An Auspicious Initiative
Paul Tiyambe Zeleza
(page 2 of 5)
Both of you are right that there are different “Africas” in different locations. This underscores an obvious if ignored fact: knowledge production is a spatialized social practice. I agree with Ato that the Africa of European study is, in many ways, quite different from the Africa of North American study, let alone of study in Africa itself. Europe’s Africa is deeply implicated with empire, with colonialism. I was intrigued to learn of Tony Blair’s Sierra Leonean upbringing and the possible implications this may have had on his Africa policy.
I would qualify some of Ato’s observations with a few points of detail. Colonial empire and its aftermath frame some but not all European countries where African Studies constitute an important or recognizable field of study. This is true of the Scandinavian countries and Russia, for example, where the study of Africa was driven, historically, by developmentalist and revolutionary imperatives, respectively. If the legacies of empire structure African Studies in Britain and France, the impulses of solidarity do so in Sweden and Russia. Then there is the peculiar case of Germany, a colonial power that lost its African empire after World War I, where African Studies developed, exhibiting a complex amalgam of imperial, solidarity, and postcolonial tendencies, especially if we consider the two Germanys of post-World War II era together.
The field of African Studies in North America is no less diverse if we take North America to include Canada, the United States, and Mexico; the common practice is to conflate the U.S. with North America. Canadian and Mexican scholars understandably object to this. African Studies in the two countries have their own distinctive histories, in part framed by their very locations on the northern and southern borders of the belly of the contemporary imperial beast. Also, African Diaspora populations in both countries are relatively small, and each country relates to Africa and race quite differently. Canada’s Africa relations are mediated by the legacies of British and French colonial empires in Africa, through the Commonwealth and La Francophonie, while Mexico has no similar mechanism through Spain, whose African empire was negligible.
Race and racial hierarchies are foundational for the settler societies of the Americas. They frame the political and cultural economies of social life and public discourse, including scholarship. This is true of African Studies in the United States itself. Conventional white histories of the field attribute its development to the historically white universities, where it is said that the field emerged after World War II to serve the national security agenda of the American state, now embroiled in superpower rivalry with the former Soviet Union, to win hearts and minds in the rapidly decolonizing Third World. This narrative ignores the simple fact that African Studies was pioneered in the historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), by Howard not Northwestern, by W.E.B Dubois rather than Melville Herskovits.