 My name is Laura Hammond, I'm a professor of development studies at SOAS. It's a real honor to be joining you today and to be chairing what I think will be a really interesting, fascinating discussion on mobility, migration, and diaspora. We have three speakers today and I am going to introduce them as I'll introduce each in depth as as we go forward, but just to say we have Professor Kalpana Herala from the University of KwaZulu, Natal, Dr. Binia Mizgun also from the University of KwaZulu, Natal, and Mr. Onyikachi Wambu who is the Executive Director of African, I always get afford the acronym wrong, but the African Foundation for Development. Exactly, sorry. I'll read that better when I come to your biography. Sorry about that. I'm getting a bunch of messages here. Here we go. So, first of all, we're going to hear from Professor Kalpana Heralal who is a professor of history in the School of Social Sciences at Howard College at the University of KwaZulu, Natal. She teaches both undergraduate and graduate level modules on global history, women, gender, and politics. Her PhD was looking at South Asian diaspora to Africa in settlement, trade, and identity formation. She has two key areas of interest in gender and South Asian diaspora and women in the anti-apartheid struggle. Her most recent publications are the co-author of pioneers of, I'm going to spell this and pronounce this wrong probably, but South African defy racist laws 1907 to 1914 and the co-author of gender and mobility borders, bodies, and boundaries. She is going to speak on gender migrations in the political economy of Natal. So, go ahead, Kalpana. Okay. Thank you, Professor Hammond, and thank you to SOAS and the U.K. for giving me the opportunity to present this very short paper. It's titled Gender Migration in the Political Economy of Natal. So, basically it examines historical migrations within the British Empire with specific reference to Natal in the mid-19th century, where the focus is on European and Indian women from India and India respectively who migrated to Natal in the 19th century, as well as the local urbanization of African women. So, the paper actually problematizes, and it's very much an explorative paper, it kind of problematizes female migration patterns to Natal, but within a comparative framework, arguing that race, class, and gender had a very pivotal role in kind of shape and bind the everyday lives of these women. So, European women settlers were privileged within the kind of the colonial economy, while Indian and African women suffered triple oppression in terms of their race, class, and gender. So, a comparative analysis not only highlights the gender dynamics of migration to colonial Natal, but also that migratory experiences cannot be, in a way, centralized or homogenized. And it also helps us to understand the kind of the relationship between the oppressed and the oppressors, but more significantly, it also helps us to understand the kind of nuances in the experiences between the oppressed groups, particularly in the context of migration, particularly when we look at in terms of, you know, local and international migrations. So, in the interest of time, and I only have 10 minutes, I'm just going to run through very four key aspects that I would like to highlight, particularly in trying in the framework of comparisons. So, if we look at the first one, there's reasons for migration. In all three groups, whether local or international, there were kind of similar reasons for migration shaped by socio-economic political factors. So, British settlers, women settlers, women immigrants were part of a kind of a colonization scheme to entrench British presence in Southern Africa. So, between 1849 and around 1851, you had like approximately 5,000 settlers arriving in Natal under the Joseph Brine scheme. And of course, there were other settlers also that followed like the German and the Norwegians. But that the women were motivated by several factors to immigrate, the impact of the industrialization in Britain, the outbreak of diseases and a well-run publicity campaign by the immigration and colonization office, which touted colonies as lands of opportunities. And the early British women settlers in Natal were married women, but very few amongst them were saved. African women during this period were largely confined to the reserves or locations which were overcrowded, impoverished and devoid of any kind of Richmondal source and became an essential source of cheap labor for mining capitalists. And these kind of conditions merely exacerbated the living conditions of the local Africans. So, colonial rule kind of created ships within the rural household, within the rural economy and not only in the means and the kind of mode of production, but also in the sexual division of labor. So, the movement of young African men to the mines, the entire migrant labor system created ships in agricultural responsibilities for women and the age in the rural economy. And this had a tremendous implications for the rural household and further kind of exacerbated poverty levels in the reserves. Indentured women on the other hand who arrived in 1860, but unlike African and European women, British women, arrived under a contractual system of five years. So, at the end of the five years, they could either return to India or re-indenture, but like settling African women, their reasons for migration kind of varied, poverty, the desire for a better livelihood, and also consisted of married, single, widowed and divorced women. The second aspect that I want to look at is labor and employment. If we do a comparison of all three groups, what emerges is that colonial attitudes towards women were gendered and most noticeable in the employment and labor patterns. So, settling women on arrival worked in kind of very traditional occupations such as being a governess, dressmaker, but not much later. You find that they, by the turn of the century, they entered wage labor, working as shop assistants or secretaries or clerks, etc. They became, and I quote, the symbols of the authority and superiority, unquote, of the white ruling class in the town. And they were very much embedded in Victorian notions of domesticity and gentility. Urban white women very rarely forged relations with African and Indian women other than, you know, for labor purposes. And African women, on the other hand, frustrated by the limited opportunities in the reserves and the growing levels of poverty and sought employment elsewhere. So, many of them, for example, worked as farm laborers or domestic servants and nearby white-owned farms on the reserves. And they were amongst, and these were actually amongst the lowest paid jobs available. So, frustrated, some of them actually fed to the mission stations or to the cities. Indentured women, on the other hand, were kind of seen as a junk migrants. And in fact, initially, they were not very much welcome. They were kind of reluctantly or grudgingly brought to the colony. It was only much later that attitudes towards endangered women kind of changed. And the type of work that they were signed to, and I quote, were delicate and more inclined to do light work, sorry, unquote. And so hence, they were signed on the plantations, for example, on the north coast of the town. As agricultural workers, but it was more as field hands on plantations, domestic servants, childminds, and kind of doing surface work on railways and coal mines. The third aspect that I want to highlight is the recruitment procedures. And once again, it affects colonial attitudes towards women and their role within the empire and how that kind of all was shaped by geopolitical social and economic factors. So settler women were encouraged to migrate to contribute to the colonization in the wake of the British Empire. Various colonization societies, and they were quite a few at that time, were established to facilitate recruitment and the kind of peddled employment prospects, such as that of being a governess or a nurse. But the hidden agenda was really part of the colonization scheme, and also towards colonial marriage and motherhood. For example, the Colonial Land and Immigration Board was looking for, and I quote, the right sort of women that will contribute to colonization in the wake of the British Empire, skilled, intelligent, and domesticated. In other words, the colonialists in the town were looking for homemakers and homekeepers. Indentured women, on the other hand, came to labor on a contractual system, labor system to serve the interests of the local capitalists and recruited by agents that were appointed by immigration agents, both in Calcutta and in Madras, which were the key areas of recruitment. And it was recruiting ages, for example, also touted towns and villages to secure the 40 percent quota that was required of women immigrants. In the process, coercion and deception was prevalent. On the other hand, the urbanization of African women to resentment from both colonial officials and local chiefs, the former seeking to control the inability to the urban areas through legislation and the latter who kind of sought to exercise a customary malehold on the woman. In the cities, many African women found employment as domestic servants, hawkers, beer brewing, etc. The last aspect that I would look on is resistance. So African and Indian women, unlike British women, were subject to numerous disabilities, particularly efforts to stem their mobility in the urban areas. So the presence of free Indians, those, for example, who did not renew their indentured labor contracts and stayed in a town and the gradual urbanization of African women were not particularly welcomed by colonial authorities. And since a series of restrictions were instituted, for example, the passes for African women, the three pound tax on Indian and on indentured women, Indians were barred from hotels, public baths, and so on and so forth, state controls to marriage, beer brewing and social reproduction. But African and Indian women resisted and this was most noticeable in the anti-pass campaign in Bloemfontein in 1913 and the 1913 Satyagraha movement. So in conclusion then, what I'd like to just highlight is that Indian women, Indian indentured women like the African and African, like the African counterparts suffered a triple oppression in terms of their race, class, and gender. And despite the oppressed status, there was very little in the way of interracial, social, and political solidarity during the first quarter of the century. Both groups remained largely isolated from each other to some extent, politically and socially. It was only in the 1950s when mainstream political organizations like the African National Congress and the South African Indian Congress and later the Liberal Democrats embraced non-racialism. Was there a closer cooperation between Indo-African and white women? Thank you. Thank you so much, Kalpana. It's a fascinating account, really, really rich. I'm sure there'll be some good discussion about that afterwards. I should say that if you have questions, there's a Q&A box down at the bottom of your screen. There should be one. Please enter them in any time. I'm going to hold on the questions until we've heard from all of our speakers and then we can refer to them. But if you don't want to lose track of them, please just enter them anytime. So now moving to our second speaker, Binia Mizgun, who is, as I mentioned, a lecturer in the Department of Economic History and Development Studies at the University of KwaZulu Natal. Binia's main research interests include migration development and the environment. And he's going to speak today on playing with sameness and difference, ethnography of transnational practices and Ethiopian migrants in Durban. Binia, can you think you need to unmute yourself? Yeah, okay. Thank you, Laura. In this particular project, what I tried to do is draw from broader research on the problematics of integration that we have in South Africa as a transnational space and trying to make sense of how identities are weaved in those transnational spaces as far as nationals coming into South Africa. That's what I try to grapple with. And considering integration as a problematic instead of an outcome, which most migration studies have been accustomed to, appropriated it in that way. And here what I want to do is using a geography, try to capture how integration is represented in and through the everyday. And here two writers have been very influential to my thinking about this. The one is Stuart Hall and his description of identities, diasporic identities as stories we tell about ourselves and others. And for him, that temporary attachment is a very essential element of how he characterised identities. And another author has been very important here is the Michel Desartes, particularly his work on strategies and tactics, strategies as organised by power in the form of structure, architecture, and then in this case, I appropriated it to also look at how narratives have been organised by powers. And tactic is how individuals from the low appropriates those challenge power and subverts it and invent new ways of representing themselves and facilitating their interaction. And then every day and that every day has been very central here. And it's true that I try to make sense of the movements and moments and their implication to shifting sense of identity, belonging and community among Ethiopian migrants in South Africa, more broadly but for the purpose of this particular paper, I only selected those who would be in the war in Durban and it not accounts from Durban as a particular side for our research. And what I wanted to portray here is the fluidity of association belonging and sociability and how power relations continue to regulate who is in and who is out and ways of capturing this by exploring the everyday interaction and the everyday conversations that individuals have. And therefore much of what I present today would be snippets of the ethnographic accounts and I hope you bear with that. Ethiopians do derive or started arriving in Durban in the early 90s, though there are accounts that some of them had come to South Africa prior to that even while our tide was full swing. But much of it is from the 90s with the new dispensation in South Africa and many of them arrived different routes or foods via Mozambique or through the harbor, Durban harbor and an electron of course, a direct fight coming here as students or as expatriates and there is a diversity in that so and many of them have continued to come rather as refugees or asylum seekers. And here I think I need to be very specific about why I use migrant and I use the word migrant despite knowing there are multiple legal statuses accorded to them, asylum seekers, expats or permanent residents, citizens or respective of their legal status here. They continue to interact with each other in a particular form and therefore use the term migrant to put all of them together into a. So and following this, I tried to make sense of how they interact with each other, form a community, identify themselves as migrants in South Africa and here what I what I've noticed is a very important ways of marking geography bodies and social spaces and it starts from home shops or restaurants that they own. They continue to portray this and speak about themselves, but at the same time also mark that particular geography there through different symbols that they post at home, for example, they put their Christian, then they put, you know, the icon stats would portray them as Christians and Muslims and similarly to to to recapture that they are from Ethiopia, then they put symbols that remind us of home pictures, paintings, different forms are put together to represent their identities and the shops in the restaurant the same way, depending on who they serve and the shops that you would see the Ethiopian scripture, which is particularly Amharic or scripture and all the other to be trying to capture the attention of their particular customers, but in this case what they're creating is they they're creating marked geographies and this is where Ethiopians are residing. So wherever walking paths would just start to identify that area as a marked geography and here, particularly in the beginning of Waste the Streets in Durban, which is now called the Dr. Pixely Kassami Street, you would vividly identify if you know a little bit about Ethiopia, that this is where Ethiopians are residing or those are shops run by Ethiopians and locals are already recognizing that and seeing this this is where Ethiopians are. Prior to the beginning of the beginning of Waste Street, they used to be at Albert Park area and those movements are facilitated as by by economic factors and other social relations. For example, renting a place is very difficult for some so they depend on their social network who has access to them and most importantly they depend on internal network which is an Ethiopian network. Now I keep mentioning Ethiopian-Ethiopian but then you will see that there are subtle differences and differences that may not be visible to outsiders but from as an insider then you would be able to see it and it's in a very interesting way they continue to represent themselves in conversations as well, not only by marking geographies but also in conversations, narratives that they project. We are all Africans, is he one of us? If only you were one of us, are you Habersha? I don't want to live at Waste Street because it's full of Kambatta and Hadiyah. Kambatta and Hadiyah are ethnic groups from Ethiopia. Why don't you give me a decent discount? As it as it was we were said to be children of the same country, trying to bargain with a trader, a wholesaler and I'm sure you know that the price I'm giving you is for Kim and Kim and the shop owner would reply and in other moments then you would notice that my country man is projected, ethnic group is also being mentioned regularly and a person would shift from one to the other within a space of a day if not weeks or months and those are the ways in which they try to facilitate the air interaction but we also notice that this shop is bought by an Ethiopian from an Indian businessman. An Ethiopian owns this bar. Let's go and support one of our own. Aren't we from the same country, my country man? All those are very interesting ways of capturing self and others and in that way then one is moving between different identities and facilitate that interaction and here what you notice is that they call a feature of their conversation interaction with each other and they continue to shift with moments and movements. For example, if one is in Ethiopia you wouldn't call themselves as an Africa but here you know I'm a migrant, I'm a refugee or I'm an African would be something very much relevant but it also depends who that person is interacting with. Why am I raising all this? They're very important to consider inclusion and exclusion. Who is in or who is out? Who should be afforded some sympathy, support and who shouldn't? Who should earn our trust and who shouldn't? This is very much determined through those processes and through those narratives that they project and we also notice that it besides discourses as well, and it decides the spaces as produced as a transnational production. So them versus them is often a part of this arrangement. Associations that they establish what they call a support group for in the time of Dave and Moabir is a saving group and all are organized around ethnic identities and or identity markers of a different kind perhaps it could be it could transcend the ethnic. For example, those who come from a particular personic would then add this would come together despite the fact that they come from different ethnic background but this is basically something that exclude others they won't be trusted but at the moments they would try to use the Ethiopian identity to earn trust or to negotiate a different kind of social and material relation with the other. What do we learn from this and what I've picked up from here is sameness and difference are playfully appropriated and exploited in moments and movements and the significance of one particular story a narrative about self and others is selectively mobilized to particular forms of using particular forms setting similarity or difference. When they're fighting then they emphasize on the difference when they try to reconcile they emphasize on a sameness and for example a particular incident that the Somali and Ethiopian thoughts of a business dispute and illness came together and the narratives that they give to reconcile them is you know we are all from same region yeah we are all migrants and in another moment you would hear that we're all Christians and they are very useful to facilitating actions of each individual or group but it's also very important to recognize at this point that those narratives are not all accessible to everybody for example those who come from a rural area may not mobilize being an African as a particular claim making a relation to South Africans I'm entitled to live in this place or using that Ethiopian assisted the South Africans in their fight against apartheid is not something that will be accessible to everybody but those who have access to it would mobilize that and it's also very important to recognize that some narratives are pushed by those in power local elites facilitate that why because there is so much to retain to gain from that to exclude others in controlling the particular group and any kind of benefits whether it's through trust or savings and material relations or customer relationship to be established through those networks or the local elites then try to use that to strengthen bond within a particular group so that other elites would be excluded from that this is within different ethnic groups or religious groups within the Ethiopian community but there's a say that this kind of relations may not tell us there is a solid community which we can refer as Ethiopian community rather what we see is communities operate a different level and organized by a different interest and we also notice that those are full of contradictions tensions and anxieties as they promote one particular narrative of sameness or difference they don't see those contradictions and but in their practices you see the attentions and anxieties and those are directly lend themselves to the desire to fit in to bring in there here together home and abroad part of those strategies and to conclude we tend to see this as a very important way of the very important way of organizing south and organizing others and mobilizing narratives of sameness and difference as a strategy by those in power and from below we tend to see that individuals are separating it and mobilizing it to facilitate their interaction and making this notion of integration a very problematic one and I leave it here thank you very much thank you so much I'm really fascinating maybe if we have a chance and I can snatch a few moments to to comment a bit more on this work because it's quite links quite well with some work that I'm involved in as well but now without further ado we will turn to our final speaker who is Onyukachi Wambu Onyukachi is as I mentioned earlier the executive director of the african foundation for development excuse me from my brain freeze at the beginning which is a charity that seeks to enhance the the contributions that africans in the diaspora make to african development african development uh it's afford is a pioneer and an innovator in the field of policy and practice of diaspora development like um and responding to the disjuncture between the mainstream international development and actual diaspora action uh and we at the center of african studies at so has have worked pretty closely with afford for many many years affords the advocacy work uh under Onyukachi's leadership has contributed to uk and international recognition of the role of diaspora in african and international development and in the subsequent initiation of new policies programs funds and schemes by such global institutions as the european union the african union uh diffid now known as the fcdo foreign commonwealth and development office the world bank iom comic relief giz and the swiss development cooperative corporation Onyukachi is a journalist by and by training and by many years many years previously um he's also written widely on africa and her global diaspora including a publication called under the tree of talking leadership for change in africa and edited volume and empire wind rush 50 years of writing about black britain so please uh Onyukachi over to you he's going to speak sorry i should say going to speak about remembrance restitution and the 10 rs processing the past and increasing cultural understanding of legacies and enslavement and colonialism in the african world thanks Onyukachi thank you laura um for that awesome introduction and also thank you to um so as um i'm the university of kwaizulu um for the opportunity to share my thoughts on this um um about um 1988 89 we started to notice um a lot of increased interest and um actions by the diaspora um about issues of slavery and issues of um remembrance and and it was really interesting that that interest and urgency has been picking up i mean there've always been a series of connected movements led by africans in the diaspora and on the continent um in response to the economic social cultural and spiritual legacies legacies of enslavement and colonialism but as i say around 88 um this interest um was heightened and i'm going to try and explain why i think it happened and why we are currently in a period of um profound reckoning um that will actually be you know i think going going to be with us for a considerable period of time um as i said the struggles took on urgency in the late 1980s and by 1992 the organisation fabric community had established a reparations committee and appointed an eminent persons group to address wide-ranging issues around reparations um so this steam of head was building up amongst the diaspora groups and in the UK it included the launch of Bernie Grants a former MP very respected MP who launched an african reparations movement uh in the UK and the movement began to seek reparations from the British government but also began to focus on issues of restitution of cultural artifacts as well in British museums and indeed some demonstrations were held outside the British museum to that effect but at that stage in those conversations i actually attended one of those demonstrations um you know i think the people in the museum sort of looks on us with mild amusement at the time um around the same time that Bernie Grant was launching the african reparations movement i was thinking about a um launch of an african remembrance day which would uh ceremony which would really commemorate the victims of enslavement um i was aware that there was nothing that was being done um despite the millions who had perished crossing in capture on the continent crossing across the atlantic ocean and and also on the plantation economies of the new world so that was um on the cards in terms of thinking about that that day was eventually launching 1995 but it was a historical development in South Africa in 94 that i think really explains what was happening around this and why this head of steam so to speak was building up and that development in 94 was obviously the election of Nassim Mandela, South Africa's president um and it for me finally explained what was happening uh South Africa in 94 signified the official end of an age in history and i think what we are looking at here in terms of kind of contested spaces is is also about contested histories or spaces in the historical sense and i think what began what happened with 94 was this uh official end of an age in history which one could perhaps call the age of enslavement and constitutional second class citizenship as far as the african was concerned globally so beginning in 1452 when Pope Nicholas the 5th issued his faithful bull that authorized that king Afonso the 5th of Portugal could initially reduce any muslims or saracens as they were called then and pagans and other unbelievers of perpetual slavery um a second bull was issued by the pope shortly after the Romanus Pontifex from January the 5th 1554 1455 um to the same Afonso and it extended uh in this papal bull the Catholic nations of European domination over the discovered lands during the age of discovery and along with extending that the ownership of these discovered lands it sanctified the seizure of non-christian lands and also encouraged the enslavement of natives non-christian peoples in Africa and the new world so i'm marking this period of enslavement and constitutional second class citizenship as far as impacts the african and obviously the diaspora have the very intense perceptions of this having gone through that process um so this moment so the age of discovery empire conquest and colonization for Europe becomes the age of dispossession slavery occupation um and second class citizenship for Africans during this period of course um there were there was always um resistance as that was happening um but what i think Miles's period out is that uh constitutions and laws in different countries around the globe but especially in the Atlantic space what i'm calling the Atlantic space um enshrined African impurity um so the resistant battles and free and wars of freedom and liberation and decolonization were waged in different locations where Africans were to reverse these laws and try to cause for freedom um the first measure of freedom was of course achieved in eight on a scale was achieved in 1804 in Haiti and then bookended by the final liberation in South Africa um 190 years later so South Africa ends this period of global and constitutional inferior inferiority of Africans globally and i think you can see what was happening in the African world is that from the moments of the people boom what people have been engaged in is actually pushing forward to remove each indignity in terms of the different locations that we've been um where Africans were so Haiti and then you have the battles in America you have the the battles within the purchase system that leads to the end of slavery then in Brazil in all the different locations and then we're into a decolonization battles so each time we're looking forward trying to remove the next indignity and then it ends in i think in in 1994 um and then we what happens in 1994 is that um we begin to look backwards at what happened uh who were the victims um you know what what other roles did we play in terms of reform in this Atlantic space so during this period a number of discreet but related campaigns have been waging resistance involving what i'm now characterizes as the 10 hours uh recognition remembrance restoration restitution reparations reconciliation return and reimagination renewal and reconstruction and the diaspora have played very important roles in in in the sights of those struggles um and it seems to me that the 10 hours are parts of the reckoning now by the black and African world of the damaging impact uh and the structural legacies of slavery and colonization they've frequently the 10 hours been uh frequently developed uh as us organizations and movements that have been nuanced around one of those hours um but often um they work as a continuum of a broader movement as i said burning ground would take on the issue of reparations but he would also address issues of restitution uh of of the artifacts but each of those move ours i would argue is nuanced and um and complex in itself but obviously the whole is to really um tackle and respond to this the this legacy that so we have in terms of the age of second class citizenship and um and slavery so if we go through the ours just a little bit more the first was just recognition and acknowledgement of what had happened during this period and we're still finding that very difficult when we engage um different uh sectors of um of empire of the old imperial order where you know the the cultural world wars that are now being launched against the national english national heritage for even trying to uh write about the fact that a lot of these older buildings were built on slavery or the or the results of slavery is that issue of recognition of what happened is still an acknowledgement is still uh you know with us uh and there are a lot of people who are launched as i said in terms of the current government launching culture wars to prevent um that recognition then we have the remembrance of the victims now at the most conservative estimate crossing the Atlantic there's two million people uh i said to have died others uh give much larger uh projections of that figure so you have these numbers of people who who left the the earth and there's been very little i mean before we started the memorial in the uk in 1995 there was nothing said about that number of people who could leave the earth and um and nothing we said about them you know fathers mothers children children daughters um perished and i'm not a word so the remembrance of the victims and um you know and those on the african continent and those on the plantations and as i said those in the middle passage it has been very important and then kind of this issue of restitution of physical artifacts and human remains and you know a lot of human remains were taken some as trophies um the zimbabweans are still fighting to get the heads of some of the first heroes in the first wars of liberation which were taken and stored somewhere in in a in a in a box in the basement somewhere we believe in the vna so there are these issues of restitution the restoration of african dignity and their reparations for the financial and other psychological uh impacts of what happened um you know as people always say you know why why make the argument for reparations and i said well if it wasn't about money then cutting millions of people across the atlantic was just a form of sadism so it's either about money or sadism and if it's about money let's have a conversation about how you compensate the descendants of those who who went through their precious experience and then there's been the issues that um again within the african world because there was a incredible severe breach and of relationships so there's issues around reconciliation within the severed african world and how we deal with that and then others like the rusters and have led a big movement for return which is the the most powerful form of reconnection and and now there is again another movement to to return i understand in the last couple of weeks db1 they made some noises about moving back to garner so that's all again back on on the agenda in a big way and then we're now into also how do we reimagine how do we renew and reconstruct these shattered african societies or in terms of that last characterisation the african union will see because they're renaissance and this is how it describes it in its agenda 2063 so we are the beginning of this period of reckoning it's likely to be a period of intense focus on different aspects of the three yards the black lives matter movements last year for instance again brought this back and the issues of recognition were to the forefront who are these people with who we are venerating our public squares why is it that these statues are still up so each of these movements throws up these bigger questions and i think at heart what we're seeing is a reinsertion of the missing narrative of the african participation in the creation of the atlantic civilizational space this space unleashed by columbus has been if not the most important geopolitical reality of the last 500 years the gold land and free labour of the conquered and the enslaved transformed the fortunes of the european world turning small and medium-sized countries into superpowers people of african descent played critical roles in co-creating this civilizational space over the last 100 years but i really enjoyed the benefits and have indeed even been written out of the narrative of how that space was created so the 10 hours are a reassertion of that african narrative of co-creation the victims are being remembered and spoken about requests are being made for artifacts human remains and icons who were taken during that period statues of cruel oppressors are once more in the frames as we try and acknowledge what happened the colonization of texts institutions all of these on the agenda as african contributions and african contributions have been excavated and added to the corpus of knowledge history and the future i think is being reborn and to quote a title of genoa chebys it is morning yes on creation day thank you thank you so much on akachi it's really interesting i think the ways in which these three contributions contribute to our thinking about how history is made and how it's remembered and remade i guess in terms of and and and well remade and also marked and and commemorated and it's though it's which voices are are remembered in which voices are obscured and our kind of constant quest and all of this is to try to bring out the voices that are being obscured maybe that's a thread that seems to link all three of these contributions and although they take different perspectives um so yeah so so i think there's there's a lot here to get our get our wrap our heads around angelica asked me if i would just at the beginning say a little bit about the work that i'm doing which maybe i was just thinking of some work that i'm involved in that relates a bit particularly to tubinium's contribution but but not only um so i'm involved in something called the migrating migration uh for uh development and equality inequality i can't even my brain's breathing again it's called the middeck hub um it's looking at migration and inequalities in the context of movements between so-called southern countries which is a terrible term to use but one of the corridors that we look at kind of pairs of countries and one of them that i'm working on particularly is is Ethiopia to South Africa so i was interested in thinking about the ways in which in these kinds of in these contributions um the the notion of community of who belongs to a community of how of having multiple communities or communities that adhere in certain contexts and fragment in other contexts becomes relevant so one of the things we're looking at is you know what is the experience of people as they move from Ethiopia to South Africa and how what is their experience of arriving but also then how does that relate to inequalities between themselves and their original communities as well as themselves and their communities in which they've they've settled in in South Africa and we're working with the University of Cape Town with Faisal Garba and Johannes Seifu and others um and and in that i think that the some of the points that Binu made about multiple communities really rings true for sure but also i think Kavana's comments on mobility and immobility and the ways in which people's movements are cons conscripted conscripted restricted by their access to power by their own um agency which which is some in some ways determined by forces outside of them is really relevant here um and and i think as well kind of links in some ways to the thinking about sort of how how do we i guess i've been thinking a lot about how do we write this history this is an important moment in the history of of some Ethiopian communities and some South African communities and how our migrants and people on the move being worked into those understandings of history is really kind of an interesting point i won't go into more detail on my own research but i'm fascinated by all of these different contributions we have quite a number of questions that have already been entered into the q and a box and if you have others please i would encourage you to put them in and i will unfortunately i can't we can't unmute you to ask your own question i would have preferred that you would ask your own questions and we could have more of a real kind of live discussion but since we're not able to i'm gonna have to read some of these questions i hope that's all right um and the first one so maybe i'll take three i'll take a round of three and then i'll come back and we'll do another round after as well so we can try to keep it as much as as if we were in the room together as possible so the first question comes from daniella atana sova uh for um kalpana saying thank you for the fascinating talk in the title an abstract of your talk you use the term migration while in the talk itself you often use the term mobility and immobility when speaking about the movements of women to nintal could you please comment on this choice of terms and concepts and then based on what you learned from your sources how successful do you think they were how do you successful do you think colonial and traditional authorities were in stymie the mobility of african women and thirdly i guess when did those efforts to control mobility and so that's one set of questions and and kalpana if you've not kept track if it's hard to keep track of all the different strands of that three-part question you can look in the q and a um and then another for uh binium from samson sagai um is there so-called ethiopian identity and if so what are its characteristics um samson's asking that he says i'm assuming that ethiopia is a country of more than 80 ethnicities and mostly people think across ethnic lines although i suppose you'd have something particular to say on that binium um and i'm going to go down we haven't yet got questions for anikachi probably because these came in while uh the others were speaking so i'm gonna then take another question here around well that's around uh luvna's questions for the suffering and pain experienced by indentured indian women as well as other enslaved women within the context of forced migration to the various british colonies and particularly port natal so let's take those questions and then we'll come back kalpana do you want to go first yes um i'll go first i'll look at the first question um yes i do use the term migration so perhaps a very simplistic um reconstruction or rather understanding of migration would be just the movements of people but as i said in the introduction of my paper it's a very much looking at from a local and an international perspective so you know looking at how um women immigrants from britain india and um you know came to south africa and also looking at um migration from the local context so looking at african urbanization so kind of juxtaposing the the transnational migration with within and local migration within the kind of framework so in what ways perhaps and i'm trying to understand and explore in what ways are the are these transnational migrations or um local migrations in what way are they in a sense um similar or dissimilar and if so how and why and um we need not see it with in in an isolation so and i think when we we we engage in a much more comparative uh within a analyzes within a comparative framework we tend to understand um you know how ways in which for example race casting ethnicity into weed to shape the destinies and the histories of these individuals um then there was the question on mobility yes the mobility that i was alluding to in the paper i referred to within a much within a contextual use of mobility and here i referred to the kind of um you know agency of women more in terms of the um the the personal mobility of these individuals individuals um so towards the end of the paper i alluded to how for example indentured Indian women had certain limitations um and in terms of their mobility so the 1895 three pound tax that prevented them um you know they had to pay the three pound tax um otherwise they had to pay a fine or be imprisoned if they did not re-indenture then also the issue of the uh passes um where African women in for example in blimpantine had to carry passes um uh and this kind of stand there their their personal uh mobility um so what i'm trying to allude to here is that um this has a serious impact on on on women in terms of the uh the kind of legislations that were introduced attempted to it was not only attacked on the uh for example their livelihood but it was an attack on their dignity as individuals is in a front on the on their dignity so um um in a sense it it kind of um uh had a huge impact on the personal uh on their kind of personal identities and their personal agency uh personal uh movement the other just to add to that particular question also was to what extent were they successful if we look uh sorry colonial and um authorities were successful i think in limiting the movements of individuals let me just add that at the turn of the century you know following the 1913 anti uh past campaigns in blimpantine and the 1913 satyagraha campaign you would find that um um despite the resistance of the these communities i mean legislation still continued um so particularly with um for example in the night in the early 1920s like you had the 1923 urban areas act which which established segregated locations or townships within african for africans within the cities and then um the authorities constantly tried to introduce legislation that would limit the the the the entry or the mobility of women within the urban area so it made it extremely difficult for them to actually to you know acquire accommodation in the cities or employment etc they were only allowed to be there for a couple of months or hours etc and they needed a pass and even then um for example um if this sorry it had a huge impact on the overall um mobility um and and then over a period of time by the 1940s you would find that more and more um african urbanization kind of increased by the 1940s um and also i just want to add that um by the 1930s and early 40s youth we see more for example protests and unrest by women uh particularly in farina kong in many of the various eastern towns there were for example uh police raids against woman beer bill beer brewing in potter system the municipality for for example imposed lodges permits as a means of controlling those who wish to live in the locations so what is important here to also understand is that the the the the 1930s and 1940s you had women being part you know seeing these legislation as an affront to their personal mobility to their dignity to their livelihood and so what what we see emerging is a kind of a political consciousness emerging during this period and it actually um matures in a sense within a multiracial framework in the 1950s particularly with the formation of the federation of south african women so i'll just stop there the other question perfect thank you so much and capanna we'll come back for us for us more questions in a few minutes uh binium do you want to take the the the question around a so-called ethiopian identity and i if i could i would just maybe um combine that with a second question from fricado abatto who asks um can you please give us specific instances when ethiopians in south africa think themselves as ethiopian and not as african uh and the implication that this thinking has on their integration within the wider south african population in durban i think the two questions kind of go together quite well hopefully thank you laura uh yes uh i think it's very true that ethiopia is a very diverse country 80 uh over 80 ethnic groups do live in ethiopia but uh it's very important also to recognize that the narratives that i capture is how they represent themselves how how they talk about themselves yeah and they are conversational with others or in their in their conversation with me uh as a narratrian uh they would talk to me we come from that same area same neighborhood as somali you somali i'm an ethiopian but we come from the same neighborhood so that's how you identify uh how they uh they they represent themselves as an ethiopia it also goes beyond that the they mark their hopes with their flags or ethiopian uh map or artifacts from ethiopia so when you go into the restaurant even though it is owned by one person from a particular ethnic group it could be marked with the honoured of ethiopian symbols yeah symbols from ethiopia whether it's a painting that that is that represents ethiopia it could be a cultural artifact from its particular ethnic group but those are blended and they represent that this is an ethiopian space yeah an ethiopian restaurant and and that's how you try to make sense of how they they capture themselves so and they are and they are claim making strategy and tactics they move in and out of those categories they're not always fixed etiopias they're not always fixed a particular ethnic group or combata hadiya depending on who they're talking to depending on who they're relating to and depending on who they are engaging with they move in and out of those categories and it's very important to recognize that local illets uh from let's say from uh hadiya ethnic group they would organize and uh what they call it you know this association to support in case of uh bereavement and death and there was a material element to it uh the money to be collected money to be managed dispersed depending on uh uh the particular situation so they've been charged with it so whatever is going to come in they monitor and regulate uh uh based on ethnicity but in other instance they mobilize an ethiopian identity in order to have access to uh let's say angios yeah so we are representatives of etiopias and as they approach the local angios who are trying to support refugees and asylum seekers so depending on the moments they are moving in and out of those categories so they're not fixed and and african identity is also mobilized in a similar fashion yeah they're not always fixedly african but when they're speaking to somebody a local one the zulu person they would make a claim that we are all african why we need to engage with each other we need to relate to each other as one because we belong to this continent it's a it's a claim making a strategy and it's a claim making a tactic but then they they're not constantly fixed in one day they move from one to the other they move from one to the other depending on who they're interacting with so what i'm trying to claim is that they those facilitate interactions with different groups of different individuals from different backgrounds as they engage with each other and the geographies that they mark uh uh it's very important and sometimes they use the south african flag to represent that they are in south africa or when they want south africans to come in or use a south african name to their shop if they are eager to attract local customers yeah uh many of them you know are in running small shops spas or shops and they they use those local names in order to attract customers so they claim the sameness and difference they claim uh uh uh uh in such uh uh uh intricate fashion but they are not they're very fleeting and determined always in their everyday interaction with uh the uh what what happens and i think uh i should leave it there thanks thanks so much we'll come back to you in a few minutes um on you catch i have a question for you uh which is um surround the sort of your position of kind of brokering conversations between diaspora and african-based communities and i wondered whether in simulating these discussions whether there are challenges in terms of different historical readings different ideas different expectations of how people think that memorization and commemoration should take place and if so how do you how do you manage those how do you respond to those so um that's a question for you and then um there are there are actually two questions here for vinium i must confess i'm not entirely sure that i understand this question but so i'm gonna read it out it's from sonia um ab and i'm gonna ask her maybe she can type in any clarification if it's not clear to you vinium so anyway she's asked why are marked geography is important and do markings and artifact have immediate currency um how for example how what and why and that's with speaking from the perspective of indigenous south african uh san and koi descendant communities that have been assimilated and disappeared and are now trying to reappear under the new democratic government so i guess it's asking maybe about making a parallel between um these different communities and the second question is um from gracious ma visa um about trying to understand the the sameness and difference how sameness and difference is conceptualized um is this within and among ethiopians only um or also uh or is it also embracing sameness and difference in the interactions between ethiopians and locals in terms of south africans and or endurban um so maybe you could take bin if you could take take those two questions and i want to catch you the other one any catch you do you want to go first okay thank you um yes it's a difficult question um and very complex in terms of the reactions um when we started the remembrance day people um would come along and there is a moment when you you go through and i had that moment and you realize um that you go beyond statistics and you realize that the the people at the bottom of the atlantic ocean were people um i watch a lot of these uh who do you think you are programs and every time there's a somebody of african descent um um and they're from the caribbean eventually they will go back either to the museum or wherever the record is and and see that log that traces their ancestor to the point where they arrive um in in the americas and um and then it says you know there's no name there's no personality just says african uh and i remember the news custom or a steward going through that and on camera you could see her up until then it had been yes she she knew this would happen yes she knew this moment was coming but then when the moment comes she goes through an extraordinary experience on camera in fact she breaks down and they cut the camera and i've seen two or three others go through this moment so when we started to remember and say people go through this moment they when it stops being statistics and it's about them it's about human beings and the responses are difficult um and how you then have that conversation because we are talking about the atlantic space so there's a african dimension of that there's a european dimension then there's you know the plantation economies how you have that conversation in terms of that um triangle is very difficult so again you've seen complex reactions when people make the pilgrimage to to the castles the slave enslaved castles are on the coast of Ghana and then they get there and of course they're going through this incredible moment uh you want the world around you to stop but just outside the castles the Naeans are getting on with trying to in the markets trying to make a living and they're like this is too important for you to just be doing these ordinary things and sometimes there's a kind of an anger that the broader society hasn't taken on the weight of what they're going through emotionally and and what happened and then so alongside that there's just also issues of how this past is thought taught in schools both on the continent and elsewhere and and that is really inadequate um I would say and the reason the people around the castles sometimes don't have that sense of a sacred space that those who are coming back have is that um they just haven't there isn't the educational system hasn't enabled them to go through that process so yeah it's uh it's a it's a difficult conversation I remember a friend who took his partner from the Caribbean back to a village in Nigeria and and the person said where are you from and you know these are villages who've never left the village and they said well um I'm from Jamaica at that point they didn't know where Jamaica was so they just said oh America yeah and and and then she felt well why don't you know where Jamaica is so there there is um there's a lot of work to do in terms of the different kind of appreciations of what happened and and the weight of the people feel about that history once they understand it and then to get other people to also share the sense of of the immensity and the weight of that okay great yeah that's really interesting and I'm sure it has it actually I'm thinking it has lots of um extensions to other kinds of you know diet as you well know from for its other work you know in terms of diaspora discussions across different diaspora groups and as well with communities that they're engaging with in in Africa or wherever so just another point just another point even the village woman yeah knew so much about Europe but not about those who left right so it's still that dominant discourse is really with the European center of it is still what we're trying I think to to now kind of uh I think it's more than the center I think we're trying to actually put in place a an accurate portrayal of that past and all the different forces that were involved and all the different peoples who were involved in that right thank you very interesting um Biniam yes thanks Laura yeah um okay uh I think to answer this particular questions I would I would try to just give you that one particular count a homophase had a way the the refugee reception center had translators for local communities of each countries that are uh that they uh had to serve on a regular basis so this is from back in 2012 yeah and what has happened there was uh uh though the homophase recognized uh those translators as Ethiopians they are divided along ethnic lines yeah the the local elites who act as mediators between a state and a institution and their local communities so what what they did was they said a particular figure of money that they should charge to those who are seeking their service even though the service those services are meant to be for free so what they do is they collect the money from those asylum seekers for whom that they fill in the form or trans act as translators and one particular person interjected and said this is not acceptable so he started to do it on his own and for free and they try to literally harass him and destroy him and what they did was now they start to mobilize their ethnic groups against this particular person don't go through him don't trust him you know so they even though he's for free even though he would accept them well they try to mobilize it along those ethnic lines so when do they emphasize uh narratives of sameness when do they emphasize narrative of differences what I am very much uh keen on and try to understand and unpack and they tend to mark geographies as well this bar is owned by Ethiopia it's no longer just the bar it's a bar owned by Ethiopia so let's go and socialize there this is a bar owned by Kenya one of us yeah one of us because we are now refugees or migrants in this unhospitable country yeah that doesn't like foreigners or you meet a Zulu person he said that we are all the same you know we are Africans you know and stand together and it's a claim making strategies so they shift in moments and movements and that's what I try to appreciate and try to relate it to how those facilitate interaction economic social and material engagement with within those communities and across communities as well locals or other foreigners thank you great thank you so much we have one additional question for Anikachi here from Joe Davis saying thank you for your brilliant contribution today I sincerely hope that the efforts to gain reparation payments prevail um I wonder did you know that the national african-american reparations commission yesterday called on president biden to support reparations and hr 40 by any means necessary do you think uh there's a place or is there a place one place where all the reparations proponents gather to caucus and do you think it will work and is the african union I guess still involved in this so set of set of set of questions I guess Anikachi well at the african union the person who led the charge and finance that was the former Nigerian presidential candidate Mkayola Biola and he was passionate about this issue and and had the money to finance african union to take it on at that level which is why there's he he in fact financed the work of the eminent persons group the affluent will have come together around the issues of reparations and the last you know we keep coming back to South Africa in all of this and the the last time everybody came together was to put the case at the Durban conference on on racism and where in the end they pushed through a you know the the idea that what happened in the middle passage and during slavery was a crime against humanity so that was a major pressure a lot of momentum built up after that conference in Durban in 2001 in august early september and of course all that momentum dissipated a few days later when the twin towers were hit and we have 911 so for about 10 years the you know new new battles were being fought in in the middle east and elsewhere and there wasn't this just went off the agenda the last few years caracom in the Caribbean the caracom countries have come together and now have an agenda and they passed a resolution when they passed the former european colonial powers who had colonies in in the in the caravan region to to make reparations and those you know there's a you know at the University of West Indies there's a research commission there on reparations which feeds into the caracom initiative and the vice chancellor the University of West Indies Hilary Beckles has been taking up a lot of you know a lot of the pressure to get recognition of this the University of West Indies signed an agreement recently with Glasgow University I think where there was going to be some form of reparations because of the role of that university in the trade but yes there hasn't been kind of widespread recognition from the parties on this side to to do that and what when we were putting these arguments sometimes to under the blade government or others they wanted to talk instead about how they were dealing with this legacy through the prism of development aid and that was how they wanted to have the conversation and dealing with it as development aid does not allow you to go through the process I think as South Africans went through where you understand what happened and understand why it is that a conversation needs to be happened about you know you know what exactly happened who benefited the structural inequalities and disparities that were put in place as a result and then you can then work out a way that you think you might be able to look at how you address issues of compensation or issues of redress as I would prefer to to call it so um I think those you know the conversations are going on the African side the at certainly the elite level at the level of the level of the level of the congressional black hawkers there's there's there have been a lot of conversations and common positions have been arrived at and as I said the most uh you know really dramatic one was the common position that was arrived at before the the Durban conference in 2001 great thank you that's really helpful and interesting information um we're just about out of time so I just want to thank all of our speakers for a really rich and fascinating um conversation around all sorts we've covered a huge amount of of um different sort of subjects but also different sort of um perspectives I think bringing in history bringing in identity um thinking forward to the future about how do we how do we make make sense of or make come to some sense of um sense of reconciliation in terms of going into the future as well so I really want to thank all of you for um some fascinating conversations I also um wanted to draw people's attention to the fact that there's a keynote speech which is going to start in about 15 minutes um uh keynote conversation actually on archives museums and heritage as contested spaces of identity with Professor Paul Basu from SOAS and uh Elsie Owusu who is an architect and director of just Ghana LTD so please do join that if you're able and this then later on after that will be another panel on archives museums and heritage as contested spaces of identity so um thank you so much to everyone here who's joined us we've had a great crowd and um I hope that somehow we can virtually clap our hands and and say thank you to Kelpana Biniam and Onyakachi thank you so much take care thank you