African Intellectual History Research Articles

History and the Development of Historical Scholarship in Africa

Abstract How has historical scholarship fared in Africa? What is the state of decolonization and deconstruction historiography in the production of historical knowledge on the continent? What role does the state play in aiding or undermining historians’ access to official historical data and the production of historical knowledge in postcolonial Africa? This article engages these questions. It harps on the reconstruction of African intellectual history as a daunting postcolonial challenge, and argues that historians on Africa need to engage with and reexamine the development of the discipline of history in Africa in relation to the debates on decolonization and the enterprise of history-writing in the production of historical knowledge and historical scholarship across the continent. This illuminates the understanding of the history of contemporary Africa. It also throws fresh light on the continent’s remote past as a way of establishing its connections with the present. Complementary to the problems of writing the history of contemporary Africa, this work argues that to appreciate and understand the problems of history-writing on Africa, we need to focus on the development and limitations of the discipline across the institutional sites of the universities in postcolonial Africa.

African storytellers and their philosopher relatives

Literary conversations on African philosophy and literature often mirror two sides of the same epistemic dilemma in African intellectual history. On the one hand, questions emerge in negotiating the ontology or being of African philosophy or literature with regard to its substantive value. On the other hand, are epistemic anxieties on legitimation of stories told about Africa or in Africa often couched as residual epistemology to the Western intellectual gaze. The short review herein wades into these challenges and questions, showing how Jeanne-Marie Jackson, in an intriguing work delineates new perspectives that unmasks historical mis-presentations of the African novel while forging a new direction.

Dal cosmopolitismo radicale al cosmopolitismo radicato. Intervista a Anthony Kwame Appiah

Anthony Kwame Appiah is an internationally renowned philosopher who has worked on the philosophy of language, political and moral theory, African intellectual history and cosmopolitanism, with a particular interest in the theme of identity. He has held prominent positions and received numerous important awards; he has also dedicated himself to an intense activity of dissemination, giving countless lectures and collaborating with a number of newspapers, such as the BBC at which in 2016 he gave the Reith Lectures on the theme of identity and the New York Times Magazine where, as a columnist, he reasons about the ethical dilemmas that can arise in everyday life. In Italy he has published Cosmopolitismo. L’etica in un mondo di estranei (2007), Il codice d’onore. Come cambia la morale (2011), La menzogna dell’identità (2019). In this interview, given in July 2021, he explains his conception of cosmopolitanism, which he named “rooted or patriotic”, and from this perspective addresses the topics of migration, cosmopolitan education and practice, ‘cancel culture’ and freedom of expression.

Ghana and Nkrumah Revisited: Lenin, State Capitalism, and Black Marxist Orbits

AbstractThis paper reexamines African socialism, the Ghanaian political economy under Kwame Nkrumah (1957–1966), Nkrumah’s intellectual genealogical heritage, and African intellectual history as a genre that transcends the bounds of the Atlantic world. First, I sketch the lives of Black Marxists—Nkrumah, C.L.R. James, George Padmore, and Bankole Awoonor-Renner—from Africa and the Americas, to the Soviet Union, to England and Ghana, to rethink Black bodies not merely as theorists of racial and decolonial questions but also as sites, carriers, and manipulators of political-economic theories. In constructing connected and overlapping histories, I demonstrate how controversial and contested Soviet ideas became key sites of interrogation among global Black Marxists. By reframing travel as an intellectual process, I reconceptualize the movements of Black Marxists to the USSR, the United States, England, and Ghana as critical intellectual and historical processes in their understandings of Lenin’s state capitalist ideas. Second, I revisit the Ghanaian political economy under Nkrumah to argue that combining socialist and capitalist development paths was not a contradictory Marxian policy but was embedded within Black Marxist understandings of Lenin’s state capitalist ideas. In so doing, I argue that we must situate African political ideologies not solely within a romanticized Afrocentric origin but as ideas that emerge out of contemporaneous global political and ideological struggles. I draw on global Black Marxists’ correspondence; newspaper and magazine articles; British and American espionage files; and Ghanaian, American, and British state and inter-state departmental documents in imperial, colonial, and postcolonial British, Ghanaian, American, and Russian archives.

On the Object of History and Doing History in the Intellectual History of Muslim West Africa

Abstract Haydon White’s Metahistory (1973) interprets representations of history as inherently reflecting historians’ subjectivity. That is, the modes in which historians represent history are significantly determined and grounded by their ideological commitments. In this article, I offer a metahistorical analysis of the modes of doing history undertaken by the African Islamic intellectual historians Ousmane Kane and Souleymane Bachir Diagne. I critically evaluate the consistency between the object of history as they assume it to be and the discourses they (re)produce, taking account of their ideologically grounded mode of realizing their chosen object of history. Taking the general object of history for the African intellectual to be the resistance of the colonial library, I argue that, in their pursuit of this object of history, Kane and Diagne fall short owing to their use of the Islamic library to assert the existence of an African intellectual history.

The Place of Socialism in African Art

The Place of Socialism in African Art

Sam C. Nolutshungu: Race, Reform, Resistance and the Black Consciousness Movement

Abstract This paper excavates and historically contextualizes the political theory of a largely neglected thinker within South African black intellectual history, Sam C. Nolutshungu. It seeks to rectify the current imbalance in South African intellectual history which largely neglects or effaces the contribution of black thinkers in the colonial or Apartheid period notwithstanding significant black contributions in theorizing racial submission, domination, reform and popular resistance in the context of state oppression. In this paper I argue that two such areas of inquiry are present in Nolutshungu’s overall position on political reform. The first is with regards to his intervention in the race- class debates which dominated political and intellectual discussions during the late Apartheid period. Here, Nolutshungu, argues that political domination could not be reformed with simple concessions as a result of its racially exclusionary nature. Thus Nolutshungu argued that race rather than class was the fundamental source of domination. The second is the theoretical evaluation of the social and political significance of the Black Consciousness Movement as an important symbol of resistance and racial solidarity. The link between these two aspects of his thought, I argue are not insignificant and should be carefully considered. Nolutshungu’s valuable analysis on the route to political reform is strengthened by his evaluation of the role of the Black Consciousness Movement, which for Nolutshungu was an instance of how resistance was mobilized along racial rather than class lines. Moreover, the Black Consciousness Movement not only prioritized the question of race as a primary factor in its mode of resistance but served to illustrate how and why meaningful change in South Africa was contingent on the abolition of racial oppression and the overturning of the institutions of Apartheid. Finally, I argue that there is a contextual urgency in undertaking projects that seek to establish the importance of black intellectual ideas and reclaiming these ideas in order to give content and meaning to contested contemporary debates on justice, legitimacy, liberty, equality and land rights in South Africa. While the discourse of the negotiated settlement and reconciliation sparks intense debate often resulting in greater forms of racial polarisation, historical rumination and reflection offers a powerful and enduring opportunity for collective inquiry.

Presuppositions in the Study of African Social and Political Thought

The essay sought to initiate discussion among scholars of social and politicaltheory on a then insufficiently acknowledged problem in African intellectualhistory. Attention was drawn to the neglect of African social and political thoughtin worldwide social and intellectual analysis in the hopes that it would lead torigorous examination and debate that would lead to new and generalizableconceptual frameworks.

Indecent exposure – writing violence and resistance today

Today in South Africa the rainbow is gone. We live in a society scarred by history, crippled by a lack of transformation, subjugated by the spectacle of global capitalism and marked by inequality, alienation and the reinvention of difference. These tensions are exemplified in the waves of student protest that have engulfed universities across the country in recent years. My paper asks what forms do we create in crisis, from crisis? The question for me as a writer, as a writing teacher and as a creative practitioner working within the university, is can we find a way to write that is equal to this moment – a writing that can capture and confront the present, with its new urgencies and particular forms of violence, including violence done to the body and to language? In March last year at Yale University’s Workshop in African Intellectual History , Achille Mbembe critiqued the current student movements as embracing a “politics of viscerality” that he claims curtails criticality and delimits the possibilities of intersubjectivity. I answer Mbembe’s critique with a poetics of viscerality. Language, I argue has the amazing capacity to ingest the violence it meets and, rather than merely record it, to expel it sonically and viscerally. Working from the prose, poetry and hybrid practices of a range of renegade and revolutionary writers from the global South and African diaspora, including Sony Lab’ou Tansi, Cecilia Vicuna, Raul Zurita, Daniel Borzutzky, Lesego Rampolokeng, Claudia Rankine, Valerie Mejer Caso, Mishka Hoosen and more, while at the same time interrogating my own creative practice, I ask how can we, as writers, harness and channel the liberatory and celebratory energies of the recent protests? How do we draw from our history of writing as protest and invent in the present to interrogate, reject, embrace, deface and bear out, on the page, our current pain and anger and to transcend the intimate and public wreckages of our present moment? Keywords: Poetics, viscerality, student movements, creative practices

The Foundation: Design, Time, and Possibility in 1960s Nairobi

AbstractThis article explores the history of an experiment in architectural education that took place at what is today the University of Nairobi, between 1965 and 1967. Organized by Selby Mvusi, a South African industrial designer, and Derek Morgan, a British expatriate architect, what was known as the “Foundation Course” was both an experiment in architectural education in postcolonial Africa and a serious attempt to think through the African experience of time and equip students with the tools to recognize and respond to the unique conditions of the postcolonial African present. Based on archival sources, including those in private collections, and oral interviews, the article situates the Foundation Course within African intellectual history as an exercise in social theory and phenomenology. I examine the content of Mvusi and Morgan's intellectual partnership and project by tracing their individual trajectories, and especially the pedagogical scheme they developed at Nairobi, which came to focus more on humanity in dialogue with the material environment than on material objects themselves. I trace the intellectual lineages of their concepts and explore their articulation within the postcolonial university until the course was cancelled in 1967. I conclude by considering how Mvusi imagined the Foundation Course as a laboratory for both being and building in postcolonial Africa, drawing from a conference paper he delivered just weeks before he died in 1967.

Francophone African Philosophy: History, trends and influences

In this paper, I engage in a critical discussion of Francophone African philosophy focusing on its history, the influences, and emerging trends. Beginning the historical account from the 1920s, I examine the colonial discourses on racialism, and the various reactions generated leading to the Négritude movement in Francophone African intellectual history. I explore the wider implications of the debate on Négritude as an integral component of ethnophilosophy in postcolonial Francophone African philosophy. Finally, I argue that in spite of the apparent linguistic divides/boundaries between Francophone African philosophy and the philosophical traditions in Anglophone and Lusophone Africa, there are robust interactions and critical exchanges of ideas converging and reconnecting with other philosophical orientations outside Africa.Keywords: African Philosophy, Colonialism, Francophone, Anglophone, Lusophone, Négritude, Ethnophilosophy

Leslie James, George Padmore and Decolonisation from Below: Pan-Africanism, the Cold War and the End of Empire

The study of black and African intellectual history, and its location in transnational activist networks, has recently generated insightful studies that take such people’s ideas seriously and locate them in a mid-twentieth century context in which contested notions of decolonization and racial liberation were debated in new media, private and public spaces, in metropoles and across the empires. Leslie James makes a major contribution to these works with her enlightening study of George Padmore’s life and, particularly, his ideas, demonstrating that, perhaps more than any other individual, he shaped a generation of radical Africanist thinkers and the political direction of newly independent Anglophone Africa.

Lived experience, active citizenry and South African intellectual history: reflections on a colloquium on ‘The intellectual heritage and inherited values of the Eastern Cape’

Lived experience, active citizenry and South African intellectual history: reflections on a colloquium on ‘The intellectual heritage and inherited values of the Eastern Cape’ André Odendaal (bio) This colloquium, held from October 2–5, 2017, and a smaller preliminary planning conference in June, were attended by a rich mix of academics and public intellectuals and dealt with an old topic in need of rethinking. Sponsored by the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIHSS), both events were hosted at a venue oozing historical significance–Hunterstoun, alongside the Tyhume River, which tumbles down the great Hogsback escarpment to a valley where frontier Wars of Dispossession once unfolded. The former home of anthropologists professors Monica and Godfrey Wilson, where ZK Matthews visited regularly and is reputed to have worked on the proposal for a Freedom Charter, it has now been converted into the Hunterstoun Centre as a place of reflection belonging to the University of Fort Hare. The political and educational heritage and inherited values of the Eastern Cape have long been celebrated. The Eastern Cape after all is the region where the Hundred Years War was fought. ‘More blood was shed per square metre’ here, commented influential participant Pallo Jordan, ‘than anywhere else in South Africa’. It is also the region which until the 1940s produced more than 50 per cent of black African matriculants and the only black graduates in the country (Mager 1999:196). From this context and from the harsh experiences of incorporation into a colonial order there emerged generations of indigenous intellectuals, activists and organisations who first conceived of a democratic and inclusive South [End Page 83] Africa and were to lead the struggle for liberation for many decades (Odendaal 1983, 1984, 2003, 2012 and 2016). Something unique, we all agree, happened in this region. But has the way the legacies of the Eastern Cape are engaged with not become stereotyped, static and increasingly remote from people, especially younger audiences? Is this not a history now largely reduced to formalised protocols at ceremonies for struggle (and government) royalty? Or a narrative reflected in sad, improperly functioning liberation heritage routes and sites that don’t live up to the promise of the shiny road signs pointing to their location? Like DDT Jabavu’s crumbling house at Middledrift, where this foremost intellectual of his day once put to paper visions of ‘common citizenship’, alive to the aching beauty of the Amathole Mountains visible through the big bay windows (See Higgs 1997). Those visitors who can get access today are challenged to reimagine how his study must have once looked like. There is also the monument in nearby Cradock that is supposed to attest to the profound narrative of the ‘Cradock Four’ whose funerals defined the changing balance of forces in the brutal 1980s. But it is, likewise, sadly derelict. ‘A broken gate greets you’. Weeds ‘sprout up through great gaps in the tar’. There are missing doors, smashed windows, pilfered light fittings, gaps in the roof. No-one welcomes you (Spies 2018). Only rarely now, it seems, does an event drawing inspiration from the Eastern Cape’s traditions galvanise national opinion and lead to energetic action, such as the 2016 funeral of the rev Makhenkhesi Stofile did. Addressing a tradition in crisis There are many reasons for this dip in the national influence and leadership role of the Eastern Cape in recent decades, and this was an underlying theme throughout the discussions. One is its precarious economy. As professor Francis Wilson explained with graphs and maps containing impressive economic data on the second evening of the colloquium, the province remains stuck in historical patterns of land dispossession, economic exclusion and social marginalisation stemming from its past role as a labour reservoir for the migrant labour system which underpinned the economies of colonial and apartheid South Africa. Another is the weakening of Eastern Cape influence within the ANC since the Zuma ‘tsunami’ at Polokwane in 2007, as well as the systematic tarnishing of the brand of the liberation struggle and the ANC-in-government since then. [End Page 84] The lead-in group discussions at the colloquium dealt with leadership and values, and the participants were in no...

MAKING RAIN, MAKING MAPS: COMPETING GEOGRAPHIES OF WATER AND POWER IN SOUTHWESTERN AFRICA

AbstractThis article explores the alchemy whereby ritual and political worlds invisible to Europeans were rendered visible on European maps. It begins with a puzzle: representations of southwestern Africa's rivers on those maps bear little resemblance to physical reality as the cartographers would have understood it. Using GIS technology to georeference a series of maps and highlight the placement of rivers on them illustrates the convergence of cartographers’ representations and regional political cosmologies linking power to control over water. Travelers’ accounts and colonial archives illuminate how knowledge was produced and why African ideas about geography were inadvertently embedded in those maps well into the twentieth century. This method opens a window into otherwise-obscured African intellectual history and demonstrates that even something as apparently and unambiguously ‘European’ as modern mapping was the result of on-the-ground negotiations well into the colonial period.

The Historical and Literary Moment of Njabulo S. Ndebele

An essay that defined a particular moment in South African intellectual history in the twentieth century was Nadine Gordimer’s “Living in the Interregnum.” In it, she articulated the historical crisis that engulfed the country after 1960 with the defeat of the democratic forces following the banning of the African National Congress (ANC) and the Pan Africanist Congress by the apartheid State. The South African Communist Party had been banned in 1950. Borrowing the historical construct of the “interregnum” – as understood by Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci – Gordimer viewed the power struggle in South Africa as one between an oppressive and unjust old order outstaying its historical moment and the new order of liberty and democracy, still uncertain about its scheduled hour of arrival. 1 The interregnum, a force field of political and cultural contestations, lasted for three decades until 1994 when democratic elections brought a new order into being. The year 1960 signified not only the defeat of the aforementioned political movements but was also the termination of the cultural and intellectual phenomenon that some have called the ‘New African Movement.’ From Oxford- and Columbia-trained lawyer, Pixley ka Isaka Seme’s early vision of such a New African Movement in 1904 to the formation of the South African Natives National Congress (later ANC) in 1912 under his aegis, it may be argued that these two historical movements were mutually inseparable, in that the former was the cultural expression of the latter and the latter was the driving political force of the former.

Ideology, Discourse and Social Theory: André Du Toit's Contribution to South African Studies

Du Toit's conception of ideology, discourse and texts as applied to South African intellectual history lies on the edges, is deeply layered and open to multiple interpretations and approaches. In this paper, I want to trace those identifiable, yet faint, pathways passing through Marxist, Post-Structuralist and Post-Colonial literature, which allow us to appreciate Du Toit's contribution to our understanding and analysis of ideology in South African history and politics. The first part identifies the problems associated with applying a narrow conception of ideology to Afrikaner and African nationalist discourses in South Africa. The second section traces the debate of ideology in the context of Marxism, particularly the relationship between ideology and power. This is followed by a discussion of ideology in relation to discourse and, finally, the paper concludes with an overview of Du Toit's reworking of Thompson's framework. We will see how Du Toit's conception of ideology—one related to a broader social theory, and also to the production of discourses, the relations of domination and the constitution of subjects—provides a far more nuanced conception to apply to South African intellectual history.

An Archaeology of African Knowledge: A Discussion of V. Y. Mudimbe

The significance of the work of V. Y. Mudimbe can be cited from various points of view. First, it makes up part of the growing literature in recent years which critically reviews some of the epistemological claims underlying the history of the construction of the image of otherness in Western scholarship. Mudimbe's The Invention of Africa is a brilliant general survey of how Western construction of primitive and savage images of Africa, particularly in historical and anthropological studies, has influenced alienated discourse and self-identity among Africans themselves. Victim and product of this influence, African intellectual history unveils in itself a consistent rupture from its harshly negated past. In the humanities and social sciences in general, and in philosophy and religion in particular, African intellectuals continue to define their world on the basis of Western epistemological standards. Second, Mudimbe's work is also a brilliant intellectual description of the historical dilemmas which many educated African elites face daily in regard to how best to adapt what Jewsiewicki calls the usable to the construction of their present. Haunted by the feeling of their denigrated past, African elites, Mudimbe argues, are constantly eager to abandon it in order to adopt what is foreign (Western) because they think that it is modern and civilized. Everyday, the battle against the past is fought and the past, frequently called the traditional in the constructed discourse, is suppressed in legal suits, political rhetoric, economic and social planning and policy making. In this respect, Mudimbe implicitly raises significant questions about the contrast and complementarity between past and present as distinct periodizations of their history and identity. We can summarize those questions under the following three main points: - the definitions of tradition and its role in African representational discourse; - the contrast between traditionalism and Westernism-must they be contrasted, and what makes each of them acceptable or unacceptable; - the instruments for judging the acceptability or unacceptability of either traditionalism or Westernism, and who sets and standardizes those instruments. The Invention of Africa does not answer all these questions, but they present, I believe, the intellectual and social dilemmas and contexts with which Mudimbe's work basically deals, also brilliantly portrayed in his novels -the polygamous African husband married to two wives -one African the other white; or the contrast between the Church as a Western institution and Christianity as a set of deinstitutionalized values universally open to all, Africans included. The contemporary African intellectual in the humanities and social sciences is torn between two intellectual directions and has