Bordering the Lake: Transcending Spatial Orders in Kigoma-Ujiji

Abstract

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the spatial order in the Lake Tanganyika region was repeatedly and thoroughly redefined. The frontier character of the lake at the crossroads where resources, produce and skills met, was overshadowed by the westward moving frontier of an expanding global market under the guise of an Arab-Swahili-led trade network, which was in turn overrun by European colonization and the drawing of territorial borders. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Kigoma-Ujiji also experienced massive immigration from around and across Lake Tanganyika, including waves of refugees from Burundi and East Congo in the past decades. Although this process started long before national territories and  boundaries were defined, the continued arrival of newcomers cultivates narratives depicting Kigoma-Ujiji as a town of foreigners or of ‘Congolese’. Remarkably, the descendants of the first inhabitants, dating back to the establishment of an urban area in the nineteenth century, sympathize and identify with refugees of contemporary conflicts. This paper argues that the succession of spatial orders in the area provides the historical context to distinguish between successive groups of urban settlers, but also to understand their sense of a common destiny under the dominant territorial/national spatial order of today.

Biographical Note

Geert Castryck (SFB 1199, Leipzig University)

Geert Castryck is a historian specializing in African and global history. He did research on African urban history, remembrance education, and colonial legacies. He earned his PhD in history from Ghent University in 2006 for his dissertation about the colonial Muslim communities of Bujumbura (Burundi). He came to Leipzig University in 2010 to write a global history of the East Central African town of Kigoma-Ujiji. At the Collaborative Research Centre, he analyses the redefinition of political, economic, and religious spaces in East and Central Africa as well as in Europe during and after the Scramble for Africa.