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- Convenors:
-
Alessandro Gusman
(University of Turin)
Riccardo Ciavolella (CNRS/EHESS)
Alice Bellagamba (University of Milan-Bicocca)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Streams:
- Anthropology (x) Decoloniality & Knowledge Production (y)
- Location:
- Neues Seminargebäude, Seminarraum 22
- Sessions:
- Friday 2 June, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Berlin
Short Abstract:
Freedom is increasingly indicative of an emerging field of reflection in African Studies and beyond. We invite papers to open a "bottom-up" perspective that questions freedom as dreamt, sought, and achieved in concrete experiences of successful (or unsuccessful) emancipation.
Long Abstract:
For long onto the margins of African studies, freedom is increasingly indicative of an emerging field of reflection that combines ethnography, history and political sciences in order to reposition the discussion on its contours and contents from a Southern perspective.
Insights on African lexicons of freedom, as entangled in specific cultural and social environments, come from Riesman's pioneering ethnography of Fulani ideas of self and society (1973) or from Kopytoff and Miers' (1977) seminal definition of African freedoms in terms of belonging, which Nyamnjoh (2002) and Geschiere (2009) have further enriched through a focus on contemporary contexts. Whereas post-colonial thinkers have addressed this controversial notion in light of African history of subjection first to the slave trade, and then to European imperialism, a growing literature has considered African ideas of freedom at the crossroad between local, regional, interregional and global process of change. Other researchers have explored the wave of new declinations of freedom triggered by the end of Cold War and the 1990s liberalisation of the continent's economies and political systems through processes of privatisation, decentralisation, and democratization (i.e. Englund 2006).
Focusing on local and historicised lexicons of freedom (and related ideas of autonomy, mastery of the self, independence, etc.), we invite to open a "bottom-up" perspective that questions freedom as dreamt, sought, and achieved in concrete experiences of successful (or unsuccessful) emancipation. Authors are invited to submit papers based on field and/or archival research, to enhance the understanding of the similarities and differences cutting across geography and history.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 2 June, 2023, -Ettore Morelli (University of Basel)
Paper short abstract:
The paper analyses one of the first texts written in Sesotho, the transcription of a dream in which an African kingdom is saved from conquest by heavenly intervention. The dream of Tsekelo offers a breakthrough on divinatory practices and aspirations to freedom in 19th-century southern Africa.
Paper long abstract:
The paper analyses one of the first texts written in Sesotho, the transcription of a dream in which an African kingdom is saved from conquest by heavenly intervention.
At the beginning of 1858, the African mountain kingdom of Lesotho was on the verge of a war which would last until its subjugation under the British empire, in 1868. The newly-founded Republic of the Orange Free State (OFS) claimed the most fertile part of the kingdom and threatened an invasion, which took place later that year. At the same time, two of the sons of the king Moshoeshoe were in Cape Town, hosted by the Governor George Grey with the purpose of receiving an education. These two young men, Tlali and Tsekelo, composed on this occasion the first texts written in Sesotho by native Sesotho speakers. One of them was the dream of Tsekelo.
Tsekelo dreamt of a war fought between the Basotho of his father and an invincible enemy. During the battle, the heavens opened and flames, shining spears, and an army of men descended upon their enemies, sent by Molimo, ‘the Ancestor’/‘God’, granting them victory. The dreamer, however, reassured that he was not ‘a Seer or a Prophet’ and that this dream ‘led to nothing’.
The analysis this unique source offers a breakthrough on divinatory practices and aspirations to freedom in 19th-century southern Africa, in a context marked by prophecies, visions, and dreams of anti-colonial victory.
Elia Vitturini (University of Milan)
Paper short abstract:
The paper discusses the legacies of slavery and the mobilisation of ideological and material resources around the semantic repertoires of freedom and emancipation through the history of a Gambian village from mid-twentieth century up to the post 2017 dictatorship transition in The Gambia.
Paper long abstract:
The case study discussed is a rural village located in an area north of the river Gambia where slavery was until the first decades of twentieth century a fundamental institution which left important traces in the economic, political and social life of the community. The village arena is internally articulated on the basis of several individual and familial trajectories of emancipation related to strong legacies of slavery which are rooted in the precolonial and colonial socio-economic rural organisation. The village has adjusted itself as the socio-politically delimited terrain of application of national and transnational ideals, policies and politics of social change which both in the past and the present have mobilised the ideas of slavery, freedom and emancipation: from the legal abolition of the slave trade enforced by the colonial ruler up to the idea of the slavery of poverty which is combated by state, development interventions and programmes. Nevertheless, the village arena has a historicity that is more than the sum of the external influences. The Gambian village case study shows that in different historical phases from the years of national independence in the 1960s, the declining trajectory of agriculture, and through the transition between authoritarian and formally democratic national regimes, people have concentrated their efforts to master the materiality of slavery or freedom attributes by managing in the everyday village life the effects of the genealogical transmission of the hierarchised belonging to different status groups, the control of space and the organisation of geographic mobility.
Robson Pedrosa Costa (University of Lisbon - Centre for History - FLUL)
Paper short abstract:
The aim of this study is to analyse the discourses constructed by Afro-descendant communities in Brazil (Quilombolas), seeking to understand the relationships between the struggle for land, for autonomy and for freedom.
Paper long abstract:
The aim of this study is to analyse the discourses constructed by Afro-descendant communities in Brazil, self-denominated Quilombolas, seeking to understand the relationships between the struggle for land, for autonomy and for freedom through the analysis of the re-signification of an initially strange lexicon, imposed from “outside”, “from above”. Due to the process of recognition of these communities by the State (post-1988) and the consequent legalization of their lands, a movement organized by black leaders emerged to reframe the concept of Quilombo and “being a quilombola”. This resignification went through the search for a memory that would help legitimize their struggle, their existence. Spontaneously, the search for this memory led many groups to recognize themselves as heirs of a glorious past that has a direct connection with Africa and with the struggle of enslaved people for freedom and autonomy. In this study, we will focus on six quilombola communities in the state of Pernambuco, northeaster Brazil. What they have in common is the construction of a narrative that goes back to Quilombo dos Palmares (revered by the Black Movement) and its leaders (Ganga Zumba and Zumbi). Rescuing this memory helped these communities gain recognition from the State, collective belonging, and appreciation of the Afro-descendant past. With an eye on the future and the daily struggle for survival, new lexicons have entered communities, in a movement that aims to promote community based tourism, collective empowerment, entrepreneurship and governance. Lexicons also resignified and rethought in a participatory way.
Fairuzah Munaaya Atchulo (University of Amsterdam)
Paper short abstract:
Relying on an ethnographic survey and a historical analysis of the Cooperation Agreements signed between Cote D’Ivoire and France in 1960, this contribution examines the confines of the concepts of independence, freedom, and autonomy and their realities and contradictions among Ivoirians.
Paper long abstract:
In 2017, Franco-Beninese activist, Kemi Seba in a symbolic protest against the CFA currency burnt a 5,000 CFA bank note. His subsequent arrest provoked just another protest fuelled by anti-France and anti-CFA sentiments. The crux of the longevity of these anti- France, anti-CFA protests exemplifies either an unwillingness or an inability to address the core of these protests. The core of these protests are framed in the narratives and opinions of the nature and constituents of freedom, autonomy, and independence of Francophone Africa from colonial France. Thus, bringing to focus the incongruity of the notions of independence as envisioned, attained, and sustained since the 1960s by their political leaders and the realities of the present. In this contribution, the focus of this interrogation will be Cote D’Ivoire as one of the Francophone countries with the deepest historical and contemporary ties to France. This paper provides an intersectional analysis of the concepts of independence, freedom and autonomy of Cote D’Ivoire within a transactional paradigm. By aligning and analyzing these concepts from the perspectives of the three main actors enshrined within this paradigm: France, Cote D’Ivoire and Ivoirians, the modalities of these concepts are examined. It interrogates the modalities of these concepts by France through the nature and context of the Cooperation Treaties signed in 1960 with Cote D’Ivoire, challenges the mode of Cote D’Ivoire as discussed in the contents of these Treaties, and finally the perspective of Ivoirians to the affectations of these Treaties in contemporary times. In this multi- tiered, convoluted paradigm, this paper argues the complex realities that show these conceptions as not merely free floating imaginaries, but ones bound and tethered to the systems and institutions that perhaps call to notion the very meaning of these concepts.
Cláudia Leal (ISCTE-IUL)
Paper short abstract:
The study examines the emancipation of Mozambican women through their war memories and their involvement in politics. FRELIMO women ex-combatants have a recognized social and political status in society, but RENAMO women's stories of the war, political experiences, daily lives, and resistance as part of the opposition remain unknown. Some consciously engaged as combatants but many were captured and forced to assume important key social roles in the conflict. Their path to freedom and emancipation is still ongoing but is marginalized.
Paper long abstract:
This study analyzes the silences of the official memory about the roles of women in Mozambique's struggles, contrasting them with the memories of women combatants and their current struggles. The research focuses on the women combatants of RENAMO, doubly silenced by power relations based on gender and by the status of losers, compared to the women of FRELIMO. The recollection of their memories allows us to revisit the past and, through voices and perspectives that are usually subalternized, to offer new perspectives on the relations between gender, emancipation and power.
The objective is to contribute to the debate about the multiple ways of producing memories from critical studies on memory and the production of history, analyzing their memories and the ways they are remembered or erased.
It is a qualitative approach with recourse to several methods: bibliographical analysis, documentary research, interviews, biographical research, emphasizing the triangulation and critical analysis of sources.
The aim is to fill the absence of studies on Memory, from the Renamo point of view, and in particular women's memories, starting from the hypothesis that there is a double subordination of women that results from the articulation of a gender dimension and political legitimacy.
More than a mere reference these combatants are places of memory and also represent a learning space. The issues of social inequalities remain marked not only between men and women, but also among women themselves, in this case those who are on the losing side.
Leanne Williams Green (University of Cambridge)
Paper short abstract:
Baptists Christians in Harare are engaged in debate about the nature of freedom as a spiritual and ethical reality. I draw on ethnographic fieldwork to explore the political implications of their religious vision of freedom in a postcolonial city.
Paper long abstract:
Residents of Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare, sometimes recount a familiar postcolonial experience of being ‘independent but not free’. Within this context, a group of Baptist Christians in the city are engaged in their own debates about the nature of freedom as a spiritual and ethical reality. Their religious account challenges a reigning liberal and Eurocentric view of freedom in some scholarship and public discourse, which presumes that freedom is the capacity to choose between alternatives.
Drawing on 15 months of fieldwork with a network of middle-class Baptist Christians, I argue that these believers adhere to a “normative freedom” as an alternative to classically liberal perspectives. I show how they develop these ideas through the urgency of their daily moral deliberations as religious practitioners, with important outcomes for their political lives.
Bringing recent work in the anthropological study of ethics into conversation with emerging reflections on freedom in African Studies, I show how religious visions of freedom intersect with current questions about experiences of postcolonial life. I propose that attending to this Zimbabwean Baptist account of spiritual freedom provides a key avenue for further theorising diverse conceptions of human freedoms and the attendant political implications.
Carla Bertin (Iscte - University Institute of Lisbon)
Paper short abstract:
Based on an ethnography of Pentecostalism in southern Benin, this paper questions women’ efforts to submit to their husbands. An anthropology of the future leads us to a theoretical shift and to situate the moral ‘mastery of self’ within a larger set of women aspirations and quests for dignity.
Paper long abstract:
In Pentecostal churches, women learn how to submit to their husbands. The importance of women’s submission has polarized the academic literature around the ‘Pentecostal gender paradox’: while some authors denounce the patriarchal structure of these Churches, others identify women’s agency towards their husbands through and within religious rules, following Mahmood (2005) critics of the occidental link between self-realization with individual autonomy. However, much like the interlocutors of Schielke (2015), the women with whom I worked, who live in villages of Southern Benin, do not quite fit Mahmood’s pious religious subjects. Furthermore, the assumption that mastery of self exercises power on the partner’s behaviors, does not apply to my field-site: despite the efforts of submissive women, husbands do not change.
Pentecostal moral education cannot be isolated from other religious activities (prayers of ‘ropes’ breaking’; church’s economic initiatives, etc.). More importantly, I will show that moral education must be understood as being part of a broader set of aspirations and difficulties that women encounter as they attempt to realize their ordinary future. In other words, an anthropology of the future allows us to ensure a critical ‘displacement’ necessary to understand Pentecostal women’s quest for dignity. The future they aspire to can be spatialized and incorporated into specific relationships, especially linked to the household. The idea of a ‘government of the house’ (Foucault 1984; de l’Estoile 2014) will help us to understand how Christian duty is situated within a larger set of duties, that is, what is right and worthy for my interlocutors.
Marta Gentilucci (Centre Universitaire de formation et de recherche de Mayotte) Georgeta Stoica (Centre Universitaire de Recherche et Formation (CUFR) de Mayotte)
Paper short abstract:
Based on ethnographic research conducted in Mayotte island between 2022 and 2023, this presentation aims to historicize and deconstruct the discourse of freedom in the ongoing construction of consensus «from below» in the last French overseas department of Mayotte.
Paper long abstract:
The achievement of French departmental status in 2011 was the result of a long fight of Mahorais people to detach irreversibly from the «neighboring» and «cousin» islands of Comores that acquired independence in 1975. While locally the post-abolition of slavery was marked by the search for peace between slaves and slaveholders by leveraging the common Islamic base, the liberation of Mayotte from Comoros was built on the claim of a different «identity». Interestingly, while the history of slavery has almost fallen into oblivion, in contrast, separatist history has been strengthened through a process of fabricating the foundation myth of a « protective and emancipatory France » (Roinsard, 2022). Today, however, this paternalistic image of France is beginning to falter as a result of laxity vis-a-vis what locally it is called the «invasion» of Comorians seeking «for freedom» in the so-called European «Eldorado». Additionally, the increasingly soured relations between locals and «muzungu community» (white-skinned) give a different perspective of how freedom is perceived and lived. Without questioning Mayotte dependence on France, new declinations of freedom are built in the local discourses and political rhetorics around ideas of intercontinental mobility, economic development, environmental protection, aspiration for jobs historically assigned to metros (main-land France inhabitants), and multiple identity claims, etc.
Based on ethnographic research conducted in Mayotte between 2022 and 2023, this presentation aims to historicize and deconstruct the discourse of freedom in the ongoing construction of consensus «from below» in the last French overseas department of Mayotte.
Diego Marinozzi (KU Eichstätt-Ingolstadt)
Paper short abstract:
The purpose of this proposal is to analyze the ethnographical material of Ernesto Guevara's diary in Congo focussing on the cultural problems he faced at the moment of understanding the native conceptions of revolution and emancipation.
Paper long abstract:
This proposal is intended to analyze the ethnographical richness of Ernesto Guevara's diary which was written during the months he spent supporting Kabila's maquis in Eastern Congo. Guevara tried to export the Cuban revolutionary model to this region of Africa. In his own words: they "aimed to bring about the Cubanization of the Congolese." Even when the attempt can be considered as a failure in many aspects, the diary as source can be read as an ethnographical description of a clash between two very different conceptions of revolution and emancipation.
According to one of the traditional interpretation of Guevara's mission in Congo, this action can be considered as part of the unrealistic aspirations which ended up in a great political and military failure. A failure that anticipated the destiny of Guevara a couple of years later in Bolivia. From another point of view, the Cuban intervention in Congo may be considered as one of the first chapters of an African odyssey which would successfully lead to the visit of Nelson Mandela in Cuba in the 1990s.
None of these interpretations are adopted in this proposal, which considers the presence of Cubans in Congo as part of what we call today a global phenomenon and in the 1960s was conceptualized as an anti-imperialist struggle. It is in this "global" context that Guevara wrote this ethnographical description which provides an insight on the interaction between a "global south" and a native revolutionary and emancipatory logic.