National borders cross a line of decency: we should all be citizens of the world
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Version 0 of 1. The most convincing border I know is near Ouesso, where Cameroon meets the Republic of the Congo. And the Central African Republic, just upriver. This morning, as on mornings eight years ago, I like to think the Gardien came out of his office on the misty riverbank, straightening his beret; ran up the pole the flag of Cameroon, saluted it, his expression blank, with just enough flourish to show due duty and professionalism, before retreating behind his desk, and attending to the the line of river travellers the pirogues disgorge now and then. This is a watched if not an obviously armed border, though no doubt the Gardien has weapons. His everyday weapons are stamps and ledgers. To be turned back there is no joke. The river may be presumed full of crocodiles; the surrounding equatorial rainforest dense and wild. This is a true, or pure, border, in that you cannot cross it illicitly without peril. And the Gardien has great authority. His battledress, his professionally slouching beret made me think of paratroopers. A sergeant, he had the paratrooper NCO’s knack of switching on instant, overwhelming aggression when confronted and an instantly mollified air where he found cooperation. In our line, he found two felonies, some fees requiring payment and one attempted fraud – a lady who claimed she had a passport, and that she had recently used it here on the trip from which she was now attempting to return. The Gardien was not having it. His ledger was not having it, even when she pointed at a signature and said it was hers. My own crime was easily identified and solved. The Cameroonian visa I had been sold in London was out of date, as I should have noticed, would have noticed if I had studied the stamp I had paid handsomely for in Kensington, in the embassy where a member of staff was asleep at their desk. The Gardien took this evidence of criminality in his country’s London embassy unblinkingly and charged the fee again for the correct stamp. A gold trader, three trading women, a jobbing rugby player and “a white”, our accidental group reminded me of Chaucer’s pilgrims. In the end, after half a day of arguments, payments and interrogations, we were all allowed to proceed – price, three-and-a-half working days, split between six travellers and the Gardien. And so a straight line drawn on a map in Europe in 1901 (redrawn 1911 and 1919) did its job once again: the coffers of Cameroon were minutely swelled, no undesirable was allowed in. (Though the net repressive effect on local trade caused by fees and inconvenience to the traders in my party probably amounted to an overall loss to the region.) The only other travellers we saw on that frontier were white, with local assistants, all wearing protective suits, speeding by on a small craft. Loggers, my companions said. Neither frontiers nor jungle would interfere much with their work, the logging industry enjoying similar relations with all three adjoining countries. And there were the local pygmies, the forest people, who gave no sign of being affected by the frontiers, though they must have been. My favourite borders are geographic, the point where the hill people used to meet the people of the plains They are only selectively effective, even the purest borders. The only time I have knowingly crossed one illegally it was similar: another river populated by famously hungry crocodiles; a low shore, Namibia; and a steeper, Angola. I promised the boatman I would keep quiet about it, and we watched the sun come up over the two countries, listened to the many birds on both banks and left cautiously when stalked by a crocodile. The peculiar thing is, I still do not really believe borders need exist, or that they do, in the ways they pretend, or that they will stand for many more decades. The life of a repeat traveller exposes frontier fences and crossing points as philosophical obscenities, unnecessary burdens on humankind and the planet. When was the last time you crossed a frontier, looked over your shoulder at the lines, the computers, the uniforms, and thought, “Phew! I’m glad that’s there”? It has never happened to me. My favourite borders are geographic, the point where the hill people used to meet the people of the plains; where person contemplated person across a gulf, an estuary or a river; where words spoken on both sides found their own tongues. The border between England and Wales is obscured, near my home, by the Forest of Dean, a third nation in the self-perception of many residents. Wooded hills, the river Wye; Chepstow for Ouesso. They would not have been such different frontiers once, and may not be again. (Although that would involve the fall of Paul Biya, Africa’s most successful dictator, and no doubt approval from the French government as well as western logging companies.) Certainly the peoples of the border region would vote unhesitatingly for its dismantling. Who wants walls, except those under attack? Citizens of Israel and occupied Palestine are divided by the desirability of their new walls, but it is an easy place to find border advocates. Political support for borders is less interesting, in the cases I am studying, than local enthusiasm for them. The distance between the Gardien’s hut and Yaoundé and Douala (four days’ travel by logging truck and shared taxi) places a contradiction of mutually supposed ignorance between the centre of power and its place of exercise. The Gardien sees the conditions of the frontier daily, but might be supposed at least partially ignorant of the operations between the countries he watches over, their higher motives and strategies. From the capital, the border appears a line between dominated territory and prized resources and rivals’ resources; little more. Logging fills the coffers of Cameroon. What Mr Biya does not invest on the Riviera he uses to pay civil service wages, notably the army’s and those of the police, who keep him in power. That border guards are accessories in their own and, often, their nation’s limitations - in the case of those who do not do the job for love - is one of the many ironies of borders. (The economic argument for doing away with borders scarcely needs rehearsing here.) Does it make any difference if you can see the fence, or if the fence is nearby, at least – or do we all carry them within us, now? The question my research addresses is whether it makes any difference to feelings of nationality, rootedness, sympathy or fear if an individual lives near the geographical border between the adjoining states of his or her heritage and adoption. Or are borders now overwhelmingly imaginary constructions, undermined by telephone lines, YouTube, Skype and “globalised culture”? The current prime minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland unwittingly hit upon a truth of the age. If you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere, she said. And she owes her position to the votes of people who feel they have become, in her sense “citizens of the world” without moving much; the local has never felt less local, the nostalgia for heritage has never been keener, or undergoing more perceived erosion. Her opponents’ contention that we are all citizens of all locales, now, seems theoretical and tenuous, as the opportunity to try the case, to move anywhere and live consistently with new circumstances and a largely unchallenged heritage is an experience afforded only to elites, certain minorities, successful migrants and certain demographics: the constituency of the anti-border, “international class” as I heard one member describe it. The most educational border I have crossed is the old line of Berlin’s Wall. Every politician, every fence-building contractor, every guard and every protectionist should be made to walk along it once, to atone for the temerity of daring to divide the world, and humanity. Citizens of the world, citizens of nowhere, this is a triumphal arch, this is a plaque where once was a watchtower, and these crosses and grave-shapes mark where they fell, gunned down in the road, in the river, on the brickwork, in the death zone. It would be easy to fall to cursing, but instead we might say: blessed be the wall-destroyers, for they shall know a wider world. (Not a sentiment you hear in the sheep country of south Wales; though the hills, where the flocks go in summer, are unfenced.) • Citizens of Everywhere is a project by the Centre for New and International Writing at the University of Liverpool. @CitizensofWhere #CitizensofEverywhere Horatio Clare’s most recent novel is Aubrey and the Terrible Yoot. The fee for this article will be donated to Atlantic Pacific International Rescue Boats Project. |