African Refugee History

In Purity and Exile (1995a), Liisa Malkki’s ethnography of Burundian Hutu refugees living in mid-1980s Tanzania, Malkki draws attention to a complex and paradoxical relationship between refugees and history. As Malkki argues, the global system of nation-states, composed of national governments, United Nations bodies, and humanitarian agencies, all present “the refugee” as a kind of victim, one who has been expelled from a national and natural “home.” This point implies that “the refugee problem” is a recurring phenomenon that may be solved through proper management of this system, and without knowledge of specific histories that generate particular contexts of displacement. Most academic work in the interdisciplinary domain of refugee studies reproduces this managerial, ahistorical, and indeed, apolitical perspective.1 Nevertheless, as Malkki’s study demonstrates, historical knowledge—both in the sense of knowledge about the past and of knowledge about how people narrate the past in the present—may be immensely important for comprehending the dynamics within a given displaced community and for enabling displaced people to pursue their desired futures. From this standpoint, Malkki calls for a “radically historicizing” approach to refugees and displacement, an approach that “insists on acknowledging not only human suffering but also narrative authority, historical agency, and political memory” (Malkki 1996:398).