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- Convenors:
-
Klaas Van Walraven
(African Studies Centre)
Jan-Bart Gewald (Leiden University)
Send message to Convenors
- Chair:
-
Klaas Van Walraven
(African Studies Centre)
- Discussant:
-
Jan-Bart Gewald
(Leiden University)
- Format:
- Panels
- Location:
- KH212
- Start time:
- 29 June, 2017 at
Time zone: Europe/Zurich
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
There is increasing awareness of the importance of biographical research in African historical studies. This panel therefore explores, through presentations of papers of biographies of African individual(s), the possibilities that the biographical method offers in the study of African history.
Long Abstract:
Contextualised biographical research provides insights into the wider historical context in which the person under study lived. Conversely, it can demonstrate the influence that the historical context exercised on the persona. Biographical research offers a unique opportunity to get an understanding of how ontologies have emerged in Africa as a product of interaction between context and individuals. Such focus allows insight in the process of meaning giving to domains as the political, religious or social in different African historical contexts and contemporary realities. This pertains to the role of the individual and individuals taken together, whose shared characteristics can be studied through the biographical method (prosopography).
These approaches enable us to reconsider what makes people significant or remarkable in African history: people are not only remarkable for what they have achieved, for how they have influenced history (traditional biography), they may also be remarkable for how their being, views and acts have been shaped by the interface between structure and agency. Such biographies enable an insight in the interface between the individual and the time in which s/he lived, and will enhance understanding of how the historical context made people to what they were.
The panel invites papers on the biography of individuals and that of specific groups tied together through shared characteristics.
Convenors
Dr. Klaas van Walraven, Senior Researcher African Studies Centre, Leiden University; Chair AEGIS CRG 'African History'; walraven@ascleiden.nl.
Prof. dr. Jan-Bart Gewald, Chair CRG African History of the African Studies Centre, University of Leiden; gewald@ascleiden.nl.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
This paper considers how accounts of the lives and deeds of “great men” in 18th & 19th century East Africa were celebrated and memorialized. Accounts of heroic elephant hunters, warriors and traders inspired other men to pursue such hazardous, but potentially rewarding, activities.
Paper long abstract:
Accounts of historical change in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century East African societies typically described "great men" - hunters, chiefs, mythological founders - who through their actions brought about great changes in state, society and economics. Academic historians have long recognised that such accounts tended to personalise broader shifts, presenting one architect of processes that might have taken centuries. They have paid less attention, however, to the way that the biographical form of such narratives influenced those who heard and related them.
In this paper, I trace the role that celebrations of and stories about elephant hunters and long-distance traders shaped the aspirations of young Nyamwezi and Sumbwa men in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. I argue that stories, songs and dances memorialising historical and mythological figures made the ideals of heroic masculinity embodied by hunters and traders a presence in the lives of boys and young men. Most boys would not grow up to professional hunters, to found kingdoms, or to vanquish monsters, but they could dream. When economic changes made it possible for more young men from Unyamwezi to become hunter-warriors, and to found chiefdoms, or to discover new sources of wealth there were many ambitious men who leapt at the chance to make their dreams reality.
I focus on life stories of the Sumbwa and Nyamwezi founders of the Yeke state, in what is currently the Democratic Republic of Congo. These stories both illustrate how biography served as history, and how accounts of great men inspired others to emulate them.
Paper short abstract:
Cette communication s’intéresse aux itinéraires biographiques d’une dizaine de soldats et d’anciens combattants sénégalais, entre 1945 et 1962. Certains de ces hommes s’engagèrent dans l’armée française tandis que d’autres rejoignirent les rangs du nationalisme africain.
Paper long abstract:
L'histoire des tirailleurs sénégalais débute en 1857 pour s'achever en 1962, avec la fin de la guerre d'Algérie. Ces hommes, recrutés principalement en Afrique de l'Ouest, participèrent à tous les conflits mondiaux dans lesquels la France fut engagée durant le XXe siècle : les deux guerres mondiales mais aussi les guerres de décolonisation après 1945. Si la socio-histoire de ces soldats a déjà fait l'objet de nombreux travaux, il n'existe pourtant que peu d'études sur leur participation aux conflits indochinois (1945-1954) et algérien (1954-1962). De plus, le contexte historique de l'après Seconde Guerre mondiale en Afrique de l'Ouest, marque le début de nouvelles revendications sociales et politiques - notamment sous l'égide du Rassemblement démocratique Africain (RDA). Cette communication, en s'intéressant à la trajectoire de vie d'une dizaine de soldats sénégalais mais aussi à celles d'anciens combattants, entre 1945 et 1962, se propose d'aborder cette identité collective du soldat sénégalais, une identité qui a pu se manifester au sein de deux pôles opposés : l'engagement dans l'armée française lors des guerres de décolonisation, l'engagement politique au sein du nationalisme ouest-africain. Il s'agit alors de prendre en compte les milieux sociaux et géographiques d'où provenaient ces hommes, leurs places dans la fratrie, les conditions de leurs engagements, leurs attentes au moment des démobilisations, etc. Outre des entretiens, nous nous appuyons sur certaines archives personnelles et familiales, afin de mieux documenter les expériences de vie et les imaginaires de ces hommes durant cette période de profondes transformations historiques.
Paper short abstract:
Barthélémy Boganda was a Catholic priest in Oubangui-Chari, the colonial name of the Central African Republic, who in the course of the 1940s developed into the prime anti-colonial agitator in this territory.
Paper long abstract:
The life, work and times of Barthélémy Boganda - ca. 1910-1959 - provide insight, on a micro level, in the nature and consequences of colonialism in French Equatorial Africa. The terror of colonial conquest, its destructive consequences for Equatorial civilisation and the means of personal salvation and advancement provided by that other dimension of colonial rule - the missionary world - became encapsulated in the personal life of Barthélémy Boganda. Born in the Lobaye forest - an area that suffered particularly under concessionary colonialism - Boganda was orphaned before the age of ten as a direct consequence of colonial terror. A lone, lost child literally picked up by a colonial patrol in the rainforest, Boganda was put into missionary care, where his gift for learning was quickly noticed. An itinerary through mission-run educational institutions culminated in Boganda's ordination as Oubangui-Chari's first Catholic priest (1938). His personal diaries, recently (re-)discovered, provide, however, glimpses of troubled memories of childhood and deep-seated misgivings about missionary paternalism and the racism of the colonial order. The mid-1940s became a turning point in his life, whereupon Boganda commenced a political career marked by agitation against colonialism and its (settler) representatives. Remarkable for its ferocity even for the times, his comportment betrayed a troubled soul, while his anti-colonial discourse was marked by a syncretism of Christian modernity and old beliefs, both caricatured and venerated. Thus, the study of Boganda's life provides insight in the nexus between politics and religion as ingrained in Equatorial civilisation.
Paper short abstract:
Arrie Paulus was apartheid South Africa’s most infamous white trade unionist, remembered as the personification of working-class racism. This paper focuses on rumours surrounding Paulus’ racial and ethnic origins to examine the political currency of biographical rumour in late and post-apartheid SA.
Paper long abstract:
Arrie Paulus grew up in working-class Pretoria during the 1930s and 1940s. As a young developer on the gold mines of South Africa's West Rand, he distinguished himself as one of the top-earning rock breakers. In 1967, Paulus became general secretary of the all-white Mineworkers' Union, a position he held for twenty years. Under his leadership, the union administration emerged from years of corruption into a 'golden decade'. Paulus' infamous brinkmanship saw him win financial benefits and improved working conditions for the semi-skilled workers he represented. He oversaw the MWU jealously guarding the race-based protection whites enjoyed under apartheid rule, and government and mining capital alike regarded him with wary reverence. In scholarship, he remains immortalized as the personification of white working-class racism.
Yet Paulus was haunted by a rumour: that he was not South African-born, but the son of Middle Eastern immigrants who became Afrikaans on the mines. This defender of race-based privilege and staunch Afrikaner nationalist, it was whispered, was not actually white. The rumour circulated in reform-era South Africa, and persists in the post-apartheid present.
Historians have considered the meaning and function of rumour in relation to events and social groups, but it has received little attention in relation to individual biography. Through the Paulus story, this paper examines the political currency of biographical rumour in late and post-apartheid South Africa. It argues that biographical rumour provides insight into not only the time in which a person lived, but also the context in which their legacy lingers.