current problem of the contemporary people within their immediate situation.

Eruptions: Poulomi Basu and the art of renewal

This paper considers the vision and practice of Indian born transmedia artist Poulomi Basu. It takes Basu's exhibition ‘Eruptions: a decade of creation' (SIDE Gallery 2021) as a starting point to explore her use of analogue and digital photography, film, print, and virtual reality (VR) as tools for collaboration and storytelling with women in India and Nepal. The artist's interview and accompanying images showcase the evolution of Basu’s work and imagination through the projects To Conquer Her Land (2009-12); Blood Speaks: A Ritual of Exile (2013-18) and Centralia (2010-21). Exposing the contemporary injustices and the disinheritance brought by British colonial divisions of land and power, including those along religious lines, the multifaceted stories within these works respond to an important critical juncture. They look back to the past as well as to the present post-colonial struggles in which the complexities and contradictions of tradition are brought firmly into question.

The Dialectics of Abolition

The Dialectics of Abolition Lisa Lowe (bio) Ruth Wilson Gilmore has devoted decades to the study of the prison-industrial complex and to organizing for its abolition, and her profound contributions have become cornerstones of carceral studies and the prison abolition movement owing to their compelling explanatory power. Her famous formulations that "capitalism requires inequality and racism enshrines it"1 and that "racism is the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death"2 have become indispensable for scholars, students, and activists. Now, three decades of her essays are available to inspire new generations, meticulously collected and introduced by Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano. It is a daunting task to attempt to briefly highlight Gilmore's contributions to our understanding of the conditions that lead to prison expansion and the abolition imperative, but I trust that collectively, this forum may highlight a range of them. In my comment, I emphasize the profoundly dialectical thinking and practice that underlie Gilmore's invaluable work on the buildup of US prisons in the 1980s, and the significance of her situating this expansion both within the contradictions of neoliberal globalization and in relation to the political struggles of people on the ground responding to these increasingly violent conditions. Gilmore's commitment to thinking and acting dialectically means that she always approaches prisons systematically within the conditions of globalizing racial capitalism. Situating the buildup of US prisons in the 1980s within contradictions of neoliberal globalization, she analyzes this historical shift as a transition from "military Keynesianism to post-Keynesian militarism."3 Significantly, she draws attention to how this entails the US postwar racial state's structural adjustment from "the welfare-warfare state to the workfare-warfare state"4 as well as the "organized abandonment" and "organized violence" of the "anti-state state."5 Yet Gilmore has emphasized repeatedly that "the prison fix" is not an isolated phenomenon: the decisions to build prisons—and to invest in industrial punishment, policing, and military rather than in public welfare, health care, roads or schools—have been central to a structural reorganization of the US postwar "landscape of accumulation and dispossession."6 [End Page 371] In other words, Gilmore emphasizes the ways that US prison expansion cannot be separated from the multiple crises of racial capitalism as it expanded globally in the second half of the twentieth century and thus, dialectically, that prisons cannot be countered as a single institution and that abolition cannot be understood or fought without consideration of this global imperial context. Racial capitalism is inherently unstable, and it comes into crisis when the contradiction between accumulation and exploitation reaches a level that is unsustainable, expressed in the United States by overproduction, diminishing profits, and unemployment, on the one hand, and widening wealth gaps, racial segregation, and increasing impoverishment of communities of color, on the other. These crises manifested internationally as foreign investment, flexible accumulation, and export processing, which rearticulated the colonial divisions between the first and third worlds and was secured by overt and covert US imperial wars in countries where socialism or left-leaning independence movements gained significant footholds: in Africa, Central America, Northeast and Southeast Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East. Meanwhile, these crises of globalizing racial capitalism were expressed domestically as deindustrialization, state withdrawal from social welfare, deepened economic divides, criminalization of racialized gendered poverty, and the militarization of the border. Yet while some may have declared that globalization meant the "end of the nation-state," Gilmore has always stressed that even as the traditional role of the state changes, the state does not become less powerful. To the contrary, the state expands and fortifies as it reorganizes, and it is precisely in prison buildup that we observe the apotheosis of the state's means to restructure both criminal justice and the political economy in order to safeguard capital and exerting social control. With increasing intensity since the 1960s–1970s, these contradictions of racial capitalism dialectically produced antagonisms that erupted in radical Black, Brown, Yellow, and Red Power movements, labor strikes, urban rebellions, and social movements, from antiwar to women of color feminist to anti-apartheid movements. The US state responded to these political challenges...

Love of Empire by Dissociations

Love of Empire by Dissociations Chien-ting Lin (bio) In the past two years, as the whole world has been deeply mired in the COVID-19 pandemic, we may have observed neoliberal capitalism's crisis of care: exposed and exacerbated by the global pandemic, made explicit alongside examples such as the collapsing of health systems, the shortage of care labor and overwork of nurses, the serious outbreaks in aged care facilities, the increased burden of domestic labor and care work due to school closures, and the worldwide rise of domestic abuse. In this short essay, I situate neoliberalism's care problems as a displaced process of imperial racialization in long-standing feminist debates over the "labor of love," returned to us by COVID in the form of crisis. Specifically, I reflect on the political discourses of love vis-à-vis war and militarism during the pandemic. The goal is to consider the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic mediates our relationship to geohistorical formations of laboring for love, while understanding this labor as care and sex work embedded in the racial structures of nation and empire. It is through this critical reflection on the questions of love, militarism, and geopolitics that I juxtapose the stigmatization of sexual laborers due to community spread in Taiwan's Wanhua teahouses with the Atlanta shooting that killed eight people, including six Asian women. As articulated and debated since second-wave feminism, the labor of love could be expansively understood in relation to the social conditions under which unpaid care services provided primarily by women within the household are utilized to resolve the contradictions of capitalist world order.1 Following the lead of Micki McGee's discussion about capitalism's care problem, a gender-only feminist perspective sees the unpaid labor of love within the household as the patriarchal exploitation of women. Feminist calls for economic independence for (mostly middle-class) women to work for equal pay as men certainly do not resolve the care problem but, instead, further obscure colonial divisions of labor under which the racialized labor mostly from formerly colonized nations is made to fill up the gap.2 I consider the discursive formations of love as a point of departure to review how the global pandemic bears on our everyday practices of intimacy. Pandemic-mediated effects on domestic intimacy, for [End Page 700] example, are often mistaken as simply a social problem about gender divisions of labor within individualized households when it is deeply implicated in the global imperial process. I argue that the impacts on domestic care during the pandemic are intimately connected with colonial divisions of labor when outsourced surrogate intimacies are vicariously performed by racialized third world labor. The historical effects of racialized displacement can be seen as consisting of three sets of often-dissociated social relations during the pandemic crisis: archetypical angel-heroines in white (nurses), angels in the house (housewife and mother), and fallen angels (prostitutes).3 During the pandemic, many of us constantly experience fears about the health systems being overwhelmed, even while we express growing appreciation for the essential care provided by health workers. In the meantime, we have come to witness a political discourse of love that occupies a space of primary importance in the popular glorification of professional care providers such as doctors and nurses on the frontline of the anti-epidemic battle. In Taiwan's context, the creation of these new heroines comes at the expense of racialized and devalued, if not entirely demonized, migrant sexual laborers now perceived as "the breach of infection control."4 After having kept the pandemic at bay for quite some time, Taiwan experienced a COVID-19 spike in April 2021. The drastic surge in locally transmitted cases was linked to the China Airlines and Novotel quarantine hotel at Taoyuan International Airport. The virus eventually spread to the teahouses of Taipei's Wanhua neighborhood—also known as an adult entertainment red-light district in Taipei. Since Wanhua was reported as the center of a major cluster, the workers in the sexual venues, in particular, became a singularized target of public criticism. Not only were the hostesses held accountable for the worst outbreak in Taiwan since the...

Islands of Integration or Islands of Marginality? Dynamics of Belonging and Otherisation in the Sahelian Chad

ABSTRACT Histories of othering through race, ethnicity, or other forms of belonging follow context-specific trajectories. Building on nine months’ fieldwork in Chad, this article engages with discussions about othering in postcolonial Africa. The article moves from the description of micro-divisions in the Guéra province, in the Chadian Sahel, to discuss theoretical paradigms connecting African discourses on race and ethnicity to precolonial cleavages or colonial divisions, and theories that connect emerging ideas of autochthony with neoliberal reforms of governance. It shows that both precolonial cleavages and colonial shaping of identities were contradictory and remain important because of their use by French colonial and Chad postcolonial governments to divide and rule local people. This has fostered forms of political competition based on othering further reinforced by neoliberal reforms of local governance. The increasing dynamics of othering are not therefore specific to Guéra’s cleavages but connected to divisive forms of governance.

Working on the Farm: An Autoethnography Exploring Gender, Race, and Labor Divisions in Middle America

In this paper, the author reflects on her own work in the agritourism field as a Latina woman in the Midwest. Connecting place to lived experience, the author describes how her gender, ethnicity, language, and education are positioned within the food industry and within her career trajectory. By examining her individual journey, the author reveals systems of oppression that continue to maintain colonial divisions of labor in ways often overlooked or ignored in the everyday. Her story is an example of the struggle many women of color face as they navigate upward mobility within White and/or male-dominated arenas. Utilizing logics based in intersectionality, feminism, raciolinguistic, and racial capitalism, this story bears witness to the ways identities continue to be perceived, performed, accepted, and rejected against dominant narratives in small-town America.

Regiments from the Province of Posen in the Final Engagements of the Battle of Verdun in December 1916

The last episode of the Battle of Verdun took place in December 1916. At that time, the French army, having a considerable advantage in this section of the front, conducted a daring offensive. Four French divisions were opposed by five German divisions, including the 10th Infantry Division from the Province of Posen. The French side threw elite colonial divisions into the fray, who conducted daring strikes and managed to recapture ground that was lost in the previous months. This area included sites that have grown to become symbols and legends of the Battle of Verdun – the Fort de Douaumont and the village of Douaumont.

INFRASTRUCTURE, ETHNICITY, AND POLITICAL MOBILIZATION IN NAMIBIA, 1946–87

AbstractThis article uses the copper mining town Tsumeb to examine urban infrastructure, ethnicity, and African political solidarities in apartheid Namibia. To translate apartheid to Namibia, South Africa re-planned Namibian towns to reinforce colonial divisions between two classes of African laborers: mostly Ovambo migrant laborers from northern Namibia and Angola and, secondly, ethnically diverse laborers from the zone of colonial settlement and investment, the Police Zone. Housing and infrastructure were key to this social engineering project, serving as a conduit for official and company ideas about ‘Ovambo’ and Police Zone laborers. Yet Africans’ uses of infrastructure and ethnic discourses challenged, and provoked debates about the boundaries of urban social and political belonging. Between the 1971–2 general strike of northern contract workers and the 1987 strike against the multinational Tsumeb Corporation Limited, which involved northern contract workers and community members, Africans built a political community that challenged both company and colonial state.

Kinyarwanda and Kirundi: On Colonial Divisions, Discourses of National Belonging, and Language Boundaries

The development of the Bantu languages Kinyarwanda and Kirundi is entangled within the colonial histories of Rwanda and Burundi, first under German and then Belgian rule. From the turn of the twentieth century on, missionaries compiled grammars and dictionaries of the two mutually intelligible languages, contributing to the development and instrumentalisation of two prestigious varieties out of a larger dialect continuum. In this contribution, I trace the missionary and colonial activities of corpus planning and textualisation and summarise how Kinyarwanda and Kirundi turned into official languages with distinct linguistic boundaries. The central research question is how speakers of Kinyarwanda and Kirundi thereafter came to be identified as “Rwandans” or as “Burundians,” with each language indexing a specific national categorisation. Tentatively, I contrast these developments with contemporary fluid practices in multilingual neighbourhoods.

Agricultural frontier, land tenure changes and conflicts along the Gucha-Trans Mara boundary in Kenya

ABSTRACTAdministrative limits do not ordinarily constitute internal boundaries, yet this is the case of the Gucha and Trans Mara boundary between the current counties of Kisii and Narok Countries in south-western Kenya. This boundary which served as a tool for political and administrative control has had a lasting impact on land settlement. Kenya’s territorial heritage proved resilient. It confined the Gusii and the Maasai on either side of the boundary until the 1970s, when the easing of the boundary led to a new phase in the Gusii agricultural frontier to the South, later stopped when land registration started in the 1980s in Trans Mara. The introduction of legal privatization created renewed tension which took a violent turn during the 1990s politically instigated land clashes. ‘Indigenous’ territorial claims coincided with these inherited colonial divisions. Contrasting population densities are found on either side of the boundary with high population densities in the former Gusii reserve compared to the neighbouring Trans Mara. The agricultural frontier was observed in a detailed survey conducted in 1997 and 1998 at the height of politically instigated land clashes. Along this boundary, in half a century, land use was transformed from occasional grazing to intensive agricultural use, with two harvests a year, depending on the political context. The 1990s violent crises lent new vigour to the internal boundary and contributed to the rise of a semi-permanent agricultural frontier located along the boundary itself.

WAGING WAR AND PEACE IN AFRICA - William Reno. Warfare in Independent Africa: New Approaches to African History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. xxii + 271 pp. Maps. Figures. Suggested Readings. Index. $85.00. Cloth. $27.99. Paper. - Elizabeth Schmidt. Foreign Intervention in Africa: From the Cold War to the War on Terror. New Approaches to African History.New York: Cambridge

William Reno. Warfare in Independent Africa: Approaches to African History. York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. xxii + 271 pp. Maps. Figures. Suggested Readings. Index. $85.00. Cloth. $27.99. Paper.Elizabeth Schmidt Foreign Intervention in Africa: From Cold War to War on Terror. Approaches to African History. York: Cambridge University Press. 2013. xviii + 267 pp. Illustrations. Acknowledgments. Foreword. Abbreviations. Index. $27.99. Paper.Jeremy Levitt. Illegal Peace in Africa: An Inquiry into Legality of Power Sharing with Warlords, Rebels, and Junta. York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. xi + 301 pp. Bibliography. Index. $103.00. Cloth. $34.99. Paper.The books reviewed here are written with clarity and passion and they deserve a comprehensive readership. They all embrace a sweeping geographical and conceptual terrain, but authors presuppose no prior African studies knowledge or expertise. While soaring and panoptic, these books are also richly detailed and nuanced. No single review can do them justice. Each is a major contribution that merits attention from anyone concerned with armed in Africa and efforts to resolve those conflicts.William Reno's book is part of Cambridge University Press series, New Approaches to African History, which is designed to introduce students and general readers to current findings and new ideas in African history. Reno, who is a political scientist, highlights two significant features influencing warfare in Africa during past fifty years. First, African warfare and its practitioners have always operated within an existing state system based on European colonial divisions of territory and European imposed conceptions of sovereignty. The inviolability of borders and sanctity of sovereignty explain why intrastate rather than interstate warfare has been norm in Africa. Second, over past fifty years grievances motivating rebellion have remained fairly constant. What has changed are politics that shape rebels' fields of leverage and global reception of and their aims. The book's major message is that the nature of politics in states in which they fight plays a key role in shaping organization and behavior of (161).The political imperatives that shape rebels' actions have severe consequences for noncombatants. Reno observes that conflict in much of Africa has shifted from a focus on battles over which side should control and administer non-combatant population to a situation in which governing non-combatants is often less relevant as a central strategy of war fighting (2). Both government forces and opposition groups who challenge authority of African regimes (and both of which are termed rebels by Reno) exhibit high degrees of fragmentation and little capacity to instill a common sense of purpose among combatants and noncombatants alike. This fragmentation and kaleidoscopic array of motivation and purpose is not owing solely to human frailty and avarice. Reno also stresses complexity and contingency of what it means, using James Scott's memorable phrase, to see like a state {SeeingLike a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve Human Condition Have Failed, Yale University Press, 1999).Reno identifies five rebel typologies. Anti-colonial fought to end colonial domination. They garnered support through unifying ideologies that galvanized African populations and enlisted international support: nationalism, sovereignty, human rights, and political independence. Focusing on southern Africa, Reno discusses his next grouping, rule and their campaigns and activities to eliminate white minority rule regimes in region. As with anticolonial rebels, external support was important. Like their anticolonial counterparts, majority rule sought to fashion narratives and ideologies that would mute factional and personal differences and inspire loyalty and commitment. …

The Bible, The Bottle And The Knife: Religion as a Mode of Resisting Colonialism for U Dhammaloka

While those who sought solidarity between Asians and Europeans in the colonial era often ended up replicating the colonial divisions they had hoped to overcome, the interstitial position of working class and beachcomber Buddhist monks allowed for more substantive modes of solidarity and critique. U Dhammaloka offered a sophisticated critique of British colonialism in its religious, cultural and material modes, but opted to focus his efforts on Buddhism as an avenue of resistance because it offered him a means of connection, like that which Leela Gandhi has identified as a ‘politics of friendship.’

THE MINISTRY OF RECONCILIATION IN ANGOLA

The Catholic Church’s colonial legacy and Protestant support for the three nationalist parties prompted various responses to Angola’s civil war. Angolan disunity stemmed from colonial divisions and ethnocentric evangelism by foreign missionaries, which reinforced ethnic and tribal differences. But churches not only influenced and sustained the war; they eventually moved toward a new ecumenical vision committed to the healing and wholeness of the nation. For example, the Catholic Church partnered with major Protestant groups to form an ecumenical initiative for peace. As churches contribute to social reconstruction, they should focus on three areas in particular: education, economic development, and democracy promotion.

Editorial introduction Oceanic routes: migrations and mtissages in South Pacific literatures and travelogues

Oceanic routes focuses on the South Pacific region but also reaches beyond simply francophone shores to encompass English-speaking archipelagoes. It examines the labor-driven population transfers that resulted in the extended exchanges of peoples, languages, customs and cultures that reshaped key aspects of the South Pacific. Geographically, refocusing on the indigenous vision of the region valorizes the term Oceania, originally used to reflect a universe which once comprised not just land surfaces but also the ocean surrounding them. Thus the sea links past and future beyond island boundaries through the transmission of cross-cultural connections and intersections. By contrast, enduring colonial divisions based on geography or language tends to further the legacy of colonialist perspectives and praxes and contribute to the fragmentation and distanciation of the region from the unitary vision of its origins. Such a vision of the island as intrinsically linked to other locales and open to the world naturally calls forth the image of the ship. Inverting this relation such that the vessel remains static and the island is seen as moving, is in keeping with alternative oceanic epistemologies of person and place which valorise both roots and routes.

Self-determination in Oceania

The interplay between national self-determination, the colonial legacy, the concept of sovereignty and the nature of state formation is what is at issue in any understanding of political development in the Pacific Islands. These complex territorial entities, scattered over thousands of square miles of ocean, embrace a vast range of cultural, geographical and linguistic diversity. Indigenous social and political organisation has been overlaid by arbitrary colonial divisions, and a model of western-style nation state formation promulgated by UN agencies. In the event, many of the fundamental economic and political problems of these societies have never been properly addressed-a situation exacerbated by the growing recourse to interventionism against ‘failed’ states by the most powerful. Any starting point for true self-determination in Oceania has to be found in indigenous practices of self-government.

Women Writing Africa. Vol. 1 : The Southern Region (review)

Women Writing Africa: Southern Region. Edited by M.J. Daymond, Dorothy Driver, Sheila Meintjes, Leloba Molema, Chiedza Musengezi, Margie Orford and Nobantu Rasebotsa. Women Writing Africa Project, Volume 1. New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2003. Pp. xxx, 554. $29.95 paper. Women Writing Africa: Southern Region is the first in a projected series of regional anthologies of women's texts for the continent, produced by Women Writing Africa Project of the Feminist Press, with support from the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations. It contains a broadly defined range of print and oral texts rendered in print-including historical and legal documents, songs, praise poems, oral narratives, fiction, poetry, journal entries, and much more-all produced by and having to do with African women. The project has been undertaken with the expectation that the publication of these texts will allow for new readings of African women's history (p. ii). texts certainly promise more fully gendered perspectives in Southern African history. Issues of coverage and organization are basic considerations for any anthology, so that is where we begin. Although the cover and title page carry the subtitle, The Southern Region, it is taken to mean Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland, Namibia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. Mozambique was probably excluded-despite sharing borders and peoples with Swaziland, South Africa, and Zimbabwe-because it was part of the Portuguese rather than the British colonial empire. Colonial divisions thus persevere. Uneven coverage is probably inevitable given the diversity of populations, academic traditions, and publishing opportunities in the region, but it is nonetheless startling to see only three authors from Lesotho where editor David Coplan has done such extensive work, and only two authors from Swaziland. South Africa, appropriately on the basis of population alone, leads with more than 60 authors, followed by Namibia with less than half that number, Botswana with 23, and Zimbabwe on the light side with 18. 120 entries were harvested from existing publications or archives and are arranged chronologically. Each is introduced by a headnote providing context and commentary. An anonymous of the afflicted from Lesotho opens the collection. title and table of contents date the song 1842, although the headnote tells us that it was collected by Thomas Arbousset in 1836. remaining 16 entries for the nineteenth century date from mid-century to the 1890s and cover only South Africa, Namibia, and Lesotho. Coverage of the twentieth century is weighted toward the later decades: 10 entries for the period 1900 to 1918, 24 between 1921 and 1959, 22 for the 1960s and 1970s, 17 for the 1980s, and 30 for the 1990 to 2001-more than twice as many entries for the last four decades of the century than for the first six. book's preface provides a very detailed explanation of the process. 54-page introduction with nearly 30 pages of notes and bibliography does much more than provide guideposts for the texts that follow. Notes on the contributing editors, associate editors, translators, and headnote writers, permissions, and indices close out the last 30 pages. material is conveniently and professionally presented, and reasonably priced for classrooms and personal libraries. There you have the necessary but least interesting information about the book. This is a fine effort to bring together a rich range of women's perspectives. introductory essay raises theoretical issues for specific kinds of texts and repeats the appropriate, if now standard, cautions about silences, appropriation, translation, responsible and accountable engagement, and the limitations of print presentation. …

Kings of the Mountains: Mayréna, Missionaries, and French Colonial Divisions in 1880s Indochina

In the late nineteenth century, the distance from Qui Nhon to Kontum – a trip of about two hundred kilometers – was nearly insurmountable. The route most travellers took led from the port town in southern Annam out across a narrow coastal plain of cultivated fields before crossing rivers and gorges, and ascending rocky mountains. Then the path leveled out on a high plateau of extreme weather and dense forests where fever, tigers, and unwelcoming local communities intimidated even the hardiest of travellers. Though well within the borders of French-controlled Annam, there was little Vietnamese – and even less French – about these highlands. The region was inhabited almost exclusively by a variety of indigenous groups like the Sedang, the Bahnar, and thejarai, who were both ethnically distinct from the majority Vietnamese population of Annam, and politically independent from the emperor in Hué as well as the French colonial administration. The region was so isolated from the rest of the colony that Frenchmen invoked the Vietnamese name for the area, calling it thePays Moï– ‘savages' country’ – and even the missionaries, the only Europeans to live in the region until the early 1900s, referred to their headquarters in Kontum as the ‘Mission des Sauvages’. It was an unlikely focal point for one of the most divisive controversies in the French empire.

The Genesis of the Somali Civil War: A New Perspective

Scholarship in Somali studies, especially that which addresses the origin and culture of the people, has accepted the homogeneity of the society without any extensive investigation of the cultural intricacies of the country. Thus historians, anthropologists, and successive Somali governments alike have failed to recognize the cultural, socioeconomic, and the ecological differences among the people. Rather, they tend to concentrate more on how the country was divided and certain regions were incorporated within Ethiopia and Kenya by the colonial powers. A large part of Somali political literature also concentrate on how these colonial divisions affect the country's relations with Ethiopia and Kenya. This portrayal of the Somali nation has painted a picture for students of Somali studies and for Somali experts in which the slightest hint of a civil war remained inconceivable. Yet, Somalia is currently experiencing one of the worst civil wars in Africa. Tens of thousands have died since

Colonial Divisions

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