Introduction^{Footnote 1}

Knowledge production about Africa and its history reflects an underlying spatial ordering of the continent. Part of the historiographical production makes claims about Africa as a whole – either limited to Sub-Saharan Africa or including Northern Africa. Other parts take states or cities as units of analysis. Yet other historical research is regionally subdivided, following seemingly neutral geographical orientations (e.g. West or Southern Africa) and ecological differences (e.g. Sahel or Great Lakes), but also reflecting linguistic and colonial divisions.^{Footnote 2} The division between scholarship on East and on Central Africa is a case in point. The distinction between regionally defined research areas tends to follow the divisions between former colonial empires and their languages, reflected in an inclination towards English (and German) in research about East Africa versus French (and Portuguese) for Central Africa – complemented with an altogether different understanding of what constitutes East and Central Africa.^{Footnote 3}

Analogously to methodological nationalism, we are here confronted with the legacy of a kind of methodological imperialism. For instance, anglophone scholars of East Africa typically consider Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania (sometimes complemented with Rwanda and Burundi, thus including the whole of the former German East Africa), but tend to refrain from including in their analysis the areas formerly associated with Belgian or Portuguese colonial rule.^{Footnote 4} Conversely, francophone Central Africa usually has its focus on the two Congos, and includes the remaining countries formerly part of French Equatorial Africa, but tends to take little notice of the historiographical production on what used to be British or German colonies.^{Footnote 5} Our message is not that these somewhat separate historiographies are flawed. Rather we want to illustrate that paradigms and insights gained from research on East Africa can be made productive in Central African historiography, and vice versa.

Even without going into such crosscutting insights for a moment, it is evident that this area-based epistemic divide produces its own contradictions. What was known, during the colonial period, as “British Central Africa” (today Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Malawi) or “Portuguese East Africa” (today Mozambique) is sometimes associated more with “East,” sometimes more with “Central,” sometimes also with “Southern” Africa. The anglophone authors David Birmingham and Phyllis Martin have grouped “British Central Africa” together with francophone Central or Equatorial Africa and Portuguese East and West Africa (Mozambique and Angola) as a vast “Central Africa.”^{Footnote 6} This area, stretching from the southern border of Libya to the northern border of South Africa and from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, goes well beyond the francophone understanding of Central Africa, yet neatly leaves out the British notion of East Africa.

In a similar vein, the so-called “Great Lakes” region, encompassing Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, and parts of western Tanzania and eastern Congo (Democratic Republic), sits astride the “East”-“Central” divide, depending on the perspectives and considerations applied. The francophone historian Jean-Pierre Chrétien, for instance, clearly associates this area with East Africa, thus extending East Africa beyond the anglophone bounds.^{Footnote 7} This is not just a matter of drawing arbitrary demarcations on maps, but reflects different conceptions and views of what constitutes an area geographically, historically, culturally or politically. The resulting ambivalences are relevant to such an extent that they can inadvertently influence contemporary international politics.

The diversity of recent views on Rwanda can serve as an example. During the first decade of the twenty-first century, Rwanda has at times been hailed as a well-performing, reliable state, which could become a model for the rest of Africa and the world. At the same time, Rwandan authorities have been blamed for causing havoc and violence in eastern Congo and violating human rights domestically. Rather than wanting to mediate between these positions, we assert that such contradictory appreciations reflect not only tensions between domestic, regional, and international perspectives, or between humanitarian considerations and economic criteria, but also a difference between an East African and a Central African perspective on Rwanda.^{Footnote 8} Seen from Central Africa, Rwanda’s involvement in the wars and plundering in eastern Congo strikes the eye. The Rwandan government, however, prefers to be perceived as East African, as can be seen in the decisions to join the East African Community and the Commonwealth, and to adopt English as an official language. In a comparatively tranquil East African setting, Rwanda’s economic performance and apparent political stability can be contemplated as a success story.^{Footnote 9} The example makes clear that it is negotiable whether a particular place belongs to East or to Central Africa (or both), and that each attribution opens its own registers of appraisal and association. Regional demarcations are neither neutral nor clear-cut, but have old and ongoing histories. The articles in this section endeavor to bridge empirically these historical and historiographical divisions, which the people in East and Central Africa have never stopped crossing and entangling.

The Historical Construction of East and Central Africa

Few would deny that East and Central Africa are historical constructs. Ever since the spatial turn in the social sciences and humanities has been taken, the constructed nature of space is received knowledge.^{Footnote 10} Concerning continents in particular, the critique of metageography is also already known for over twenty years.^{Footnote 11} However, knowing in general that regions are constructs does not yet tell us how specific spatial constellations, demarcations and connections have been produced, represented and lived across time and space. Just as the idea of Africa as one large “continental” space is a construct in its own right,^{Footnote 12} so too subdivisions such as “East” and “Central” Africa have been constructed originally very much from an outsiders’ perspective. Only gradually, from the colonial period onwards, these regional constructs have been appropriated by the inhabitants of those spaces themselves.

African regional definitions can be traced back to before colonial times. “Directional divisions,” named after the cardinal directions, were introduced from at least the mid-nineteenth century, when continents came to be envisaged – always by outsiders – as large territorial blocs, divided into spheres of geographical and cultural peculiarity, of economic interest, and increasingly for political conquest.^{Footnote 13} “Central Africa,” in this context, implied a distinction from neighboring “directional” regions. It was imagined as a part of Africa that had little or no connection to the outside “civilized” world – classically reflected in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness – yet was at the same time seen as a strategic position to gain control of the continent as a whole and aspired for by European “explorers,” missionary societies, and colonial conquerors. Consequently, in the nineteenth century many different “Central Africas” emerged from the European perspective.

With the related advance of modern geography and colonial expansion, it became increasingly of interest for European thought to go beyond a perspectival approach and to conceive regions as territorial blocks, defined – like the continent as a whole – by an assumed internal homogeneity and external difference. It was only at this point that the idea of territorial (i.e. clear-cut and continuous) borders began to shape African regional distinctions – in other words, the idea of regional borders came later than regionalization as such. Divisions that subsequently came to be used for colonial boundary-making, however, were constructed first along geographical criteria. With the dominance of hydrogeographic models of regionalization in the earlier nineteenth century and the subsequent rise of geology, the watersheds between the Congo and the Nile, the limits of the Congo Basin, and the East African Rift with its high volcanic mountain ranges seemed to provide perfect markers for a “natural” border between East and Central Africa.^{Footnote 14} Not accidentally, they were in the focus of European explorers since the 1850s as well as of border treaties following the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885.^{Footnote 15}

With the enormous variety of concepts of space, criteria of delimitation, perspectives and interests of the actors involved, it is not surprising, then, that the seeming clarity of clear-cut, territorial borders has not resulted in any consensus on where one region would end and another begin. During the colonial period, there were many different “Central Africas” and “East Africas,” depending on the perspective of the European colonial powers. Today, there is still a bewildering variety of official delineations of “East Africa” as well as of “Central Africa.”^{Footnote 16}

Another set of criteria for regional distinction, besides political and geostrategical interests, were economic as well as cultural production and exchange. Such criteria were underpinned by the refining of geographical, economic, anthropological, religious, linguistic, and historical research. However, the phenomena and processes (such as migration, trade, productive innovation and specialization, political or religious expansion) examined here were far more mobile and changeable than (apparently) natural phenomena or political borders, which provided a new source for disagreement. Furthermore, the social sciences and humanities, because of their practical importance for the colonial project as well as for the postcolonial state and its inter-national relations (e.g. concerning development cooperation), came to be subsumed more fully under imperial and national (or postcolonial) forms of organizing research. This entailed considerable pressure to adhere to political units of analysis with their respective paradigmatic traditions, even where the phenomena observed clearly went across their boundaries.

In recent years, these ambivalences have contributed to a rethinking of academic approaches to the problem of defining and demarcating regions in East/Central Africa and beyond. Helmut Bley, for instance, has proposed to define African “macro-regions” (Großregionen) by the intensity of their internal exchanges and their particular connectedness to the wider world.^{Footnote 17} A similar approach has been proposed by Jean-Luc Vellut, postulating for different times and spheres of African history a coexistence of different “spatial configurations” and representations of space, based on “nodes of communication” clearly cutting across today’s national borders.^{Footnote 18} Even though these approaches do not question the division between “East” and “Central” Africa as such, they clearly owe much to the advance of transnational, translocal and global perspectives in the social sciences and humanities.^{Footnote 19} Together with the constructivist stimulus of the spatial turn mentioned above, they have removed borders from, and moved connections to, center-stage in the definition of regions, while regarding indisputable spatial distinctions (similar to inter-state borders) as “frontiers” or interfaces (“borderlands”) rather than divisions between spaces.^{Footnote 20} However, there remains a difference as to whether such interfaces are approached from one side of the dividing/connecting line or from the other – or more specifically, an East African perspective on the frontiers or borderlands can differ significantly from a Central African perspective.

Five Empirical Approaches to Overcome Epistemic Divisions

The articles in this section illustrate how research approaches prevalent in either East or Central Africa can cast new light on the history of the other area. All five articles approach East and Central Africa as a space of historical entanglement, empirically reconstructing connections and relations across this space. We thus contribute to academic research that has dealt with connections as well as comparisons between East and Central Africa before.^{Footnote 21} Additionally, however, the authors tackle the traditional divide between East and Central Africa at an epistemological level, by productively transferring research perspectives from one region to the other, and by analyzing how these regions have been and can be conceived. Bridging histories of East and Central Africa can reveal histories that would remain hidden or marginal within the context or from the perspective of only one of the regions. This approach is further enlarged by perspectives from Indian Ocean studies and from the distinct field of the African Great Lakes region. The critical thrust of this approach is to show that dominant narratives, topoi and historical constellations in each of these regionally defined and region-defining research fields tend to blind out phenomena that become visible or tangible when one adopts viewpoints that are commonplace in another research field. Thus, the contributions envisage a methodological and epistemological reconsideration of East and Central African history and of regionally organized historical research in general.

Stephen Rockel, in his article, reconstructs the position of Tutsi pastoralists in the social and economic context of Unyamwezi (present-day Central Tanzania) in the late nineteenth century. Whereas Tutsi pastoralists are usually depicted as politically dominant in research on their “Central African” heartlands in the Great Lakes region, an inverted narrative emanates when we try to understand Tutsi pastoralists in the “East African” setting of Unyamwezi. This article on the one hand counters the prevailing narrative of Tutsi or pastoralist dominance as developed in the Great Lakes context. On the other hand, it illustrates the transregional entanglements between the Great Lakes dynamics of population movement and the caravan trade system connecting the Indian Ocean and the African interior.

Tracing, conversely, coastal or Swahili connections in the Great Lakes region, the article by Geert Castryck makes sense of religious developments among the Muslim community of colonial Bujumbura (present-day Burundi) as a combination of facing local challenges and discriminations, making use of “Central African” connections, and picking up currents of Islam prevalent in “East Africa.” So far, this group of people has remained all but absent in the historiography. The author argues that this absence is not an indication of their limited relevance for the history of the area, but of not fitting the respective master narratives. Adopting a translocal approach, seen from within the community, allows us to overcome the limitations of Burundian national, Great Lakes, Central African, and East African perspectives.

Whereas Castryck adopts the perspective of one locality, Katharina Zöller traces a highly mobile group across East and Central Africa. The “Manyema” are people who have roots in what is today known as eastern Congo and who moved in the direction of or right up to the East African coast – and often back – since the time when their area of origin was under Swahili-Arab domination. In East African historiography the Manyema are known as a group of people that had some importance in East African towns, but their continuing connections with Central Africa received negligible attention so far. In Central African research traditions, on the other hand, Maniema is associated with a region or province in eastern Congo, but is hardly known as a group of people reaching into East Africa. However, following the approach adopted in this section, the bridging of these East and Central African perspectives discloses how Manyema actors, in relation to colonial and postcolonial contexts, have negotiated their mobility and identity across East and Central Africa as a single social and geographical space.

Even though the Manyema do not figure prominently in the existing historiography, the historical context in which this group came into being did not go unnoticed. Swahili-Arab domination in what is today known as eastern Congo, and its defeat by the Congo Free State during the wars of colonial conquest, is well covered by historiography on Central Africa. However, its aftermath and legacy in the region – and beyond – have been largely ignored. Maarten Couttenier, focusing on the imagination and representations of “the East” in the Congo Museum (today the Royal Museum for Central Africa) in Tervuren (Belgium), reconstructs how museum displays systematically externalized this inherent and constituent part of Congolese history. We observe a flashing and dwindling of attention paid to “the East” which, rather than showing a genuine interest, merely casts a negative image of an “East” that allegedly does not – or must not – belong to the Congo.

Rather than juxtaposing East and Central African perspectives, the concluding article builds on insights from Indian Ocean studies. Julia Verne treads the thin line between tracing an apparent Indian Ocean cocoon as far inland as possible, and reflecting on how this can provide a productive relational way of conceiving regions. Starting from a critical reflection about the relational character of maritime worlds in general and of the Indian Ocean in particular, she goes on to trace this “maritimity” in the way of life of a coastal family living and trading in the East Central African town of Sumbawanga (present-day Western Tanzania). Whereas established Indian Ocean studies tend to limit their scope to coastal areas and at best to the immediate hinterland, the “emic” perspective of people making up that maritime world shows a lived experience of “their” Indian Ocean world that is much less bounded and reaches much further into the interior of the continent. The central point is not so much that the Indian Ocean world reaches far into the interior, but rather the need for a relational approach to regions in general. People, their imaginations and their relations constitute the basis for analysis of regional connectivity.

In sum, this section on “Bridging histories of East and Central Africa” illustrates the epistemic divide between East and Central African historiographies and offers different ways to overcome this divide by making it heuristically productive. Whether by applying “East African” perspectives on “Central Africa,” and vice versa, by analyzing trans-local connections seen from one locality, by tracing the mobility of people across the East-Central divide, by reconstructing the making of master narratives through museum representations, or by proposing a “maritime” or relational way of conceiving of regions, the articles all contribute to a historiography that bridges East and Central Africa in particular, and established regional distinctions in general.