Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies (22 page)

The lease of Sealand to an Internet company, HavenCo, in 1999, compounded its tarnished image. Silicon Valley investors pumped in hundreds of thousands of dollars in seed money to turn Sealand into an off-limits Internet server and “fat-pipe data haven.” Child pornography, spamming, and malicious hacking were prohibited, but with no restrictions on copyright or intellectual property for data hosted on its servers, Sealand looked set to become a center for file sharing and other infringement activities. The injection of cash was used by the Bates family to secure the kingdom. A desalinization plant and new generators were installed, satellite connections were established, microwave links to Britain were rigged up, and miles of cables were laid. With the help of the extra cash Prince Michael also established a Sealand army and navy, with machine guns and high-speed dinghies. Despite all this, HavenCo’s customers soon began to thin out. What seems to have scared away most of them was the fact that all of Sealand’s Internet traffic went through Britain, which claimed that the platform was within its territorial waters. In 2008 HavenCo went bust, and the media was fed a story by Michael Bates that Sealand was up for sale, valued at 750 million euros. This appears to have been a ploy to drum up interest in a new leasing arrangement. With no new funds, Sealand became, in the late 2000s, once again uninhabited, and Prince Michael lives out his days in Leigh-on-Sea. This is also where his father spent his last days. Roy Bates died on October 9, 2012, at the age of ninety-one.

Talking to the
Sealand News
, Joan Bates offered a romantic view of life on Sealand: “It’s been a fairytale. What greater compliment can a man pay to a woman than to make her Princess of her own Principality? I love being able to call myself Princess. When we travel abroad on our Sealand passports we are always greeted with a lot of fuss and treated like royalty.”

It’s a fantasy that is immediately comprehensible. For those of us who are bored and frustrated by the endless rules and impersonal bureaucracies of conventional nations, the idea of creating one’s own island kingdom has tremendous appeal. Indeed, the most telling recent stories about Sealand concern the way it has been taken up as an icon by a new generation of eco-libertarian planners. The Seasteading Institute, founded in 2008 in California, looks to Sealand as a pioneer. The aim of the institute is plainly stated as “creating sustainable sea platforms where people can choose to live if they’re unsatisfied with life on solid ground.” Man-made sea kingdoms have a growing appeal, and something of that appeal is being captured in new islands built in the Maldives and Dubai, as well as in a new generation of cruise ships that are morphing into permanent sea-roving settlements. But the root of Sealand’s appeal takes us into terrain that these ventures still only hint at. It is the territory of independence, of sovereignty, of really having one’s own place. It may be a foolish fantasy, but it’s an important and very human one.

12° 39′ S, 20° 27′ E

Although it is accompanied by a lot of polemic about fragmentation and crisis, the birth of new nations is an unstoppable and unending process. One of the reasons it has become a difficult and sensitive topic is that ethnicity is still central to most acts of nation-building. The widespread tendency to treat such ethnic claims as throwbacks consigns many embryonic nations to the geopolitical shadows. This is where the United Kingdom of Lunda Tchokwe languishes, ignored by the outside world yet ceaseless in its struggle.

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.

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 USSR 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.