Vol. 1 Response

Introit: Cosmopolitan Rootedness

An E-Symposium on Paul Tiyambe Zeleza's Inaugural Lecture of the Liberal Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professorship, University of Illinois at Chicago, January 30, 2008

Welcome to the first e-symposium of The Zeleza Post, a new feature aimed at reinforcing the site's mission as a bazaar of Africanist, pan-Africanist, and Black Diasporic intellection. As occasion demands, The Zeleza Post will convene discussions in this special e-format on issues germane to the politics and production of knowledge in/on Africa and its polymorphous diasporic unfoldings. I am particularly pleased and honored to convene this inaugural edition dedicated, most auspiciously, to an engagement of the spectacular intellectual/scholarly trajectory and monumental oeuvre of one of the most humble African polymaths I ever been privileged to encounter, Paul Tiyambe Zeleza.

Reading Paul Zeleza's odyssey was a gratifying experience. In turning to autobiography, Zeleza the historian has done us the service of beginning to reflect on the intellectual traditions of a rather poorly documented generation of African scholars - that of the first generation to emerge, not out of colonialism, but to have been educated in the postcolonial era. He aptly characterizes us as ‘the beneficiaries of Africa's decolonization...educated during the golden years of African universities', thus reminding us of the historical significance of this cohort. We make up a cohort, if not an intellectual community that is thus profoundly different from those who relied on the colonial tutelage, and the capacity to rebel against it, which Ki Zerbo, the late Burkinabe historian so cogently argues was "not a matter of choice" (Ki Zerbo 2005: 81). The postcolonial generation has been faced with choices as well as with profound challenges. We thus exhibit a variety of intellectual proclivities, and a full range of intellectual politics too. Africa's academics have not always pursued their work in a manner that is fully consistent with the pan-African and nationalist dreams of those who were compelled to rebel, although many have relied on these for their intellectual motivation and survival.

To interpret Paul Zeleza's personal and intellectual trajectory as representative of the African scholar's condition would be to retreat behind a comforting but ultimately sterile cliché. For the account he gives of his life and work is much more than that. In part it tells of contexts and factors that he could not have chosen, yet in others the exercise of extraordinary enlightenment in what we all must acknowledge to be an exemplary career.

The Zelezean trajectory, from a Malawian boy, to youthful university student and writer, to a cosmopolitan scholar writing about a diaspora encompassing all of world history and geography, is marked by a dazzling array of publications. I see so clearly that path he traces from the 70s when dictatorial rule was establishing itself across the continent, to the present, when we look at the continent from a perspective ranging from visions of China, both in the present and two thousand years ago, to Europe, a shrinking donkey skin of an empire. The Zeleza markers take us from the years of enthusiasm with Frantz Fanon to postcolonialism and globalization, and we relive those decades through the accounts of his fantastically burgeoning oeuvre.

Paul Tiyambe Zeleza's biographical and intellectual itinerary has been most interesting for one central reason: it subverts the myth concerning the African continent as an irredeemable ghetto. It also deftly bypasses a common assumption regarding Africa and the African as being inextricably tied to death, disease, decay and even madness. My brief intervention dwells on how Zeleza addresses the deterritorialization as well as the re-affirmation of the politics of identity. In other words, I am interested in the transnationalization of cultural subjectivity. My submission also addresses the connections- contained in Zeleza's project- between the imperatives of diasporan existence and continental Africa in a way that brings to the fore, a new socio-cultural symbiosis, a new configuration of cultural synergies.

Reading the commentaries above made me realize that one of the few but crucial benefits of a life of intellectual cosmopolitanism has been the incredible opportunity to meet and become friends with distinguished scholars and writers from around the Pan-African world. I first met Pius at Penn State where we fast became close, personally and professionally, in an environment that was otherwise indifferent to African studies and things African. I can only try to reciprocate his generosity in his introduction to this symposium, the first of what will become regular symposia on this site. He is the one who inspired the idea, who asked me to provide my public lecture delivered on the occasion of being named the first Liberal Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Pius is simply one of the most gifted and energetic scholars that I have been privileged to know in recent years, whose critical love for Africa is as palpable as it is incisive.