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Paper short abstract:

Amidst Cold War divisions, the International Congress of Africanists brought Africanist scholars together on the African continent. This paper explores debates at the earliest Congresses surrounding the emergent study of visual art, and its relevance to national progress and continental solidarity.

Paper long abstract:

Established in the early 1960s, the International Congress of Africanists brought together African and Africanist scholars from around the world in the emerging capital cities of a liberating continent. Concurrent with a Cold War-fuelled rush for knowledge about Africa, the first three gatherings were held in Ghana (1962), Senegal (1967) and Ethiopia (1973), with the earliest dominated by white scholars, particularly from America and the USSR. The third iteration in Addis Ababa was opened by Emperor Haile Selassie, whose inaugural speech reflected on the fact that for the first time in the Congress' existence African and black American scholars outnumbered white delegates. Africans, Haile Selassie remarked, must come to 'carry a greater share of the study and research on their continent than they do at present.' The stakes were high, he remarked; African knowledge had 'great relevance to the struggle our continent is now waging against poverty, ignorance and disease.' This paper explores the significance of the early International Congresses against the backdrop of Cold War tensions, asserting that they provided direct points of contact, contest and exchange in an atmosphere that did not otherwise allow for such. Particular focus falls on the evolution of debates about the visual arts of Africa, how they should be studied, historically and methodologically, and what role they and their histories had to play in emergent narratives of national progress and continental solidarity.