Rwandan refugees began trickling into Ngara district in 1959. These people were different than the economic migrants who had traveled through the area over the previous decades. They were women and elderly, men and children, leaders and herders. In the first few years, from around 1959–62, they arrived in small groups from the Rwandan and Burundian sides of the Kagera River. There they paid local boaters, or took a ferry to Ngara district in Tanzania.Footnote 1 Sometimes they swam. Some lived with family and friends throughout the West Lake Region (WLR), becoming in United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees' (UNHCR) parlance ‘self-settled’. By 1963, the number of Rwandans in WLR had reached over 10,000. It was then that the Tanzanian government requested the UNHCR to take over the administration of the Muyenzi refugee camp in Ngara district.
The history of the Muyenzi refugee camp and settlements reveals the process through which global and state projects of nation-state territorialization succeeded during decolonization.Footnote 2 The 1960s were a time of possibility in Tanzania, when local, national, and international actors negotiated new categories of citizenship. At a time when the nation-state was coming into existence in sub-Saharan Africa, ‘refugees’ became actors and subjects in popular reimaginings of borders and identity – imaginations that existed at the confluence of international, state, and local policies and events. The circumstances surrounding the construction of Rwandans as ‘refugees’ in Ngara district have deep implications for the history of the district and the region, as well as wider discussions of nationalism and refugees at a moment when the number of displaced peoples worldwide is higher than ever.Footnote 3
Ngara district lies on the western edge of the Tanzanian state, just within the triangle of borders that demarcate the nation-states of Burundi, Rwanda, and Tanzania under international law. The district's landscape as seen from the ground is comprised of large hills and valleys that extend relentlessly past state boundaries. Today, as in the past, Ngarans are aware of the borders that separate Tanzania from her neighbors. Such borders do not prevent, but rather serve as a conduit for the widespread circulation of people, animals, and goods in the area.Footnote 4 Regional laborers, traders, and herders cross state boundaries daily, usually without passing through official border posts. Borders, then, cannot be conceived as barriers for Ngarans. Rather, during the process of decolonization there developed what Paul Nugent and A. I. Asiwaju have called the ‘mental space’ of ‘difference between communities across the line’.Footnote 5
I argue that Ngarans came to identify as Tanzanians during the process of decolonization; a time when local political identities congealed around internationally reified categorizations of the ‘refugee’ and the ‘citizen’. It was during this process that the border first became relevant to popular conceptions of identity in Ngara – as Ngarans for the first time began to perceive of themselves as belonging within the Tanzanian nation-state, rather than within Great Lakes region communities.Footnote 6 Nevertheless, the various nomenclatures used by Ngarans and officials to describe Rwandans, such as ‘settlers’, ‘immigrants’, and ‘watoro’ (those who flee justice), reveal that these migrants did not enter Ngara as wakimbizi (refugees). Rather, during decolonization, they discursively and legally came to embody the concept of ‘refugee’ through contested processes of settlement and aid.
State development planners, international aid agencies, and Rwandan refugees arrived in Ngara district as the Great Lakes region underwent a traumatic process of decolonization. As different versions of nationalism and ‘progress’ collided, the presence of these three groups within Ngara led to conflicts over security, identity, and development. For the first time, the movement of Rwandans across state boundaries became construed in Ngara as inimical to national progress and stability. As many in the district began to perceive Rwandan refugees as both violent and lazy, they also reified a particular version of Tanzanian citizenship, one that existed more in ideology than in reality.
During decolonization, the Tanzanian state under the leadership of Julius Nyerere advocated a form of African socialism based in equality and a particular notion of ‘African traditions’. Pivotal within this policy was the idea of a culture of shared resources and self-help.Footnote 7 Tanzania would be united through the language of Swahili. Despite the fact that in the early 1960s, the Tanzanian state was far from a coherent entity, for many in Ngara the idea of Tanzania, and Tanzanian ‘development’, became something to be proud of and to rally around.Footnote 8 For Ngarans, the early 1960s were a time of hope – of expectations of progress and improved living standards as articulated by the charismatic leader of what was becoming ‘their’ nation-state.
The rhetoric of nation-building in neighboring Ruanda-Urundi was different. In the waning years of Belgian colonial rule in Rwanda, a group of educated Hutu gained power and recognition through the support of the Belgian politico-military establishment and the Catholic Church. Earlier, Belgian colonizers had utilized a group of Tutsi monarchists to enact legislation and exert control over the population.Footnote 9 Although by the end of colonial rule most Tutsi were in relatively the same economic position as the majority of Hutu, the prestige and power long afforded a small Tutsi elite angered a disenfranchised and brutalized Hutu population who blamed all Tutsi for the trials of colonialism.Footnote 10 When, in the mid-1950s, Tutsi leaders began to advocate for immediate independence, the Belgian government switched allegiance to a nascent Hutu elite.Footnote 11
The struggle over independence in Rwanda occurred between two visions of nationalism: one which discursively empowered the Hutu as ‘true’ Rwandans, and the other which sought to restore the Tutsi monarchy and/or Tutsi leadership to power.Footnote 12 The initial violence of decolonization in 1959 resulted in the first large wave of late colonial/early postcolonial Tutsi departees, many of whom left Rwanda to regroup and later to stage political coups against the Parmehutu regime that had gained power in Rwanda following the 1959–62 revolution. Those Tutsi who supported the power of the exiled Mwami (king), in addition to those who wished to reclaim political power, crossed into neighboring countries.Footnote 13 Tens of thousands of others, those whose identity cards read ‘Tutsi’, and those who due to their moderate or pro-Tutsi political stance were deemed a danger to the new government, also fled the ensuing violence – many to Ngara district.
This article begins by analyzing the role of refugee populations in processes of nation-state formation and regulation. It proceeds by briefly exploring Ngaran cultural and economic linkages within the Great Lakes region throughout the precolonial and colonial eras. I show that regional integration increased during the late colonial period, as Ngarans chose to migrate within the Great Lakes region rather than within the Tanganyika Territory. I then examine shifts in Ngaran identity politics during decolonization, a time when the Afro-socialist policies of the Tanzanian state contrasted sharply with the violence of postcolonial state formation in Rwanda and the broader region. The last section analyzes the discursive construction of Rwandans in the Muyenzi settlement as refugees – a process furthered by Rwandan refugee imbrication within, and resistance to, national and international refugee development schemes. Throughout, the article considers the evolution of identities in Ngara within the contexts of different forms of migration and attendant narratives of belonging.
CITIZENS AND REFUGEES
In his study of autochthony and belonging in contemporary Africa, Peter Geschiere writes that ‘it is high time … for a return to the topic of nation building’, particularly since we have ‘surprisingly few studies of what nation-building meant on the ground’.Footnote 14 For Geschiere, current politics and violence around notions of belonging cannot be divorced from the ‘specific trajectories that nation-building took’ during decolonization.Footnote 15 And, as Frederick Cooper has shown, the ‘nation-state’ was only one of many political possibilities during decolonization.Footnote 16 To understand how different versions of nation and citizenship gained traction locally, it is necessary to attend to the ways in which people came to imagine their place in the world, and who they came to include and exclude within that imagined space. In other words, we have to denaturalize what Giorgio Agamben calls ‘the trinity of state-nation-territory’.Footnote 17 And, if historians are to take seriously the challenge of analyzing processes of nation-building, then we have to acknowledge a category that has remained within the shadows of historical writing – that of the refugee.
New categories of the refugee were born alongside those of the nation-state. Only a decade prior to decolonization in Tanzania, events in postwar Europe had propelled the ‘great powers’ to create a system of global governance based on a notion of inviolate, sovereign, nation-states.Footnote 18 In 1951, for the first time, a definition of ‘refugee’ became solidified in international law.Footnote 19 Concurrently, nation-state representatives developed an international apparatus to police and aid those rejects of the nation-state system whose unauthorized migration was ‘a threat to territorial security’.Footnote 20
In the Cold War world of great powers and nation-states, leaders in Geneva, New York, and across Africa became intent on maintaining the boundaries of the colonial state within the nation-state form.Footnote 21 Colonial state borders that had to a large extent remained ‘operationally nonexistent’ for the majority of their history needed to be actualized.Footnote 22 The clearer demarcation of borders was crucial to nation-building and, in the words of one scholar, ‘the creation of novel sources of legitimizing political membership’.Footnote 23 However, despite the fact that scholars have increasingly called attention to the role of refugees within processes of nation-state formation, we know little about the interplay between refugees and nation-building during decolonization.Footnote 24 Historians have been slow to examine the significance of refugee experiences. This ‘structural’ exclusion of refugees from the historical canon, according to Tony Kushner, is due to historians' emphasis on ‘continuity of presence rather than temporariness, flux and statelessness’.Footnote 25 Yet, historians have interrogated topics of migration and instability related to issues such as slavery, colonialism, labor, and development. Particularly in the African Great Lakes region, where migration myths are imbricated in legitimizing political claims, historians have explored migration and change within cultural, economic, and political contexts.Footnote 26 Scholars have also examined the histories of border regions in Africa, exploring their historical roots as well as more contemporary economic patterns.Footnote 27 It is therefore peculiar that the role of refugees within African history has been neglected, as historians are uniquely situated to counter dominant representations of displaced people that often strip them of history and agency.Footnote 28
Recent historical scholarship on refugees illustrates the seminal role that such groups played in the formation of nation-states.Footnote 29 This literature reveals that the creation of the nation-state in early modern Europe depended on new techniques of territorially ‘fixing people and places’.Footnote 30 Displacements of those ‘others’ who did not belong within accepted (re)definitions of national citizenries were critical to nation-building, as ‘people rejected by the new nations were in fact integral to them’.Footnote 31 Such rejections often entailed violent processes of mass displacement, movements that were most visible within border areas – locations where populations at the geographical edge of one vision of the nation encountered those expelled from another. And, as Achille Mbembe notes, this ‘polarization with regard to culture and identity’ so intrinsic to nationalism, becomes most visible within the space of the refugee camp.Footnote 32 Historical inquiries on refugees are therefore integral to understanding ongoing processes of nation-state territorialization.
The history of Rwandan refugee settlements in Ngara district brings into focus the power of refugee political imaginaries at the time when the modern refugee first came into existence.Footnote 33 As notions of the ‘refugee’ circulated within international, national, and local spheres, they were appropriated and influenced by individuals and groups in Ngara. Because refugees bring with them into exile the social, economic, and political contexts of their prior lives and subjectivities, refugee encounters can greatly influence the tenor and pace of nationalism. Not all refugees are interested in resettlement and many retain political ambitions, which can be altered and solidified by their experiences in exile.Footnote 34 It is perhaps for this reason that the international community, endeavoring to maintain a world of interlocking nation-states, seeks to neutralize the refugee problem through replacing/settling such people within the framework of sovereign nation-states.Footnote 35
MIGRATION AND DECOLONIZATION
Rwandans came to be viewed as ‘refugees’ in Ngara district despite centuries of regional migration and integration. Economics, politics, and culture link Ngarans with populations across the Great Lakes region. Ngara district is comprised of the two (former) chiefdoms of Busubi and Bugufi, the population of the former known as Subi and the latter as Hangaza.Footnote 36 Both Subi and Hangaza chiefs shared familial ties with chiefs in Rwanda and Burundi, as well as political and economic structures based, generally, on interdependent pastoralist (Tutsi) and farming (Hutu) populations.Footnote 37 The trade in livestock, produce, salt, and other goods linked populations in Ngara with those in Rwanda and Burundi.Footnote 38 In addition to linguistic connections – Kinyarwanda and Kirundi, spoken in Rwanda and Burundi respectively, are closely related to the Kihangaza and Kisubi spoken by Hangaza and Subi – regional integration among the populations of Busubi, Bugufi, Burundi, and Rwanda increased due to popular economic migration during the late colonial era.
The area between what are now the nation-states of Tanzania, Rwanda, and Burundi was formally divided after the First World War, following the division of German East Africa into the Belgian and British mandates of Ruanda-Urundi and Tanganyika.Footnote 39 During the 1920s, colonial authorities increasingly monetized the economy of Ngara district.Footnote 40 Soon hard currency was needed for chiefly dues and taxes, and for participation in integral social and economic exchanges, such as bridewealth payments, the procurement of clothing and food, and the maintenance of clan obligations.Footnote 41 Like their neighbors across the borders, many Ngaran men found entrance to the wage economy through migration to farms and plantations in southern Uganda.Footnote 42 There they lived and worked with people from the colony of Ruanda-Urundi, many of whom had traversed Ngara district on their way to the Uganda Protectorate. Many migrants from Ruanda-Urundi also remained within Ngara district, intermarrying locally and establishing their own farms within the district.Footnote 43 According to interviewees, it was relatively ‘easy’ for these migrants from Burundi and Rwanda to acclimate to life in Ngara during the colonial period due to similarities in culture and language.Footnote 44
In migrating to Uganda, Hangaza and Subi men rejected colonial recruitment campaigns that sought to retain them for contract work within the Tanganyika Territory.Footnote 45 Former migrants noted that their decision to work in Uganda was because ‘nobody had any money’ in Tanganyika and, further, that to work in Tanganyika was to work under poor, even ‘slave-like’, conditions.Footnote 46 In opposition to the perceived poverty of Tanganyika, migrants understood Buganda as a place of opportunity.Footnote 47 Moreover, for many Ngarans, the region of Buganda was simply more familiar, more comfortable, than the vast unknown areas to the east in the Tanganyika Territory.Footnote 48
Migration out of Ngara continued despite the increasing concern of colonial officials over the absence of men, and their labor power, in the district. To the colonial government, the lack of a permanent, robust labor force in the district hindered the growth of a cash crop economy.Footnote 49 Moreover, economic migration meant fewer people to prevent the growth of bush in areas originally cleared by the agricultural department in order to prevent the spread of the tsetse fly. Looking back on her husband's choice to work in Uganda, rather than on their own shamba (farm) in Bugufi, Mary Bamenya noted that during the colonial period Tanzanians ‘had not discovered themselves’ either economically or as a nation.Footnote 50 For Mary, and for many others, such a ‘discovery’ began with decolonization.
During the late 1950s and early 1960s, many Ngarans stopped migrating to Uganda. In response to questions as to why they had halted this decades-old circulation, former labor migrants replied that ‘Mwalimu [teacher] Nyerere’ had influenced their decisions to remain and work in Ngara district. Accordingly, many former migrants recalled that Nyerere had ‘taught us to develop our own shamba’, that instead of ‘making money for other people in Uganda, we could make money for ourselves’, money that could be used to contribute to their own, and the nation's ‘development’.Footnote 51 Returning migrants therefore labored in Ngara in order to make ‘wealth’ and development ‘in our own land’.Footnote 52 By contrast, some former migrants reported that they continued to travel to Uganda after independence, a few to avoid taxes.Footnote 53 Others expressed that they had wanted to wait to see if Tanganyika would ‘develop’.Footnote 54 Others still spoke of family members who continue to reside in Uganda.Footnote 55 Of course, when utilizing oral interviews it is necessary to account for possible biases in personal recollections, particularly as many memories may have been influenced by nostalgia for the Nyerere era.Footnote 56 Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of people I spoke with invoked the figure and words of Julius Nyerere as they explained their decision to stop traveling to Uganda. Ngarans took seriously Nyerere's plan for Tanganyika – one that required each citizen to take up the work of nation-building through self-help.Footnote 57
Ngarans during the 1960s began to engage in state-led development efforts. Many Subi began farming tobacco in accordance with district development plans and became members of regional cooperative societies.Footnote 58 These societies, however, failed to support local farmers who, in light of the corruption and broken promises of cooperative leaders, sold their crop illegally in Burundi and Rwanda.Footnote 59 Local government officials similarly failed to respond to Ngaran requests for improved water supplies.Footnote 60 And, although many Ngarans did work on district ‘self-help’ projects, these projects generally did not improve local infrastructure due, in part, to the district's peripheral status.Footnote 61 Nevertheless, the demise of chieftaincies in Tanzania in 1962 was welcomed by most Subi and Hangaza, who celebrated the end of chiefly tribute and looked forward to the social equality promised by Nyerere and the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU).Footnote 62 More than anything, Ngarans viewed the relatively peaceful transition to independence in Tanzania as a source of pride, particularly in light of the violence occurring beyond the borders of their new state.
Rwandan decolonization entailed a different form of nation-state creation, one predicated upon ideologies of difference rooted in notions of ethnicity, rather than in the discourses of unity, equality, and development burgeoning in Tanganyika. As Tutsi and Hutu groups contended with each other over the political and ideological composition of the new Rwandan nation-state, unknown numbers of civilians were killed and wounded. An estimated 150,000 Rwandans, primarily Tutsi, crossed the borders of Rwanda into all of the neighboring, nascent, states.Footnote 63
FROM MIGRANTS TO REFUGEES
These exiles brought the struggle for control over the Rwandan state with them into their nations and communities of asylum, struggles that continue in different forms up until the present day.Footnote 64 From the viewpoint of the new Tanzanian state, Rwandans in Ngara district would come to represent both a developmental opportunity and a security threat. The security threat stemmed from the political ambitions among many refugees, and their attempts to violently overthrow the new Rwandan government from bases within their asylum countries. The vision of a community of ‘refugee-warriors’ utilizing Tanzanian lands and resources in order to overthrow a neighboring African government was one that prompted the Tanzanian state's increasing control over Rwandans in Ngara district.Footnote 65
At the same time, Rwandans in Ngara district represented a population which could further the development of Ngara through their own labor power and, perhaps more importantly, by attracting funding from burgeoning international refugee organizations. Nyerere's vision of the Tanzanian nation-state was rooted in developmental nationalism, in which it was the responsibility of every citizen to assist in the progress of the nation.Footnote 66 This vision was rooted in the country's rural areas, those potentially fertile sites of agricultural sustainability, which were as underpopulated as they were underdeveloped.Footnote 67
The leaders of Ngara had continually bemoaned the lack of development in their far-off district. People needed roads, clean water, seeds, and game hunters to rid the district of the dangerous lions and bush pigs that threatened local crops.Footnote 68 Those officials who attended the meeting of the West Lake Province development committee in 1961, noted that without central government funding it would be impossible to build the roads and distribute the materials needed for the self-help programs essential to ‘development’.Footnote 69 For these officials, Rwandan migrants were potential sources of manpower; they presented an opportunity to bring to fruition development schemes to eradicate tsetse fly and to settle farmers, to make the land profitable and the people self-sufficient. And it all could be accomplished with international funding. Nyerere himself had sat in on a November 1961 provincial team meeting during which it was reported that the Ministry for Finance had raised the anticipated national deficit for 1962 from £400,000 to £2,000,000, and the leadership voiced their hope for additional international loans and grants.Footnote 70 At this meeting, provincial officers discussed the donations provided by the international community on behalf of Rwandans – a discussion aptly labeled in official minutes under the title of ‘Position Regarding Development Projects’.Footnote 71
During the meeting, regional and national leaders referred to Rwandans as ‘permanent settlers’ who could be integral to Ngara district's development.Footnote 72 The provincial tsetse officer ‘expressed the hope that more settlers after the original group now proposed to be settled in [Ntobeye-Ngara] would follow so that the area would be adequately occupied and the return of tsetse prevented’.Footnote 73 In this instance, the deputy provincial commissioner noted that further ‘settlers’ to Ntobeye should be locals, so as not to invite ‘inter-territorial incidents’ by Rwandans.Footnote 74 Despite the specter of such cross-border military activity, the notion of Rwandan settlers supplying and attracting much needed labor and funding for Ngara district, and the nation, proved compelling: the same official later noted that land further from the border, such as the area located near Rulenge in Busubi, would ‘prove satisfactory’ for further ‘settlers’ from Rwanda.Footnote 75
Local and national leaders initially hoped to incorporate and absorb Rwandans within district development plans, and so within the Tanzanian nation-state. The first government sponsored ‘refugee’ settlements were based on this idea. Correspondence from government officials during the fall of 1962 indicate this willingness to absorb the Rwandans as citizens within the framework of the new nation-state. As D. A. Mwakosya, the regional extension officer in Ngara, wrote to his superiors in Dar es Salaam:
I envisage a settlement which will encourage and enable the refugees to become useful Tanganyika citizens … Traditional land settlement would be preferred to in this case i.e. small groups of 4 to 10 families forming villages … Furthermore the refugees will psychologically feel that they are Tanganyika citizens and be loyal to Tanganyika.Footnote 76
In the early years of these Rwandans' arrival in Ngara district, it seemed that the conjunction of refugee-settler-citizen might work. Because the refugees arrived as individuals and in small groups, local leaders in Ngara were able to give them tracts of land for settlement.Footnote 77 Migrants were able to find food, shelter, and work through friends and relatives within Ngaran communities, particularly with people from Ruanda-Urundi who had settled in the area during the colonial era. Those who were unable to find succor for themselves and families often turned to local churches and village councils.Footnote 78 Newly-elected officials hoped that these migrants would be integrated locally, particularly in light of the high expense of maintaining refugee camps and shelters.Footnote 79 However, throughout 1962–4, the number of Rwandans entering Ngara and WLR grew exponentially.Footnote 80 Local generosity could only stretch so far, particularly as Ngara itself experienced severe food shortages during 1960–4.Footnote 81 Ngarans traveled to Burundi just to buy millet, a grain not favored in the area. The few resources that the international community gave to aid these newcomers rapidly proved inadequate.Footnote 82
Local residents and national leaders also grew concerned about the security of Tanzania within an increasingly unstable region. The leadership feared that refugee attacks against the Rwandan state would damage Tanzania's relationship with Rwanda.Footnote 83 Anxiety about security increased as a result of the unregulated circulation of Rwandans throughout the area. For the first time, local people began to perceive uncontrolled Rwandan migration as a threat to ‘development’ in Ngara and to the security of the district and country.Footnote 84 It was also becoming apparent that many of the Rwandans had no interest in settling within, or helping to develop, Tanzania. Many throughout the region began to complain that the ‘refugees’ were lazy, unproductive people. Protests against the presence of the refugees became more common in official correspondence by the end of 1961.Footnote 85 More frequently residents and officials throughout the area complained about the poor, ‘utterly inadequate’, work ethic of Rwandans – who were increasingly referred to as ‘refugees’.Footnote 86
MUYENZI: THE MAKING OF A ‘REFUGEE SETTLEMENT’
The Muyenzi settlement first began in November 1961, when Rwandans began constructing a camp in the area known as ‘Muyenzi’ in southern Ngara (Busubi). After some debate, government officials concluded that the similarities of the area to Rwanda, and the need for Ngaran development, called for a permanent refugee settlement at Muyenzi. Officials planned to settle the Rwandans with the ‘object … to intergrate [sic] them into a Tanganyika farming system, when in due course, they will regard themselves as Tanganyikans and contribute to the economy of the country’.Footnote 87 By early 1962, the government had used scarce personnel and resources to reconnoiter the area around Muyenzi, demarcating village and shamba sites.Footnote 88 Local government officials expected the refugees to be self-supporting by July 1962.Footnote 89 To officials' dismay, by November 1962, the population in Muyenzi had grown to 7,000 and no progress had been made towards self-sufficiency. Nevertheless, local officials painstakingly continued the demarcation of ten-acre land plots in new villages around Muyenzi.Footnote 90 The demarcation and survey of settlement areas required an ‘estimated … 70 men per day for 4 ½ months’ on the construction of around one hundred miles of internal roads, access roads, and waterways.Footnote 91 This was a large project overseen by the Ministry of Agriculture and dependent upon both governmental expertise and refugee labor.
The refugees, however, had no intention of acceding to government settlement plans or becoming Tanzanian.Footnote 92 While all of this work had been carried out, at least in part, with both national and international funding, it had also been done with extreme reluctance.Footnote 93 Rwandans sporadically and grudgingly contributed their labor to the various water and demarcation projects, frustrating members of the local administration and community. Local officials' opinion of the Rwandans in Ngara, and of international refugee aid, can be glimpsed throughout the archives, particularly in correspondence regarding the provisioning of water to Muyenzi. In June 1962, a field officer complained about the expansion of the Muyenzi camp beyond its original perimeters and the ‘appalling amount of human excrement’ along the local stream, despite the adequate number of latrines.Footnote 94 According to the officer, refugees bathed and washed laundry upstream ‘against the express instructions of the camp authorities’.Footnote 95 Predictably, the drinking water at Muyenzi became polluted.
International agencies, like the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), soon donated funds to supply the refugee settlement with adequate water supplies. Not all of the local officials were happy about this aid, however. D. W. Edwards, the officer in charge, wrote that ‘not one of the settlement areas is seriously short of water’.Footnote 96 As for the £40,000 donated by the FAO for the construction of water supplies, Edwards did ‘not consider that such a large sum of money is necessary and … it is out of proportion to the needs of the refugees’.Footnote 97 Another official noted that many of the refugees' complaints were ‘exaggerated as to water supply and quite out of line with what local farmers can endure’.Footnote 98
By March 1963, the agriculture department had demarcated over 15 different settlement villages throughout the area. However, in villages such as Kanyina 1 and Mbuba 1, the refugees ‘refused the cite [sic]’ and returned to the original camp.Footnote 99 Others stayed in the new settlements only during the day, returning each night to the original Muyenzi camp.Footnote 100 Those individuals who refused to ‘cooperate’ with the authorities often had their rations withdrawn.Footnote 101 As a result, many individuals and groups began stealing from seed stocks in Muyenzi, and beyond.Footnote 102
Local and national officials blamed lack of refugee cultivation on a few refugee ‘trouble makers’, or ‘jumbe’ (leaders). To increase refugee productivity and compliance, officials attempted to split-up such individuals between different settlements.Footnote 103 When the population refused to move, police officers arrested the leaders. Within two days of the arrests, in April 1963, almost the entire population of Muyenzi walked the thirty miles to the Burundian border, seeking asylum.Footnote 104 The Burundian authorities refused the Rwandans entrance, at which point they returned to Muyenzi and were forced into settlement villages.Footnote 105 By July 1963, despite their coerced dispersal into planned settlements, the refugees had still not cultivated the expected amount of land. Rwandans also continued to circumvent Tanzanian authorities by moving throughout the area, and by registering in settlements multiple times, or not at all.Footnote 106 Perhaps more disturbing than the refugees' refusal to cultivate were the rumors of refugee crossborder attacks into Rwanda. There were reports of munitions in certain settlements, as well as late night military training exercises.Footnote 107 In April 1964, the Field Force police responded to rumors that the refugees planned to steal local arms and invade Rwanda.Footnote 108 People who lived near the settlements recalled their fear that the refugees would bring the violence of Rwanda into Ngara.Footnote 109
The resistance of the Rwandan community in Muyenzi to settlement and development was itself anchored in the chaotic politics of decolonization. Certainly not all of the Rwandans in Muyenzi were interested in violently overthrowing the new Rwandan state and seizing its bureaucratic apparatus. However, the majority defied governmental and international orders to ‘settle’ in Muyenzi during their first six years in Tanzania.Footnote 110 While acknowledging that refugees never constitute homogenous groups, it is possible to trace the motivations and perceptions that led to Rwandan non-cooperation and subversion in Muyenzi.Footnote 111 Rachel Yeld, an Oxfam volunteer who lived and worked in Muyenzi during the early 1960s, emphasizes the role of rumor amongst the Rwandan population in Muyenzi, including the idea that the Tanzanian authorities in Ngara were allied with the Parmehutu Rwandan government.Footnote 112 Yeld notes that, like the ‘mythico-histories’ described by Liisa Malkki, Rwandans in Ngara saw themselves as the ‘true’ citizens and leaders of Rwanda.Footnote 113 Refugee leaders then appealed to popular imaginaries of return to a revolutionary Rwandan nation-state. Leaders spread rumors that warned the population not to disperse into settlements, or risk losing their claims to Rwandan citizenship. The refugee leadership emphasized that the populations' stay in Ngara was temporary, lasting only until the Mwami was restored to power.Footnote 114 This vision of what Rwanda should be, and for whom, required loyalty to a specific version of Rwandan nationalism, one inimical to becoming ‘citizens’ of the new Tanzanian nation.Footnote 115
It was within this context that the Tanganyikan government appealed to the UNHCR to find a voluntary agency to administer Muyenzi.Footnote 116 In October 1961, the government had first requested aid from the UNHCR to help care for the over 6,000 Rwandan refugees in northwestern Tanganyika.Footnote 117 In June 1963, the government signed its first tri-partite agreement with the UNHCR and the League of Red Cross Societies (LRCS). The original agreement was for a program beginning on 1 August 1963 and ending on 30 June 1964, with the aim of making the refugees at Muyenzi ‘self-supporting’ by the close of that period. UNHCR officials speculated that the government required an external agency to take over care for Rwandan refugees for three main reasons: funding; the fact that politically the Tanganyikan government feared damaging relations with Rwanda by appearing to associate too closely with the refugees; and a ‘psychological impasse’ between the local authorities and the refugees.Footnote 118 By 1965, the refugees at Muyenzi were still not ‘self-supporting’ and continued to rely on international aid.Footnote 119
Ngarans came to recognize Rwandans as ‘refugees’ largely due to their concentration within segregated camps and settlements.Footnote 120 Some locals did benefit from the presence of the refugees by trading local produce for internationally donated goods and working on internationally funded refugee development programs.Footnote 121 Conversely, others grew angry at the aid given to refugees, particularly as local councils were themselves in ‘great financial difficulties’.Footnote 122 Many Ngarans resented the international provisioning of refugees with free schools, rations, and clean water.Footnote 123 Ngarans blamed the refugees for thieving, harboring violent persons, and even attacking local people.Footnote 124 In 1965, a humanitarian aid worker at Muyenzi considered the refugees to be so violent as to require his acquisition of a gun for protection.Footnote 125 The association of Rwandans with violence, laziness, and privilege, contrasted starkly with local notions of progress and belonging.Footnote 126
Ngaran perceptions are perhaps best accessed through the language that people used to describe Rwandans in the district. Charles Gasarasi, a former refugee in Muyenzi camp, noted that Rwandans were first described as watoro, meaning those who flee justice.Footnote 127 According to Gasarasi, it was only later that the word wakimbizi was institutionalized in reference to Rwandans in Ngara, meaning ‘those who run’. Throughout their first years in Ngara, government officials referred almost interchangeably to Rwandans as ‘immigrants’, ‘Banyaruanda tribesmen’, ‘settlers’, and ‘refugees’. Over time, local people came to call the Rwandans wakimbizi, distinguishable from wageni (guests), due to their having fled a struggle, their inability to return to the place that they belonged, and the need to keep such people in controlled camps and settlements.
In 1965, the Tanzanian government passed the Refugee (Control) Act, meant to protect the nation from the harmful actions of refugees, and based largely on experiences with Rwandan refugees in Muyenzi.Footnote 128 Fittingly, some of the first people to be refused asylum under the new law were Rwandans, deemed ‘undesirable immigrants’, who attempted to settle in northern WLR in 1966.Footnote 129 Nevertheless, six years later, a UNHCR official summed up the problem of Rwandan refugees in Tanzania by noting that ‘Rwandese [refugees] in general … are migrant. An “illegal migration” is continuously going on between Tanzania and Burundi’, and that the Tanzanian government remained unable to ‘keep track’ of the Rwandan refugees within its territory.Footnote 130
CONCLUSION
Three decades following the arrival of the first Rwandan ‘refugees’, Ngara district again came under an international spotlight. In 1994, close to half a million Rwandans fled into Ngara, followed by over twenty international aid agencies which spent hundreds of millions of dollars on refugee relief in the district. Like the humanitarian aid given to Rwandan refugees in the 1960s, Ngarans largely did not benefit from, and came to resent, the money spent on ‘others’ in their district. Much has been written on the ‘emergency response’ to the Rwandan genocide and refugee crisis. However, few accounts have historicized the refugee encounter in Ngara. Historical work on refugees is necessary to unearth the simmering identity politics that so often fester in refugee contexts, as well as the constitutive relationship between refugee flows and nation-building.
During the early 1960s in Ngara district, nation-building efforts coincided with a broader project of global governance which endeavored to create and maintain a world of sovereign nation-states. Through decolonization, Ngarans began to perceive of themselves as part of an idea called ‘Tanzania’, an amalgamation of one hundred and fifty different tribes within a territory that just a few years prior had connoted poverty and alienness. Rwandans shared cultural and familial links with Ngarans. They shared similar languages and, in some cases, they shared migratory routes and work experiences in the Uganda Protectorate. Linguistic and cultural linkages facilitated communication and economic activities, as well as sympathy. And yet, while the physical borders between Ngara, Rwanda, and Burundi remained porous, the violent context of decolonization in Rwanda combined with national and international refugee polices and aid to create a space of difference between Ngarans and those ‘across the line’.Footnote 131
Rwandans presented Ngarans with the specter of an undesirable ‘other’, of what might have been without Mwalimu Nyerere and Tanzania.Footnote 132 When Ngarans speak about what it means, and meant, to be Tanzanian they often posit that it means not being Rwandan. A great source of pride for Ngarans continues to be Tanzania's peaceful transition to independence, particularly in light of the violence occurring in neighboring states and despite the state's unfulfilled promises of development.
Examining the history of refugees during decolonization, ‘one of the ultimate symbols of placelessness’ and difference, yields new insights into the processes through which colonized peoples became national citizens and the stumbling blocks within this transition.Footnote 133 The production of different nationalities in Ngara existed at the interstice of decolonization and the ascendancy of an international regime created to operationalize the borders of new nations and the populations therein. Rwandans did not enter Ngara as refugees. Rather, they became wakimbizi – ‘people on the run’ or refugees – over time as local perceptions molded around national and international categories of the ‘citizen’ and the ‘nation-state’.
