Idea Of Africa Research Articles

The African Novel of Ideas: Philosophy and Individualism in the Age of Global Writing

The African Novel of Ideas: Philosophy and Individualism in the Age of Global Writing

Introduction

Introduction Ryan Thomas Skinner (bio) Djibril Tamsir Niane’s Soundjata ou l’épopée mandingue (1960) is, without a doubt, one of the most important texts published in African studies in the twentieth century. To the readers of this journal, the book is also arguably one of the most important modern publications of any kind. The breadth and depth of Soundjata’s influence—on Mande studies, African studies, and the human-istic enterprise more generally—cannot be overstated. In the wake of Niane’s recent passing (1932–2021), and in light of Soundjata’s long published lifespan, now entering its seventh decade, it is an opportune time to pay homage to and reflect on the significance and substance of Niane’s seminal work and influential life. Published on the cusp of African independence from European colonial rule, Soundjata is profoundly, indeed foundationally, postcolonial. The text presents an archetypal story of triumph over adversity in terms of both the character arc of its main protagonist, Sunjata Keita—from outcast to emperor—and the society that this singular Mande Mansa is destined to establish, turning a modest kingdom into a mighty empire. To Pan-Africanists and anticolonial activists alike, then as now, Niane’s text is equal parts revelatory and revolutionary, revealing a historic precedent for modern aspirations for African renaissance and unity. Soundjata also makes a full-throated case for the historical and cultural value of oral traditions, and the art of the griot (jeliya) in particular. In the face of obscurantist and injurious colonial “myths,” to paraphrase Herskovits, “of the African past,” Soundjata makes a rich and uplifting case for the status, identity, and importance of griots (jeliw) and their societal role as the guardians and purveyors of Mande society’s collective memory. African history prior to [End Page 7] colonial rule is not, in other words, a shameful blank slate to be filled in by “civilization,” but a vivid tapestry born of cultures that run deep and live on. In the hands of present-day readers, and in university and college classrooms the world over, Soundjata may be further understood as emphatically decolonial. Racist and dehumanizing “ideas of Africa,” anchored in age-old stereotypes and prejudices, give way to the existential drama of the Mande epic with its myriad lessons for human being, belonging, and becoming, from intercultural communication and community formation to confronting and overcoming hardship, loss, and injustice. Eurocentric epistemologies, insisting on the sanctity of the written word and positivist inquiry, are reminded in no uncertain terms (Mamadou Kouyaté, whose spoken words the book translates, interprets, and narrativizes, pulls no punches) that other domains of knowledge, rooted in the verbal art and expressive culture of the Belen Tigi (Master of the Word), are possible. In short, when meditating on the legacy and importance of Soundjata at sixty (1960–2020) and beyond, there is much—in the panegyric spirt of jeliya—to praise. As postcolonial as it is decolonial, as rooted in tradition as it is modern in outlook, Soundjata has stood the test of time to become a contemporary classic. However, this is hardly the end of the story, as this collection of essays attests. Niane’s work continues to inspire interest and invite inquiry. Read together, the authors of the following papers ask: • What kind of “classic” is Soundiata? Is it literature, orature, scholarship, or some combination of these? • How did the text come about? What regional and historical precedents are there for such work? Who were the chief informants and intellectual peers that made Niane’s research and writing possible? • What critical lenses might we apply to the contemporary study of Soundiata? What are the epistemological pitfalls and challenges of presenting “legend” or “myth” as “history,” using a texted language with essential ties to verbal art? • How might the postcolonial drama of D.T. Niane’s own personal and professional life inform our understanding of his scholarship and legacy? In other words, having noted the enduring significance of Niane’s Soundiata, the following essays invite us to pan out and zoom in, assessing the context of the book’s provenance, its intertextuality and interdisciplinarity, the complex field of its analysis and interpretation, and the...

An Idea of Africa in “We Are the World”: Decontextualization, Celebrity Savior Complex, Race, and Neoliberal Charity

An Idea of Africa in “We Are the World”: Decontextualization, Celebrity Savior Complex, Race, and Neoliberal Charity

Refusing to Vanish: Despair, Contingency, and the African Political

This paper offers a historico-political exegesis of V-I Mudimbe’s Invention of Africa and Idea of Africa, reading how these texts respond to a post-independence African context of political and epistemic despair. This despair reflects at once the desire for a non-Western claim to knowledge and life, for political and economic autonomy from the West, and the seeming impossibilities (confirmed by the political ordinary) of enacting these. Retracing Mudimbe’s analysis of African political thought in the wake of Négritude and his critique of representation, this essay works through Mudimbe’s intellectual historical methods to draw out a subtextual response to questions of historicity, political commitment, and the role of intellectual thought in Black resistant response. I argue that these questions are instantiated in the concept of “absolute discourse.” This concept reveals a theory of speech, inhabitation, and contingency critically aligned with postcolonial Marxist demands for authenticity, sovereignty and authority. Moreover, through this, and against any presumption of futility, I argue that Mudimbe constitutes a theory of politics—of resistance, claim, and seizure, and their limits—and contingency amidst seeming and real epistemic and material closures.

Dionysian Africa as an Antithesis of the Apollonian West

On his deathbed, the protagonist Harry in the story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” examines his past life. He concludes that he lived an empty life and that none but he is to blame for it. The narrative is structured in a diegetic frame, telling the past events of the protagonist by separating them off from the present events. The narrative, consequently, swings back and forth from interjected flashbacks to flashforward scenes, suggesting a triumph of the Apollonian virtue over the Dionysian vice, as the yardstick to measure a man. In setting his locales and depiction of places, Hemingway employs Manichean dialectics, indicative of his internalizing an Orientalist perspective that places Africa as opposed to the West. The bipartite representation reflects the author’s subscription to the high Victorian values that he had absorbed while growing up. This paper contends that “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” embodies a dialectical struggle between the Apollonian virtue and the Dionysian vice in the human soul, presented as thesis and as antithesis. It attempts to decode the embedded binary symbols, illustrating that the usage of the imageries of the snow-capped mountains and the peaks, as opposed to the dusty plane of Africa infested with beasts, alludes to representation of life and death. Further, it asserts that the idea of Africa is feminized when Hemingway equates the continent with the image of Helen, making the latter a synecdoche of the former; and that this blending of hegemony and misogyny reinforces a politics of aesthetics that obliterates, distorts, and dehumanizes the image of Africa.

Against the Idea of Africa as “Absolute Dystopia”

This paper examines two works that anticipate Africa-centred futures as positive and possible, without promising utopia. Americanah and After the Flare both embrace contradiction and complexity. Furthermore, their treatment of societies (mis)shaped by historical violence includes acknowledgement of their own imbrication in global structures of capitalist modernity. Against the grim backdrop of rising inequality, resurgent racism and the effects of climate change – a moment in which dystopic visions tend to predominate – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Deji Bryce Olukotun’s novels embody a kind of hope. Nonetheless, these alternatives to dystopia do not imagine that the problems and abuses of the present might easily be overcome. Thus, despite their employment of popular genres that invite rather than disavow pleasure, these fictions do not simply offer a form of escapism to distract us as the world burns. Rather, I would argue, they provide useful perspectives on Africa, on race and on humanity, that also have relevance in terms of current discourses of the Anthropocene. Before elaborating my argument in relation to Adichie and Olukotun’s works, I will examine some aspects of the contexts within and against which they operate – in terms of history, geography and representation concerning race, blackness, humanity, and Africa.

Swap and Formation of Diasporic Identities in Amiri Baraka’s Theater: from Afrocentric Leanings to a Pan-Africanist Worldview

Amiri Baraka embraces authenticity and moves in the direction of Africa. The latter is fundamentally a founding idea that revolves around ancient African culture, rites, and customs. The idea of Africa greatly rests upon Afrocentricity. Afrocentricity accentuates values of freedom and equality. The Afrocentric identity is an all-embracing identity, since Afrocentricity poses itself as a liberatory ideology. Afrocentricity succeeds authenticity, and both coalesce and grow together. Authenticity calls for the restoration and invigoration of one’s cultural features; it requires racial pride and the affirmation of one’s choices and goals in life. Authenticity refers to the genuineness of black ingenuity and the exaltation of the black spirit and originality. It posits that blackness is quintessential and not exotic. It emphasizes essential characteristics and traits. From authenticity via Afrocentricity, Baraka shifts to Pan-Africanism, an idea that links internal struggle with Third World militancy and resistance against colonization and global imperialism. Pan-Africanism is essentially a political ideology, which targets colonialism and imperialism and their respective policies of identity formation. Pan-Africanism thereby enlarges the standpoint from which Baraka looks at contemporary America amid racial turmoil and sociopolitical troubles. The central issue is how Baraka effects this transition from authenticity through Afrocentricity to Pan-Africanism. This article traces back the authentication effort and its links to Afrocentric leanings and Pan-African tendencies in relation to identity formation in select plays, ranging essentially from The Motion of History, Madheart, and A Black Mass. What to retain most is that Baraka frequently swaps ideological blocs, searching to contrive an ever counter-identity.

Looking at the Colonial Atlantic, Ironically: Slavery and the Idea of Africa in Eugène Sue’s Atar-Gull

Looking at the Colonial Atlantic, Ironically: Slavery and the Idea of Africa in Eugène Sue’s Atar-Gull

Ben Okri’s <i>Wild</i> (2012): The Muse of Archaeology

This article focuses on three related poems inspired by the geology and archaeology of the Rift Valley, using them to develop an argument about Ben Okri’s humanism, optimism and symbolist technique. All three poems are connected by an imagined locus in Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania and stimulated by the discoveries of fossils of the earliest hominids. Each is distinguished by focus on a particular type of rock, standing in for periods of human development, and thence with the idea of Africa as the origin of humanity generally. These are meditations on human history and imagination from the earliest appearance in Africa of the predecessors of Homo sapiens sapiens to urgent present-day concerns. Okri suggests that through poetry humankind can leap across a postcolonial self/other divide to straddle the polarities of darkness and light. I suggest that his belief is that, through the Imaginatio Creatix, we can re-dream the world and so access our higher nature. Keywords: African cosmogony, cultural connections, decolonial turns, ius dominandi [urge to control], Ben Okri, ontopoiesis, the poetic muse, Wild (2012)

Metamorphoses of the African American Identity in Post-segregation Era and the Theory of Afrocentrism

The article deals with the issue of African American identity in the post-segregation period (after 1968). The problem of African Americans’ “double consciousness”, marked for the first time yet in the late 19th – early 20th century, still remains relevant. It is that descendants of slaves, who over the centuries have been relegated to the periphery of the American society, have been experiencing and in part are experiencing an internal conflict, caused by the presence of both American and African components in their identities. The authors focus on Afrocentrism (Afrocentricity) – a socio-cultural theory, proposed by Molefi Kete Asante in 1980 as a strategy to overcome this conflict and to construct a particular form of “African” collective identity of African Americans. This theory, based on the idea of Africa and all people of African descent’s centrality in world history and culture, was urged to completely decolonize and transform African Americans’ consciousness. The Afrocentrists proposed African Americans to re- Africanize their self-consciousness, turn to African cultural roots in order to get rid of a heritable inferiority complex formed by slavery and segregation. This article presents a brief outline of the history of Afrocentrism, its intellectual sources and essential structural elements, particularly Africology. The authors analyze the concepts of racial identity, “black consciousness” and “black unity” in the contexts of the Afrocentric theory and current social realities of the African American community. Special attention is paid to the methodology and practice of Afrocentric education. In Conclusion, the authors evaluate the role and prospects of Afrocentrism among African Americans in the context of general trends of their identities transformations.

"La parole construit le pays": Théâtre, langues et didactisme au Katanga (République Démocratique du Congo) by Maëline Le Lay

Reviewed by: "La parole construit le pays": Théâtre, langues et didactisme au Katanga (République Démocratique du Congo) by Maëline Le Lay Judith G. Miller Maëline Le Lay. "La parole construit le pays": Théâtre, langues et didactisme au Katanga (République Démocratique du Congo). Paris: Honoré Champion, 2014. Pp. 483. In this multi-faceted, sometimes awkwardly integrated, but rich study, Maëline Le Lay educates her readers as to why and how didacticism holds sway in Katangan theatre. She details the fascinating array of diglossic strategies (i.e. resemantization of French words and loanblends in Swahili speech; inclusion of Swahili proverbs and citations in French texts) theatre makers use to legitimize their lessons and convince their audiences. In contextualizing the mind set and artistic vision that makes didacticism inevitable, Le Lay also sets out a history of francophone literature in the Congo-Kinshasa, takes up a discussion of the changing concepts of "evolution" and "development," offers a story of the publishing industry, and most pertinently examines the destabilizing educational policy of Belgian colonizers, including the Catholic Church, who created linguistic hierarchies to separate an intellectual class from other "Congolese" peoples. Every successive strongman governing the Congo since independence (1960) has similarly instrumentalized language to divide the population and shore up power (for example, Mobutu promoting Lingala, Ciluba, and Kikongo to counter the prominence of French, or Laurent-Désiré Kabila making Swahili the language of his army.) Today's Congo promotes "la francophonie" as the path toward economic and cultural development, ironically in opposition to exiled Lubumbashi intellectual V.I. Mudimbé's well-rehearsed fear about the colonized mind (The Idea of Africa, 1994). The instrumentalization of language permeates Le Lay's sociological and sociolinguistic approach to contemporary theatre (1970–2010) in the Congo's second largest city, Lubumbashi, capital of a province still generating wealth for the few through mining. Her admirable fifteen months of fieldwork, myriad interviews with actors, directors, playwrights, and publishers, transcriptions of Swahili-language scripts into French, and extensive reading lead her to conclude that Katangan theatre makers, whether performing in French or Swahili, imitate in their theatre the way language works in the streets. In surveying a corpus of twenty-five plays in French and ten in Swahili, she demonstrates how such theatre almost uniformly ends with a lesson contrasting tradition and modernity, rural and urban life, or the treatment of the outsider. The didacticism of colonial era literature, meant to form Africans to European norms (Christianity, patriarchy), thus undergirds the structure and dialogue of contemporary theatre—although the learning goals are frequently more pragmatic (protecting against HIV, handling adultery, getting vaccinated, countering the widespread myth of child sorcerers). [End Page 143] Le Lay shows how French-language theatre and Swahili-language performances, while having a common ancestor in the missionary theatre of the early twentieth century, have arrived at quite different places. The first plays in French in the 1950s, which lionized African heroes to solidify national identity (as was true of African fran-cophone theatre in general), have given way to local melodramas. The Swahili companies, the formation of which signaled theatrical professionalization, have added street performances to their work in radio and television. Each has a distinct audience: plays in French are performed for a more educated population in theatre spaces usually sponsored by the French government; Swahili performances, most commissioned by N.G.O.'s or government agencies, play to audiences gathered together around a designated space in a town square. If the teaching impulse colors both forms of theatre, different dramaturgical strategies result in the greater success of the Swahili pieces. For example, in the case of Papa Mufwankolo's company, a key troupe Le Lay studies, actors have been playing fixed roles for over forty years. This makes them familiar and thus believable to their public. On the contrary, French-language texts, such as those by Katsh M'Bika Katende, another Lubumbashi theatrical star central to Le Lay's analysis, no longer seem realistic, the Swahili used, although providing local color, unsuccessfully capturing the speech patterns of the population. The francophone plays of Yvon Kibawa, another target author, read, Le Lay suggests...

Global Media and Local Verbal Art Representations of Northern Malian Tuareg

Abstract:This article offers a critique of widely disseminated portrayals of northern Malian Tuareg by outside media, which tend to portray all Tuareg as warriors and criminals and to project pseudo-scientific concepts of “race” onto relationships between Tuareg and other Malians, recalling the now discredited colonial “Hamitic Myth” in Rwanda. It also analyzes local oral historical accounts that present themes of Mali as both a protected fortress and welcoming crossroads, a country that both resists and absorbs intruders, and that also express concepts of identity based on language, culture, and flexible social affiliation. The article is based partly on interviews with internationally known local musicians who function as mediating “third voices,” and concludes with a discussion of wider implications of these findings for notions of voice, authority, and the mutual construction of ideas of Africa.

Il Pci e il processo d'indipendenza dell'Africa nera francese (1958-1961)

French Sub-Saharan Africa's decolonization - which occurred between 1958 and 1960 - had particularly interested the Italian Communist Party for ideological originality shown by anti-colonial parties into the struggle for independence. The ideas of self-determination of peoples subjected to European domination, influenced by Marxism, by the French Communist Party and by the socialist world, it developed, however, a kind of nationalism that was independent from the working-class design and taking into account a mass of underlings ready to rise again and to gain freedom and self-awareness. If the Pcf struggled to give support to those same African movements that it had influenced himself, the Pci, that was intent on carving out a political space just inside the socialist camp, was very interested in the «afromarxiste» and nationalist experimentation in the French colonies. Especially after 1956, at the end of the Cominform and at the begin of recognition of «national roads to socialism», the Italian Communists intertwined relationships with the government of independent Guinea (1958), led by Sekou Toure, with the independence movement of Cameroon, Union des populations du Cameroun (Upc), with Mali led by Modibo Keita and with the Parti africain de l'independance (Pai) in Senegal. The Communist Party and its idea of Africa also influenced the vision that the Italian Left and its cultural environment had about this territory.

The Idea of Africa in South African Political Science

The aim of this article is to provide a perspective on the development of knowledge and the teaching of Political Science on Africa from a South African view point. The article sketches the historical context of the study of the politics of the continent in relation to various institutions. It also discusses the development of teachers and scholars who were involved in the emerging field of study as well as some of the controversy around the transformation of the higher education sector in the country. Publications on the politics of Africa suggest an initial focus on the core issues in the politics of South Africa, and only later on the continent itself. Some of the professional associations are also referred to. The conclusion is reached that the study of the politics of Africa in South Africa is more than an idea and is becoming more centrally located in the discipline as well as in allied multi-disciplinary approaches, and is poised for further growth as the countries of the continent become more integrated.

African Religions and Art in the Americas

This print symposium of Nova Religio is devoted to African religions and arts in the Americas, focusing specifically on devotional arts inspired by the Yoruba people of West Africa. The authors presented here privilege an emic approach to the study of art and religion, basing their work on extensive interviews with artists, religious practitioners, and consumers. These articles contribute an understanding of devotional arts that shows Africa, or the idea of Africa, remains a powerful political and aesthetic force in the religious imagination of the Americas.

Ayi Kwei Armah’s Intellectuals of the African Renaissance

Ayi Kwei Armah is a living Ghanaian novelist and cultural activist. His life and body of novelistic experiments show a meticulous preoccupation with Africa’s present cultural crisis. His seven novels to date, in addition to his autobiography entitled The Eloquence of the Scribes (2006), all illustrate a relentless intellectual campaign for articulating the ways in which the ”right” and committed intellectuals can be singled out from what he takes as multitudes of pseudo- or parvenu academics. For Armah, a carefully devised and administered educational system should form the basis for a reformed African ethos. This article explores Armah’s call for renovating the present educational philosophy that aims to promote a new idea of Africa. Constructing an authentic educational system is justified by him through the need to supersede the devastating effects imposed by and instituted through colonial education. Below is an attempt to debate Armah’s deconstructive approach of the colonial educational pattern. Similarly, viable prospects of a change of perspective are reviewed. In founding schools throughout Africa and granting scholarships in metropolitan universities to African students, Armah thinks, colonial powers only meant to maintain control, even after the end of their direct occupation.

The Pentagon's HIV/AIDS Programmes: Governmentality, Political Economy, Security

This article brings together governmentality and political economic readings of security to offer a critical examination of the international HIV/AIDS programmes operated by the US Department of Defense, particularly as they focus on populations in Africa. Reaching groups often left out of national HIV/AIDS strategies and conducting research into HIV vaccines, US military HIV/AIDS programmes can be read as supportive of the broader global health effort to secure populations from HIV. However, a consideration of publicly available material shows that growing US commitment to addressing the problem of HIV/AIDS parallels, and in the case of military programmes intersects with, the idea of Africa as a locus of strategic resources, fragile states and potential terrorist threats. These ideas are furthermore articulated in terms of a neoliberal teleology, in which health programmes appear as part of an effort to help populations along the path to normal, healthy development, occluding the exploitative manner in which populations and regions highly affected by HIV have been incorporated into the global political economy. Such rationalities are problematic in that they obviate a more substantive grounding of health in ideas of peace or equity and thus provide a poor guide to a more healthy global order. While noting the contribution of US military programmes to the international response to HIV/AIDS, the article emphasises the importance of examining associations between HIV/AIDS, military forces and security in terms of the broader web of rationalities and relationships within which they are situated.

Toni Morrison and the Idea of Africa

Book Review| March 01 2011 Toni Morrison and the Idea of Africa La Vinia DeloisToni Morrison and the Idea of Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 257 pp. $35.99. Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́ Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́ Ohio State University Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́ is a professor in the departments of English and African American and African Studies at the Ohio State University. He is the author of Proverbs, Textuality, and Nativism in African Literature (1998) and The Slave's Rebellion: History, Orature, Literature (2005). His ongoing research is on new panegyric forms in Lagos, Nigeria, and animist poetics in African American poetry. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Comparative Literature Studies (2011) 48 (1): 86–89. https://doi.org/10.5325/complitstudies.48.1.0086 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́; Toni Morrison and the Idea of Africa. Comparative Literature Studies 1 March 2011; 48 (1): 86–89. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/complitstudies.48.1.0086 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressComparative Literature Studies Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2011 by The Pennsylvania State University. All rights reserved.2011The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Ethics Brewed in an African Pot

The following is a true story. I am a Nigerian. Coming to North Amer ica fourteen years ago, I was greeted with the following question by an American: Would you happen to know my friend in Tanzania? To get a picture of how daunting this question was, consider: the average travel time from Nigeria to Tanzania by air is almost the same as from New York to Los Angeles! More than two thousand miles of villages, cities, countries, desert, rivers, and tropical forest separate Lagos from Dar es Salaam. Any chance of running into my interlocutor's Tanzanian friend in the densely populated streets of Lagos seemed mathematically quite slim, if not possible except by chance. This simple story makes a point: it evokes stereotypes, generalizations, and im ages frequently associated with the idea of Africa in the Western imagination. Perhaps not unsurprisingly in the media-conditioned perception of many peo ple in the global north, Africa is a simple reality, albeit a reality riddled with complex and emergent situations of conflict, diseases, and misery. In light of this simplistic perception of Africa, a preliminary caution seems necessary: I do not speak for Africa. My experience of the continent is limited to about half a dozen countries out of fifty-three, not counting the colorful and of tentimes confusing blend of cultures, peoples, and languages that constitute the reality called Africa. My first advice to anyone trying to understand something of Africa is to rethink whatever he or she has thought about the continent. Africa is not one thing; it is a million things compressed into a vast geopolitical entity. As such, Africa lends itself to a multiplicity of meanings, interpretations, and con troversies. This dimension of cultural, political, social, geographical, and reli gious diversity should inform how we are to understand ethics and the moral

Toni Morrison and the Idea of Africa (review)

Toni Morrison and the Idea of Africa (review)