Vision Of Africa Research Articles

Définir l’Afrique par la littérature – le littéraire comme vecteur de l’africanité dans le discours des Congrès des écrivains et artistes noirs (Paris, 1956 et Rome, 1959)

In our paper we show how Black writers (those of Africa and those of the Black diaspora in Europe and America) have contributed to the intellectual work centered on the idea of Africanity. We explain to what extent literature, as one of the domains of culture, reflects different visions of Africa, as formulated in the discourse of the World Congresses of Black Writers and Artists (Paris, 1956 and Rome, 1959). With reference to the official texts presented or elaborated during these events, we expose in which way literature is involved in the decolonial remapping of the geocultural place of Africa and in the remodeling of the postcolonial literary geography while pointing out the precursory or heralding character of certain postulates whose echoes will be heard during the festivals of negro and pan-African art of the 1960s and whose relevance is also confirmed nowadays.

아비 모건과 모이라 버피니 작품에 나타난 '현장 이야기'로서의 여성사

This study analyzes Abi Morgan''s work Splendour (2000) and Moira Buffini''s Welcome to Thebes (2010). In this study, we analyze how women existed as subjects in the historical field. In these two works, the motifs of real historical figures evoke the fact that women exist as ‘actors’ rather than as ‘peripherals’ in a large historical ‘site’. In particular, the background of the work is a scene of chaos where violence such as civil war or revolution is taking place. In this process, the woman who was recorded as the wife of the dictator husband is rather portrayed as a person who instigated the dictatorship. And the woman who was Africa''s first female president is portrayed as a revolutionary. The dictator’s wife in Splendor is based on Elena, the wife of Romanian President Ceausescu. Morgan drew attention to the violence of the dictator’s wife and the hypocrisy of women in the times of revolution, which have been relatively less noticed in the historical record. Welcome to Thebes was also inspired by Alan Johnson-Sulliffe of Liberia, who was Africa’s first female president. Allen faces two challenges: unifying the scars of the civil war and simultaneously presenting a new vision for Africa. Both of these works deal with the lives of women at the center of inter-state wars, civil wars, violence, and power. We are looking at women''s history again in the paradigm of ‘field stories’. (Daejeon Institute of Science & Technology)

Picturing Women: Identity, Power, and Photographies in Urban Nigeria

In urban Nigeria, the profile of photography as an art form is on the rise and the work of female artists is coming to global attention. This article argues for a more nuanced analysis that reflects on image objects that ‘speak back’ to issues of inequality and challenge center/periphery sightlines that remain salient within a transnational, interconnected ecosystem. ‘Picturing women’ alludes to the active intersection of the feminine as framed identity within a context of unequal power relations at the global and local level. Through the prism of three key pieces from artists Ndidi Dike, Adeola Olagunju, and Jumoke Sanwo, based in Lagos, Nigeria, I trace the use of lens-based media within their respective practice. What emerges is the relevance of enduring ways of seeing and being from a local ethnographic context that challenge the powerlessness discourse that so often frames visions of Africa. The concept of ‘impaired citizenship’ from the work of theorist Ariella Azoulay provides a helpful provocation to think about the particularities of place that photography unsettles to propose connectivity beyond borders. In conclusion, the article calls for more critical engagement with discursive questions of difference to counter persistent opacities and silences.

Migration, Emigration, and Immigration: African Cartoonists Draw the Lines

Migration, Emigration, and Immigration: African Cartoonists Draw the Lines

The critique of ethnophilosophy in the mapping and trajectory of African philosophy

By ignoring the history of thinking in other traditions around the world, philosophy established itself as a narrow tradition, and in the name of reason, according to Bernasconi, it constituted itself as a narrative shaped largely by exclusions. Similar exclusionary tendencies have also permeated the field of African philosophy. In an effort to legitimise and indeed consolidate their discipline, a generation of academic philosophers in Africa have attempted to establish the boundaries of African philosophy with significant consequences on its meaning and future development. Their effort is credited with putting African philosophy on the world map. However, by aligning the practice of African philosophy to a particular conceptualisation of the enterprise, what was meant to serve as the springboard for intellectual freedom, including the liberation of thought and imagination in Africa became restrictive if not intolerant or repressive in its outlook. In this essay, I wish to assess the impact of the critique of ethnophilosophy on the growth and expression of African philosophy as an autonomous discipline. In doing so reference will be made to what Mudimbe has called ‘the bible of anti-ethnophilosophers.’Keywords: Critique of Ethnophilosophy, Africa, African philosophy, Exclusionary practices, Universalism

The Paradoxes of Description in André Gide's Voyage au Congo and Le retour du Tchad

The Paradoxes of Description in André Gide's Voyage au Congo and Le retour du Tchad Matt Reeck (bio) I don't promise extraordinary adventures; you will not find the charm of the desert or that of Islam, which has seduced everyone. But there is contour and color. When you have traveled here a little, you gain, I believe, a very exact and pure view of primitive Africa. It's not the North African village, it's not the forest, but it's a land, wooded in places with large trees, watered by beautiful rivers, inhabited by a splendid naked race that our Western civilization hasn't yet sullied.1 On January 16, 1925, Marcel de Coppet, a French colonial officer stationed at Fort Archambault near Lake Chad, wrote to André Gide about his upcoming visit. Through their mutual friend Roger Martin du Gard, Gide had met Coppet in Paris in 1920. The fact that Coppet had been stationed at Fort Archambault for four years by the time that Gide and Marc Allégret began to plan the course of their trip to Africa provided the traveling duo with a natural turn-around point for their voyage through French Equatorial Africa. Coppet writes ahead to his new friend that there will not be adventures; at Fort Archambault, there will also not be "charming" desert scenes or those of Islam, the staples of late nineteenth-century Orientalist representations of Africa and the Middle East. Instead of these classic exotic scenes, Gide would be able to witness the "real" Africa, primitive Africa, that Africa inhabited by a "splendid naked race" that existed beyond the sullying touch of Western civilization. This is the same vision of Africa that elicits the name Congo as a blanket term meant to describe sub-Saharan Africa—black Africa—as a primal zone of origin, originality, and infrangible authenticity, available still for discovery to the intrepid European traveler. In short, this encapsulates Africanist discourse,2 which also happens to be the primary lens through which Gide's African travelogues have been read since the advent of postcolonial studies. Coppet's letter is remarkable evidence of aspects of the thinking of the time, as well as the literary style of which Gide himself might be the best representative—a style that increasingly would come to stand for the [End Page 82] best and worst of the French tradition, elegant and formal, contemplative and yet displaying a racial, if not racist, worldview. Coppet's letter also shows us the epistemological and aesthetic connections between natural history writing and ethnographic writing, including the blurred line dividing description of nature with descriptions of people and culture. In attempting to adumbrate the importance of ethnographic description to French modern literature, I read Voyage au Congo (1927) and Le retour du Tchad (1928) in the following ways. Gide's double book—the one charting his course to Fort Lamy, and the next, his return—reveals the continuity of epistemology and aesthetics from the natural history monograph to the ethnographic. Demonstrating this continuity is important. It will help show how descriptive practices are not bald-faced equations of transparency and objectivity, but that ethnographic description carries with it a complex history that includes an inheritance from natural history writing and the natural sciences. Ethnographic description, then, viewed as a surface phenomenon of rendering a worldview visible, must be thought of as part of a multi-faceted system of descriptive practices. Uncertain Designs, Open Form Jeffrey Geiger argues that whatever expectations a postcolonial reader might have in regards to Gide's worldview breaking down upon the encounter of cultural others, this does not come to pass. Gide's "persistent self-regard" leads to more of "Gide's self-projections"; the works are "works of egoism" that do not show any of the risks of "going native,"3 a characteristic that Henrietta Moore cites as being shared by modern ethnography and travel narratives.4 Walter Putnam, too, writes that Gide himself stands at the center of the voyage. The travelogues relied upon the stature of Gide as an author at the height of his popularity to convince readers that political redress...

Developmental Regionalism and Regional Value Chains: Pitfalls to South Africa's Vision for the Tripartite Free Trade Area

Regional integration via the Tripartite Free Trade Area (TFTA) received a significant boost when the South African parliament signed the corresponding agreement in October 2018. This article uncovers the convictions and objectives that drive South Africa's commitment to the TFTA. It reveals that South Africa sees the TFTA as a means of “developmental regionalism,” which is expected to facilitate region-wide industrialisation based on value addition in regional value chains (RVCs). For this purpose, South Africa seeks to coordinate industrial policies within the TFTA and rehabilitate infrastructure jointly with the regional states. In addition to explaining the logic behind these goals, and analysing how far they have already been achieved, the article also highlights important challenges to South Africa's vision for the TFTA. It calls the prospects of developmental regionalism into question, being particularly sceptical about the way in which RVCs are conceived.

Sci-fi and Afrofuturism in the Afrophone Novel: Writing the Future and the Possible in Swahili and in Shona

The article explores literary experimentation in novels in African languages with a focus on Swahili and Shona science fiction and Afrofuturism. While science fiction is a genre whose relevance to Africa has often been questioned, Afrophone writers have produced sci-fi novels in several African languages and the genre seems to be experiencing new interest in the 21st century. A number of novels contain visions of Africa’s utopian or dystopian futures and often suggest ways to construct this future or, indeed, reconstruct the present in view of the future. The look at Africa from its imagined future also stimulates a rethinking of narratives about Africa’s past. The paper outlines the history of sci-fi and futuristic prose in Swahili and in Shona and analyzes the textual strategies that these novels employ to “write the future and the possible.”

KWAME NKRUMAH AND THE PANAFRICAN VISION: BETWEEN ACCEPTANCE AND REBUTTAL

This paper focuses on the pan-African vision of Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of independent Ghana, and how this vision has been appreciated over time. Nkrumah was the greatest advocate of the political unity of Africa. This was to enable the continent to ward off exploitation by the West and then build a continent self-reliant. This paper examines the divergence in the acceptance and rebuttal of his vision for Africa through a content analysis of written works.

Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals in Africa: Call for a Paradigm Shift.

Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals in Africa: Call for a Paradigm Shift.

‘United by blood’: race and transnationalism during the Belle Époque

The Belle Époque, often thought to be a period defined by nationalism, also saw the remarkable global proliferation of transnational affinities – especially those centred on race. Across Europe and its settler territories, notions of pan‐racial affinity spread alongside imperial nationalism, in the context of technological advancement that permitted novel imaginative possibilities. Meanwhile, texts of political imagination in Africa and Asia during this period – particularly those of pan‐Africanism and pan‐Islamism – demonstrate not only an awareness of the significance of racial thinking for Europe but a theorisation of the connections between Europe's racial imagination and its policies in the colonised world. The same advances in the fields of communication and travel that opened the door for new imaginative possibilities in Europe also enabled disparate communities in the colonised world to conceive of themselves, often for the first time, as collectively racialised subjects of a European world order.

South Africa debuts world-class Science Forum

Science Forum South Africa, held 8-9 December 2015 in Pretoria, was a showcase for Africa's vision and strength before an audience that included high-level researchers and policymakers from Africa and around the world. It offered discussions on topics ranging from space science and climate change to education and science diplomacy. And it hosted the launch of a major global accord, 'Open Data in a Big Data World', by four leading international science organisations: the International Council for Science (ICSU), The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS), the International Social Sciences Council (ISSC) and the InterAcademy Partnership (IAP).

Harnessing Natural Resources for Diversification

This article outlines a vision for Africa in 2050 in which the continent narrows the gap in per capita income and development outcomes that it has with middle- and high-income countries. Specifically, this article describes the challenges of building on Africa’s endowment of natural resources to become a supplier of intermediate and finished goods and agricultural products, with a diversified private sector, a growing service sector, and a high degree of economic integration on the continent and in the world. First, the article outlines Africa’s resource endowment. Africa has a fairly modest global reserve position, with the exception of gemstones, titanium, and bauxite. Second, the article evaluates African countries’ track record in terms of extraction and processing, including a classification of countries according to their reliance on resource rents. Next, the authors present a vision for Africa’s extractive industries that has the ultimate goal of macroeconomic stability. The article suggests that stabilization/liquidity funds and wealth funds contribute to an increase in the quality of public investment and monetary policy. Finally, the authors suggest that African governments should encourage the growth of an ecosystem of supportive industries around the natural resource sector to increase the number of positive spinoffs from the extractive industries.

Imagining Africa and blackness in the Russian empire: from extra-textual arapka and distant cannibals to Dahomey amazon shows – live in Moscow and Riga

In the nineteenth century, Dahomey amazon shows, traveling circuses with menageries and ‘African villages,’ emerged as part of the transnational entertainment industry. This article extends the geography of this global model and generic system and its role in the visual politics of whiteness and blackness in a context outside the imperial colonization of Africa. The first sections examine a rise of visuality in the Russian imperial imagination of race, Africa and blackness through a ‘symptomatic’ reading of Aleksandr Griboedov's play Woe from Wit and Arkadii Averchenko's Death of an African Hunter. These are followed by a discussion of the Dahomey amazon shows in Moscow and their significance in the Russian cultural imagination of Africa and blackness, Europe and whiteness. The discussion of the Dahomey amazon shows in Riga unravels the complexities of interaction between the global visual model and its reception in the Baltic colonies of the Russian empire.1

Offline: The season of infinite madness

The first meeting of a new Commission on the Future of Health in Africa, led by Peter Piot (Director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine), met last week in Ghana's capital city, Accra. The last Commission for Africa, produced for the G8 Summit held at Gleneagles in 2005, received mixed reviews. Bob Geldof called Tony Blair's Commission “a triumph for Africa”. But its longer term impact is contested. The vision for Africa in 2005 was of a continent in the midst of a crisis: the Commission's opening line was “African poverty and stagnation is the greatest tragedy of our time”.

In Search of Brightest Africa: Reimagining the Dark Continent in American Culture, 1884–1936 by Jeannette Eileen Jones

Reviewed by: In Search of Brightest Africa: Reimagining the Dark Continent in American Culture, 1884–1936 by Jeannette Eileen Jones Sharai Erima (bio) Jones, Jeannette Eileen. In Search of Brightest Africa: Reimagining the Dark Continent in American Culture, 1884–1936. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2010. You’re five years old. You hold your father’s massive yet reassuring hand while you marvel at a herd of seven elephants stampeding towards you. Ten minutes ago you were riding the A train in Manhattan. Now you are in the American Museum of Natural History aboard an “invisible train” as it takes you on a safari through Carl Akeley’s vision of Africa. The museum boasts comprehensive replicas of African wildlife, including people dressed in grass and hide and mud and shell. You remember your father telling you about the Egyptians, but you see no sign of them. He tells you to ask the tour guide. You do. The man answers: Natural history museums don’t exhibit the cultures of “white people”; go visit the Met across the park (xii). These early memories of author Jeannette Jones serve as a powerful metaphor for her first book, In Search of Brightest Africa: Reimagining the Dark Continent in American Culture, 1884–1936. Jones, an assistant professor at Nebraska University, weaves a compelling examination of outsiders’ first impressions of Africa through film, thought, bullet, and plunder. Jones aims to unravel complex evolutions in white American and African American thoughts about Africa. In her assessment, the modern American view of Africa formed from a collision of white naturalists and black nationalists during events bookended by the Belgian occupation of the Congo and the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. The resulting debates sought to characterize the continent during a time when America looked outwardly to define its own relative modernity at the expense of African people’s ability to define themselves on the world stage. Both the white naturalists and the black nationalists sought to protect Africa from Western expansion, but wished to keep Africans in the role of observer. Jones effectively writes with a sense of symmetry that links seemingly disparate events in a purposeful way, such as the rise of the rubber trade, the birth of modern pan-Africanism, and innovations in taxidermy. Jones organizes events well, ascribing two distinct Western responses to Africa: one white and one black. I will address her analysis of black responses later. Jones’s bifurcation further breaks up white responses into European and American. European responses then divide as either imperialist, typified by the attendees of the Berlin Conference and led by the Belgians, or missionary, exemplified by institutional efforts to spread Christianity intended to eradicate traditionalism and stall the Islamic influence. Jones separates American responses into either definitive, reinforcing the collective view of America as modern in opposition to a perceived African retardation, or primitive, an appeal to American game hunters wishing to express rugged masculinity by dominating an uncivilized frontier much like America’s Wild West. The Belgian occupation of the Congo also brought the area’s wildlife to the attention of the upstart American Museum of Natural History who sent naturalist-environmentalists on expeditions, under the approval of Belgium’s King Leopold, to amass collections by shooting and skinning the animals they wished to preserve. In the process, they stumbled upon ethnographic evidence that challenged their assumption that the Congolese were benighted compared to white, American modernity. Bantu African advancements in metallurgy, it appeared, brought civilization to Egypt and then, by extension, to Europe and ultimately America. These discoveries were not widely accepted and instead were [End Page 493] replaced with a more palatable metanarrative of Africans as savage children, mistreated by the superior, yet crafty, white Belgians (80). In Jones’s evaluation of naturalist-environmentalist discourses on and displays of Africa, no individual looms larger than Carl Akeley does. Akeley’s single-minded efforts to preserve what he viewed as a vanishing Africa led him to innovative methods in taxidermy and wildlife display, unmatched even today. Jones dedicates one of the five chapters of In Search of Brightest Africa almost entirely to Akeley. It flows well and is easily the most focused of the chapters, but...

After an imaginary slumber: visual and verbal imagery of ‘awakening’ Africa

After an imaginary slumber: visual and verbal imagery of ‘awakening’ Africa

Introduction

The euphoria greeting the election of Barack Hussein Obama as the forty-fourth president of the United States seized the popular imagination in Africa, much as it did in the U. S. There was hope and enormous goodwill on the continent, derived from President Obama's special tie to Africa—the dreams from his father that he has translated so eloquently. There was hope that the Obama administration would initiate new policies based on mutual respect, multilateral collaboration, and an awareness that there will be no security unless there is common security—and also that security must be broadly defined, extending beyond the military to include the environment, the economy, and health, as well as political and social rights. Yet as many anticipated, given the enormous and wide-ranging problems confronting the new administration, Africa has not been front and center on its agenda. Although President Obama visited Egypt in June and Ghana in July 2009, only a few months into his presidency, Africa has not become a centerpiece of his foreign policy.In his much-publicized speech in Accra, President Obama lauded Ghana for its “repeated peaceful transfers of power,” declared that “development depends on good governance,” and urged Africans to take responsibility for their continent: “to hold [their] leaders accountable, and to build institutions that serve the people.” He pledged that the United States would support their efforts and committed his administration to opening the doors to African goods and services in ways that previous administrations have not. He pledged $63 billion to a new, comprehensive global health strategy that would promote public health systems and combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, polio, and other devastating diseases. In the months that followed, he pledged to double American foreign aid to $50 billion a year and to develop a multilateral program to combat hunger.

Sarkozy, Mabanckou, and Notes from the Bar: Alain Mabanckou’s Verre cassé

This article analyzes Mabanckou's Verre casse (2005) in light of the (literary) politics surrounding the concept of Francophonie. I argue that the novel responds to President Sarkozy's speech in Dakar, and to the signatories of the Manifesto, Pour une Litterature-Monde en francais. The former proposes a cooperative Eurafrique, while the latter proclaim the death of Francophonie. The eponymous narrator of Verre casse sits at the crossroads of postcolonial woes and the promise of a more inclusive world-literature. My article finds that the novel's portrayal of the historical ambiguities of Francophone spaces reveals the blind spot of Sarkozy's vision of Africa.

Virtual, Partial, and Fabricated Visions of Africa

Virtual, Partial, and Fabricated Visions of Africa