5 - La route, ça coûte: Roadblock Geographies

Summary

Thus far, this book has explored the ‘prehistory of the roadblock’: how control over logistical space has formed a pivot of patterns of contestation and order-making in Central Africa’s turbulent history. The remainder of the book delves into contemporary roadblock politics. Popular accounts of the region often contain anecdotes of swaggering thugs running improvised checkpoints along the road. It is tempting to read these as symptomatic of a total lack of political order in Central Africa. Yet one should not be fooled by this superficial randomness. Chapter 5 tries to undo the image of anarchy tagged onto conflict in Central Africa by piecing together the rough-and-ready patterns that structure the geography of roadblocks. Instead of an open political terrain -- anarchy -- the occurrence of roadblocks is bound by certain vernacular logics which only become apparent if one is attentive to the material and environmental features of terrain which place important limits on the circulation of people and goods in contexts where infrastructure is absent. The distribution of roadblocks, and the control they afford over logistical space to different kinds of roadblock operators, follow these features of logistical terrain to produce entangled geographies of movement and appropriation that structure everyday mobility in Central Africa.