African Studies: Ato Quayson Speaks!
PIUS ADESANMI: It is my pleasure to welcome you to the inaugural edition of the PONAL Quarterly Forum (PQF). At PQF, we let our guests - starting with you! - introduce themselves to our audience. So, who is Ato Quayson?
Ato Quayson
ATO QUAYSON: I am the inaugural director of the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto and Professor of English. Previously I was a Reader in Commonwealth and Postcolonial Literature at the University of Cambridge in the UK and also Director of the Centre for African Studies there.
PIUS: My first set of questions has to do with institutions, landscapes, and the production of African (ist) knowledge. You spent more than a decade in Cambridge University as one of the leading Africanists in Europe. Now you have crossed over to the North American landscape. You are auspiciously positioned to reflect on the similarities and differences in the production of Africanist knowledge in the European academy and its North American counterpart. With specific reference to your own work, what, if any, are some of the consequences of this move in terms of the Africa you research, teach, and write? Is the “Africa” of European African Studies significantly different from the “Africa” of North American African Studies?
ATO: That is a very important question. The Africa of European study is somewhat different from that of its North American counterpart, even though there are overlaps here and there. My answer would have to take account of the broader systemic contexts of the two geographical areas, as well as more specifically focusing on Cambridge University, where as you said, I was based for over a decade. One thing that immediately differentiates the European countries (UK, France, Holland, Germany) from North America (predominantly the US but also Canada) is that the countries of Europe ran extensive empires, of which their African colonies were a part. In running their colonial bureaucracies there developed quite elaborate expatriate communities. In some cases, such as in Kenya or South Africa, these expatriate communities expropriated local lands and established explicit hierarchies between themselves and the local Africans. However, one of the unintended effects of these expatriate communities is that, to this day, there are many Europeans who trace some family connection to Africa. Thus at a place like Cambridge University the bulk of people who come to study Africa do so because they had older generations in their families working in colonial Africa, or, as is often the case, going there to help in the nation-building effort after independence.
Even though these European Africanists study the continent because of an initial sense of familial nostalgia, it is also the case that they often show a very robust commitment to African development. And this is far from merely skin deep. It would interest you to know that Britain’s Tony Blair spent some of his childhood in Sierra Leone, where his father was a teacher; John Major, a Prime Minister before him, also spent some time in Nigeria as a young man. Tony Blair’s commitment to Africa derives partly from this detail of his personal life. Yet well before the institutionalization of the study of Africa at universities in Europe, Africa was already an object of study by missionaries and colonial officials. Without a doubt the early missionaries that came to places like South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya and others were avid scholars of the continent and, both in their journals and through more learned avenues, produced an image of Africa that was to feed into the “Africa” that was later to be studied. Indeed, it would not be unfair to say that missionaries were the earliest anthropologists and that the templates they established implicitly influenced the study of Africa for a very long time afterwards. Rev Fr Tempels is a classic in this mould of missionary scholars, but he was not alone in his exertions. After the missionaries came the colonial officers who, with the help of local translators, also produced an object of study useful for the colonial enterprise. Lord Lugard offers a classic example of the colonial officer/student of Africa and we know how important his understanding of local mores was for shaping the country that is now Nigeria. In addition to missionaries and colonial officers we must also take account of the local interpreters, who precisely because of their efforts at mediating a version of Africa to the missionaries and colonialists, also served to contribute to the image of Africa that made its way back to Europe.
Let me point out the particularly poignant case of Krotoa, the first Khoikhoi to live and work with the Dutch when they came to settle in Cape Town from the 1650s. She and the other translators, who worked for the Dutch settlers, were instrumental in mediating knowledge of the various cattle herding groups of the area, in giving useful geographical knowledge about the environment, and, most importantly, in providing the settlers a picture of the political landscape that they had let themselves into. There is no doubt that Krotoa and others such as her were producing an object of knowledge, even if this appeared to be merely instrumental and not particularly scholarly. Later scholars were to cover the same ground as Krotoa and, whether consciously or not, were acting as translators of local knowledge for various constituencies, all of which were not African or indeed particularly interested in the welfare of the continent. The link then between Europe and the continent and the conduits through which African(ist) knowledge was produced varied across time and yet had an overall character that is recognizable in the European scholarly discourse on Africa to this day.
In the US, on the other hand, the study of Africa has less diachronic depth. It is conventionally traced to the establishment of Area Studies programs under the auspices of the Title VI provisions of the NDEA (National Defence Education Act). Title VI of the NDEA set out to provide grants to Area Studies units across the country in support of core programs, student fellowships, library resources, and language training. The grants were, and still are, subject to competitive renewal every three years. The appointment by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) from the 1940s of various area Joint Committees served to consolidate the position of these areas. Thus Joint Committees were set up for the Slavic area in 1948, Asia (1949), the Near- and Middle East (1951), China (1959), Latin America (1959) and Africa (1960).
It is now generally acknowledged by scholars of African Studies that these Area Studies programs had as their central aim the provision of knowledge of various geographical areas of the world to aid America, not just in understanding those areas, but in devising policy instruments by which to anticipate changes in this rapidly growing world. At the same time it also had unintended effects, the most significant of which was that not all scholars trained under the NDEA rubric necessarily had an interest in lending their knowledge to expand American interests in Africa. We must make a distinction between these and the programs that have been institutionalized and still benefit from state funding. Institutionalized programs in African Studies were in many ways forced to establish partnerships (and sometimes even rivalries) with programs in Ethnic Studies and African-American Studies, both of which were driven by the demands of American minorities, which organized themselves from the 70s to change the curriculum to reflect a more diverse interest. African Studies then became the study of the Africa that lay “elsewhere” (i.e., on the continent), while Ethnic Studies and African-American Studies were arguably about the Africa (and other places) that lay within America itself. The two are not necessarily the same but there are very interesting points of intersection that cannot be ignored. At any rate, in talking about African-American Studies, it is important to recall the efforts of the early pioneers of this area, such as Herskovits and others, whose interest was well and truly “diasporic” in the sense that they argued for an understanding of those parts of African culture that had remained pertinent to African- American life. They were joined by others at historically black institutions such as Howard College, where the focus was on race pride and on tracing a robust African heritage that went back to Egypt and to Timbuktu. This heritage Africa is what later on emerges as an object of celebration in the Harlem Renaissance. It is an Africa distinct from the Africa to be gleaned from the works of social scientists, political theorists, and other academic scholars *and yet extends their “Africa” in sometimes unanticipated directions. It is in these ways that I think the study of Africa in Europe differs from that of North America.