ECAS 2013

Like money, borders are cultural. The necessity is to create the impression that one has them; to leverage resources into power. Too big - too disciplined, too dangerous, too formidable, too well-informed - to fail. So every sovereign entity must perform its border and its effective control - the more so the less effective control it has. Like its on-going performance, the process of bordering is never stable, never complete. What is performed goes beyond geo-political delimitation to enactments of identity, community, relations of self and other, and narratives of inclusion and exclusion. Ultimately, performing borders is an essential vehicle for adapting the old 'national' model of sovereignty to the debordering forces of globalization. Having said all that, performing borders is always most essentially a dyadic encounter between gate keeper and entrance seeker.

The political and symbolic meaning of borders in French West Africa changed deeply in the two decades after the Second World War until early independence. While the Union française (1946) encouraged the federal system of Afrique occidentale française (AOF), the Loi Cadre (1956), the Communauté française (1958) and independence (1960) favored the strengthening of national borders in West Africa. Leopold Sedar Senghor contested this as a process of "balkanization". A few former AOF-member states tried to create new federations, such as the Mali-federation. This paper asks how these changing political borders in West Africa were imbued with new symbolic meaning and how political leaders aimed at communicating this to broader audiences. The paper examines travels and state visits of African and French political leaders as a prism for examining how borders in the French colonial Empire were celebrated and contested during this period and how new concepts of African nationalism and Pan-Africanism emerged. The paper explores these state visits less as a diplomatic endeavor, but rather as a stage on which political leaders claimed and contested borders through ceremonial politics. The paper analyses which places were selected for staging the diplomatic protocol of state visits (sometimes even along borders) and through which signs, symbols and performative acts borders were produced and celebrated in performative acts during state visits. The paper is based on archival documents and newspapers cuttings. It is part of a broader project on travelling politicians and the representation of power in mid-20th century French West Africa.

This article provides a detailed ethnographic account of how state performance through the practical norms of taxation along the South Sudan - Ugandan border is shaped by interactions between state officials and traders. It is argued that the day-to-day practices of negotiation with state officials are embedded in different types of cross-border trade networks, consequently shaping state performance in different ways. Here we consider two stages of state performance: the national stage on which customs officials interact with large-scale regional cross-border traders and the local stage on which State and County officials interact with small-scale traders native to the border region. The different outcomes in state performance are considered in relation to the literature on negotiated statehood and the sociology of economic life in fragile and conflict-affected areas.

This paper presents a situational analysis of the opening ceremony in May 2004 for a road bridge across the Zambezi in the no-man's land between the Namibian and Zambian border checkpoint Wenela, in order to investigate the political relations between the leadership of the former Lozi Kingdom and the Zambian central government. It argues that both parties attempted to use the border location as a stage to publicly portray themselves as the hosts of the event. This has deep and contentious historical and political roots in claims made by the Lozi leadership since the transition towards Zambian independence in 1964 and which have more recently manifested dramatically in renewed attempts by the Lozi leadership in Zambia's Western Province to secede from the rest of Zambia.

The bridge opening ceremony was attended by the presidents of the two countries, a high-level Lozi delegation, a large print and broadcast press corps, several thousand borderland inhabitants as well as the author.

The paper draws on and seeks to contribute to the Africanist literature on the history and politics of public performances of state authority.