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Paper short abstract:

The paper examines the photographic archives of two Lutheran hospitals in the south of Madagascar and explores the interplay of scattered temporalities and contrasted moralities in the evocation of the past of Christian care as it collides with the imagination of its future.

Paper long abstract:

The presentation meditates on the photographic archives of two Lutheran hospitals in the south of Madagascar - Manambaro on the east coast and Ejeda in the western hinterland. The hospitals were established by an American mission between the mid-50s and 60s and were later integrated into SALFA, the healthcare department of the Malagasy Lutheran Church - one of the largest private healthcare providers in contemporary Madagascar. In the USA, the photographic archives of the hospitals are prized possessions of the former missionaries, the Church or its libraries. In Madagascar, photographs are displayed in the homes of those who built the hospitals or worked in them. Their existence materialises diverging individuals trajectories, various collective projects, and occasionaly conflicting teleologies. In both contexts however, those visual remnants inspire a nostalgia for the future that enchanted their past. In the first decades of their existence, the Lutheran hospitals represented a medical and technological tour de force, an ideal of service and the hope of a moral salvation. The paper explores the interplay of scattered temporalities and contrasted moralities in the evocation of the past of Christian care as it collides with the imagination of its future.

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What surfaces when a library is burnt, an archive lost? What emerges from the ashes and ruins? Our creative publication “Lost Libraries, Burnt Archive” addresses these questions and gathers perspectives from the arts and academia to contemplate loss, libraries, knowledge and the future of archives.

Paper long abstract:

What surfaces when a library is burnt, an archive lost? What emerges from the ashes and ruins? In this talk, we will present our recently published creative book “Lost Libraries, Burnt Archive” which brings together a plethora of perspectives from the fields of literature, fine arts, poetry and academic scholarship. The publication is a response to the tragic fire at the Jagger Library at the University of Cape Town in April 2021 and brought together a group of artists, poets, photographers, writers and scholars who collectively engaged with the significance of the event as well as broader questions pertaining to the loss of archives and the future of knowledge production practices for African Studies. In this presentation we share some of the key issues and problems raised by our 22 contributors. These include critical re-readings of what constitutes the ‘value’ of an archive, musings on archival loss and the significance of fire in the South African context, and elsewhere. This creative publication – combining diverse mediums, print and design formats and styles – and emerging from the ashes of many other books, is in itself a response to a lost archive and a contribution to a new one in the making.

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The paper considers how an image of rebirth, political and aesthetic, is mobilised in the disputed restoration of the Eyethu Cinema in Soweto. It does so by considering the futures cinema engenders and how the cinema's temporal layers both underline and complicate projects of urban renewal.

Paper long abstract:

"Eyethu was uterine. Warm and liquid in there while outside the wind howled across Mofolo Park, carrying cries with it." (Lesego Rampolokeng, 2017)

Eyethu was a cultural institution of Soweto in the 1970s and 1980s and, as Rampolokeng offers it, a temple of doom and solace. One of the few African-owned cinemas in apartheid South Africa, Eyethu remains, some thirty years after its closure, a place that evokes both decay and nostalgia. Providing terrain for futures beyond apartheid and for the making of a community project under the apartheid's guise, Eyethu represents the possibility, albeit fragile, of the public, political potential of cinema to reemerge in projects of urban restoration. Even when facing the threat of its building being substituted by a shopping mall, Eyethu remains forward-looking, a cipher of promised African renaissance and a reminder of the valences of cultural heritage. For this reason, the paper contends, it is a privileged site for charting figurations of transformation and change, and the mobilisation of a past political aesthetic in the present. The disputed time of Eyethu, one that works for or agains its own rebirth, allows us to reconsider African Renaissance from the vantage of Mofolo Park, not as a broad historical schema, as Bhekizizwe Peterson puts it, but, using his words, through "the synchronic layers and complexities that often underscore, and sometimes call into question, the seemingly uncomplicated forward-moving sense of temporality and social transformation." The paper proposes alternative Eyethu rebirths, on the threshold of the cinema's 'second coming'.

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Paper short abstract:

Taking the example of a political theater project and a city walk in Durban, I discuss how insurgent temporalities are processed into aesthetic forms in an activist way to articulate, perform and embody resistances.

Paper long abstract:

Based on my anthropological fieldwork in urban South Africa, I investigate how political performance projects mold local experiences and activist visions into aesthetic forms. Activism as a medium to reimagine and shape futures is deeply intertwined with collective memories and imaginaries that fold and curl into contemporary ways of being and acting in the world. Considering forms as emergent and contingent becomings, I draw on Handelman‘s notion of „forming form“ which points to the infinite and unpredictable processuality of the social practice of forming (Handelman 2021). I argue that performative projects such as political theatre and public walks create utopian time-spaces of experimentation and imagination that draw political ideas and visions into an embodied and tangible experience. As such, they open up new ways of knowing, and navigating through current challenges, urgencies and (a)synchronicities. Insurgent temporalities endow aesthetic forms with depth: the multi-layered sediments of remembered and anticipated times accumulate in the staged forms and enable new potentials to be tapped in order to trigger socio-political change. Exploring two case studies in Durban, I show how insurgent temporalities are processed in aesthetic forms to articulate resistance and make it accessible to different sets of agents.

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Paper short abstract:

Firstly, I am approaching this paper with the idea that Africa prefigures the future. Secondly, I am using José Esteban Muñoz”s idea of queer futurity. I am interested in African queer futurities by looking at the music and music video visuals of queer black artist Nakhane, and Desire Marea.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is a meditation on the relationship between aesthetics and politics. There are two issues: Firstly, I am approaching this paper with the idea that Africa prefigures the future. Secondly, I am using José Esteban Muñoz”s idea of queer futurity, where he argues that “queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. The future is queerness’s domain.” I am interested in African queer futurities by looking at the music and music video visuals of queer black artist Nakhane, and Desire Marea. My analysis will focus on Nakhane’s “interloper” and “do you well”, and Desire Marea’s “you think I’m horny” and “tavern kween”. These two artists have created work that centralises black queer aesthetics, and because “the aesthetic, especially the queer aesthetic, frequently contains blueprints and schemata of a forward-dawning futurity” (José Esteban Muñoz), I am interested in the politics contained in the work of these artists as they imagine queerness and Africanness. I am interested in the possibilities created by and through their music and visuals, and how that possibility offers us ways to think of another world. A queerness-to-come that is beyond the idea of sexuality, but is more in line with bell hook’s idea of the queer; “‘queer' not as being about who you're having sex with (that can be a dimension of it); but 'queer' as being about the self that is at odds with everything."

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Paper short abstract:

This chapter takes a critical look at the various conceptions of water spirits among the diverse cultures of the Nigeria Niger Delta and makes the case for the abundant visual cultures inherent in ritual veneration.

Paper long abstract:

The mobility of wealth is intricately tied to water commerce, this was the phenomenon that many cultures exploited within the rubric of water spirit veneration. Not only that it is correct to adduce such dynamic, but it remains the most viable of the ways that communities even nations thrived in the past and today. Therefore, this chapter takes a critical look at the various conceptions of water spirits among the diverse cultures of the Nigeria Niger Delta. At the instance of the Portuguese appearing at the coasts of western Africa, many cultures assumed that such pale skinned humans must have been their returning ancestors who have come to fulfill the promises that their forbears were expecting. Not only that the boats and vessels that accompanied these early Europeans were filled with assorted exotic goods, but such coming kickstarted what will become the fortification of empires. Kongo and Benin were some of the oldest kingdoms that validated this claim, as they matched with sophistication in their wars of conquests. Water spirit veneration within this region took various nomenclature, but the idea that permeated them were similar. While the Benin people made huge reference to Olokun, other cultures of the Niger Delta alluded to names such as; Onoku (delta, Igbo); Ejoramen (among the Urhobo); berikrukru and odede-oru (the Ijaw); Ndem (Efik and Ibibio).

By analyzing the visual cultures of the conceptions of water spirit, we hope to articulate their importance in the life and culture of the culturally diverse Niger Delta.