Jan
13

The Idea of Africa

One of the classic critiques of scholarship on Africa (and conceptualizations thereof more broadly) was penned by the Congolese scholar (and Duke professor) V. Y. Mudimbe in his "The Invention of Africa" (1988), which was followed by this book, "The Idea of Africa" (1994). This book revolves around the idea of "Africa" as an idea, meaning how it has been employed historically, through cultural expressions and so forth. Landmark contributions, as these are, often appear less groundbreaking when read decades later, which is more a product of the mode of critique becoming much more integrated into our thinking than it does the uniqueness of the day. A few notes:

"As I read some critics of my books, my first reaction was to remain silent. To use a metaphor, why should I be forced to play chess with people who do not seem to know the rules of the game? In effect, beyond positivism, I have been trying to understand the powerful yet invisible epistemological order that seems to make possible, at a given period, a given type of discourse about Africa - or, for that matter, about any social group in Africa, Asia, or Europe." (p. xiv)

"A comprehensive study of the "terra nullius" politics by Keller, Lisitzyn, and Mann (1938) indicates that between 1400 and 1800 not one non-European nations was considered to have the right "to possess or to transfer any dominion in the international law sense."" (p. 33)

"The sequence of analyses in this book has focused on two main significant issues: first, the Greco-Roman thematization of otherness and its articulation in such concepts as 'barbarism' and 'savagery'; second, the complex process that has organized in Europe the idea of Africa. It is, in any case, troubling to note that since the fifteenth century the will to truth in Europe seems to espouse perfectly a will to power." (p. 212)

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Nov
09

Empire, Global Coloniality and African Subjectivity

The book "Empire, Global Coloniality and African Subjectivity" is authored by one the leading scholars of ideas relating to decolonization and coloniality. In this 2013 book, Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni draws out the meaning and implications of coloniality, and sets the foundation for his widely cited 2018 book (Epistemic Freedom in Africa). There are chapters on South Africa and Zimbabwe as cases. A few notes:

"What is emphasized here is one of the core ideological life-springs of colonel conquest and colonial violence was the questioning of the very humanity of colonized people. Questioning the humanity of the colonized people authorized even slavery and other forms of abuse, repression, exploitation, and domination..." (p. 35)

"Global imperial designs refer to the core technologies of modernity that underpinned its expansion into the non-Western parts of the world from the fifteenth century onwards. Race and Euro-American epistemology, particularly its techno-scientific knowledge claims, were used to classify and name the world according to a Euro-Christian Modernist imaginary. African peoples, and others whose cultures and ways of life were not informed by imperatives of Euro-Christian modernity, were deemed to be barbarians - a people who did not belong to history and had no history." (p. 49)

"The field of development studies is terribly affected by what Žižek terms 'weak thought' as opposed to 'strong thought' privileging what he described as 'large-scale expansions' and 'true ideas' which are 'indestructible' and have the capability to 'always return every time they are 'proclaimed dead'. Weak thought has even blinded some academics and intellectuals to such an extent that they continue to uncritically believe in the innocence of development discourses and to defend wrong causes when they masquerade as possessive and developmental and operate under such acceptable terms as democracy, reform development, good governance, and humanitarian intervention without recognising and sifting out the dangerous colonial matrices embedded in them." (p. 82)

"What is wanted is a higher education that does not lead to alteration of African people from their societies and communities. But cultural transformation does not mean the disconnection of Africans from the ambit of global human society and broader human problems. it only implies that a confident African is one rooted in his or her society and whose locus of enunciation is African, Such an African would be able to formulate culturally friendly resolutions of the challenges facing the continent. Particularly speaking, cultural transformation, when creative, seeks a way of blending African and Euro-American epistemologies in an endeavour to advance and enrich the understanding of African experience, problems, and challenges. But it also entails a drive to decolonize knowledge, curriculum, epistemology, pedagogies, power, and institutional cultures" (p.180) 

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Nov
04

The Idea of Development in Africa

Taking its cue from another book, The Idea of Africa, this book presents the idea of the idea of development with a focus on Africa – its emergence, meanings, and connotations – and how its conceptualization is deeply rooted in colonialism. "The Idea of Development: A History" (2021) is written by Corrie Decker and Elisabeth McMahon, both historians, and is published by Cambridge University Press. This is a great introductory book, particularly for an undergraduate course on critical development studies or historical courses related to colonialism. Each chapter concludes with additional reading lists and each chapter is evenly suited to a weekly reading (with 12 chapters, the book might have been designed to align more-or-less with a semester length). Lots of notes:

"Rennel extrapolated from Mungo Park's declaration that the Niger River follow flowed from west to east. According to nineteenth-century European understanding of geography, a river the size of the Niger needed to have a significantly large geographic source such as a lake or a mountain range. James Rennel literally drew Park's speculation about the mountain and assertion about the directional flow of the river onto the map of West Africa. This was how the European "scientific" imagination gave birth to the nonexistent Kong Mountains in western Africa. Although Rennel had no firsthand knowledge of the mountains and no evidence they existed, his position as a leading cartographer, combined with Park's apparent expertise in geography, lent scientific legitimacy to the Kong Mountains, which the Europeans believed were real for almost 100 years." (p. 39-41)

"Linnaeus eventually refined his system of classification and organized humans into four "races" based on their skin tone and continental origins. These four "races" were European, American, Asian, and African. Linnaeus's secularization of knowledge classification built the foundation for scientific constructs of race." (p. 60)

"Most of Broca's peers in the scientific community, predominantly white men themselves, were easily convinced that women, people of colour, the elderly, and the poor were "naturally" less intelligent than wealthy and healthy white men. As long as he provided "scientific" arguments about racial and gender differences, Broca and his colleagues believed their work was without bias and based in sound evidence, they were convinced their work was "objective"." (p. 67-68)

"The underlying arguments of eugenics, that elite Europeans were racially superior to the rest of humanity, was used to justify settlers' claims over land and right to rule. Campbell explained, "as well as expressing the cultural fears of colonialism, eugenics also expressed the modernity of the colonial project in Africa, the newness of settler society and the perceived wrongness of African development presented an ideal opportunity to create a society modeled on eugenic insights." In colonial Africa eugenic development policies became cultural practices as much as scientific programs. As occurred with physical anthropological theories of race, eugenicists masked cultural assumptions as scientific evidence designed to make the case for European racial superiority." (p. 71-72)

"Julian Huxley, the first director general of UNESCO, took the reins in 1946 determined to bring his ideas of evolutionary humanism to this new international organization. Huxley had been a well-known eugenicist before the Second World War... Huxley gradually abandoned references to "race" and "tribe" in favor of "culture," but he maintained a strong belief in social evolutionary theory. Before World War II Huxley was both an avowed eugenicist and anti-Nazi. Huxley renounced the overtly racialist ideas of many eugenicists of his time and argued that the improvement of humanity was an issue of culture rather than skin tone Huxley promoted evolutionary humanism, which was the theory that "more evolved" societies in the West could and should facilitate the development of "less evolved" societies through a combination of cultural, economic, and social interventions." (p. 74)

"For far too long, forced and coercive sterilization has been used to control population growth among "undesirable" groups in Africa and elsewhere, most recently among HIV-positive women in South Africa during the height of the HIV crisis in the 1990s. Many women around the world find access to birth control liberating, but the "right" to birth control also includes the "right" to have children. Awareness of these rights and of reproductive justice debates generally is crucial for understanding the family planning policies that continue to be foundational in contemporary International Development discourses." (p. 77)

"The organization of Africans into "tribes" was also part of the divide-and-rule approach of indirect rule. Colonial officials often privileged some ethnic groups over others. In British colonial Kenya, educated Kikuyu men (and some women) had greater access to colonial education and thus occupied many of the intermediary positions, or government jobs, in greater proportion than other Kenyans, the effect of which is still perceptible in Kenya today. Similarly, Belgian colonial discourses about the distinction between Hutus and Tutsis helped to fuel the conflict that led to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. The Belgians incorporated Tutsis into the colonial administration based on their claim that the racial stock of Tutsis was more evolved than that of neighboring Hutus." (p. 89)

"Many European and American women came to Africa in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s to work in anthropology, nutrition, hygiene, child and maternal health, and education. In the Belgian Congo, for example, this work began when the Ligue pour la Protection de l'Enfance Noire (League for the Protection of Black Children) took up the issues of breastfeeding and birth spacing. However, metropolitan development funding was only available for such endeavors when direct economic benefits were evident. Investment in the health of wives and mothers, for instance, flowed only after officials recognized that this would increase the productivity of laborers, generate wealth for colonial industries, and reinforce the racialized colonial economy. In one way or another, the science of development always served interests in profit." (p. 111-112) 

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Oct
15

The Art of Emergency

Originating at a 2016 conference, the edited book "The Art of Emergency: Aesthetics and Aid in African Crisis" edited by Ndaliko and Andreson (2020) is a unique contribution. Admittedly this is not an area I've followed closely. Published by Oxford University Press, the book has a companion artistic website and covers a wide range of artistic expression amidst or related to emergency - the NGO gaze, art as resistance, art as NGO activity and communication, art as healing, art as reconciliation. The editors summarize the book as: "The Art of Emergency confronts the combustive force of creativity erupting in the wake of material crises across the African continent. Art produced in the context of emergency not only directly implicates local politics but moreover provides a map of the often illusive relationships between power and aesthetics. Through ethnographic and historical case studies, the scholars, artists, and activists in this book explore how actors on the ground employ creativity as a currency with which to regulate the forms and forces laid bare by catastrophe" (p. 1).  

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