On the Challenge of De-Provincializing the University Classroom: Teaching African History from a Postcolonial Perspective

Abstract

For an Africanist historian with focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it goes without saying that the exploration of the meanings and repercussions of (post)colonialism is at the core of my research and teaching agendas. That is why I consider it major challenge to sensitize both students and colleagues in the field of historiography to the reciprocity of the (post)colonial situation. The entanglement of intricately intertwined, transformative relationships that evolved from and shaped interactions among colonizers, colonized elites, and subalterns left deep imprints on societies and individuals on both sides. Whether this problematic but shared past is accounted for, refashioned in accordance with specific requirements, or simply dismissed, it needs to be investigated, not assumed. Whereas nobody would seriously contest the idea that African societies have been profoundly changed by a series of European hegemonic projects1 - to recall Frederick Cooper's characterization of colonialism - the same cannot be said for the impact of the colonial experience on European polities and life-worlds. Consequently, to elucidate how and with what effect African agency intersected with European initiative, other than by acknowledging the continent as mere provider of natural and human resources for the European modernizing project, is an intriguing aim of social and cultural research from the (post)colonial perspective.Based on my teaching experience of the last eight years at Hannover University, I consider it essential for my discipline to bring out into the open and engage with unrecognized assumptions and ways of thinking which impede an understanding of the (post)colonial encounter that accounts both for the historicity of the mutual exchange between 'core' and 'periphery' and for the various cultural forms through which all of the actors involved rework their experiences of shared past according to the exigencies of the present. Uncovering these attitudes contributes to comprehension of (post)coloniality as shared structuring condition that resulted from unequal but intricately interlinked relations. Not only can this comprehension open up possibilities of seeing how deeply colonies were woven into what it meant to be European2 but it can also facilitate deconstructing persisting conceptions of Africa as archaic. Successors of ideological devices which formerly served to legitimate colonial intervention by duly differentiating the 'modem': i.e. contemporaneous European, from the 'traditional': i.e. ancestral African, these hard-dying archaisms - which are sufficiently well known from safari-themed coffeetable books and travel documentaries - account for the longevity of stereotypical retrogression through which the contemporariness of Africans is constantly denied.Thus, in teaching African history in the university and supervising doctoral research in this field, one should confront students and young scholars with African agency and contemporaneousness, which explains my strategic preference for materials, themes, and methodologies likely to enhance their awareness of these matters: urban history; modes and practices of popular culture; relations of gender, family, and generations; oral history; Africa in the Atlantic space; the concept of Africa; etc. I am significantly supported in this by long-established inter-regional and interdisciplinary research and teaching networks in Hannover, such as the study and research programme 'Transformation Studies', which draws on joint expertise pertaining to Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean in the fields of history, sociology, cultural anthropology, and religious studies as well as English, American and Hispanic studies. This broadened comparative focus enables us not only to critically reassess the historical depth and spatial scope of globalizing processes but also to stress their impact as seen from the perspective of polities in the global south. …