ABSTRACT
This chapter tells the story of how mobilities and multilingualism can make continents but also erase individual histories. It draws on several narratives and time frames of Africa (suggestive of the south more widely) as places of meeting for displaced, mobile, and settled communities. Using the idea of ‘bordering’ as a methodology and borders as lenses through which to view mobilities, it explores the significance of multilinguality in the production, sustainability, and erasure of knowledge and highlighting wayfarers’ dreams, their destinies, and disappointments. The ‘rich’ Africa of meshworks, mobilities, and multilingualisms, an Africa that is recounted here, runs counter to prevailing narratives that depict Africa as of ‘little consequence’. This is a continent of innovation, complex societies, multilinguality, multilingualisms, and epistemological pluriversality. However, the technologies of imperial borders have fenced off geopolitical spaces, interrupting everyday flows of human exchanges, mobility, and networks; destroyed written archives; and suspended in time the passing of knowledge from one generation to another. In categorizing travellers/wayfarers as migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers, some find multivocality in multilingual encounters and opportunity for knowledge exchange and settlement. Others are caught in traps of temporality where, disconnected or dislocated, their multilinguality slips from engagement in communality to masking precarity and vulnerability.
