African Thresholds: Borders and Places of Passage in Africa, C.1450 to Present

Erscheinungsjahr 2025
ISBN: 978-90-04-72696-3
Verlag: Brill

Buch, Englisch, Band 56/5, 381 Seiten, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 732 g

Reihe: Studies in Global Social History / Studies in the Social History of the Global South

The Open Access publication of this book has been made possible by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

What is a border, and why does it exist? Reappraising a key idea from Arnold van Gennep’s Les rites de passage, this book argues that a border is a threshold, a limen, made to be crossed. African Thresholds studies places of passage spanning from the riverine networks of Senegambia to border-making in colonial Gold Coast and Côte d’Ivoire; from the desert roads of central southern Africa to river heartlands in colonial Togo; from flows of cowrie shells across the Volta River to insurgent borderities in the Lake Chad. In a time when state borders are increasingly shut, this book aims to show us that a border is made by those who cross it as much as by those who stand by it.

Contributors are: Ettore Morelli, Fernando Mouta, Pierluigi Valsecchi, María José Pont Cháfer, Giulia Casentini, and Aimé Raoul Sumo Tayo.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Weitere Mitwirkende

Morelli, Ettore

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Afrikanische Geschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Preface

Lists of Figures and Maps

Notes on Contributors

Introduction: The Threshold Ettore Morelli

1 Merchants without Borders: Lançados and Luso-Africans in Upper Guinea, 1450s–1600s Fernando Mouta

2 Gyzikoa: Twin-Folk and Threshold on the Orange River Border, Southern Africa 1686–1796 Ettore Morelli

3 ‘No Palaver about 1 or 2 Villages with 10 or 20 inhabitants’ Pierluigi Valsecchi

4 Thresholds, Borders and Cowries: the Problem of Small Change in West Africa and the Spread of Single Currencies in Northern Ghana María José Pont Cháfer

5 Border Crossing, Strategies of Resistance and Colonial Violence: Narratives from Northern Ghana and Togo (1920s–1940s) Giulia Casentini

6 Borderities and Freedom in Colonial and Post-Colonial African Borderlands: a Case Study of the Borders in the Lake Chad Basin Aimé Raoul Sumo Tayo

Conclusion: Places of Passage Ettore Morelli

Bibliography

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Ettore Morelli, Ph.D. (2019), SOAS, is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Universität Basel. His research focuses on the history of central southern Africa from Mapungubwe to the lifaqane (c. 1200–1830s). He has published on various themes in African history.