Kindred Concerns: The Vernacular and Contemporary Media in Africa

Abstract

he literature on early modern Europe has long provided historians of modern Africa with a fertile space for thinking about worlds not wholly encompassed by enlightenment thinking, industrialization, the nation-state, and so on. Friendly and suggestive conversations have persisted for decades across these seemingly incongruent fields because they regularly produce in- teresting insights, raise suggestive problems, and provide helpful contrasts. One has an odd sense of the familiar that is off-center enough to provoke new thought. Mary Fissell's Vernacular Bodies: the Politics of Reproduction in Early Modern England is just the kind of study that nourishes these kinds of conversations—as it happens it is in unexpected sympathy with a strain of work on the politics of reproduction in twentieth-century Africa. 1 Among the elements that strike a familiar note probably the most im- portant one for me is that power relations of all kinds in the England she describes were understood to be analogous to the relation between a man as head of household and his family; central to that governance was the relation of a man to his wife, most materially manifested in the moment of procreation. It is striking how important metaphors of marriage are to political discourse in the region of Africa I work in (the west African Sahel); ordinary political language is freighted with language that calls forth im- ages of farmers, families, and mothers tending to the needs of an agrarian household. Women are not insignificant in these metaphors—indeed the primary expression in Hausa for providing significant political support evokes the image of a woman carrying a baby on her back. Fissell's central observation is that because of the profound interweaving of political power with understandings of gender relations, as familiar political relations were turned upside down by the Reformation and Civil War, family relations were of necessity profoundly unsettled as well. Her reflections help me to make sense of the deep anxiety over gender one finds so regularly in contemporary Africa as independent states struggle to make sovereignty real in a global context that consistently undermines it. The extraordinary body of vernacular texts she has available to trace the shifting understandings of the female body and reproduction so fun- damental to early modern gender relations is a treasure trove of a kind few Africanists could ever hope to draw upon. The advent of print culture and