African Studies: Ato Quayson Speaks!
PIUS: This is not a question. It’s a scenario I want you to put in perspective. As founding Director of the University of Toronto’s Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies, can you describe the position of Africa within the overall scheme of things at the Centre? This question betrays a certain anxiety I share with so many of our friends in the field. There are positive murmurs in the circuit and I wonder if you’re aware of this. There is this feeling among some of us, core Africanists, that we may well be watching the diasporic branch of Black knowledge production snatch you from us in broad daylight! This applies to our esteemed colleague, Paul Zeleza, who now chairs a Department of African American studies in Illinois. In the North American institutional landscape – with a postcolonial theory that privileges translocation, hybridity, deracination and Diaspora; with a Black Atlanticist theoretical ambience that privileges the excision of Africa – Africa already receives the short end of the stick as it were. So, if Diaspora becomes the “centre” of the scholarship of our Ato Quaysons and Paul Zelezas, does Africa become a residual site of scholarly engagement?
Ato Quayson
ATO: Well, I do not see the matter in terms of African Studies losing out to Postolonial or Diaspora Studies when people such as Paul and I switch fields. Recall that I was director of the Centre for African Studies at Cambridge for a long time and that my earliest work was firmly within African literary studies. In many ways my basic instincts are and will remain that of an Africanist. Having said that, I should also note that scholars such as Paul and myself cannot be limited to any particular disciplinary field or indeed area. My work has always been interdisciplinary. The move to Diaspora Studies is thus a natural transition for me, especially also because it represents a very significant dimension of Postcolonial Studies, itself an area that I have done a fair amount of work in. In terms of the position of African Studies within the broader area of Diaspora Studies, the thing to note is that in that field the African Diaspora embracing the Americas (the US, Brazil), the Caribbean and Europe is taken as one of the classic Diasporas along with the Jewish, the Greek, and the Armenian traditions. African and African-American Diaspora studies are, in many ways, quite different from African Diaspora Studies. Studies of Diaspora within African Studies have to take account of the many confluences and trajectories of non-African peoples that for various reasons have found themselves on the continent, and also on Africans that have found themselves elsewhere. In the first category we might include the considerable South Asian Diaspora in East Africa, the Lebanese Diaspora of West Africa, and the Italian Diaspora of the Southern African region. Each of these fit in well with the economic history of the relevant regions, something that I am sure Paul would be better at discussing than I. But just as a sign of the complex issues that might be raised: South Asians, mainly from India, were first brought to East Africa as indentured labour from the 1880s. Remember that the indenture labour policy was itself designed as a response to the abolition of slavery in the 1840s to take account of the needs of plantation owners in the West Indies who now felt their plantations were sure to collapse due to the loss of slave labour. By the 1880s the policy had been extended to East Africa, but mainly in order to provide a useful group of non-African labour that could be used on development projects. The practice of bringing South Asian indentured labour to the region was officially discontinued in the 1920s, yet many of the early labourers refused to return to South Asia. Rather, being mostly male, they invited their wives and families to come and join them. Because of the particular exigencies of colonial policy, many of these South Asians went into business and commerce and, with time, came to be recognized as significant economic players in the region. By the 1970s, however, and after several generations of successful settlement in the region, the fate of these South Asians in East Africa was to undergo a radical change. I think here specifically of the rise of Idi Amin and his brutalization of this population. Idi Amin triggered a mass migration of South Asians from Uganda and the rest of the region. Thus we see that the South Asian Diaspora in East Africa allows us to explore at least three different Diaspora categories, namely, labour Diaspora (indentured labour from the 1880s), economic Diaspora (when the South Asians settled and became successful business men with links to their homeland), and victim Diaspora (when they were forcefully dispersed by the terrible policies of Idi Amin). Now the case of the South Asians of the region provides fascinating entry points for discussing the nature of African Studies (who qualifies to be called an African, for example) as well as wider debates about categories in Diaspora Studies in general (different types of diasporization and their intersections and overlaps over time). Furthermore, by taking a Diaspora Studies perspective we are led to sharpen the lens by which we understand the processes of migration among exclusively African populations. Are there lessons to be drawn from Diaspora Studies for understanding the large movements of Nigerians and Ghanaians between their two countries over a period of, at least, the past 40yrs? How about the Hutu refugees who have been in Tanzania since the 1970s? And what of the increasing numbers of Africans from all parts of the country coming to seek their welfare in post-apartheid South Africa? What we see then is that there are fertile intersections between African Studies and Diaspora Studies. Thus my move from the one to the other should be taken as a happy coincidence, rather than cause for alarm and lamentation.