Critical Terms for the Study of Africa

Gaurav Desai, Adeline Masquelier, Gaurav Desai, Adeline Masquelier

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780226548975, 9780226548838
• eBook ISBN: 9780226549026
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

For far too long, the Western world viewed Africa as unmappable terrain—a repository for outsiders' wildest imaginings. This problematic notion has had lingering effects not only on popular impressions of the region but also on the development of the academic study of Africa. Critical Terms for the Study of Africa considers the legacies that have shaped our understanding of the continent and its place within the conceptual grammar of contemporary world affairs.
 
Written by a distinguished group of scholars, the essays compiled in this volume take stock of African studies today and look toward a future beyond its fraught intellectual and political past. Each essay discusses one of our most critical terms for talking about Africa, exploring the trajectory of its development while pushing its boundaries. Editors Gaurav Desai and Adeline Masquelier balance the choice of twenty-five terms between the expected and the unexpected, calling for nothing short of a new mapping of the scholarly field. The result is an essential reference that will challenge assumptions, stimulate lively debate, and make the past, present, and future of African Studies accessible to students and teachers alike.

1 Africa/African

Jemima Pierre

When Africa is mentioned in the public sphere, it is often either described as in “crisis” or “rising.” Most often it is a combination of the two: Africa has the potential to rise if it can ever get itself out of crisis. These seemingly contradictory narratives are not new or surprising; they are part of a long history, intellectual and popular, of confirming the alterity of Africa.

The Africa in crisis narrative is currently ubiquitous. War. Poverty. Failed states. Corruption. Genocide. Terrorism. Disease. The unending circulation of tales of crisis in Africa is fueled as much by actual events as by the world’s predictable and prejudiced response to phenomena on the continent. Thus, at the height of the global panic over the recent Ebola outbreak in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea in the fall of 2014, the US magazine Newsweek ran a lead story with the following headline: “A Back Door for Ebola: Smuggled Bushmeat Could Spark a U.S. Epidemic,” with a cover photo of a large chimpanzee. The authors used pseudoscientific theories to accentuate this moment of African “crisis” by claiming that Ebola was at the door of the US. Doing so required them to implicate the African continent as a place of endemic and contagious disease (and Africans as disease carriers) and to also affirm the centuries-old stereotypes of Africans’ unique link to primates.

This trope is not new, of course. Primates, in general, are the stand in, variously, for Africa, its people, and its people’s presumed natural savagery/nobility. As Winthrop Jordan demonstrates, late eighteenth-century English writings easily drew direct connections between apes and Africans, a connection no doubt aided by the relentless literary imagery of “beastlike men of Africa.” At the height of the transatlantic slave trade and African enslavement, there was the need for Europeans to point to natural and “sexual association of apes with Negroes” in order to further separate Africans from themselves and, ultimately, humanity.

The Newsweek story articulated what had been clear in the global and local medical response to the Ebola crisis: the established inferior position of African life—that is Black African life. Accordingly, the other less prominent response to the medical crisis was the simultaneous valuation of non-African life (that is, white and Western life) and devaluation of African life. Indeed, by the time of the Newsweek story, Ebola had already arrived in the US as two white missionaries infected in Liberia were given an experimental drug and flown to the US for treatment. Another white American was flown to Nebraska. By then, the disease was already ravaging the West African country, having infected thousands of Liberians, including health workers, and by late July, killing scores. As African medical workers died, including several prominent physicians (such as Drs. Olivet Buck and Sheik Umar Khan), many recognized and decried the racial disparity in the treatment of African doctors and health care workers, compared to non-Black missionaries and health workers (Giorgis 2014).

The Ebola story is a useful synecdoche for the long-standing historical, popular, and even academic construction of Africa. It is also one for understanding the significance of Africa’s Blackness. The crisis-ridden continent both cannot help itself in promulgating crisis, nor can it save itself. In come Africa’s numerous “saviors.” Such “saviors” have to be non-African, usually white, and their participation in “saving” the African continent depends directly on the trope of (Black) Africa in crisis. Novelist Teju Cole (2014), who coined the term “White Savior Industrial Complex,” notes in this regard: “Africa serves as a backdrop for white fantasies of conquest and heroism. From the colonial project to Out of Africa to The Constant Gardener and Kony 2012, Africa has to provide a space onto which white egos can conveniently be projected.”

Alongside numerous forecasts of Africa as ongoing disaster, we also have another narrative from some corners of the Western economic and political world that Africa is “rising.” This is epitomized most fervently by the recent headline from the conservative Economist magazine: “Africa Rising: The Hopeful Continent.” But it was the same magazine whose May 13, 2000, issue had a solid black cover with an outline of the map of Africa inside of which was a young man holding a large weapon with the screaming headline, “The Hopeless Continent.” Although the accompanying article was focused on Sierra Leone, it equated that country with the entire continent while arguing that Africans are “buried in their cultures” and, therefore, exceptional violence such as “rape, cannibalism and amputation have been common” (2000). The “hopeful” take on the African continent does not deviate much from established orthodoxy, as we are reminded, “optimism about Africa has to be taken in small doses . . . [as] corruption, strife will not disappear overnight” (2011). Nevertheless, the “Africa rising” narrative is primarily for the benefit of the Western business elite and governments whose control of and investments in Africa’s resources need the occasional justification. (One may note that this “Africa Rising” narrative is distinct from the “African renaissance” one espoused by former South African president Thabo Mbeki. Mbeki’s call for recognizing this African renaissance came in the triumphant post-Apartheid moment and the consequent triumphant calls for African self-determination.)

It is significant that those engaged in teaching and writing about the African continent often begin with a refutation of “myths and stereotypes” about the African continent. But to what avail if the discussion does not take into account what Michel-Rolph Trouillot calls the “enunciative context” of these representations and narratives? For Africa, the context is a violent colonial encounter and its aftermath. It is a long history of enslavement and conquest and the establishment of sets of racial hierarchies that depended upon the debasement of the continent’s peoples. The enunciative context of enslavement and colonialism is a physical, structural, and epistemological violence. This context has created the material conditions that shape Africa’s political, social, and economic positioning within the world. It has also created forms of knowledge production, archives, and ideologies that, in turn, naturalize this historical and material condition into imperial stereotypes that serve as its justification. The resulting understanding of Africa—and the idea of Africans—is one that reinforces the racial and cultural logic of the imperial context. Race and racialization—specifically, the construction and maintenance of Africa’s “Blackness” (and, importantly, Europe’s “whiteness”)—then, are key determinants in understanding the meaning of Africa and “Africans.”

What Is Africa? Who Is an African?

The racialization of the continent has often involved a geographical split. As Amadou-Mahtar M’Bow pointed out in introducing UNESCO’s General History of Africa, historically, “emphasis was laid on everything likely to lend credence to the idea that a split had existed, from time immemorial, between a ‘white Africa’ and a ‘black Africa’” (1981, xvii). While the explicit racial discourse surrounding this geographical-cum-racial division of the African continent is not as prevalent today, the distinction remains a central and persistent aspect of contemporary thinking, research, writing, and politics about Africa. Academic scholarship continues to maintain, for example, the divergent focus on “MENA” (Middle East and North African) studies as often contrasted to—or indifferent to—African studies. A cursory review of recent political events clearly reveals this point. Thus, in both the mass media and academic discussions around the 2011 Arab Spring, there was hardly any mention of the African continent—even as these uprisings occurred in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, respectively.

Historian Ghislaine Lydon points out that it took a long time for scholars and colonists to erect the Saharan divide and fabricate the idea of two “Africas.” But even before scholars took up this project, religious leaders had already laid the foundations. Both the Arab and the European conquerors of Africa were first influenced by, and in turn helped sediment, the “Negro-Hamitic” hypothesis. This hypothesis stems from the biblical story of Noah’s curse of his son, Ham, with servitude. While the original sources of this tale did not generally reference race, later interpretations of the curse presented Ham as “Black,” linking the idea of blackness to servitude and to a racial hierarchy. The Hamitic hypothesis was disseminated through the three main external religious traditions that have impacted the African continent—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (El Hamel 2014).

The link of a presumed inferiority to racial Blackness served to not only erect a geo-racial barrier on the African continent, but to also justify the already established trans-Saharan slave trade and the beginnings of European conquest of the African continent. By the fourteenth century, “racial stereotypes of black Africans were conspicuous in Arabic sources” (El Hamel 2014, 72). They were conspicuous in European “classical” texts as well. By the time of the Arab invasions and occupation of the northern part of the continent in the seventh century, ideas about racial Blackness contributed to the erection of the Saharan desert as an ideological, civilizational, cultural, religious, and racial barrier. It must be noted that a few Islamic scholars disputed the Judeo-Christian—and by now Islamic—view about Blackness and the curse of Ham. The Maghrebi fourteenth-century scholar, Ibn Khaldūn, for example, argued that it was hot climate and not a religious curse that caused the “Black” skin of Africans. Yet he also concurred with other Islamic writers that Western Africa, Sudan (the Bilād al-Sūdān), and the geographical area south of the Sahara was the “land of Blacks.” After the spread of Islam in the northern part of Africa, certain Arab Muslim scholars began demarcating the African continent into distinct zones that had explicit racial inferences. Some of these Arab Muslim communities over time “came to label themselves as ‘whites’ (bidān), and began writing about theirs as ‘a territory of the whites’ ‘(trāb al-bidān)’” (Lydon 2015, 8).

But as Paul Zeleza notes, the North African/sub-Saharan split “got its epistemic and ideological imprimatur with the emergence of Eurocentricism following the rise of modern Europe” through the transatlantic slave trade and, later, the conquest of the African continent. While many point to anthropologist C. G. Seligman’s Races of Africa as the key text for establishing this racialized distinction (his thesis: “the Hamites—who are ‘Europeans’—belong to the same great branch of mankind as the ‘Whites’”), the first edition of that text was not published until 1930 (Harris 1987, 24). Others point to the French scholar, Émile-Félix Gautier whose 1939 book, l’Afrique blanche “equated the Sahara to an ‘ethnic partition’ (cloison ethnique) separating the black African from the white African, and . . . [assimilating] the latter to the ‘White Mediterranean’” (Lydon 2015, 10). These works, however, only articulated the shift that had occurred in Europe’s engagement with the African continent—and the Negro-Hamite hypothesis alongside the consolidation of European whiteness.

By the early 1900s, the Hamitic Hypothesis had taken a unique turn from its original conception of Ham as cursed with racial blackness and servitude. Hamites were now European, and white, and the sole carriers of civilization and culture to the African continent. This sharp shift in thinking occurred through an accumulated set of historical, political, and intellectual developments. The expansion of the transatlantic trade in Africans, the entrenchment of slavery in the New World, and the struggle among European nations for global hegemony that would eventually lead to formal colonial control of the African continent (as well as Asia), all worked to further sediment racist attitudes toward Africans. At the same time the emergence and consolidation of racial science worked to justify the exploitation and dehumanization of Africans, on the continent and abroad. But it was not until Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion of Egypt in 1798, however, that we see intensification of European intellectual investment in the racial division of the continent. Napoleon traveled to Egypt with a large number of archaeologists, engineers, and other scientists to study Egyptian history and culture. This scientific expedition yielded numerous studies and publications covering every aspect of Egyptian culture and its people. Not only was Egypt’s civilization said to be much older than European scientists had assumed, but the foundation of Western civilization was to be found there as well. But because Egypt was in Africa, the land of the “inferior” Negroes, and because Negro-Hamites were thought to be Egyptian (a fact which many of the early French scholars ironically affirmed), this new knowledge meant a renewed effort to construct Egypt as white (Diop 1974).

In the context of the transatlantic slave trade and European empire making, the quick ascent of French—and later, European—Egyptology was the “attempt to prove in some way that the Egyptians were not Negroes” (Sanders 1969, 525). Thus, the insistence that Egyptians were white and “Caucasoid”—or just not Black or Negro—served as the basis for the new Hamitic hypothesis which argued either that both ancient and modern Egyptians were Hamites, or that white Hamitic outsiders brought civilization to the African continent. The new Hamitic hypothesis had a double function. On the one hand, it further racialized the idea of civilization as “white” (and European). On the other hand, it racialized “Africanness” as “Blackness” and therefore as lacking civilization and history. As Kamugisha contends, “The status and nature of ‘blackness’ here are important, as this is little more than another way of saying that ancient Egypt is not an African civilization, despite its location in Africa” (2003, 42). Thus, the point was not only to demonstrate that Egypt was not “Black” but also to show that it was not “African.” For, to be “Negro” (or “Black”) was to be “African,” and to be “African” was to be “Negro” (or “Black”). Such tautology not only had the effect of removing Egypt from Africa, it also insisted on the racial/biological and cultural unity of the rest of non-Hamite or “Black Africa.”

Immanuel Wallerstein reminds us that it would not matter who the Egyptians were had it not been such an obsession during the period of European colonialism. Egypt was the key site for the “invention of ‘white Africa’” (Lydon 2015, 8) and the enduring racial separation of the African continent. This developed throughout various European schools of thought and was entrenched in European epistemologies, particularly the French and British, whose colonial ventures on the northern part of the African continent depended on it. The French, for example, deployed this “white Africa” formulation in the administration of its colonies. While France lost Egypt to the British, it managed to take over Algeria by 1830 (and by 1885, a group of Western European nations met at the Berlin Conference to carve up the rest of the African continent). But even as France sought to build an African empire, this empire depended upon the racial distinction between the “north” and the rest of Africa. Thus, Algeria, and later Morocco and Tunisia, were part of “white Africa” and designated as the extension of France, despite their large Muslim populations, long Arab legacy, and the presence of indigenous Black populations. This did not mean, of course, that North Africans did not also suffer dehumanizing racialization. Rather, this was a distinct process of racialization inasmuch as colonies in the north were considered—and constructed as—non-Black (ostensibly erasing the history and presence of the indigenous Black population of North Africa). A clear example of this is the way that French colonial rule distinguished between Arabs and “Blacks” (or “Africans”) through both its political and juridical practices. French colonial authorities passed a decree in 1911 to prohibit spoken Arabic throughout their administration in “black” Africa, starting in courthouses (Lydon 2015, 11). In its intense fixation on Islamic resistance to its rule (and presumed Islamic radicalism), French politicians and scholars also measured degree of radicaliz...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction  •  Adeline Masquelier and Gaurav Desai
• 1   Africa/African  •  Jemima Pierre
• 2   Belonging  •  Peter Geschiere
• 3   Bondage  •  Gwyn Campbell
• 4   Citizenship  •  Francis B. Nyamnjoh
• 5   Colonialism  •  John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff
• 6   Design  •  Suzanne Preston Blier
• 7   Environment  •  Maano Ramutsindela
• 8   Evidence  •  Luise White
• 9   Gender and Sexuality  •  Marc Epprecht
• 10   Governance  •  Brenda Chalfin and Omolade Adunbi
• 11   Health  •  Susan Reynolds Whyte
• 12   Humanitarianism  •  Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf
• 13   Labor  •  Jane I. Guyer
• 14   Liberation  •  Elisabeth McMahon
• 15   Mobility  •  Patrick Manning
• 16   Modernity  •  Simon Gikandi
• 17   Narrative  •  Stephanie Newell
• 18   Performance  •  Tsitsi Jaji
• 19   Population  •  Deborah Durham
• 20   Spirit  •  Matthew Engelke
• 21   Theory  •  Joseph Slaughter and Jennifer Wenzel
• 22   Value  •  Leonard Wantchekon and Paul-Aarons Ngomo
• 23   Vernacular  •  Derek R. Peterson
• 24   Violence  •  Kamari M. Clarke
• 25   Witchcraft  •  Adam Ashforth
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Index