ABSTRACT
The impossibility of a borderless world is due not only to this frightening mobility of people, but to the most destructive force of modern times, the force that keeps borders in place, nationalism. Nationalism is always complicated by ethnocentrism and racism, and as nationalism proliferates, violence increases. The means of mapping and naming colonized space was brought into the European world by imposing the doctrine of property developed from agricultural Europe. For the ordinary people who cross borders every day in African states, the reality of the national boundary is already being transformed because it is accorded a very different meaning. The concept of habitation, which accepts the politically impermeable nature of national boundaries and yet reveals their porosity when the life practices of people are taken into account, allows us to conceive a 'transnational' reality that extends from within and goes beyond national borders.
