From "Migrants" to "Refugees": Humanitarian Aid, Development, and Nationalism in Ngara District, Tanzania, 1940-2000 Open Access
Rosenthal, Jill Robyn (2014)
Abstract
This dissertation analyzes the history of how the "nation" came to be actualized in the popular imaginations of people living on the border of the Tanzanian nation-state. I am concerned with how the people of the Busubi and Bugufi Chiefdoms of Ngara district became Tanzanians--the processes through which the borders of a colony became the boundaries of a state and a citizenry. I argue that transnational aid to Rwandan refugees in Ngara district unfolded as part of a broader project of nation-state formation and regulation--one which deeply affected local narratives of community and belonging.
Situated on the Tanzanian border of the present nation-states of Tanzania, Rwanda, and Burundi, Ngara district has been a site of Wanyaruanda migration, later termed "Rwandan refugee" movement, for centuries. As such, Ngara's past and present are inextricably entwined with global and regional forces of trade and culture, as well as transnational constructions of "refugees" and "nation-states." The long and varied presence of humanitarian aid to a specific sector of the Ngaran population, Rwandan refugees, has deep implications for Ngarans, as well as for how we understand histories of humanitarian aid and nation-state formation in Africa. Examining this history yields insights into changing international geographies of control and regulation and their effects on local imaginaries of self, community, and "others." Through multi-sited archival research as well as over one hundred interviews conducted in Ngara district, I examine the competing topographies of authority and control that became crucial to refugee encounters in Ngara, as they did throughout the decolonizing world. Specifically I argue that as Rwandans in Ngara were increasingly segregated and made subjects of exclusionary national and transnational aid projects, aid that refugees frequently rejected and subverted, so did Ngarans come to see themselves as part of the Tanzanian nation-state.
Table of Contents
Introduction: 1-29
From "Migrants" to "Refugees"
Chapter 1: 30-79
Mandates, Trustees and Irrelevance
Border-making and economic migration in Ngara District, 1920-1960
Chapter 2: 80-130
Undeveloped Decolonization
Education, Coffee, and Tobacco Production in Ngara District, 1940-1965
Chapter 3 : 131-188
Developmental Refugees
Local, State, and Transnational Encounters with Rwandan Refugees in
Ngara District, 1959-1964
Chapter 4: 189-247
Conflicting Authorities
The Creation of Mwese Highland Rwandan Refugee Settlement, 1959-1970
Chapter 5: 248-290
Of "Natural" Citizens and "Natural" Illegality
Ujamaa, Magendo, and Naturalization in Ngara District, 1970-1984
Chapter 6: 291-341
Of Genocidaires and Humanitarians
The Rwandan Refugee Emergency in Ngara District
Conclusion 342-351
The Business of Nationalism and Humanitarian Aid
References (Primary Sources) 352-358
Bibliography 359-369
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