Keynote Address, Colloquium, Opening of the Centre for Africa Studies, University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa, November 5, 2007: When I was first approached to participate in this occasion marking the opening of the Centre for African Studies at the University of the Free State I readily accepted more out of excitement that I would be visiting South Africa and Bloemfontein than conviction that I knew what to say, or that what I said would be terribly meaningful. Part of my trepidation was the title, ‘African studies in the postcolony’, for I remain mystified by the analytical import of ‘postcolonialism’, the discursive provenance of the term ‘postcolony’. More importantly, my knowledge of African studies as an academic field, as a distinctive interdiscipline or constellation of disciplinary and scholarly engagements with African phenomena, is largely derived from my experience in the Euroamerican academy. And schooled as I was in the post-independent African academy to be wary of the universalistic pretensions of western scholarship, I am averse to generalizing from this experience.
This is another way of confessing that I am not sure what African studies look like, or should look like, in the African university having spent 20 out of the past 25 years teaching outside the continent. And I am only too aware of the analytical and prescriptive dangers of homogenizing our vast, complex and beloved continent, home to 54 countries, and astonishingly diverse cultures, histories, and intellectual traditions; generalizations about Africa are often inspired either by the solidarities and anxieties of Pan-Africanism or the simplicities and arrogance of Eurocentricism. It was partly out of this concern that in my recently published edited two-volume collection, The Study of Africa, much of the focus is on African studies outside the continent. I thought an inventory and interrogation of African studies in the continent demanded a more systematic, even separate, investigation. But having accepted the invitation, I have no choice but to share some reflections on the constitution of African studies in African universities.
It would not be farfetched to argue that African studies in the Euroamerican and African academies enjoy some similarities in so far as universities in Africa and Euroamerica, despite their many differences, are molded from intersected histories. The historical influences have flown in both directions. The “western” university introduced in Africa from the nineteenth century had African antecedents in so far as it bore Islamic influences and the first Islamic universities were established in Africa. The postcolonial university is, in turn, as Ali Mazrui once observed, a multinational educational enterprise, whose organizational structures and epistemic cultures are patented in the global North. The processes of contemporary globalization—the intensified flows of capital, commodities, and cultures across communities, countries and continents—reinforce the universalizing ambitions and propensities of universities. Globalization is simultaneously producing new contexts and imperatives for intellectual communities and transnational intellectual flows and engagements.
If these assumptions are correct, it is possible, indeed crucial, to identify the dominant modes and models that have framed African studies in various world regions including Africa. There are of course several ways in which the models can be conceived. We can ask of African studies, as for any field of scholarly inquiry, the five ‘Ws’: when, where, what, why, and who—the temporal, spatial, epistemic, and social composition of the field. Or we can invoke the three ‘Is’: the institutional, intellectual, or ideological dynamics of knowledge production. Alternatively, knowledge systems can be discussed in terms of the metadisciplinary divisions of the contemporary academy—the social sciences, humanities, natural sciences, and professions. The institutional-intellectual-ideological triad perhaps captures best the complex dimensions of knowledge production, dissemination, and consumption. Institutionally, African studies has been constituted in existing disciplines or seen as an independent discipline or interdiscipline in the humanities and social sciences and takes various organizational forms—departments, centers, institutes, or programs. Ideologically, it has exhibited imperial, solidarity, and liberatory tendencies. Intellectually, it has been dominated by culturalist, developmentalist, deconstructionist, and globalist imperatives.
These trends manifest themselves quite differently in different world regions. This is merely to point out that knowledge production is, in a fundamental sense, a spatialized social practice notwithstanding the vigorous, but often vain, attempts by some scholars to free their disciplines, specialties, theories and models from the supposedly suffocating confines of time and space. In short, the disciplines and interdisciplines are porous and changing branches of knowledge, epistemic and social constructs whose intellectual, institutional, and ideological configurations are mediated and mapped by the unyielding demands of historical geography.
The Institutional Tendencies of African Studies
The institutional dimensions should not detain us much here. Suffice it to point out that within Africa there are few stand alone African studies programs as such; a similar situation prevails with regards to American studies in the United States, European studies in Europe, and Asian studies in Asia. In each of these regions, regional knowledges are largely incorporated in the disciplines. Your new center joins a handful of African studies centers across the continent, such as those at the universities of Cape Town, Ghana, Nairobi, and Cairo, to mention a few. The ‘area studies’ model, popularized in the Euroamerican academy, refers to the study of either ‘external others’ or the imagined ‘collective self’.
The key distinction is that in Euroamerican universities national or regional phenomena and paradigms are integral to the disciplinary and interdisciplinary grid, while Africa remains marginal in the foundational projects of scholarly knowledges consumed in African universities. Thus, Africa suffers a dual epistemic disability: it is the ‘other’ in both Euroamerican and African knowledge systems. Whereas the study of Africa outside the continent is often lodged in ‘area studies’, in Africa the study of Euroamerica is firmly entrenched in the disciplines and interdisciplines. This is merely to point out that the terms of global intellectual exchange, like the terms of trade for the so-called developed and developing economies, are decidedly unequal: African studies in the global North are a peripheral part of the academy, whereas the Euroamerican epistemological order remains central in the African academy.
This has persisted since the colonial encounter. More often than not the scholars who have tended to set the terms of debate and discourse in African studies, prescribing much of what is deemed authoritative knowledge, framing the methodological and theoretical terrain of the field, and shaping the infrastructures of scholarly knowledge production are Euroamerican rather than African. There is perhaps no other region in the world that has suffered more from what Paulin Hountodji calls ‘theoretical extraversion’ than Africa, where imported intellectual perspectives, preoccupations, and perversions play such a powerful role in scholarship, not to mention policy formulation and even popular discourse. It is quite evident that the ‘area studies’ model, through which many African scholars educated in the global North were themselves trained, and through which academic relations between Euroamerican universities and African universities are often organized, mediated or reproduced played a critical role.
For Africa, then, the real challenge is the ‘Africanization’ of the existing disciplines and interdisciplines and any new knowledge formations that may emerge. I am not suggesting Africanization for emotional reasons, although that has its own satisfactions, but in pursuit of epistemic rationality, to deepen our understanding of our complex histories, societies, polities, cultures, and ecologies that can only be understood partially, superficially, or even speciously if we continue to rely on analytical models, however sophisticated, developed in other intellectual climes; there is no law of nature that says our universities and intellectual communities are doomed to be exporters of empirical data and importers of refined theory.
In this context, the role of African studies centers on the continent has to be the deconstruction of Eurocentricism and construction of conceptual registers that best address African phenomena and contribute to the global corpus of theoretical and empirical knowledges. The mission of these centers, therefore, cannot be, should not be, the same as those of their counterparts overseas—processing African phenomena through already made theoretical packages, but manufacturing theory through which African data is more thoroughly processed and valorized.
The Ideological Tendencies of African Studies
In its development in various world regions, the field of African studies has exhibited three dominant ideological tendencies—imperial, solidarity, and liberatory. Among the colonial powers of Western Europe knowledge of Africa, however distorted or self-serving, was an essential part of the colonial project. Empire and its aftermath continues to structure African studies in such countries as Britain, France, Belgium, and Portugal, notwithstanding the differences of national intellectual traditions. In these countries African studies developed and was disciplinarized because of the existence of an Africa of colonial memory. Such countries have found it particularly difficult to incorporate the Africa within, the African diasporas largely created out of empire that are ensconced within their borders, and so African studies remains, by and large, the study of the colonial and postcolonial ‘other’.
Not surprisingly, African intellectual voices remain muted in much of the European academy, whether those of the historic diasporas or the recent immigrants of structural adjustment. For example, Francophone scholars have been trekking to the Anglophone world, especially to the United States, rather than France because of restrictive French immigration policies and institutional racism. The relocated Francophone scholars are forced to produce works in English, which are not readily translated in France. I am told V.Y. Mudimbe’s canonical text, The Invention of Africa, published nearly twenty years ago, has yet to be translated in France. Yet, we all happily imbibe, and enjoy becoming intoxicated with translated French high theory. Intellectual inhospitality is of course not a failing peculiar to Gallic conceit. Good old Britain faces similar challenges of how to develop more equitable and productive relations between the white and black British Africanists, as well as between them and the African academics who have migrated to Britain since the 1990s. On a trip to Britain last month, I met several scholars of African descent who complained bitterly of their professional exclusion and African textual exclusion in the African studies canon.
Germany offers a peculiar case in that it was a colonial power that lost its African empire after World War I. In Germany, African studies exhibited a complex amalgam of imperial and solidarity tendencies, especially if we consider the two Germanys of the post-World War II era together, in which scholarship in West Germany continued the long colonial tradition of studying African languages and cultural areas, themes that echoed scholarly preoccupations within Germany itself on German migrations and cultural formation, while in East Germany Africanist scholarship expressed Marxist solidarities with Africa’s oppressed classes and nations.
If the operations, legacies, and imperatives of imperialism structured African studies in Britain and France, and more ambivalently in Germany, the impulses of solidarity are most evident in Sweden and Russia, as well as in parts of Asia. Swedish interest in Africa and African studies was motivated by the needs of small power global diplomacy, specifically political solidarity with the liberation movements in Southern Africa and economic support for development cooperation that was spawned by the ideological correspondence between the Swedish social welfare state project and the developmentalist state projects in the new African states. In Russia, during the Soviet period, African studies flourished predicated on support for African anti-colonial struggles and post-independence development and social transformation, and driven by the shifting preoccupations of Soviet Marxism and superpower status. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the solidarity imperative in Russian African studies has waned, even if the field has become freer from ideological controls.
In Asia, the solidarity impulse characterizes African studies in India and China. The development of African studies in India from the mid-1950s owed much to the internationalist vision of India’s leaders, especially Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, both of whom were Africanists in their own right. India’s independence leaders believed fervently in Afro-Asian liberation and resurgence and stressed the need for a clear and critical understanding of the world and the imperative to develop a cadre of academic specialists on various world regions. The establishment of African studies in China from the late 1950s grew out of expanding ties between Africa and China in the aftermath of African decolonization and the Chinese revolution and shared concerns against European imperialism and for rapid development. As in India, there was strong ideological and fiscal support from the state for African studies programs. African studies in China grew from a politically oriented to an academically oriented interdiscipline and gradually expanded the range of its thematic and topical focus and disciplinary coverage.
In none of these countries has African studies developed out of liberatory demands, that is, the production of Africanist knowledges for the empowerment and emancipation of marginalized and racialized national citizens. This impulse has been most pronounced in the Americas among African diasporas and in Africa itself. Race and racial hierarchies are foundational for the settler societies of the Americas. They frame the political and cultural economies of social life and public and scholarly discourses. The role of domestic liberation politics in the development of African studies is readily apparent in Brazil, the Caribbean, and the United States.
Brazil has the largest African diaspora population in the world—an estimated 85 million. As President Lula likes to say when meeting African leaders, Brazil is the second most populous African country after Nigeria! From the 1930s Brazil developed the myth of racial democracy following the failures of the whitening project of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The severe limits of ‘racial democracy’ forced Afro-Brazilian activists and scholars began to mobilize the population to fight for a new dispensation that promoted racial equality. Specifically, demands were made for the teaching of African history and the history of Africans in Brazil long ignored in the country’s historiography that ignored the enormous contributions of Africans in the formation of Brazil. In 2003 a law was passed making the teaching of Afro-Brazilian and African history and culture compulsory. This was a struggle to produce and disseminate complex, critical, and empowering histories of Africa and Brazil, to recognize the historicity and humanity of Africans and Afro-Brazilians, and incorporate Afro-Brazilian connections to both Africa and the other Afro-American diasporas.
Many of the Caribbean islands have African diaspora majorities, but out of slavery and colonialism they developed insidious ideologies of racial disparagement against Africa and Africanness or blackness. Consequently, African studies formally developed, in part, as part of the wave of the black power movement and collective self-refashioning following independence in the 1960s. The introduction of African studies in schools and institutions of higher learning emerged alongside an age-old popular, activist tradition embodied in the work of Caribbean intellectuals on African societies, cultures, and history and their impact on Caribbean modernities and identities. Most of these scholar-activists, ranging from Marcus Garvey and George Padmore to C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon and Arthur Lewis, made significant contributions to Pan-Africanism and global intellectual movements.
It is in the United States that the imperial and liberatory tendencies coexist and compete most fiercely. The U.S. is currently home to nearly 40 million people of African descent, who if they were a country would be Africa’s 6th most populous (after South Africa), the most educated (17% of African Americans aged 25 and above have bachelor degrees and 2.3 million are enrolled in colleges and universities), and would boast Africa’s largest economy by far ($798.9 billion) and the world’s fifteenth largest (between Mexico and Australia). On the one hand, knowledges of Africa are part of the arsenal of imperial hegemony for the world’s lone, and now very lonely, superpower. Indeed, conventional white histories of African studies attribute the development of African studies to the historically white universities, where it is said the field emerged after World War II to serve the national security agenda of the American state, now embroiled in superpower rivalry with the former Soviet Union to win hearts and minds in the Third World.
This narrative is correct as far as the historically white universities are concerned which currently dominate African studies. But it ignores the origins of the field in the historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) before the white universities belatedly discovered African studies in the context of the Cold War. In other words, African studies was pioneered by Howard university not Northwestern university, by W.E.B Dubois rather than Melville Herskovits. The Africa of African American activist-scholars focused on Africa’s global civilizational status, the continent as a whole, and its diasporic connections, whereas the Africa of professional European American scholars became increasingly prescriptive and focused on Africa’s lack and on that truncated contraption called “sub-Saharan” Africa.
Ironically the civil rights movement, which brought more African studies and African American studies programs to American campuses, led to the institutional and racial split in African studies as African American scholars gravitated and were pushed to African American studies and African studies came to be dominated by European American scholars. More recently, another Africa has emerged in the American academy, that of continental African scholars who relocated in growing numbers from the 1980s as African universities went into the crisis of structural maladajustment thanks to the inane policies of the international financial institutions based on the dangerous fiction that Africa did not need higher education, advice which African leaders foolishly followed. These scholars brought the preoccupations and anxieties of postcolonial Africa.
Thus, there are at least three ‘Africas’ in the American academy, each with its own history and interests, which has made the contestations within African studies complex and fierce. The imperial and liberatory tendencies have jostled for supremacy for the last half century. Today, following the terrorist attacks of September 11, we are back to the security imperative that guided area studies at the height of the Cold War and the imperial tendency frames funding formulas of area studies including African studies by state agencies and the private foundations. At the same time, however, the Africana studies movement and the diaspora studies movement are reconfiguring the study of Africa, forcing new realignments within the American academy among Africanists and engagements between them and institutions and intellectual communities based on the continent.
Clearly, the development of African studies in various parts of the world has been motivated by different imperatives, which is not surprising because the construction of knowledge has social, spatial and temporal contexts and referents. Few would disagree that knowledge, whatever the prevailing disciplinary labels, is produced through specific paradigms that are developed by certain groups of people in particular places and periods.
The question we have to ask ourselves, then, is what are the ideological motivations of African studies in African universities? Given the sheer number and diversity of African countries, it stands to reason that African studies serve a variety of interests. I would like to suggest, however, that two tendencies have characterized African studies programs across the continent. These tendencies coincide with the colonial and postcolonial periods and imperatives. During the colonial period, the imperial tendency predominated, whereas the liberatory impulse manifested itself more strongly after independence.
As is well known, whatever its other objectives, colonialism was not an educational enterprise. It left behind very few universities in Africa; the majority of countries did not even have a single university at independence. The few colonial universities were established rather belatedly during the turbulent years of decolonization. Small and elitist, they were unapologetically Eurocentric, patterned on metropolitan universities from where they drew their faculty and curricula. Not even African history was taught at these universities, for African societies were supposed to have no history before the ‘civilizing mission’ of the European conquest. At best, Africa was the subject of anthropological folklore.
One of the few countries with a concentration of universities was South Africa where racial segregation had characterized higher education almost from the beginning. The introduction of apartheid in 1948 reinforced the iron grid of educational racial inequality as Blacks were no longer allowed to attend the “white” universities without special government approval and separate universities were created for Africans in the so-called self-governing homelands and for Coloreds and Indians in the major cities. If the white universities were irredeemably Eurocentric, the Black universities were condemned to the mediocrity of Bantu education. And when African studies was introduced in the white universities, it was Bantu studies, focusing on Bantu administration, customary law, Bantu languages and anthropology, as Mamood Mamdan observed in his trenchant critique of African studies at UCT in 1998. The Africa of Bantu studies, like that of Euroamerican African studies, was confined to the Hegelian construct of tropical, equatorial, Black or sub-Saharan Africa.
It was in independent Africa that the liberatory thrust of African studies, first developed in the diaspora, found an auspicious home as the newly independent states sought to undo a century of colonial educational neglect and to decolonize African studies. The expansion of higher education after independence was phenomenal as hundreds of universities were established and the number of university students skyrocketed from 120,000 in 1960 to 3.5 million thirty-five years later. The postcolonial universities were much larger in size than their colonial predecessors, broader in their missions, and they expanded their disciplinary and curricula offerings; they were designed as engines of socioeconomic transformation and centers of epistemic emancipation as the African intelligentsia eagerly rediscovered and rewrote their peoples’ histories and humanity so cruelly seized and denied by Europe.
The emancipatory mission of African studies was unambiguously articulated by Ghana’s first President, Kwame Nkrumah, when he opened the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana in 1961 and also when he addressed the first Congress of Africanists in Accra in 1962. He urged his academic audience to produce more truthful knowledge about Africa through scientific and academic rigor, knowledge that would promote Africa’s development and transformation, and to share their discoveries with the rest of the world. Kwame Nkrumah was a Pan-Africanist, schooled in the civil rights struggles of the segregated diaspora and the nationalist struggles of colonial Africa, passionately committed to Africa’s regeneration in all spheres.
The Intellectual Tendencies of African Studies
I would like to conclude by examining the intellectual tendencies exhibited in African studies, the dominant paradigms through which African phenomena and processes have been filtered and analyzed. Again, at the risk of oversimplification, let me isolate a few typologies. I have identified four, what I would call the culturalist, developmentalist, deconstructionist, and globalist. It is possible to collapse them into the divisions of the scholarly enterprise between the humanities and social sciences; the culturalist tradition is characteristic of perspectives in the humanities, the developmentalist and globalist traditions are more emblematic of approaches in the social sciences, while the deconstructionist tradition straddles both.
African studies was originally almost the exclusive province of anthropology, the premier colonial science, which through its structuralist-functionalist paradigms and ethnographic present froze African societies in static “tribalized” enclaves. Anthropology was banished from much of the postcolonial academy in the wrath of decolonization, accused of exonerating colonialism from the cultural, cartographic, and cognitive violence it wrought on Africa. The discipline went into a moment of deep epistemic, ethical and political crisis as it tried to rescue itself from its discredited colonial complicity. As it slowly renewed itself it became more historical, more global, and more reflexive, so that even if the ethnographic method retained its foundational supremacy for the discipline and the romance with the “local” persisted, African cultures were increasingly expanded in scale, time, and connectedness to each other and to international cultural flows in the process of which they lost some of their timelessness, essentialism, and exoticism, and Africans as groups and individuals could at last begin to escape from the suffocating confines of stable and static “traditional,” “kinship,” and “lineage” systems. But critics such as the late Archie Mafeje still maintain that while it is possible to deconstruct colonial anthropology, it is doubtful whether anthropology can be deracialized as the study of the ‘other’, escape its racial, racializing and racist past.
The culturalist tradition in African studies is of course not confined to anthropology as a discipline or Eurocentric approaches. The vindicationist tradition of African diaspora scholars from the 18th century, in which they tried to vigorously defend the historicity of Africa and the humanity of Africans against the scientific racism emerging out of the hideous entrails of plantation slavery, rested on culturalist premises, that African cultures and societies were normal, not primitive aberrations, that they were civilizations—complex societies. The vindicationist tradition mutated into the nationalist tradition, most fully developed in nationalist historiography that bloomed following decolonization, in which African history ceased to be taught as a story of lack and becoming, lacking and becoming Europe, and scholars painstakingly sought to unravel African activity, adaptations, choice, and initiative. While nationalist historiography specifically was more enamored by political than cultural history as such, let alone social and economic history, its civilizational argument against Europe, against colonialism, was fundamentally a cultural one. This Africa-centered, some would say Afrocentric, analytical impulse exercised a powerful influence in African and Africanist scholarship: it inspired a whole host of disciplinary studies from African languages and literatures, to religions and philosophies. It finds expression in contemporary South Africa in the indigenous knowledge systems movement.
The culturalist tradition found a worthy competitor in developmentalism, which emerged after World War II out of the conjunction of several forces. There were the nationalists who prayed at the altar of development; for nationalism was, in part, a struggle for development, for the material advancement of African societies, for improved standards of living. The language of development was used by the African political class to mobilize the impoverished and restive masses. For the beleaguered colonial powers development served as a handy substitute for the tattered rhetoric of civilization discredited in the horrendous barbarism of World War II and as a plea against nationalist charges of colonial exploitation. In the meantime, the discovery and problematization of poverty and backwardness in Africa, Asia and Latin America, collectivized into the ‘Third World’ in the 1950s, turned development into a global industry overseen by newly created international financial institutions, agencies, and civil society organizations.
Developmentalism became a powerful paradigm in African studies as disciplines ranging from sociology to political science and economics, the queen of the social sciences, devised ever more sophisticated and prescriptive models to examine African societies, polities, and economies and engineer their modernization. Africanist sociology came with a succession of conceptual and methodological approaches from the pluralist model to Marxist theory; the pluralists gave us ‘acculturation’ and ‘modernization’ theses and the Marxists their materialist and class concerns. The will-to-knowledge and the will-to-power were locked in a fateful paradigmatic and prescriptive embrace in political science which wrestled with two fundamental questions: how to construct coherent political communities in the territorial contraptions inherited from colonialism—nation-building—and how to build institutions and technologies for effective governance over the newly forged political communities—state-building. In the 1960s much of the discourse was guided by the evolutionary hopes of modernization theory, but by the 1980s, the postcolonial state had fallen from grace, and Africanist political scientists, especially in Euroamerica, began to recast African politics and states as crisis-ridden and they competed to coin the most gratuitous epithets for the postcolonial leviathan.
In the meantime, development economics emerged out of neo-classical economics. It inherited its parent’s veneration for the ‘invisible hand’ of the market, belief in the two commandments of perfect competition and perfect rationality, indifference to the classical concerns of growth and distribution, and fondness for dualities, for which the Africa and the ‘Third World’ proved quite fertile: ‘modern-traditional’ societies, ‘market-subsistence’ economies, ‘formal-informal’ sectors. Before long, in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War and the triumphalist rise of neo-liberalism development economics largely disappeared from economics. The World Bank seeking to produce a new generation of pliant African economists, freed from the radical illusions of Marxist economics and dependency theory and their assorted calls for socialism and a new international economic order, began to generously fund African university economics departments and consortia in the intricacies and illusions of the neo-liberal gospel.
The culturalist and developmentalist traditions enjoyed competing and shifting hegemonies in African studies for many decades. But from the turn of the 1970s counterhegemonic insurgencies arose first centered around radical Marxist and frminist paradigms and later by the interventions of the more ambiguous “posts”—poststructuralism, postmodernism, and above all, postcolonialism. Collectively, these paradigms constituted what I would call in, my typology, deconstructionism. Thus, I am not using the term deconstruction in the narrow sense it is used in critical theory as a way of reading literary texts, but in the larger sense of theoretical assaults that emerged in African studies to deconstruct prevailing and dominant analyses associated with the culturalist and developmentalist traditions. In a way of course postcolonial African studies as a whole has been deconstructionist in so far as it has sought to dismantle Eurocentric epistemic hegemonies in the study of Africa.
The rise of these deconstructionist conceptual systems can be attributed, as all paradigm shifts can be, to changing, and complexly interconnected, intellectual, institutional, and ideological contexts within and outside the academy. The popularity of Marxist analysis in African studies rose as disenchantment grew with the limited fruits of the ‘first independence’ and greater faith was placed in the transformational potential of the radical liberation movements in Southern Africa. In the world at large this was a period of radical politics from universities to the United Nations as previously disaffected constituencies from students to developing countries sought to remake the existing institutional and international orders. Marxism brought class analysis to African studies which demolished the endearing and enduring myths of nationalist historiography and scholarship of a classless, communalistic Africa. It also brought historical and structural analyses of African political economies from the stylized models and dualisms of modernization theories in development economics, political science, and sociology.
The women’s movement exploded on the academic and political scene around the same time as women demanded greater gender equity from parliamentary to paradigmatic representation, for economic and epistemological empowerment. Ironically, the failures of developmentalis, especially rural development, provided a critical impetus to the women’s movement in Africa that gave rise to the women in development (WID) project, which subsequently mutated into women and development (WAD), and gender and development (GAD). The women’s development project together with more radical feminist perspectives including African critiques of white western academic feminism provided a fertile ground for feminist scholarly production. Feminism exposed the underlying androcentric biases of all major disciplinary and theoretical narratives including Marxism. Feminist scholars embarked on a vigorous mission to incorporate women’s studies in, and engender, African studies.
The 1980s ushered in a new moment in intellectual and international politics and the global economic order. In Euroamerica there was a sharp turn to the Right following the rise to power of conservative governments in the major countries beginning with Thatcher’s Britain, Reagan’s America, Mulroney’s Canada, and Kohl’s Germany. In the meantime, the Soviet Union and its allies accelerated towards implosion and China rediscovered the virtues of capitalism. Global systemic options narrowed as neo-liberalism assumed ascendancy. And our beloved Africa , battered by declining economic growth rates and SAPs lost the 1980s and 1990s and was engulfed by the convulsions of struggles for the second independence. It was an inauspicious moment for radical ideologies such as such as revolutionary feminism, Marxism and dependency theories, which perished in the collapse of socialism in the 1980s and early 1990s.
The ‘posts’ emerged in this context. Given the title of my presentation, ‘African Studies in the Postcolony,’ let me comment a little more on postcolonialism. I remain intrigued by the intellectual and ideological connections between the ‘posts’; in the tensions inherent in the use of postcolonialism as a periodizing term and as a typological description; between its chronological and epistemological ambitions; between its culturalist and materialist referents; between literary-textual readings and political-economic analyses of the real world; between aspirations of activist engagement and rhetorical dismissal of commitment for fear of accusations of totalization and essentialism; between professed affinities for pluralism, multiplicity, and difference and the tendencies to collapse and homogenize diverse histories, structures, and racial formations; between the Northern locations of its production and the Southern origins of some of its leading proponents; between its empirical insistence on the representation, inscription, and interpretation of the particular, the local, and the different, and its transcendental desire to become another universal, another grand narrative, another set of the great historicultural explanations.
Postcolonialism has been particularly attractive to literary scholars, recovering anthropologists and qualitative sociologists. Also, it has found greater succor among Africanists in the global North than in Africa and within Africa itself more among Francophone and South African scholars than elsewhere on the continent. Postcolonialism has helped to open up or refine important themes, topics, and trends that were previously ignored or undertheorized. In African historical studies, for example, it has recast the nature of metropolitan-colonial connections. Whereas before the tendency was to see the metropolitan colonial connection in one direction, to emphasize the flow of ideas, influences, institutions, and even individuals from the metropole to the colony, postcolonialism has stressed the importance of reverse flows, of flows in both directions; the metropole was made by the imperial project as much as the colonies, that Europe and Africa, whiteness and blackness, were mutually constituted.
Moreover, we are more aware of the role of colonial discourse as an incarnation and instrument of power. We understand better the discursive processes through which ideas and images of the colonized and colonizer were created, how the very notion of “Africa” was invented, as Mudimbe has demonstrated in his magisterial tomes, The Invention of Africa and The Idea of Africa, through the conceptual registers of the new academic disciplines and the disciplining ideologies of missionary Christianity and the institutions of colonial education; how hierarchies of difference, African alterity, were produced and reproduced through the temporal, spatial and social teleologies and epistemic violence of Eurocentric history, geography, anthropology, linguistics, and philosophy; how power was located, acted out and fought over in specific institutions and contexts, as well as among various social groups and projects.
Also, postcolonial analyses of the dynamics of reproduction have brought important new insights on the question of the social reproduction of the colonial order enriching Marxist-inspired studies on labor reproduction (the formation of working classes and working class struggles) and feminist research on women’s productive and reproductive roles in colonial society (in subsidizing migrant labor and the colonial economy as a whole despite their marginalization). Studies of what can be called “intimate colonialism” have sharpened focus on sexuality, the shifting constructions of gender and racial identities, and colonial representations. African sexuality and its control and representations were central to ideologies of colonial domination. Postcolonial studies have helped inspire the study of colonial masculinities, how different masculinities—dominant and hegemonic and subordinate and subversive—were produced and performed in different class, racial, institutional, and spatial contexts and changed over time.
Finally, postcolonialism has reconfigured studies of anti-colonial resistance, which were previously preoccupied with the social content and composition of anti-colonial resistance, and the continuities and discontinuities marked by decolonization. By the 1980s the old accounts of elite politics and heroic resistance had largely been abandoned in favor of analyses of resistance by peasants, workers, and women, and from the turn of the 1990s more attention was paid to everyday forms of resistance and the discourses among the various subaltern groups including the youth. Some historians embraced the perspectives of the Indian Subaltern Studies group and their notion of “alternative nationalisms” among peasants that took seriously both peasant action and intellectual production.
Despite these contributions, I harbor deep misgivings about postcolonialism as do many African historians. I share the concerns of those who caution against the abandonment of categories that were critical to earlier analytical and revolutionary discourses, especially nation and class, and the mischievous celebration of hybridity and borderlands, which encourage the sanitization and depiction of imperialism and colonialism as shared cultures, negotiated discursive spaces. Valorization of colonial ambivalence and hybridity ignore the fact that colonialism was a space and moment that entailed not just negotiations, but negations, and the specificities of African subjectification and the persistent imaginings of national liberation were and continue to be written in pain and suffering, sweat and blood. The multiplication of identities, memories, and resistances surely must not be used to forget the larger contexts, the hierarchies of power between the colonizer and the colonized, Europe and Africa, the unequal impact the empire had and left behind for the metropoles and the colonies, the fact that imperial power was upheld by physical force not simply by ideas and images, that it was underpinned by material structures not simply ideological constructs, by political economy not simply by discursive economy.
The erasures of revolution, nation, class, history, and reality turn the “posts,” even if they may have started as critiques, into legitimating ideologies of contemporary global configurations of power and production. In so far as capitalism is not as fragmented as it is assumed, the “posts” bolster the capitalist order itself by becoming part of the ideological apparatus that sustains the inability of exploited nations and social classes, splintered in their various cultural identities, to mobilize counterhegemonically. The analytical power of postcolonial theory will remain limited unless it tempers its facile celebration of newness, cosmopolitanism and globalization in a world reeling from endless war and deepening inequalities, places its favorite tropes of disjuncture and disorder in the context of the enhanced regulatory power of contemporary global capitalism, reconnects culture to political economy, pays attention to both localized or microstruggles and broad anti-imperialist struggles, considers how capitalist adjustments are reinstating and restructuring gender identities, restores focus on nationalism because the nation-state constitutes the site through which hegemonic capitalism operates and resistance against it can be organized.
Finally, there is the globalist tradition, by which I mean the tendency to see Africa in global terms, which is rooted in Eurocentricism and reactions to it, and more recently has been engendered by the rise of globalization and diasporas. Eurocentricism is inherently comparative and universalistic in its intellectual gaze and ambitions. Since the establishment of the modern academy in Europe and Africa, African phenomena have always been measured according to European master references—from humanity to history, civilization to culture, ethics to economics, temporalities to technologies, sociality to sexuality—and always found lacking, lagging behind Europe. The African response, even in its militant Afrocentric forms, has largely consisted of investing Africa with the imagined positive attributes of Europe rather than dismantling the very foundations of this colonizing epistemological order. At issue here is whether African studies can escape, transcend even, the Eurocentric coding, the seductions and sanctions of writing Africa by analogy.
When it comes to globalization discourses, strangely enough Africa is seen as marginal to globalization, when it has in fact been central to the construction of the modern world in all its ramifications—economic, political, cultural, and discursive—over the last half millennium since the emergence of the Atlantic world system. As Samir Amin has forcefully argued the notion of Africa’s marginalization which implies, on the one hand, that the continent, or much of it, is out of the global system or integrated into it only superficially, and on the other, that the poverty of African peoples is precisely the result of their not being sufficiently integrated into the global system, is not borne out by the facts. Stripped of the globaloney, globalization is both an ideological project of neo-liberal capitalist restructuring and a long term historical process of transnational and transregional interconnectedness. However it is the case that African scholars have not contributed much to the globalization literature and debates.
More productive, in my view, is the globalist tradition arising out of diaspora studies. Diaspora scholars have always seen Africa as part of the world. More recently, African interests the diaspora and diaspora studies have grown. The motivations for this are as varied as they are complex. It is partly fueled by the rising emigration of highly educated Africans to the global North. For example, according to the 2000 U.S. Census, among the African-born residents aged 25 and above, 49.3% had a bachelor’s degree or more as compared to 25.6% for the native born population and 25.8% for the foreign born population as a whole. The new diaspora is coveted by African governments for their social capital—skills, knowledge, networks, civic awareness, cultural experience and cosmopolitanism—that can provide not only access to global markets and investment and stimulate technological innovation. Already, the new diaspora is Africa’s biggest donor—according to World Bank estimates in 2006 the new diaspora remitted $39 billion; other estimates go as far as $50 billion. Not surprisingly, governments increasingly regard the diaspora as a critical remittance pipeline, as an important economic asset.
The African diaspora studies movement represents a return to the future of the Pan-Africanist scholarship of Blyden and Dubois, who always tried to understand and situate Africa into worldly representation and recognition, to affirm an African presence that was both unique and equal to others, that Africa was a central part of the world. As a historian, I find that diaspora studies offers a key avenue to globalize African history and contest European appropriations of global history. It was partly because of this conviction that I embarked on a project on the history of Africa and its diasporas. The project seeks to map out the dispersal of African peoples in all the major world regions—Asia, Europe, and the Americas; compare the processes of diaspora formation within and among these regions; and examine the ebbs and flows of linkages—demographic, cultural including religion and music, economic, political and ideological, intellectual and educational, artistic and iconographic—between these diasporas and Africa over time. I believe projects such as this have immense intellectual and policy relevance.
Clearly, diaspora studies enable us to insert Africa into global history and rewrite the histories of the various regions to which Africans were dispersed whether voluntarily or by force. The Africans who went to Portugal and Spain and ruled for eight centuries during the Andalusian period did so voluntarily, while those who were shipped to the Americas during the era of the Atlantic slave trade were coerced. Both left an indelible mark on the history of Europe, Africa, and the Americas whose effects are still with us and are central to understanding the history of Euroamerica—the whitened West. On the other hand, the European and Asian diasporas in Africa, and the contemporary Afro-European and Afro-Asian diasporas from Africa are simultaneously part of African and world histories. Lest we forget, Eurocentricism seeks to universalize the West and provincialize the Rest; diaspora studies subvert that imperial self-fashioning and give Africans global historical agency.
The globalist tradition raises fundamental questions about the epistemic boundaries of Africa and the spatial locus of the Africa of African studies. In my view, this Africa must be expansive, transcend the old localities of colonial anthropology, the nationalist preoccupations of the postcolonial academy, and racialized contraptions of ‘Black’, ‘tropical’, ‘equatorial’, and sub-Saharan Africas of Eurocentric scholarship. At the very least it must encompass the continent as a whole; more, it needs to incorporate the diaspora, and insert Africa in global processes, in world history.
Conclusion
African studies centers on the continent, both the old ones and new ones, have their work cut out. They ought to provide a vibrant interdisciplinary space doing foundational intellectual work that is beyond the competence or interest of any particular discipline, of developing an African episteme, one that is engaged in deep conversations with, not trendy borrowings from, let alone the superficial mimicry of, the great intellectual systems of the world including those of Euroamerica. It is in African studies that theoretical and methodological foundations of disciplinary and interdisciplinary studies of Africa can, and must, be systematically interrogated.
I have argued that the postcolonial university was a product of the nationalist project. As we all know, since independence African universities have undergone profound, and following the lean and mean years of structural maladajustment, quite unsettling changes. But the question remains: To what extent should African universities in general and African studies programs in particular, be committed to the pursuit of the unfinished historic project of Africa nationalism: decolonization, development, democratization, nation-building and regional integration.
I have also shown several intellectual traditions that have framed African studies. In a vibrant program of African studies, students need to be made aware of the various traditions, their strengths and weaknesses, rise and decline. Above all, we need to ask of all intellectual traditions, their epistemic commitments and contributions to the world of scholarship in Africa itself and Africa in the world, for Africa has always been simultaneously a separate and integral part of the world, as is indeed the case for the other global cartographic and civilizational constructs known today as ‘Europe’ and ‘Asia’. We all eagerly await some of the answers to these difficult questions, challenges, and intellectual opportunities that might come out of the Center for African studies at the University of the Free State. Thank you!
