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has 6 downloads
6
- Convenors:
-
Marieke van Winden (conference organiser)
(African Studies Centre Leiden)
Larissa Nordholt (Leiden University)
Jan-Bart Gewald (Leiden University)
Marie Huber (Philipps-Universität Marburg)
Adom Getachew (University of Chicago)
Enocent Msindo (Rhodes University)
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- Stream:
- D: Cases of regional and disciplinary specifics
- Start time:
- 22 January, 2021 at
Time zone: Europe/Amsterdam
- Session slots:
- 2
Long Abstract:
This panel aims to bring together old and new perspectives on the history of African historiography, i.e. on the history of how Africans and others, from within and outside of African societies, have dealt with and thought about the African past. The panel invites papers on a wide range of topics, including, the legacy of the slave trade and how it has been studied, pan-African visions of history, how the ‘Mfecane’ became conceptualized as a period in Southern-African history and how the power of the paradigmatic logic of the Hamitic hypothesis was employed to introduce a racialist logic in African history. Historical analysis of the key methodological debates, for instance, the use of oral history and oral traditions as source materials, is of interest, too – especially in relation to debates on the decolonization of history. Lastly, the panel also wishes to engage with the actors and networks of this intellectual history and the history of decolonization of historiography that ensued. For instance: what has been the role of international institutions such as UNESCO and its General History of Africa project in establishing a historiography of Africa? [coordination: ASCL and History Department Leiden, together with Humboldt University Berlin, Edinburgh University, and Rhodes University]
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper long abstract:
A literatura moçambicana tem sido um importante catalisador para a noção de nacionalidade, por meio da produção de escritores e poetas que articulam referências físicas e imateriais do país. Uma figura que tem ocupado um lugar privilegiado na produção de uma épica moçambicana é Ngungunhane, o último chefe africano do império de Gaza, que resistiu aos portugueses mas foi capturado e morreu no exílio. O objetivo desta comunicação é colocar em evidência essa personagem controversa, Ngungunhane, como o mote de obras literárias desses escritores, e discutir seu lugar na construção, não apenas de uma épica nacional mas, sobretudo, de problematização de distopias contemporâneas e da necessidade de descolonizar o imaginário.
Decolonizing African history : spotlight on the history of Africa in the ancient and medieval times
Bakail Moncef
(University of Algiers 2)
Paper long abstract:
Through this paper, we seek to demonstrate the importance of the ancient and medieval history of Africa which has been marginalized. This Paper also tries to cast lights on what has been the role of Algerian and international institutions such as the African studies laboratory; Algiers University in establishing a historiography of Africa?
Africa attracted Greek and Arab merchants to the major African capitals, and enabled us to know the social characteristics of the Bantu farmers, the blacksmiths and potters.
It is worth noting that the history of Africa is the fruit of this balance between the short time of actors and the longtime of cultural depths. .
The study of the history of Africa as an independent field of study is a recent development. Thus, until the end of the colonial period, Western historians believed that sub-Saharan Africa had no "civilization" .
The end of colonialism witnessed a growing number of African thinkers who strongly reject this approach and
relying on written sources only is an insufficient scale for writing the history of Africa, but rather than relying on other sciences such as Anthropology and Ehnology has corrected many concepts.
On this basis, many ancient people wrote about Africa, even if their writings were not systematic or objective in many cases. They were followed by the Arabs, who left an invaluable production of African societies .
The next stage in the history of Africa was dominated by the writings of merchants as well as Christian missionaries and other European adventurers, whose writings on Africa are still the main sources of many historians who specialized in the history of ancient and medieval Africa.
It can be said that with the end of colonialism , many African and European historians have emerged and rejected the idea that Africa has no ancient history and they even rejected the idea of the privilege of written sources from the one hand and insisted on including interdisciplinary sources and methods ranging from archeology to oral history .
Finally, it is worth mentioning that over the centuries, many African Kingdoms existed before the partition of Africa by the colonialists;and on this basis, we will try to analyze in depth the emergence and the fall of these kingdoms by Introducing some new terminology and concepts in order to write African history with objectivity.
The 21st century cultural self-reinvention: Mbopo ritual and the Calabar Festival in southern Nigeria
Nsima Udo
(University of Western Cape)
Paper long abstract:
There is an extensive literature on how Europeans re-invented Africa in tribal or ethnic frameworks with an emphasis on cultural performance and spectacles. This literature foregrounds the ways in which Africa was 'invented' or fabricated in the European imagination along traditional tribal lines in ways that suppressed any signs of modernity and exaggerated traditionalism. These inventions were public spectacles whether in the form of museum displays, Africans paraded on stage, or assumed esoteric ritualism. These profoundly shaped a Eurocentric discourse of 'othering' in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They contributed to the conceptual categories through which Africa was controlled, dominated and historicized during the imperial and colonial periods.
Yet Africans always represented themselves in different ways using different registers. This paper will examine how important rituals and identities associated with indigenous forms of culture in Nigeria have been re-invented or re-imagined from within as public spectacles designed for television audiences and public viewing. It does so by exploring the complex issues of cultural representations associated with two highly popular cultural performances for Nigerian television (with continental and global audiences) from the 2010s: the first is a re-enactment of the mbopo ('fattening room') rituals associated with Ibibio/Efik girls' prenuptial initiation ceremonies (televised in 2013 with young women from all over Africa as cultural subjects) and the second is the Calabar Festival and Carnival held annually in December in which the different cultural groups across Nigeria perform their traditional dances in traditional dress for a vast and growing continental and global audience. (They are now advertised as the fourth largest festival in the world.) Based on participant observation and interviews at the Calabar Festival of 2019 and close visual analysis of the 'Fattening Room' television series of 2013 this paper examines the complex issues associated with the staging of African cultural identities in the 21st century within a substantial literature on this subject. How do we assess the degree of 'authenticity' of such rituals? To what extent do they capture and convey to modern public audiences, cultural rituals, traditions and concepts of the past and the present? What is the interplay between culture as entertainment and culture as lived experience in these visualised events? How does the visual language and media of television constrain or enable different levels of cultural presentation and performance? And how do these layers of analysis help us in revisiting the cultural history of Africa?
Paper long abstract:
The contemporary Nigerian state is bedevilled with the plight of the citizenship and
indigeneship question. Dwelling on the theory of social behaviourism as espoused by George
Herbert Mead, this paper attempts to explain coloniality as it influences the citizenship and
indigeneship question in Nigeria. The paper argues that the vertical and horizontal division
of the people, orchestrated by the policies of colonialism, led to the culture and awareness of
the 'self' and 'other'. This 'othering' produced a situation whereby identities are constructed
based on a dual layered perception, contextualizing the notion of citizenship within the
frontline of both citizens and communal natives. The paper further argues that the socio-
political and economic implication of this reality is that it breeds a discriminatory tendency
whereby some individuals are excluded from enjoying full rights and privileges of citizenship
and participation in the society. The paper argues that Colonialism was, and still is an
unending phenomenon as its effect still influences contemporary realities in Nigeria. The
paper provides an analysis of colonialism in Africa, and the impact of colonialism on the
citizenship and indigeneship question in Nigeria. It concludes that while the 'divide and rule'
strategy of colonialism might have shaped contemporary perception of citizenship and
indigeneship question, policy geared at reorientation of the hearts and minds becomes of
immediate importance towards developing values for nation building in a culturally
pluralistic society.
Writing history beyond Trevor-Roper: the experience of African history, with special reference to Zimbabwe
Enocent Msindo
(Rhodes University)
Paper long abstract:
In this paper, I will connect some issues and developments that at first appear isolated in space and time, yet they help us to understand the journey so far traversed in the writing of Zimbabwean history and where we are potentially going. These are (in no particular order), Hugh Trevor-Roper's argument about there being no African history and what it triggered - the rise of nationalist historiography in the 1960s and subsequent developments; the role of SOAS, London as an institution and its historical relationship with African studies; the Southern Rhodesian Native Affairs Departmental Annual (NADA) as a settler controlled journal that ignited much interest in studying Southern Rhodesian Africans during the colonial era, and lastly, the Rhodesian Reprint Library as a key library to recover white Rhodesian memory and to ignite the Rhodesian white nationalist imagination at a time settler colonialism was in a serious political crisis. Hopefully examining these will highlight salient features and perspectives on the development of African history, with special reference to Zimbabwe. A key strand in all this is the way in which history has been used as a legitimising tool for grander political projects.
Paper long abstract:
This paper analyses how and why the so-called Hamitic hypothesis lingered as a powerful narrative within African historiography throughout the twentieth century. This happened even though it was proven factually incorrect by the 1960s. The paper takes UNESCO's General History of Africa (1964-1999) as a case-study to show that debates about the hypothesis were centred around questions of race and emancipation. The phrase 'Hamitic hypothesis', generally speaking, came to refer to the explanatory narrative that civilizational progress in Africa had stemmed from outside the continent, brought there by migrating whites from the north. It was therefore antithetical to the emancipatory goal of proving Africa had a history espoused by the UNESCO History specifically and African historiography in the mid-twentieth century generally. Within the GHA it was Cheikh Anta Diop who utilised the racialist logic inherited from 19th century European science to argue that the Hamitic Egyptians had been black. This reversal could make the hypothesis useful for the purpose of historiographical emancipation, by emphasizing blackness rather than denying it. This made the hypothesis ambiguous and therefore difficult to get rid of.
Contact author for the full paper.
Re-thinking women's histories in nationalist struggles
Kalpana Hiralal
(University of Kwazulu-Natal)
Paper long abstract:
This paper seeks to capture the lost gendered voices and histories of women in South Africa's road to democracy. Official accounts of nationalist history are often explained in the context of men, religion, community or events. Archival and newspaper sources are at times, bias and skewed in documenting women's histories. Hence, their analysis is often simplistic, one dimensional and fails to incorporate the marginalized voices of women. This paper captures the oral histories of three women who played a pivotal role in the liberation struggle in South Africa: Bertha Mkhize, Phyllis Naidoo and Goonam. The narratives captured in this article are rich, layered in multiples experiences and highlights how women's status and experiences are socially constructed and culturally determined. They show how individual memories converge to highlight the complexities of gendered experiences. It is women describing their own experiences and contributing - not someone else describing their experiences - to women's history from below. A feminist perspective not only challenges the meta-narratives of the liberation histories but also illuminates the heterogeneous experiences of women in the struggle. It decolonizes gendered experiences within an Africanist perspective and offers an alternative and new ways of documenting the gendered aspects of the liberation struggle in Africa.
Developing heritage - developing countries: UNESCO and the making of national heritage institutions in African countries from 1950 on
Marie Huber
(Philipps-Universität Marburg)
Paper short abstract:
UNESCO supported museum building in African states after 1950. This paper focuses on the training and curatorial work in museums and conservation workshops, the knowledge production and the perspectives of African and European conservators in these projects.
Paper long abstract:
In the context of decolonisation and the new international order forming in the 1960s African political leaders had to reformulate the national identities they claimed to represent and African intellectuals acted as representatives of sovereign, independent nation-states and actualised the discourse of a particular African identity and intellectuality. Various projects emerged to rewrite African history as Africa's own history, and the re-appropriation and emancipation of national heritage-making formed a relevant issue in the process of decolonisation—having a national heritage meant having a national identity and belonging to the community of sovereign nation-states. UNESCO served most prominently as a framework to promote the importance of history and heritage as a strategy for empowerment and fostering the nascent national identities of the new member states in the era of decolonisation, in other words: providing development-aid for nation-building. Aside from the historiographical project of The General History of Africa, there is more to be told about the construction of national histories, and as a part of it, identifying cultural and natural heritage to augment national identity. Based on records from the UNESCO archive and the Ethiopian Antiquities Administration I will explain UNESCO's cultural and natural heritage politics in African countries during the 60s and 70s, and show the involvement of international experts, of creating heritage-institutions and heritage-bureaucracy in African states, modeled on Western concepts of "heritage" and "conservation" as universal principles.
UNESCO's role in promoting the identity discourses that underwrote the construction of national narratives in African countries, in this paper, will be analysed in light of its role as an institution that built-up and facilitated knowledge production, and the institutional and conceptual legacies of this knowledge production.
'Making the archival watch dog bark': the UNESCO archive of African oral tradition
Casper Andersen
(University of Aarhus)
Paper long abstract:
In 1985, in the UNESCO The Courier, the Kenyan historian Ali Mazrui emphasized the importance of oral traditions for the study of African history. As long as written archives were considered the exclusive basis for historical research, the African continent would remain marginalized and largely silent about its past. Mazrui likened the situation to the Sherlock Holmes story in which the identity of the intruder is revealed negatively by the watch dog that did not bark (thus revealing that the culprit was the person the dog knew beforehand). The dog's silence was the devastating piece of evidence. Similarly, in African history - because written sources had been regarded as the only archive for history, the (apparent) silence of the continent had been taken as devastating evidence that Africa had no history and no internally driven development. At crucial moments the African archival dog had not barked - but only because until recently Africa's oral traditions had not been properly archived. It was, Mazrui concluded, the ongoing task of UNESCO to establish and vindicate this archive and, thus, make the dog bark.
This paper discusses UNESCO's gigantean program for building a continent-wide archive of African oral traditions, which became institutionalized in 1968 with the Centre for Research and Documentation of Oral Traditions in Niamey in Niger. Concerned with preserving oral traditions of the past the program was, nonetheless, obsessed with making a truly modern archive. UNESCO developed scientific typologies to cover all African oral traditions. The program employed the newest recording technologies and used fixed scripts that would allow for the making of a standardized archive. Mass media and new communication technologies were enrolled to ensure a wide distribution of the archived oral traditions as a number of national broadcasting corporations aired in radio and televised to the large urbanized African audiences plays and performances based on the UNESCO archive of oral traditions.
I argue that the archive project displayed a tension between on the one hand a commitment to promote and vindicate African ways of knowing about the past and on the other a high modernist drive to build a scientific archive that would resonate in international scientific circles. The UNESCO program to make the African archival watch dog bark, therefore, offers a fresh perspective on longstanding tensions between Afrocentric agendas and universalist aspirations in African history.
Paper long abstract:
In Southern African history the period described as the Mfecane "Time of Troubles" is seen as determining much of contemporary ethnic identity and land distribution in the sub-continent. However recent work on societal collapse indicates that societies do not collapse due to single causes, history is far more complex and messy. We assert that the "Time of Troubles"/Mfecane is more complex in origin and consequences than the activities of a single man, Shaka Zulu, or a single ethnicity, and can be better understood in the context of global interactions. This insight, coupled with a greater appreciation for Global interactions, allows us to reconsider the Mfecane in the context of:
a.) Population growth brought about by the introduction of New World Crops.
b.) Climate change and resulting crop failures brought about by the volcanoes Laki in Iceland (1784) and Tambora in Indonesia (1815).
c.) Mass-migration brought about by famine.
d.) The transition of the Cape in the context of the Global Napoleonic wars.
e.) Rapidly industrializing Great Britain, in which massive population growth, mass-migration and professional standing armies were the norm.
f.) Mass-migration of Boer settlers from the Cape in the Groot Trek of 1836.
The paper drawing on the disciplines of history, archaeology and anthropology, seeks to place this period of southern African history in a broader global context.
Paper short abstract:
We approach how the African knowledge was critical for the survival of the Africans in New Granada, today Colombia, in the 16 & 17 centuries. Based on American sources, we reconstruct biographies of Africans who forcibly crossed the Atlantic showing their responses to oppose the slavery.
Paper long abstract:
The American documentation produced during the era of the slave trade has invaluable information that can contribute, not only for the Diaspora history, but also for the retrieval of the history of Africa. Based on American primary documentation, the reconstruction of biographies from the Africans who forcibly crossed the Atlantic show the range of responses that Africans led to face the challenges imposed by slavery. As a result of my Ph.D. dissertation in history at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, I found that the African knowledge was critical for the survival of the Africans in New Granada territory (today Colombia), during the 16th and 17th centuries. In particular, they used their African knowledge as a tool to introduce agricultural, medical, dietary, architectural, and military techniques, which allowed many of them to escape successfully from oppression and reconstruct communitarian life, free from the slaveholders. For instance, I found that West Africans from the Upper Guinea region introduced the rice cultivation and the construction of houses over wood structures based on their African knowledge, and fitting it to the humid swamps of the Caribbean. The paper I propose for the Disciplinary Trends in Africa panel seeks to show how the historical awareness of the cultural memories that Africans used, reconfigure, renew or recreate in America, has aroused the need to establish more accurate connections between the African and the Diaspora history. The study of particular life histories, which I am currently working on as a Research Assistant in the Digital Humanities project Freedom Narratives https://freedomnarratives.org/, can boost that precision, as it aims to link the cultural origin of each African, to the life they performed in America. My work shows that Africans arrived to America with profound scientific, spiritual and technical knowledge, that not only allowed them to overcome the slavery, but that greatly contributed to the construction of the Americas.