Paper short abstract:

During the 1960s and 1970s, population control theorists and demographers viewed the future of Africa negatively, as one of over-population. Subverting this discourse, African medical professionals used alternate visions of the family and of the future to drive their efforts.

Paper long abstract:

During the 1960s and 1970s, population control theorists and demographers viewed the future of the Africa negatively, predicting poverty and resource scarcity as a result of over-population. This exercise in future-making was driven by international geo-politics and post-war eugenics. These prophecies gained immense traction in the West, especially in the USA, and drove the agendas of donor organisations like the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller, and USAID. Newly-independent African nations, awakened to this vision of a non-internationally competitive trajectory adopted some of the rhetoric of these policies in order to shape their own post-colonial visions of the future.

Not all shared this vision for an African future. In 1986 the Confederation of African Medical Associations and Societies (CAMAS) recognised that most people seeking contraception did so with the aim of birth spacing, rather than family limitation. Many had a “high ideal family size”. CAMAS was principally concerned with primary health care and leveraging concern for over-population into funding broader healthcare initiatives. They, and other medical professionals were accessing donor funding for family planning, but seldom with any interest in over-population. Instead they were reacting to local health concerns, using alternate visions of the future to drive their efforts. In this paper, I look at how African professionals turned prophecies of over-population into locally useful visions of health and prosperity.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how Herero sought to transcend racial discrimination in apartheid-era Namibia by prophesying alternative futures and convening new religious communities. It argues that visionary practice became crucial to envision spiritual and political redemption.

Paper long abstract:

This paper analyzes visionary practices of Herero men and women between the Second World War and the late 1960s. Made between South Africa’s attempt to incorporate Namibia as a fifth province and the beginning of an armed conflict for independence, this prophetic work has received little attention by historians. I argue that their projections of a nearing end of colonialism and an impending divine judgment represented attempts to reconcile the legacy of colonization with indigenous cosmologies and to transcend the impact of the first genocide of the twentieth century. The paper thus highlights how African spiritualities influenced the gestation of anticolonial activism. Beyond decolonization, examining this influence contributes to our understanding of African ontologies after the colonial encounter, the emergence of African churches, and the related practices of reading and writing.

Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on visionary practices of people engaging in the production of goods or provision of services.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on visionary practices of people engaging in the production of goods or provision of services. Its starting point is the application by newspaper editor I.B. Thomas to the Colonial Development and Welfare Board in 1948 for a loan to establish a pig farm. Since Thomas had, unlike others, previously been denied a loan for purchasing a printing press, this second application might be read as Thomas having changed strategy to realize the material future he envisioned with the help of a detour. Thomas’ application thus more broadly points to strategies of dealing with the seemingly unknowable (for which entrepreneurial practices money could be raised) as well as practices of imagining times to come from precarious economic positions, against the background of experiencing a volatile, hostile and exploitative economic system and with the aim to secure survival.

Starting from Thomas, this paper will also turn to the visionary practices of artisans and craftspeople such as goldsmiths, bakers and furniture makers. The aim of the paper is to point to the various ways in which people navigated the colonial economy, their prospections of how they could secure their survival and realize their aspirations. Which past, present and innovative material sources and knowledge could they draw on when engaging in such visionary practices? How did the changing economic environment inform people’s aspirations, what were their strategies to realize their aspirations, and how could they make seemingly available, tested and visionary pathways serve their goals?

Paper short abstract:

Through the lens of a key international refugee conference hosted in Addis Ababa this paper sheds light on plans drawn up to manage the presence and future of African refugees and argues for the importance of the decolonization period in understanding an international history of refugee management.

Paper long abstract:

The conference report of the Conference on the Legal, Economic and Social Aspects of African refugee problems, held between October 9-18th 1967 in Addis Ababa notes: “the whole refugee problem in Africa is essentially a problem of the 1960’s and this is very significant, since the 1960’s is the decade of maximum decolonization and the intensification of the struggle for independence on the part of the still colonial and dependent peoples” (Final report, 1968, p.9). This quotation links the presence of refugees firmly to processes of decolonization and insinuates, by temporarily anchoring Africa’s refugee challenge in the 1960s, a hope for a future without refugees for independent Africa. The decolonization era is indeed a crucial period for refugee-management on the African continent and international organizations like the Organization of African Unity and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and NGOs like the International University Exchange Fund and the Lutheran World Federation became active in addressing what the conference defined as the “refugee problem” on the continent. In this paper, I argue for the importance of the decolonization period in telling an international history of refugee management. I do so by exploring legal, educational and settlement plans formulated at the 1967 conference to manage the presence and future of Africa’s refugees and ask what impact these plans had on refugee management on the African continent and beyond.