African Cosmologies Research Articles

Between Cosmology and Technology: Nonhuman Near-Omniscience as Animist Practice in Nnedi Okorafor's Lagoon

ABSTRACT: This article develops the term nonhuman near-omniscience to examine the narrative dynamics behind narrators who know almost everything and whose super-human knowledge draws on African cosmologies. Noting the prevalence of such narration in African sf, the article takes Nnedi Okorafor's novel Lagoon (2014) as an example of nonhuman near-omniscience, focusing on the role of the storytelling spider Udide Okwanka as the novel's metanarrator. It traces Udide's use of uncertainty, paradox, and metafictional slippages, while also noting parallels between Udide's trickster qualities and technology in the novel—both human-made and alien—that likewise generate super-human registers of knowledge. As a rejection of the binaries of cosmology/technology, human/nonhuman, and realist/nonrealist, the article considers nonhuman near-omniscience as a practice of relationality, based on Harry Garuba's framework of "animist materialism" and scholarship on animism as a relational epistemology from divergent Indigenous contexts. The paper makes two overarching claims: one, that nonhuman near-omniscience draws on the conception of deities in animist traditions that are typically characterized by relationality, rather than the absolute power commonly associated with the omniscient narrator in Abrahamic traditions; and two, that nonhuman near-omniscience is a metafictional practice that is pertinent not only to our understanding of contemporary African literary genres, but to larger questions of knowledge production in the twenty-first century.

Archaeology, climate change and human adaptation in southern Africa: Evidence from Mapela and Little Mapela, southern Africa

In Africa south of the Zambezi River, archaeologists and other experts have long explored the impact of climate and environmental changes to the development of ancient civilizations during the Iron Age (CE 200–1900). Some of the prevailing thought is however still rooted in environmental deterministic models informed by selected ethnographies, stable isotopes and archaeological evidence. For instance, the drought brought by the medieval Little Ice Age is assumed to have collapsed the civilisation at Mapungubwe in the Shashi-Limpopo valley around 1300 CE. And yet, within the wider region, and in similar ecological settings, upstream (Shashi and Upper Limpopo) and downstream civilisations (Lower Limpopo), persisted and thrived through the same climatic challenges. We draw on African cosmologies, resilience theory and archaeological evidence from Mapela and Little Mapela to spotlight adaptation strategies utilised by their inhabitants to build resilience through time. The main conclusion is that even in cases of climatic extremes, humans responded to opportunities and constraints in context specific ways.

Moda Negra, past and present

The institution of slavery had a profound and enduring influence on the culture of Brazil, particularly in fashion. The early trans-Atlantic slave trade was dominated by the Portuguese, beginning in the sixteenth century; the importation of enslaved Africans to Brazil continued well into the nineteenth century, contributing to Brazil’s large Black population. Enslaved individuals actively used fashion to express their African heritage and resist the hierarchy of slavery. Fashion also served as a tool for power and control, with clothing choices reflecting social status. During pre-Lenten Carnaval celebrations, social hierarchies were temporarily overturned. African cosmologies influenced dressing, with elements like jewellery and ceremonial colours conveying spiritual significance. Contemporary Afro-Brazilian designers continue to incorporate these elements, thereby highlighting the dynamic nature of Afro-Brazilian fashion.

Africanisms in the Caribbean Region: African Descendants’ Resistance to Enslavement and Subjugation in Post-Emancipation

This article explores the central role of Africanisms in Africans’ revolts against enslavement in Haiti and Jamaica. There is an investigation on the memories of Africa that motivated the military leaders and the African masses in their insurrections or wars against their European enslavers in these countries. Hence, there is an investigation of Africanisms such as knowledge of governance and political organization, military training, code of military conduct, African cosmologies, knowledge on the decentralization of power, among other African derived values and beliefs that were learnt in Africa. These Africanisms informed the military and other modes of resistance against European colonizers. There is also attention to traditional African spirituality. Evidence is presented on the influences of spiritual beliefs and practices on military incursions during the enslavement era and in post-emancipation culture. There is a discussion on Vodun, Legba, Kafou, Eshu, Obeah, and Anansi. There is an analysis of the factors that accounted for military success or failure in the enslaved Africans’ military wars or revolts against European enslavers in the countries being discussed. The current modes of resistance in post-emancipation are also addressed.

Frobenius unbound

Whatever one thinks of his controversial reputation as a provocative gadfly among pioneering African ethnologists, Leo Frobenius contributed signifi-cantly to African studies, not only during his prodigious documentary expeditions throughout the continent but also via his productive imagination in perceiving pat-terns, regional affinities, and even hidden historicities within African cosmologies and their material forms. In this article, I return to Frobenius’s theory of Atlantis as the absent ‘origin’ of Yoruba culture and civilization. At worst, his theory can be read as a contrived variation of the Hamitic hypothesis applied to a Yoruba civili-zation predicated on Phoenician origins. On a deeper structural level, however, it mirrors the fundamental poetics of displacement at the core of Yoruba kingship and ritual renewal. I argue that this sanctified ground of originary surrogation in Yoruba cosmology – a figural ‘Atlantis’ that lies beyond recovery – not only shaped the changing political topology of Yorubaland in West Africa, but also informed the Yoruba diaspora and its historical trajectories in the Americas. Critically refor-mulated, Frobenius’s problematic ‘road to Atlantis’ charts a course for rethinking the Yoruba-Atlantic.

"One foot on the other side": Towards a Periodization of West African Spiritual Surrealism

Abstract: For both writers and scholars of African and diaspora literature, genre is a fraught concept. Western institutions, especially departments of English literature, have used the tool of genre to discipline Africana literatures and the people who create them, at once reducing conventional realism to a source of anthropological information and mischaracterizing realism with an indigenous or Nonwestern worldview as fantasy or "Magical Realism." "West African spiritual surrealism," as defined in this essay, offers a generic rubric that both attends to the literalization of Igbo and Yoruba cosmology in fiction as well as the ways these cosmologies can give rise to literary devices that resist hegemonic, Anglo-American centric literary interpretation. Through close readings of Helen Oyeyemi's The Icarus Girl (2005) and Akwaeke Emezi's Freshwater (2018), this article historicizes West African spiritual surrealism as a geographically and ideologically diasporic genre that cannot be properly understood through frameworks of globalization alone. This genre and its writers require critics to read both deeply and widely in order to understand how West African spiritual surrealism places African cosmologies and people always already at the center of literary production.

“A Consort of the Spirits” or How to Cultivate Indigo, Conjured by Herself

ABSTRACT This foreword is a personal essay in which I reflect on the other ways of knowing and the African spiritual cosmologies that were first introduced to me through Ntozake Shange’s novel Sassafrass, Cypress, & Indigo (1982). I walk readers through the quarter-century love affair I have had with black women writers and Shange, in particular. I share memories of my only meeting with the author and discuss the profound impact her novel has had on both my professional and spiritual journeys. The article engages in black narrative practices of multivocality, culture bearing, vernacular language, and conjuring moments. The testimony herein involves a powerful Ifá priestess who moonlights as an English professor, a creole-speaking ancestral spirit, and the deep cultural legacy of indigo (and Indigo). It is a story told in celebration and honor of Ntozake Shange’s creative, conjuring genius.

Revolutionary love

Revolutionary love Liseli A. Fitzpatrick (bio) you said loveis revolutionaryso youcaptured myheart in yourfist transportedme around themoon released mein open space andsaid star, love is emancipatory! [End Page 159] Liseli A. Fitzpatrick Liseli A. Fitzpatrick is a Trinidadian poet and professor of African cosmologies and sacred ontologies in the Africana studies department at Wellesley College. Her penchant for poetry is driven by her deep-rooted desire to effect emancipatory change in the cocreation of an equitable, just, and breathable world. Love, ancestral reverence, embodied wisdom, nature, and liberation are central themes in her work. She can be reached at lfitzpa3@wellesley.edu. Copyright © 2022 Liseli A. Fitzpatrick

Crossing Merfolk Narratives of the Sacred: Nalo Hopkinson’s The New Moon’s Arms and Gabrielle Tesfaye’s The Water Will Carry Us Home

This article defines what I call the ‘crossing merfolk’ narrative, the idea that African people who jumped or were cast overboard during the Middle Passage became water-dwelling beings. While critical attention has been increasing for 1990s’ electronic music duo Drexciya, whose sonic fiction contains the most well-known example of this narrative, this is actually a recurring tradition in Black oral and artistic culture that can be traced to West and Central African religions. I focus particularly on what I call ‘crossing merfolk narratives of the sacred’, M. Jacqui Alexander’s term for African diasporic religious traditions anchored in West and Central African cosmologies. Analysing the role of the sacred in two crossing merfolk narratives, Nalo Hopkinson’s 2007 novel The New Moon’s Arms and Gabrielle Tesfaye’s short film The Water Will Carry Us Home (2018), I argue that these texts expand the Black Atlantic imaginary and transform mermaid lore. I develop the term ‘diasporic collage’ to describe the ways in which Hopkinson and Tesfaye reference and combine water spirits and ritual practices from multiple African diasporic traditions into narratives that intersect mermaids and the Middle Passage.

A Note on African Socialism

A Note on African Socialism

Decolonizing Science, Digitizing the Occult: Theory from the Virtual South

AbstractIn this article Newell uses two case studies to explore one of the central threads of Mbembe’s Abiola lecture, the idea that there is a relationship between the plasticity of digital technology and African cosmologies of the deuxième monde. One case concerns the viral YouTube video #sciencemustfall, in which students at the University of Cape Town criticize “Western” science and demand that African forms of knowledge such as witchcraft be incorporated into the meaning of science. The second case considers fieldwork among the brouteurs of Côte d’Ivoire, internet scammers who build intimate relationships on false premises using social media. They acquire shocking amounts of wealth in this way which they display on their own social media accounts. However, they are said to use occult means to seduce and persuade their virtual lovers, trapping their prey in the sticky allure of the world wide web. Newell uses both examples to highlight the overlaps between the transformational efficacies embedded in both occult ontologies and digital worldings, calling for the possibility of using African cosmologies of the second world to produce a ‘theory from the south’ of virtual sociality.

Sandy's Root, Douglass's Mêtis: "Black Art" and the Craft of Resistance in the Slave Narratives of Frederick Douglass

This essay shows how Frederick Douglass's first two autobiographies, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845) and My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), ambiguously represent the power of African cosmologies in ways that might disorient the nineteenth-century white readership into rethinking the illogic of slavery. I argue that Douglass evokes Yorùbá folk knowledge in his characterizations of Sandy Jenkins and his supernatural root, and that the narratives' performance of objectivity and neutrality when representing them creates a sensibility of conceptual instability in the narratives. In his cryptic representations, I explain, Douglass enlivens mêtis—a technique in which speakers feign one purpose to cleverly achieve their opposite—as a radical rhetorical appeal. By showing how the narratives' treatment of African cosmologies can implant uncertainty that raises questions about the logic that legitimated chattel slavery, this essay establishes Douglass's autobiographies as early experiments with radical black aesthetics.

“Expanding the Present”: Utopianism and the Celebration of the Subaltern in Angolan Literature

Through the study of Rioseco (1999), a little-known novel written by the Angolan author Manuel Rui, this article proposes to examine how, during some of the country's darkest hours, Angolan postcolonial literature remained an important site of creative resistance and utopia. Using Boaventura de Sousa Santos's works on the need to widen our understanding of social reality by taking into account the subaltern experiences and cosmologies traditionally discarded as irrelevant and anachronistic by Western rationality, this article examines how fiction literature in Angola participates in the decolonization of knowledge by forming an alternative archive, shedding light on subaltern populations in the country. Focusing more specifically on the subversion of gender stereotypes and the connection between material culture, community, and spirituality in postcolonial Angola, I highlight how the celebration of African cosmologies participates in the reimagining of modes of conviviality and reconciliation in a country plagued by violence and poverty.

Tradução, interações e cosmologias Africanas

Aspira-se, neste texto, a que se partilhem reflexões em torno de outras possibilidades para se pensar o traduzir, tendo como base a ideia de interação (desenvolvida pelo escritor-pensador Zamenga B.), à luz de determinadas cosmologias negro-africanas, marcadamente, bantu.Vetores de força de pensares africanos — alguns fundamentais trazidos à tona, na contemporaneidade, por Bunseki Fu-Kiau — ancoram uma análise acerca da ação tradutória, a qual, necessariamente, nesse contexto, não se atém à dimensão mais conhecida como interlinguística. Trata-se de uma dimensão ontológica do traduzir sempre em movimento. Destarte, tal ação, ao representar um relevante acontecimento de interação bantu-africana, figura, geralmente, a transmutação de uma forma-estado de ser noutra forma-estado de ser.

Digital Technology and a Community Framework for Heritage Rock Art Tourism, Makgabeng Plateau, South Africa

Using digital technologies in the process of collecting and documenting oral heritage allows previously marginalised voices to feed into heritage and historical narratives for rock art heritage tourism. Literary heritage narratives have tended to dominate the dissemination of information on African heritage, whereas African cosmologies and oral traditions are the intangible values of place that attract visitors to heritage sites. In the Makgabeng, oral heritage narrated through stories, songs, dances and poetry and collected using digital technologies will help preserve African values threatened by the onslaught of Western ones, especially through written European languages and social media. The Makgabeng Community Rock Art Project re-values the role of elders in sustainability of heritage tourism initiatives and the integration of a community structure as a sustainable “ready-made” framework to heritage management in Africa.

Birth, death, and re-birth: The trope of eternal rejuvenation in Isidore Diala’s The Lure of Ash

Human dread of death is as old as humanity. Across cultures, this dread seems to be inaugurated by the belief that death constitutes the site of final becoming. Isidore Diala’s The Lure of Ash makes a fascinating incursion into the strange interrelationship of life, death, and rebirth, and reveals that, beyond its conception as the final destination of all flesh and the abyss to which all human strivings must return, death proves to be the only phenomenon that could truly satisfy the soul’s implacable yearning for eternal rejuvenation. The critics of Diala’s poetry seem not to have examined this cyclic kinesis, which is rooted in African cosmologies. This article, seeking to cover this gap, contends that despite the attention which The Lure of Ash draws to humanity’s eternal dread of death, there is a revelation that death is not a completely mournful experience robbed of the possibility of hope. Examining the notion of birth–death–rebirth cyclic movement in “The Hues of Ash”, which forms the first phase of the collection, the paper argues that Diala’s poetry seeks to represent death as both a terrible experience and a glorious becoming. Juxtaposing existentialist ideation with the belief in the afterlife and reincarnation in Igbo cosmology, the paper affirms that death is that point where life begins, and surmises that it is the nebulous interstices of life, death, and transcendence that hold Diala’s poetic project together.

Journeys, Paths and Healing in Simphiwe Dana's Music

ABSTRACTThis article explores the role of popular culture, especially music, in human rights struggles and global rights discourses. We highlight selected songs from Simphiwe Dana's albums, The One Love Movement on Bantu Biko Street (2006) and Kulture Noire (2010). The article centres on Dana's socially conscious music, which is replete with figurative use of streets, ways and journeys. According to African cosmologies, the journey motif is central to African narratives. In general, these narratives begin with a stability which is subsequently disturbed by imminent changes that obstruct the protagonists’ life plans, forcing them to leave their homes for exile. It is in exile that the protagonists receive counselling and training that prepares them for a return home. The protagonists’ journeys are therefore, healing journeys. Dana's music, which is influenced by the African cosmologies of Ayi Kwei Armah, Steve Biko and Frantz Fanon, follows a similarly circular pattern. The article discusses how Dana uses street symbolism in order to imagine healing as a journey to self and collective re-discovery after the material, cultural and spiritual dispossession caused by colonialism and apartheid.

Ecowomanism

This essay provides a definition and theoretical frame for ecowomanism. The approach to environmental justice centers the perspectives of women of African descent and reflects upon these women’s activist methods, religious practices, and theories on how to engage earth justice. As a part of the womanist tradition, methodologically ecowomanism features race, class, gender intersectional analysis to examine environmental injustice around the planet. Thus, it builds upon an environmental justice paradigm that also links social justice to environmental justice. Ecowomanism highlights the necessity for race-class-gender intersectional analysis when examining the logic of domination, and unjust public policies that result in environmental health disparities that historically disadvantage communities of color. As an aspect of third wave womanist religious thought, ecowomanism is also shaped by religious worldviews reflective of African cosmologies and uphold a moral imperative for earth justice. Noting the significance of African and Native American cosmologies that link divine, human and nature realms into an interconnected web of life, ecowomanism takes into account the religious practices and spiritual beliefs that are important tenets and points of inspiration for ecowomanist activism.

Islam in Black and White

Ware's impassioned condemnation of the idea of Islam noir is a reaction to its unfortunate consequences for the scholarly study of Africa and of Islam: the marginalization of Islam in the study of Africa and of Africa in the study of Islam. On the other hand, if we attempt to historicize the emergence of the paradigm of Islam noir in terms of European attitudes toward Africa and toward Islam in the early twentieth century, we can reach a more nuanced appreciation of the ambivalences in European racial (though perhaps not always unequivocally racist) thinking. Early twentieth-century French attitudes toward Africa and blackness were by no means univocally negative, although they also relied on racial dichotomization. The French avant-garde, and even the general public, celebrated blackness in the fields of art, music, and dance, while anthropologists were engaged in the quest for “authentic” African cosmologies. The Negritude movement among francophone African intellectuals incorporated the very dichotomies that had earlier informed the elaboration of the paradigm of Islam noir. The British, by way of contrast, did not elaborate a concept of Islam noir, and the comparison with the French case is instructive.

Spirits in the Marketplace: The Market as a Site of the Occult in the South and West African Supernatural and Contemporary Capitalist Cosmologies

This article explores perceptions of the market in South and West Africa and in the West, undertaking a comparative study of the occult aspects ascribed to it. This illuminates certain long-standing and contemporary forms of folklore: from specific South and West African mystical beliefs and practices to various present-day magicalities in certain regions in Africa and Western free-market capitalist societies. Moreover, certain African and Western concepts of the market resemble folk ideas: traditional folkloric notions held by particular groups, underpinning their perceptions, practices, and worldviews.