Suchergebnisse

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 Guera 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 Guera's cleavages but connected to divisive forms of governance.

In the Sahel, labels related to slavery are often tools used to marginalize specific social groups. Scholars and activists for decades underestimated this issue, which was also underemphasized by theories describing slavery in Africa and among Muslim communities as mild. Exploring two specific labels related to slavery - Yalnas and Kamaya - in Chad, the article argues that the status of slave descendants is deeply connected to the colonial encounter, when most slave descendants' labels were created; and that if slave ancestry matters today it is mainly because of forms of governance that facilitated the reproduction and political use of these labels. The focus should therefore move on from the debate about African or Muslim slavery and explore contemporary struggles around the meanings of labels used to stigmatize slave descendants.

Memories of slavery affect contemporary political life in many Sahelian countries, but how do stigmatised groups use those memories as a tool for integration?