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The Open Access publication of this book has been made possible by the Swiss National Science Foundation.
What is a border, and why does it exist? Reappraising a key idea from Arnold van Gennep’s Les rites de passage, this book argues that a border is a threshold, a limen, made to be crossed. African Thresholds studies places of passage spanning from the riverine networks of Senegambia to border-making in colonial Gold Coast and Côte d’Ivoire; from the desert roads of central southern Africa to river heartlands in colonial Togo; from flows of cowrie shells across the Volta River to insurgent borderities in the Lake Chad. In a time when state borders are increasingly shut, this book aims to show us that a border is made by those who cross it as much as by those who stand by it.
Contributors are: Ettore Morelli, Fernando Mouta, Pierluigi Valsecchi, María José Pont Cháfer, Giulia Casentini, and Aimé Raoul Sumo Tayo.
What is a border, and why does it exist? Reappraising a key idea from Arnold van Gennep’s Les rites de passage, this book argues that a border is a threshold, a limen, made to be crossed. African Thresholds studies places of passage spanning from the riverine networks of Senegambia to border-making in colonial Gold Coast and Côte d’Ivoire; from the desert roads of central southern Africa to river heartlands in colonial Togo; from flows of cowrie shells across the Volta River to insurgent borderities in the Lake Chad. In a time when state borders are increasingly shut, this book aims to show us that a border is made by those who cross it as much as by those who stand by it.
Contributors are: Ettore Morelli, Fernando Mouta, Pierluigi Valsecchi, María José Pont Cháfer, Giulia Casentini, and Aimé Raoul Sumo Tayo.
Price: $122.00
Pages: 381
Publisher: Brill
Imprint: Brill
Series: Studies in the Social History of the Global South
Publication Date:
26 June 2025
ISBN: 9789004726963
Format: Hardcover
"For readers engaged with borderlands, mobility, and West African history, the volume offers substantial insights that meaningfully contribute to the expansion and refinement of the concepts of borders and thresholds." – Cristina Udelsmann Rodrigues, Centre for African and Development Studies, University of Lisbon, in: Connections. A Journal for Historians and Area Specialists 06.02.2026.
Ettore Morelli, Ph.D. (2019), SOAS, is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Universität Basel. His research focuses on the history of central southern Africa from Mapungubwe to the lifaqane (c. 1200–1830s). He has published on various themes in African history.