Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies

by Alastair Bonnett

  Lunda Tchokwe covers the eastern half of Angola. If the kingdom is known to people outside Angola at all, it is for one thing: being the home to some the world’s largest diamond mines. An area a little smaller than Spain, with a population of only four and a half million, it is one of dozens of unrecognized countries in Africa and one of twenty-one that belong to the Federation of the Free States of Africa. It is a key member of the inner sanctum of that group, being part of the eleven proto-states that have formed an Economic and Defense Alliance that claims various portions of a huge area of southwestern Africa. Although the succession of South Sudan has bolstered the confidence of the federation, its members need one another because no one else is in the slightest bit interested. It’s an absence of concern that reflects a suspicion of ethnic secessionism, because if the Lunda Tchokwe get their own country, then why shouldn’t every other ethnic group in Africa? If such a thing came to pass, it would make the disintegration of the USSR look unspectacular: the continent could easily be covered with thousands of nations.

  Yet these nascent nations are taken very seriously by the governments whose territory they claim. Angola has criminalized the activities of the Lunda Tchokwe separatists and forced many activists into exile. Nearly 40 members of a group that goes under the cumbersome name of the Commission of the Legal Sociological Manifesto of the Lunda Tchokwe Protectorate were accused of “destabilizing national order” and arrested between April 2009 and October 2010, along with 270 suspected supporters. Many were thrown into prison. One member, Don Muatxihina Chamumbala, subsequently died, and is today hailed as “the first martyr to die in defense of the natural rights of the people of the Lunda Tchokwe.” The commission accuses the unelected Angolan regime of numerous abuses of human rights and of leaving the region to rot. The movement’s website claims that the “population of the Lunda Tchokwe are well aware of the state of total abandonment that this diamond rich area is in.”

  The story of Lunda Tchokwe illustrates a modern paradox: the remorseless power of ethnic nationalism in a world where it is increasingly believed that national identity should have nothing to do with ethnic identity. The nation-state may have grown out of ties of language and culture, but its contemporary, bureaucratic form is supposedly postethnic, or at least able to accommodate ethnic diversity. To be British or American is a matter of holding the right passport rather than having the right heritage. The claims of the world’s unrecognized states threaten to throw this cosmopolitan dynamic into reverse, and the rhetoric of the Federation of the Free States of Africa is crystal clear on the failure of what it regards as pseudo-countries like “Angola, Nigeria, Senegal, and Kenya.” On its official website, the organization’s secretary general, Mangovo Ngoyo, explains that these nations “will always [have] problems, because they do not constitute a country such as England” but rather “several countries with their specific culture, national identity, own separate language, own architecture, own history.” Ngoyo’s unfortunate choice of England as his example proves the awkwardness of his thesis. England hasn’t been a country for over three hundred years, having combined with Scotland in 1707 and developed into a modern, multiethnic United Kingdom, which accommodates wide variations of culture and heritage. That doesn’t mean that ethnic nationalism, in England or anywhere else, has gone away, but rather that it survives in a fraught relationship with other forms of association. The demands of the unrecognized states throw this unresolved and difficult relationship into relief. Indeed, the Federation of the Free States of Africa gives much play to the statement by the British prime minister, David Cameron, that “state multiculturalism has failed.” Ngoyo adds, “Of course multiculturalism is bound to fail. A Nation can only be a Nation if all are singing from the same ‘Chorus Book,’ if not then there is no harmony.”

  Ngoyo also asks, “How are we expected to keep ‘Colonial Marked Border States’ in harmony?” It is this last point that brings us to the nub of the issue for nationalists in Lunda Tchokwe. They don’t just see “multicultural” Angola as a failure. For Lunda Tchokwe activists, Angola is a colonial power, its colonialism an extension of European colonialism. They see their lands stripped of natural resources and the profits funneled away. Once they went to Portugal, the area’s former colonial master, and now they head to the boomtowns on Angola’s east coast. The Angolan government makes much use of antiseparatist counterarguments once deployed by the Portuguese: that indigenous resistance is a symptom of tribalism, and that the peoples of Angola need to be saved from factional warfare. They are able to give this old line a modern spin by claiming that Angola is a multicultural, and hence modern, liberal state, and that the nationalists are xenophobes. It is a galling accusation for activists who are routinely thrown into jail because of their ethnic affiliation.

  In fact, Lunda Tchokwe has a more complicated relationship to multiculturalism than some of the rhetoric that comes out of the Federation of the Free States of Africa implies. The ambition of a “United Kingdom” points to the fact that the Lunda and Tchokwe were once two separate groups and to the long history that has brought them together. The Lunda Kingdom had spread over 150,000 square kilometers by 1680 and kept on growing, and by the end of the nineteenth century it had doubled in size. In the course of this expansion the kingdom grew into a federation of restless clans. One of these tribute-paying clans, the Tchokwe, rebelled against Lunda rule and by the end of the nineteenth century had effectively destroyed the old kingdom. The contemporary nationalist movement places much store in Portugal’s recognition of Lunda Tchokwe during this period and in the signing of various protectorate treaties between Portugal and local kings. However, it’s not a particularly stable legal lineage. It was only because of the ongoing dismantling of the Lunda Kingdom that the Portuguese found it so easy to extend their empire eastward. Moreover, this was always remote territory. Portugal’s real relationship was with its seaboard colony, which was founded in 1575. The far-eastern interior was beyond its control and interest. Some authorities claim that it was not until the 1930s that the Portuguese even came into contact with the Tchokwe. Certainly it was only from that decade that Portugal successfully absorbed the area into the established colony of Angola, which became independent in 1975.

  This potted history tells us that, unlike Angola, Lunda Tchokwe is able to lay claim to a rich, complex, and independent African history. It also shows that Lunda Tchokwe’s relationship to Angola is both recent and shallow, and that far from being culturally homogenous, the Lunda Tchokwe are a diverse group. The various peoples of Lunda Tchokwe have fashioned a common sense of place and of group allegiance. This identity is a very recent creation but it still matters, for by attaching people to a particular part of the world, it anchors and sustains a shared vision of the past and the future.

  At the moment, the chances of any story about Lunda Tchokwe making it onto the global news agenda are slim. Speaking out against the regime is too dangerous, and Lunda Tchokwe has no military or insurgent forces. Angola is not going to let itself be torn in half, and there isn’t a state in this part of Africa that doesn’t support its crackdown on secessionism, for this is a force that threatens every one of them. We can safely conclude that the United Kingdom of Lunda Tchokwe will not appear in our atlases any day soon. But new nations will continue to be born, especially in those parts of the world where ethnic and territorial claims have been steamrollered by history. In this context, the need to claim and defend one’s own nation is constantly being reimagined and rediscovered. The struggle to create such new places is hugely difficult, but so too is the struggle to keep composite colonial creations like Angola together.

  Gagauzia

  45° 05′ N, 28° 38′ E

  The story of Gagauzia tells us about the remorseless power of nationalism to keep dividing and subdividing nations into smaller units. Gagauzia is in the south of Moldova, a small landlocked country of three and a half million people that is wedged between Ukraine and Romania. Moldova broke away from the US
SR and became independent in 1991, but it is a patchwork of nationalities that shows every sign of becoming unstitched.

  The map of Gagauzia is a ragged thing. This would-be state is spread across four unevenly sized enclaves within Moldova. In all, it covers an area of 707 square miles, about half the size of Rhode Island, and has a population of 161,000. It’s never going to be a giant among nations, but a people’s desire for freedom is not proportional to their number or the size of their territory. The force that causes nations to fly apart has a centripetal energy: it is a creative and unpredictable dynamic that gives birth to new demands for independence at the very moment it answers the demands of others. It’s a mistake to patronize places like Gagauzia or cast them as the offshoots of chaotic regions, for the fragmentary logic at work here is at work elsewhere.

  National independence is not a one-off event, a book that once opened can simply be closed. It may be comforting to think that, for example, once Scotland is independent, then a long tale will have reached its happy end. But nationalism spills out, catches on, transmutes other place-based identities into nation-building projects. If Scotland is independent, then why not Shetland? If Moldova is independent, then why not Gagauzia? Nation-making is a process that does not simply fulfill needs; it also creates them.

  One of the few people who have studied Gagauzia is the Turkish anthropologist Hülya Demirdirek. Even she is a little mystified by the self-invention of the Gagauz people into a national entity called Gagauzia, a word and an idea that barely anyone had heard of twenty years ago, because until the USSR broke up, no such place existed. At a conference on “post-communist anthropology,” Demirdirek conceded that “it is difficult to answer the question of who the Gagauz think they are.” One conventional answer is to say that the Gagauz are Eastern Orthodox Christians who trace their ancestry to Bulgaria and who speak Gagauz, a language that is similar to modern Turkish. They are a distinctive mix of the Christian and the Turkic, with some Gagauz claiming that they were the founding people of Bulgaria, descendants of the Bolgars who conquered that country in the ninth century. However, a more pertinent aspect of their complex heritage is that the Gagauz are one of the most culturally Russianized groups in Moldova, with many preferring to speak Russian rather than Gagauz. It was an unfortunate association for the Gagauz, because Moldovan nationalism is defined around an antipathy to the country’s former Soviet masters. As Moldova’s independence grew nearer, the Gagauz found themselves increasingly portrayed as a foreign element, a people apart whose real loyalty was to Mother Russia.

  It was in this hostile atmosphere, in 1988, that a social movement called the Gagauz People was founded and began to demand independence. A Moldovan Parliament report from 1990 alarmed the movement further by naming the Gagauz not as a national minority but merely as an “ethnic” minority. It was a choice of words that was widely interpreted as a calculated insult. Some members of the Moldovan Popular Front went so far as to demand that the Gagauz, like the Russians, should go “back home.” It was around this time that “Gagauzia” was invented.

  The desire to reinvent a place as a nation does not necessarily emerge from long-repressed aspirations but can arise suddenly, especially among vulnerable populations whose identity was once absorbed by vast, multinational entities like the Soviet Union and who now nurse a sense of being discriminated against and overlooked. With that perceived slight, a number of useful myths were born. It was said that Gagauzia had long been repressed, that the Gagauz had long yearned for freedom. Some even argued that they were not of foreign extraction at all but had been in this part of the world longer than the Moldovans. Little of this was true, and Gagauzia was far from ancient. Aside from a five-day independent state, declared in 1906 and limited to the capital (the Republic of Kormat), the Gagauz have never thought of themselves as needing their own nation.

  Yet this lack of historical depth only seems to have piqued their political aspirations. In 1990 the unofficial Gagauz flag, a dramatic red wolf’s head on a white circle, appeared on state buildings, and in August of that year independence was declared. Presidential elections were held and a government was installed in Kormat. Over the next four years Gagauzia claimed to be independent, although no other state deigned to recognize its existence. By late 1994 Moldova was willing to concede “self-determination” to “the people of Gagauzia,” and a referendum was held that resulted in the present hotchpotch of enclaves, with thirty settlements voting in favor of being in the newly created “national autonomous territorial unit.”

  These concessions don’t amount to much, since the only real gain is a promise that the Gagauz can decide to go it alone if there is a “change of status of the Republic of Moldova.” The reason this matters is that if it wasn’t for the national minorities in their midst, Moldova would probably opt to merge with Romania, with which it shares both history and language. The unification movement is one of the most powerful forces in Moldovan politics, and would turn the Gagauz from a small but vocal minority in a plural state into an “ethnic” irrelevance in a pan-Romanian nation. The Gagauz, along with the even more fiercely independent Transnistrians, who live on Moldova’s eastern flank, have been promised that if that happens, they can leave.

  However, the last twenty years have driven home to the Gagauz that being a “national autonomous unit” delivers very little. Gagauzia remains one of the poorest areas of Moldova, which in turn is often claimed to be the poorest country in Europe. The mood for compromise is waning while the momentum toward separation is being given new life by the development of an independent Gagauz media, led by Gagauzia Radio Televizionu. In 2012 a Gagauz nationalist threw a Molotov cocktail at the motorcade of the visiting German chancellor, Angela Merkel. That same year Mihail Formuzal, the governor of Gagauzia, responded angrily to increased signs that Moldovan-Romanian unification was gaining popular support. Formuzal threatened to declare independence and boasted that, this time, his country would achieve international recognition.

  There is an unnerving quality to the fragmentary logic of nationalism. Countries one has barely heard of break up into units that mean almost nothing. The logic of disintegration creates a geography of ignorance, in which the flowering of new identities and new nations outstrips our capacity to place or pronounce them. People outside the region throw up their hands: places like Gagauzia are consigned to a growing pile of ignored proto-states. Behind this reaction is an understandable fear: What if every nation started to be pulled apart and the political map resolved into legions of multiplying places? It may be convenient to imagine that we’re above nationalist desires, that they are mistaken or somehow tragic. But such lofty dismissals are based on just as many myths and conceits as the fabricated pasts of Gagauzia. And they lack generosity. Many Gagauz want their own country because without it they will remain placeless and marginal. The fact that it is invented won’t make it any less real.

  Pumice and Trash Islands

  Part of the attraction of floating places is their unplaceability: they promise escape from prosaic solidity and a freer relationship to the earth. Floating places have been on our minds since Aeolia, the floating island visited by Odysseus whose king was in charge of the four winds. When Gulliver visited Laputa, an airborne kingdom of distracted scientists, and Dr. Dolittle stepped onto the bobbing shores of hollow Sea-Star Island, they were joining a long tradition of geographical fantasy. It is an aspiration that has come into its own with computer games in which players skip between many islets. Further proof, if it were needed, that for earthbound creatures like ourselves, buoyant or untethered land is intrinsically enchanting.

  So it is not surprising that the news that there are islands that drift on the sea was greeted with innocent joy. That two should apparently heave into view at the same time sounds doubly delightful, but what a strange contrast they make. One is a coagulation of plastic detritus known as the Pacific Trash Vortex. The other is a natural byproduct of volcanism known as a pumice raft. Neither is the Aeolia
or Sea-Star Island of our dreams and even the name of the Trash Vortex sounds deeply sinister, but both remain oddly thrilling. Hence the urgent questions: Can we walk on them? Can they sustain life? The answer to the questions is “yes” for the pumice rafts, and “probably not” for the whirlpool of rubbish.

  One of the largest pumice rafts ever recorded was found in 2012. Indeed, to call it a raft does not do it justice. This one, spotted by the New Zealand Air Force 620 miles off the Auckland coast, was spread over an area of 10,000 square miles, or “nearly the size of Belgium” as the New Zealand press described it. Naval lieutenant Tim Oscar said it was the “weirdest thing” he’d seen in his eighteen years at sea. In fact, smaller versions of such rafts are not that uncommon, nor are they confined to the Pacific, since they are caused by undersea volcanic eruptions. Oceanographers have charted their transoceanic voyages back some two hundred years.

  Yet they seem to catch even seasoned ocean watchers and mariners by surprise. Making their way to Fiji on the yacht Maiken, the Swedish sailor Fredrik Fransson and his crew sailed into one in August 2006. Fransson’s log describes the scene:

  We noticed brown, somewhat grainy streaks in the water. First we thought that it might be an old oil dumping. Some ship cleaning its tanks. But the streak became larger and more frequent after a while, and there were rocklike brownish things the size of a fist floating in the sea. And the waters were strangely green and “lagoon like” too. Eventually it became more and more clear to us that it had to be pumice from a volcanic eruption. And then we sailed into a vast, many miles wide, belt of densely packed pumice. We were going by motor due to lack of wind and within seconds Maiken slowed down from seven to one knot. We were so fascinated and busy taking pictures that we ploughed a couple of hundred meters into this surreal floating stone field before we realized that we had to turn back.