Critical Dimensions of African Studies: Re-Membering Africa 1666917230, 9781666917239

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Language and the International/Transnational Lens
Tom Spencer-Walters
Terms Matter
Speaking Africa
“Africa for the Africans” Garvey and African Transnationality
“Back Home This Never Would Have Happened”
Humanistic Approach
Bumuntu Humanism and “Values Discourse”
“Working the Past”
The Power of Memory and Language
Marché Sandaga
Critical Theory and Practice
Africa’s Adult Literacy Landscape in the Age of Globalization
Remembering Africa
Reconciling Traditional and Nontraditional Approaches to Mental Health Services
Conclusion
Afterword
Index
About the Contributors

Citation preview

Critical Dimensions of African Studies

Critical Dimensions of African Studies Re-Membering Africa Edited by Jennifer De Maio, Suzanne Scheld, and Tom Spencer-Walters

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2023 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: De Maio, Jennifer L., editor. | Scheld, Suzanne, editor. | Spencer-Walters, Tom, editor. Title: Critical dimensions of African studies : re-membering Africa / edited by Jennifer De Maio, Suzanne Scheld, and Tom Spencer-Walters Description: Lanham, Maryland : Lexington Books, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023020215 (print) | LCCN 2023020216 (ebook) | ISBN 9781666917239 (cloth) | ISBN 9781666917246 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: African diaspora--Study and teaching (Higher) | Africa--Study and teaching (Higher) | Africa--History–1960Classification: LCC DT19.8 C76 2023 (print) | LCC DT19.8 (ebook) | DDC 960.0711–dc23/eng/20230502 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023020215 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023020216 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Part I: Language and the International/Transnational Lens . . . . . 1 1: Tom Spencer-Walters: Intellectual Freedom Fighter . . . . . . . . .3 Selase W. Williams

2: Terms Matter: The Use of “Tribe” in African Studies . . . . . . . 17 Jennifer L. De Maio and Daniel N. Posner

3: Speaking Africa: Re-membering Africa through Language, Culture, and Aesthetics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 Sheba Lo

4: “Africa for the Africans” Garvey and African Transnationality: The Idea of Flexible Citizenship . . . . . . . . . . 51 W. Gabriel Selassie I 5: “Back Home This Never Would Have Happened”: Imagining Tradition and Modernity among Ugandan Pentecostals in Los Angeles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 Kevin Zemlicka Part II: Humanistic Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 6: Bumuntu Humanism and “Values Discourse”: Reflection on the Importance of African Studies in Our Tumultuous Time . . . . 91 Mutombo Nkulu-N’Sengha

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Contents

7: “Working the Past”: Memory, Language, and Echoes of Slavery in Ama Ata Aidoo’s and . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119 Raquel Kennon

8: The Power of Memory and Language: Counter-Stories as Oppositional Re-Membering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149 Renee M. Moreno

9: Marché Sandaga: The Language of the Built Environment in Remembering and Re-Membering Africa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169 Suzanne Scheld Part III: Critical Theory and Practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185 10: Africa’s Adult Literacy Landscape in the Age of Globalization: A Path to Increased Access and Change . . . . . . . 187 Daphne W. Ntiri

11: Remembering Africa: Memory, Disability, and the Narrative Imagination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201 Rodney B. Hume-Dawson

12: Reconciling Traditional and Nontraditional Approaches to Mental Health Services: The African Diaspora Experience . . . . . 219 Senait Admassu, Kofi Peprah, and Edwin Aimufua Part IV: Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229 Afterword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231 Tom Spencer-Walters Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237

About the Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to many for their help in bringing this text to life. We thank our colleagues on the Advisory Board of the Interdisciplinary Studies of Africa Minor Program (ISAMP) at California State University, Northridge (CSUN). The motivation for this book stemmed from conversations and collaborations within this committee, and we are forever grateful to our colleagues for their support and solidarity. Our peers, staff, and students have cheered us on throughout and we especially thank Dean Yan Searcy of the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences at CSUN and Provost Mary Beth Walker for their steadfast support of ISAMP and its annual symposia, in particular the 2021 symposium where this project began. Sydney Wedbush at Lexington has also championed this book from the beginning, and we are grateful for her experience and steady editorial guidance. We also thank Emilia Rivera at Lexington for shepherding the manuscript through its final stages to publication. Finally, we owe a debt of gratitude to our families for their care and patience throughout this process.

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Introduction Jennifer De Maio, Suzanne Scheld, and Tom Spencer-Walters

Defining African studies has taken multiple paths in the post–Second World War period when many African and Asian countries were agitating for and gaining independence from colonial powers. African studies, for example, is sometimes considered as a discrete discipline, characterized by its rigid demands for content/context specificity of clearly identified African countries. While this approach largely promoted in-depth knowledge of the discipline, some say it encouraged insularity and protectiveness, as well as intellectual territorialism that was often associated with the emergence of nation states and nationalism. Observations of contemporary globalization and increased flows of transnational migration has encouraged moving away from conceiving African studies as a bounded field and toward emphasizing a more open-ended field that takes into account African mobilities, social movements, and other global and transnational phenomena rooted in Africa and networked across the globe. Some, however, continue to view African studies as “area studies,” which, unlike the discrete or independent disciplinary approach, is more regional in its orientation, dividing the continent into sub-Saharan, North African, and Southern African regions, for example. African diaspora studies is often considered as a distinct field although it overlaps with African studies. First developed in the 1950s, early scholars of the African diaspora adapted models from studies of the “dispersion” of Jews. Eventually, it was recognized that the psychological, social, and economic dimensions of migrations were important to theorize. Thus, scholars turned to the broader concept of “diaspora.” Early studies of the African diaspora focus on processes, experiences, identities, community formation, and linguistic, cultural, and human loss in the context of the transatlantic trade and ix

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the triangular trade, in general. Over time, the focus broadened to include studies of the movement of Africans to other parts of the world, including South and Central America, In the 1980s, as the result of emerging trends associated with globalization, African diaspora studies broadened its lens to consider a wider range of motivations propelling and drawing Africans into migration, including labor migration, trade, civil war, youthful adventure, among other factors. This shift has also led to studies that currently examine the African diaspora in “off the beaten path” places, including the Gulf and Asia. Over the course of these shifts in the development of studies of the African diaspora, a number of core questions endure: Why do Africans leave the continent? How does the journey shape those leaving and remaining in the “homeland,” and those attempting to integrate into a new land? How do Africans in the diaspora integrate into new lands? What motivates Africans in the diaspora to return to the homeland? What relationships exist across the spaces of the diaspora? And what aspects of culture are lost, maintained, and gained in the diaspora? While studies of Africa and the African diaspora are often treated as separate fields of inquiry, there are many points of overlap including the shared mission of critiquing hierarchies and calling for social justice and transformation. In this book, we assert that merging both perspectives is essential to reaching these objectives and to re-membering Africa. Finally, African and African diaspora studies have been characterized as fields comprised of interdisciplinary perspectives. Many see this approach as breaking down disciplinary barriers, fostering collaboration and cooperation in and across disciplines, especially where interests and research ventures intersect. One of the strengths of African and African diaspora studies is their interdisciplinarity. However, scholars from disparate fields rarely talk to and put themselves in a position to learn from one another. What is more, knowledge of Africa is often devalued, minimized, and censored in the curriculum, making interdisciplinarity an important conduit for disseminating scholarship related to Africa. This volume brings together top researchers, thinkers, and activists from across the disciplines to reflect on both Africa and the study of Africa. Our book proposes a critical approach to the study of Africa that emphasizes a critique of power structures, the promotion of human liberation, the production of relevant and applicable knowledge, a commitment to social justice and transformation, and critical reflection on the politics of the production and circulation of knowledge of Africa. This book also brings together authors who are passionate about their theoretical and applied work, and who speak from the heart when sharing their personal experiences as citizens and allies of citizens of Africa. Writing styles in the book are diverse as well, as some tackle traditional theoretical issues and others discuss their activism in African communities, while others merge both theoretical and activist

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perspectives. We feel the diversity of voices in the conversation reflects the goal and a method for re-membering Africa. This book is organized around three related key themes: international/ transnational, humanistic, and a combined critical theory and practice perspectives. Each of these themes, we argue, represents an important dimension of contemporary African and African diaspora studies and re-centering these themes within the discipline will help to advance the field. We divide the book into parts around these themes. The first part addresses the importance of an international/transnational lens and focuses on the need to integrate perspectives of phenomena on the continent and in the diaspora, and to view these spaces through a global lens. Often research focuses on either the continent or the diaspora, thereby treating these spaces as discrete silos. Yet, the movement of people and their experiences in migration and abroad shape and are shaped by events and processes in both spaces. Global perspectives bring the relationship and integration of these spaces into view. The second part evaluates a “people-first” or humanistic approach to teaching and promoting African studies, which emphasizes people as a source of innovation and creativity. In some areas of studies, such as urban studies, people are equated with urban infrastructure. A humanistic approach centers on “re-membering” the field of African studies by emphasizing African voices and the perspectives of African scholars. As language is often considered a distinguishing feature of being human, the humanistic approach emphasizes the value and role of language and symbolism. Scholars of African studies have drawn attention to the ways that language and symbolism have been used to frame Africa in the media, discourse, and policy in harmful ways. A humanistic approach also critiques these uses of language and symbolism, and the underlying power dynamics that led to these inventions. The final part proposes a critical theory and practice perspective that considers integrating learning for knowing and learning for doing (e.g., integrating theory and action) as a pedagogical principle. It emphasizes an inclusive approach to teaching and learning, bringing people together regardless of their position in the social landscape of academia, and position on the continent and in the diaspora. It offers a “community of practice” (Lave and Wenger 1991) approach to disseminating knowledge of Africa. This book makes a unique contribution to knowledge of Africa delivered through the voices of scholars, leaders, and activists, and African and other scholars with long-standing interest in and research on the continent. By reflecting, considering, and defining the field from various disciplines, this book considers the history, the critical debates, and the challenges to current views of the status and future direction of African studies. Part I on language and the international/transnational lens opens with Selase William’s consideration of the scholar Tom Spencer-Walters’s impact on the

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reclamation, analysis, and description of fundamental cultural components of African and African diasporan societies. His work interrogates the language, communication system, and literature of a wide swath of the African world, particularly uncovering the impact of European colonialism on the very fabric of African civilizations, their social and economic development, and their self-identity. Spencer-Walters has written perhaps the most comprehensive and cogent treatise on the debate between orality and literacy, played a major role in documenting and legitimizing Sierra Leone Krio as a full-fledged language, and demonstrated the creative power of African and African diasporan writers in their attempts to present an authentic African worldview. The depth and breadth of his contributions reveal Spencer-Walters to be a true intellectual freedom fighter. The part continues with Jennifer De Maio and Daniel Posner’s examination of how language, in particular the word “tribe,” used by Western researchers in their studies of Africa can have the effect of extending neocolonial power structures and perpetuating inequalities (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2018; Zeleza 2009; Lowe 1997; wa Thiong’o 1986). They analyze data from fifty years of African studies publications on the use of the word “tribe” and consider the strengths and weaknesses of adopting “ethnic group” as the preferred label for African cultural communities. The chapter engages with the debate about rethinking language choices and asks whether the words researchers use in the African context can support a discourse grounded in African realities and that moves beyond colonial frameworks/constructions. In her chapter, “Speaking Africa: Re-Membering Africa through Language, Culture, and Aesthetics,” Sheba Lo seeks to define the “Africanness” in the language, culture, and aesthetics of African Americans in the United States. The similarities in the tense and aspect systems of Wolof, the majority language of Sénégal, and African American Language (AAL) form the foundation for the discussion of an intentional re-membering, re-connecting, and re-envisioning Africa in the African American community. The chapter connects the African structures of AAL with the importance of Africa in the Black Aesthetic, African American liberation movements, and the culture and cultural expression of Black people in the United States. W. Gabriel Selassie I, in the chapter “‘Africa for the Africans’” Garvey and African Transnationality: The Idea of Flexible Citizenship,” examines whether Africa, as a collective, has forgotten its people of the diaspora. Modern modes of communication and travel, and global commercial expansion have allowed for the blossoming of a global citizenry capable of operating fluidly between nations. Transnational or flexible citizenship is increasingly a feature of many global citizens who share work and leisure between continents. A new wrinkle has emerged in this transnational phenomenon—African Americans and other Black diasporans (Caribbeans) are

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emigrating to Africa. They are largely doing so without any assistance from the United States or the governments of Africa. This move has been brought on by a growing sense that America, as a racist nation, is unredeemable. Amid the racial turmoil that African American see as intractable, there is a growing movement of emigration to Africa. This movement has coincided with an interest by a few African nations in welcoming or “returning” Black diasporans to the continent. Despite this growing interest, African nations have been reluctant or indifferent to committing themselves politically to any real measures that would offer diasporic emigres a sense of purpose and security. This article raises questions about the emergence of an African American (and, by extension, Afro-Caribbean) transnational citizen. It also seeks to raise concerns about the seeming reluctance of African nations to extend as a form of reparations the right of return through a form of flexible citizenship. Kevin Zemlicka, in the final chapter of Part I, explores the ways in which Pentecostal beliefs and practices provide connections between the past and present, transcending time and space. He draws his analysis from the time he spent with members of the Ugandan diaspora community at the Revival Power Ministries in Los Angeles, California. Zemickla focuses primarily on the experiences of women as powerful linkages between tradition and modernity in transnational settings and argues that religion allows members of the diaspora to have discursive control over how they are perceived as individuals and as a community and to navigate the marginalizing pressures of relocation and adaptation. In Part II of this book, which applies a humanistic approach, Mutombo Nkulu-N’Sengha engages with the geopolitical events of 2020–21 and the visceral reactions to “African immigrants in Europe,” “critical race theory,” the “woke” movement, and the global “Black Lives Matter” movement have brought forth a new reality that challenges old certainties about progress and postcoloniality. His chapter, “Bumuntu Humanism and ‘Values Discourse’: Reflection on the Importance of African Studies in Our Tumultuous Time” reflects on how to teach, write, and talk about Africa in the context of a new scramble for African natural and human resources, a rising cold war between China and the Western world, and growing resistance to humanistic scholarship that intends to correct the colonial and neocolonial distortion and falsification of African history and African contribution to world civilization. He draws on his teaching experience in six American Universities and colleges over the past twenty-five years and his field trips and research in Central Africa over the past eight years. His reflection on “values discourse” derives mainly from religious studies, ethics, political philosophy, and political economy, sociology and anthropology. In “‘Working the Past’”: Memory, Language, and Echoes of Slavery in Ama Ata Aidoo’s The Dilemma of a Ghost and Anowa,” Raquel Kennon

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focuses on two of Ama Ata Aidoo’s classic early plays, The Dilemma of a Ghost (1965) and Anowa (1970), which each explore questions of family, belonging, inheritance, language, and the memory of the slave trade. Her analysis of the former play centers on Aidoo’s inventive dramatization of the marriage between Ato and Eulalie as a metaphor for the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade and its impact on shaping the diaspora. While the five-acts of The Dilemma of a Ghost offer a more traditional dramatic structure with its explicit engagement with slavery’s past, the use of the chorus and supernatural elements in Anowa construct a play that operates on several literary registers to depict the specter of slavery and colonialism as allegory. Drawing on Dr. Tom Spencer-Walters’s illuminating scholarship on orality, memory, language, and diaspora in literary studies, this chapter examines how reading Dilemma and Anowa together provides an instructive dramatic dyad revealing how these key elements intersect in profound ways within the African literary tradition. The sometimes complex relationship between history and memory is inevitable in literature because writers frequently evoke history in their quest to seek and reconstruct the past. The pairing of The Dilemma of a Ghost and Anowa in the single classic edition in the Longman African Writers series persuasively dramatizes this idea of “working the past,” imaginatively wrestling with individual, societal, and global traumas. In “The Power of Memory and Language: Counter-Stories as Oppositional Re-Membering,” Renee Moreno explores the right to students’ own language in composition classrooms and their right to be literate subjects, bringing their own home literacies along as they participate in higher education. As women and people of color—from working class and underrepresented backgrounds—we know and understand the fight for inclusion well. To this end, she shares three “counter-stories” that reflect the work we do in composition classrooms on behalf of students’ literacy. Moreno reflects on perspectives and understanding of the “power of story,” of language, of counter-memory, and of re-membering. She considers how people who think about story, who think about how people tell stories, and who think about how storytelling can reclaim literacy and can reclaim memory to contend that literacy, counter-stories, and memory collapse into the struggle for inclusion. Suzanne Scheld’s chapter “Marché Sandaga: The Language of the Built Environment in Remembering and Re-Membering,” examines the history of a popular market in downtown Dakar that was recently demolished in order to improve the urban infrastructure and modernize the city. The market was created in the 1930s by French colonial administrators who needed examples of their accomplishments in order to legitimize their control over the colony. In the postcolonial era, the image of the market is transformed by Murid trading and transnational networks. Given the rich but fragmented history of the

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market, it was a controversial decision to knock it down. Scheld sees parallels between Thiong’o’s notion of re-membering Africa through the preservation of African language and re-membering Africa through cultural heritage conservation. She also points out that Marché Sandaga has become a mythical space within the city, and as such its memory is available for storytelling to suit a wide range of agendas that have the potential to contribute to as well as detract from re-membering Africa. Part III of the book applies a critical theory and practice lens to the discussion of (re)membering Africa. In her chapter, Daphne W. Ntiri takes an interdisciplinary approach to consider the capacity of literacy to serve as an agent for change, a pathway to power, a driver for academic success, and currency for socioeconomic mobility. She examines the Pan-Africanist and humanistic ideas enshrined in the Ubuntu philosophy and confronts challenges to the implementation of effective policies to promote literacy and translate those skills into economic growth. Ntiri also explores the intersection of gender and literacy to document ways by which increased access to literacy has contributed to Black women’s changing status and roles. Rodney Hume-Dawson continues the focus on humanism in “Remembering Africa: Memory and the Narrative Imagination in the Polio Survivor’s Experience.” Illnesses, chronic diseases, and disabling experiences are critical in our understanding of the human experience of disability, pain, suffering, the world of medicine, and the maturity of a society. Unfortunately, many societies still perceive disability as an anomaly, something to be feared, ashamed of, and in most cases, an individual problem. Hume-Dawson argues that as scholars, we have both a moral and human obligation to change the dynamic and challenge the status quo. We have a duty to bring this to the attention of our political leaders and initiate national dialogues that would provoke and inform discussions about our continuous negative attitudes toward disability and the inhumane ways we treat our fellow humans worldwide. Real life stories of Polio survivors can teach us about the essence of life, what we consider worthy, and how to structure our world so that all human beings, irrespective of differences, can live harmoniously and fruitfully. Tapping on the memories and narrative imaginations of polio survivors, this chapter brings to light individual and collective memories that can transform our limited notions of what it means to be disabled and human. In this book’s final chapter, Senait Admassu, Kofi Peprah, and Edwin Aimufua center their analysis of mental health services on the African diaspora in the United States in general and more specifically in Los Angeles County where their African Coalition group is based. The African Coalition partners with communities and agencies to provide mental health services and education to local African communities. In their chapter, Admassu and Peprah offer a comparative analysis of Western nontraditional and African

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nontraditional approaches to mental diagnosis and treatments. They consider the strengths and weaknesses of each approach and suggest reconciliatory approaches to improve the safety, health, and well-being of the African diaspora community. The chapters in this book approach the notion of re-membering Africa in diverse ways. From examining the connections made through discrete linguistic varieties and registers, to storytelling through literature, forms of spirituality, and the built environment, to on-the-ground efforts to improve the well-being of Africans, and planning a return to Africa, the chapters collectively offer new visions and methods for re-membering Africa. Inspiration and wisdom provided by African scholars such as Tom Spencer Walters, Ngungi wa Thiong’o, and many authors contributing to this book are creating new possibilities for re-membering Africa. African and African diaspora studies are growing and changing fields, and through their synchronization and inclusive approach, instances of dis-membering Africa can be exposed, and a new path toward re-membering Africa can be developed.

PART I

Language and the International/ Transnational Lens

1

1

Tom Spencer-Walters Intellectual Freedom Fighter Selase W. Williams

This chapter addresses the “re-membering,” or re-thinking, of African studies by describing the scholarship of one African intellectual, Dr. Tom Spencer-Walters. His individual and collaborative works not only reveal some of the shortcomings of the traditional model of African studies, but also demonstrates the value of more interdisciplinary, global approaches, applying the insights of other African and African diasporan authors. Over a period of nearly forty years, his writing, teaching and leadership in African studies and Africana studies have been elevating and liberating. The following pages will delineate the multiple ways in which he has advanced the struggle. THE HISTORICAL STRUGGLE FOR AFRICAN INTELLECTUAL SPACE In the history of African peoples, nothing has been more deplorable than the conditions under which African peoples have lived under European colonialism or, worse yet, the suffering that hundreds of millions of Africans have endured from their abduction and enslavement across the Atlantic Ocean into the Americas. For centuries, the recounting of these histories has been done by the European colonialists and the Europeans engaged in the enslavement enterprise. By the early 1900s, a significant number of books about African peoples were available on the shelves of British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and American libraries. Yet, the voices of the Africans were virtually nonexistent. Notable exceptions were works by Edward Wilmot Blyden (1887), W. E. B. Du Bois (1930 and 1946), and Jomo Kenyatta (1938). Blyden 3

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Selase W. Williams

acknowledges this fact in the preface to the second edition of his book, Christianity, Islam, and the Negro Race, in this way: It was originally written chiefly with a view of instructing Negro youth in Christian lands eager to study the history, character and destiny of their race. In my early years I sorely felt the need of some such work to assist my own studies and direct my aspirations. Wherever I turned for light and guidance, I found only what the dominant white man had said in his own way and for his own purposes; or discovered, now and then, some crude literary effort of the Negro in exile and bondage, giving in broken utterances and in forma pauperis the conceptions of a blurred past and the hopes of an indistinct and troubled future. (Blyden 1888, i)

It was not until the results of the civil rights movement in the United States and the African independence movements of the 1950s and 1960s that we began to see the stories of people of African descent published from the African perspective. However, this progress did not come without protracted struggles. In many cases, the authors had to resort to self-publishing because their perspectives were so contradictory to existing texts. While African studies programs existed in American universities during the 1950s and 1960s, almost exclusively at the graduate level, the primary impetus for teaching this information was to prepare a cadre of students for research and jobs in the US national security field. The USSR, China, and the United States were all jockeying for influence over African political leaders, for African natural resources, and for intelligence on their geopolitical rivals. Those efforts developed into initiatives like the National Defense Foreign Language Program, which granted scholarships to graduate students, like me, to learn the languages of geographical areas thought to be critical to American national security. At the same time, African American students and their allies were demanding that the universities they were attending establish Black studies programs so that the truth about their history and culture could be taught. Even after African studies and Black studies programs were established, the struggle over whose voice would be heard continued. As radical Republican politicians and ill-informed White parents wage political warfare over “critical race theory,” the debate over who gets to tell the story of the African, what gets told, and how it gets told wages on, over four hundred years after the first enslaved Africans were brought to America.

Tom Spencer-Walters

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OVERVIEW OF SPENCER-WALTERS’ SCHOLARSHIP Tom Spencer-Walters has devoted essentially his entire professional life to the reclamation, description, and analysis of fundamental cultural components of African and African diasporan societies. His work interrogates the languages, communication systems, and literatures of a wide swath of the African world, from a transnational and interdisciplinary perspective. Given the social, cultural, and economic impact of colonialism in Africa and that of slavery in the Americas, most of his work has focused on the vehicles for presenting authentic and self-affirming images of African people and ways to guarantee that their voices are heard. His bold and direct challenges to the dangerous and historically damaging Eurocentric assumptions and policies that reject, minimize, or ignore the legitimacy or value of African cultural systems and artifacts have earned Spencer-Walters the status of intellectual freedom fighter. In doing this work, he has held himself to the highest standards of scholarly integrity and transparency. Spencer-Walters has written perhaps the most comprehensive and cogent treatise on the debate between orality and literacy, has played a major role in documenting and legitimizing Sierra Leone Krio as a full-fledged language, and demonstrated the creative power of African and African diasporan writers in their use of elements of African oral traditions to reflect more authentic pictures of African life, aesthetics, and worldview. Examples of his valuable contributions are presented in the following pages. As a son of a Sierra Leone Krio family, Tom Spencer-Walters grew up with a high regard for the British educational system, the Christian Church, the English language, British literature, and Anglo-European values. However, he also grew up speaking Krio language, listening to Krio stories, singing Krio songs, and witnessing and participating in the full array of other Krio cultural traditions. He recognized that these were two very different cultures. His early questioning of why these two systems existed and why one was more highly valued than the other thrust him into a quest for understanding these competing forces, their origins, and their impact on the advancement and development of his community. He later became aware of how these dynamics have played out in the national context of Sierra Leone, a country with more than a dozen indigenous ethnic groups, in the broader continental African world, and globally.

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Selase W. Williams

INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH ON SIERRA LEONE KRIO LANGUAGE I came to know Tom Spencer-Walters for the first time in 1974 when I was conducting my dissertation research in Sierra Leone. I am fortunate that he was willing to work with me as a research assistant, helping me improving my competency in Krio language and introducing me to local resources that could assist me in achieving my research goals. By then, he was already working with the Peace Corps, providing Krio language instruction to new volunteers, introducing them to the systematic nature of the language, debunking the notion that Krio was somehow “broken English” or “sub-standard English” with a few African words sprinkled on it. Through this classroom venue, he was already unveiling an enlightened truth about Krio, that it is a full-fledged language, with a unique vocabulary, sound system, syntactic rules, semantic system, and deep sociocultural roots. Around the same time, as I later learned, he was participating in the most significant reclamation project in Sierra Leone Krio history, the creation of the definitive dictionary of the Krio language (Fyle and Jones, A Krio-English Dictionary, 1980). Spencer-Walters served as assistant editor on this project. Although this work is out of print now, it remains the most extensive dictionary of Krio language ever produced. In 1976, Tom joined me at the University of Washington where we continued a professional working relationship, writing Kapu Sɛns Nɔ Kapu Wɔd: A Guide to Sierra Leone Krio Language (1977) and teaching elementary, intermediate, and advanced Krio language in the International Studies Program. Our students were racially, ethnically, economically, and regionally diverse. Yet, every one of these students expressed their gratitude for such a unique opportunity to learn an African language and to gain invaluable insights into the culture and worldview of the Krio people. Their experience was also unique in having not one, but two, Black instructors. All of them (and there were hundreds of them over a ten-year period), but especially the African American students, were amazed to learn how similar Krio language and African American language were to each other with respect to their sound systems and grammars. Equally important was for them to learn, for the first time, how systematically different both languages were from Standard American English and their historical connection to other African languages. Williams (1993 and 2005) provides detailed analyses of the connection between African American language, Sierra Leone Krio, and indigenous African languages. For the first time, African American students could understand why they were penalized for certain “grammatical” or “spelling” errors on writing assignments in their English classes. Revelations

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like these can be self-affirming and transformative, especially if it provides marginalized students with the tools to combat or overcome the obstacles to their advancement. In his 2006 chapter, titled “Creolization and Kriodom: (Re)Visioning the Sierra Leone Experiment” (Dixon-Fyle and Cole 2006), Spencer-Walters does a masterful job of summarizing the most prominent theories of creolization, providing the most up-to-date history of the development of Sierra Leone Krio, and making the case for the ongoing mutability of Krio as a creolized language, not only in the linguistic domains but also throughout the cultural domains. He also shared recently acquired historical facts that more strongly support one theory over another. This demonstrates the value of interdisciplinary scholarship, of the type so characteristic of African studies and Africana studies. As Spencer-Walters states it, “Creolization as process has been of considerable interest to the various branches of linguistics, particularly socio-linguistics as well as ancillary disciplines like cultural anthropology and history. Collectively, these disciplines have engaged in a systematic investigation of the origins, meaning, utility and critical importance of Creole languages” (2006, 227). In further elevating the importance of history in the discussion of creole languages, Spencer-Walters states that history “provides us with the logic for change through contact, chronological details of contacts with other speech communities, motivations for these contacts, and consequent transformations, whether linguistic, aesthetic, or cultural, arising out of these contacts” (229). It is because the creolization process, over years, decades, or even centuries, involves cultural change and adaptation, as well as linguistic change and adaptation, that only a multidisciplinary approach can reveal an accurate understanding of the development and form of the languages and societies that result from this process. The studies of creolized languages from a Eurocentric perspective have concluded that the languages resulting from these contact situations are simply the unsuccessful attempts of African peoples to speak the European contact language. Spencer-Walters is a proponent of the substrate analysis, which attributes the resultant language to the grammars, sound systems, and semantics of the Africans most directly involved in the contact. Furthermore, what is most remarkable to him about the creolization process “is the power, freedom and intuitive creativity of speech communities like that of the Krio, to take linguistic elements and cultural artifacts from its metropolitan language lexifier, and from other substrate communities such as the Temne, the Yoruba, and Igbo, and create language and culture that have sustained themselves for over two hundred years” (Spencer-Walters 2006, 229). These are capacities that cannot be forced upon you. They must emanate from your mother language and home culture. Therefore, Sierra Leone Krio is

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fundamentally African, based largely in the Kwa language family, of which Yoruba and Igbo are prominent. The openness to change and the incorporation of new words, concepts, innovations is part of the DNA of creolized societies. Spencer-Walters offers as an example of this openness the integration of the Oku into the Krio community. Different from the earlier groups that comprised the Freetown community from Nova Scotia, England, and Jamaica, who were predominantly Christian, the Oku, who were rescued from slaving ships in the Atlantic, were Muslims. Although initially shunned by the Christian colonists and the Christian Krio, the Oku, who were Yoruba speakers, became not only accepted into the community, they appear to have provided the foundation for the continuing linguistic and cultural development of the colony. So fully were they integrated into the community that all residents of Freetown came to celebrate each other’s religious holidays. As Spencer-Walters reminds us, the motives of the British in establishing a colony in Sierra Leone were not all altruistic. While the British were deeply involved in the Enlightenment of their time, passing the British Anti-Slavery Act in 1807 and philanthropically sponsoring the “re-patriation” of the recaptured Africans from slaving ships in the Atlantic Ocean and the indigent Blacks in England, Nova Scotia, and Jamaica, they also saw this as an opportunity to expand the empire and spread Christianity. We must remember that Christianizing Africans was viewed as a civilizing mission, one that would produce converts who could carry the word more effectively to other African populations. Yet, in spite of the colonialists’ motives, the creolization process produced culturally syncretic societies, linguistically, culturally, and religiously. The creoles incorporated what was needed or useful to them, as long as those elements fit within the framework of their base culture and worldview. Clearly, the work that Tom Spencer-Walters has done, uncovering the systematic nature of Sierra Leone Krio, exposing the African underpinnings of Krio language and culture, and helping us better understand the very nature of creolization, linguistically and culturally, has made significant contributions to African studies. THE DEBATE ON ORALITY VERSUS LITERACY Spencer-Walters is a leading figure in the debate on orality versus literacy. His scholarship in this area describes the subtleties and implications of the debate and raises serious questions about the productivity of the dichotomy inherent in the debate. He observes that most traditional African societies are oral-based cultures, meaning that most significant components of their cultures function and are maintained by oral means. In many of these societies,

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community officials are identified to be the historians, the poets, the singers, the religious leaders, the healers. They are the repositories of the “collective memories of the society” (Spencer-Walters and Ntiri 2000, 114). At a lower, but still extremely important, level are the vehicles for communicating the morals, ethics, and common wisdom of the society. Those are the stories, parables, proverbs, and riddles which are transmitted to the community, orally, typically by the elders, which establish the social norms and maintain community harmony. Literacy, on the other hand, is the strong, if not exclusive, preference for written communication and documentation of everything important to the society. Literacy is typically associated with European societies because of their long-standing writing systems, their efforts at universal education, and their substantial repositories of written material. In contemporary societies, literacy has become the universal tool for engagement in virtually all aspects of society, particularly in education, science, business, governance, law, medicine, technology, and literature. However, anyone who is not able to effectively read and write is at a distinct disadvantage, given the pervasiveness of literacy as an artifact of modernity. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as African societies were being colonized by European countries and Africans were being enslaved in the Americas, not only was literacy considered more highly valued than orality, it was equated with civilization and intelligence. Thus, those who lived in oral-based societies were thought to be uncivilized, ignorant pagans. This belief served as one of the rationalizations for enslaving Africans, because, if they were uncivilized, they were considered less than human, and thus not deserving of the respect or treatment accorded humans. The oral traditions of African societies were never fully understood, appreciated, or valued for what they were. They were viewed only from a Eurocentric perspective. Once European colonization took hold, literacy took on even greater meaning. Anyone wishing to advance in society was expected to become educated, if only well enough to read the Bible. While the colonized Africans were encouraged to get an education so that they could better serve the European administration, especially in the civil service, but also as Christian missionaries, the enslaved Africans in America were forbidden from learning how to read and write as a control mechanism. Anyone found teaching enslaved Africans to read or write, or any enslaved Africans who learned to read or write would be fined, punished, imprisoned, or some combination of those. The first anti-literacy law in South Carolina was passed in 1740. It read, in relevant part, “be it hereby enacted by the Authority aforesaid, That all and every Person and Persons whatsoever, who shall hereafter teach, or cause any Slave or Slaves to be taught to write, or shall use or employ any Slave as a Scribe . . . shall, for every such Offence, forfeit the sum of One Hundred

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Pounds current money” (West 1972, 10). The plantation owners were terrified that the enslaved Africans would use literacy to secretly communicate with each other, develop plans for escape, and be encouraged to revolt by the literature from northern abolitionists. Thus, the highly valued literacy did not apply to the enslaved Africans. Spencer-Walters and Ntiri instruct us that orality is an essential component of African cultures. It is not something that disappears in the face of literacy. In fact, even members of African communities who attain high levels of literate education most often continue participating in aspects of their oral culture. This may take the form of naming ceremonies, funeral ceremonies, wedding ceremonies, story-telling, and prolific use of proverbs. “Reclamation is vital to selfhood, cultural integrity, and historical relevance” (Spencer-Walters and Ntiri 2000, 114). CHALLENGES TO ACQUIRING LITERACY SKILLS Another issue that affects the learning of reading and writing skills in a standard form of English (or any colonial language) for those speakers of African languages, Krio, or an African diasporan language, like African American language, is what is usually referred to as linguistic interference. This phenomenon is created by the differences between the linguistic structures of the target language, say English, and those of the native language. The phonological rules, grammatical rules, and semantic rules that exist in the home language get imprinted on the target language. This can affect the pronunciation, sentence structure, or interpretation of similar words in the target language. If the instructor of the target language is unaware of the structures of the student’s native language and, therefore, cannot demonstrate the systematic differences, the student’s best effort may, and usually does, show up as “errors” in the target language. Furthermore, since writing is the skill of aligning graphic symbols to sounds (often without a one-to-one relationship), the written word will often correspond more closely to the native language than the target language. The teaching of reading and writing (i.e., literacy) is most effective when the native language is aligned with the written form of the language. If literacy programs in Africa, for instance, were to follow this principle, Mende language speakers would be taught reading and writing in Mende first, Krio speakers would be taught reading and writing in Krio first. In other words, intentional bilingual training strategies are essential when the writing system of the target language is different from the native language of the learner.

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AFRICAN AND AFRICAN DIASPORAN APPROACHES TO “FICTIVE IMAGINATION” In Tom Spencer-Walter’s introduction to his 1998 edited volume, Orality, Literacy and the Fictive Imagination (1998, 1–17), having written perhaps the most comprehensive review of the literature on the debate on orality versus literacy in other works, he applies his expertise to the creation of literature, which he refers to as “fictive imagination.” The overarching goal of this book “is to advance the idea that the creative works of writers from Africa and the African diaspora reflect a symbiotic relationship among African verbal art forms, written traditions and the literary imagination” (1) He writes that “the colonizer takes the position that orality and literacy are antithetical and therefore cannot coexist. So he [the colonist] evokes arguments that resonate their dichotomous relationships. First, he asserts that orality deals with an old civilization that thrives on its primordial origins, questionable rituals, emotive states, and unenlightened vision. This assertion then allows him to present literacy as liberating, progressive, and totalizing in its application, essentially a western positional imperative for ‘development’” (3). Eurocentric notions like these are what have given rise to the concept of a literary canon, a set of characteristics of the most important works in English literature. If the creative work does not meet the definition and requirements of that canon, the creative works in writing are not considered to be real “literature.” For decades after the doors of universities became more open to students and faculty of color, those individuals were still held to the standards of the English canon. Works that did not conform to those standards or did not use canonical literature as the centerpiece of their scholarship were not rewarded with high praise, promotions, or tenure. Competing with these notions are the postcolonial writings of Africans and members of African diasporan communities. Orality and literacy are not antithetical. As Spencer-Walters points out, some African and Caribbean nationalist writers believe that orality should be viewed as superior to literacy and necessary for “defining or redefining the African essence.” Writers like Senghor believe that literature should present Africa as an idyllic, happy, and unified vision to be strived for, a more nostalgic approach to their African heritage. Still others would argue that African and African diasporan literature should be vested with social responsibility and committed to nation building, literature for the advancement of society. In his nearly exhaustive identification of the wide range of views on the relationship between orality and literacy, Spencer-Walters cites the view of Michel deCerteau in his book, The History of the World, where he states that “orality becomes something else from the moment when writing is no longer

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a symbol but rather . . . the instrument of a ‘production of history’ in the hands of a particular social category” (Spencer-Walters 1998, 6). Along similar lines of thinking on the topic is Harold Scheub who argues that “the oral technique is never really lost, but rather transformed” (Scheub, 1985, 15). He goes on to state that there remains a close relationship between the contemporary, literate poets and the oral poets of traditional societies. Spencer-Walters goes on to describe some of the ways in which orality and literacy are integrated in African and African diasporan literatures, a technique he refers to as “textualizing orality” (Spencer-Walters, 1998, 6). For instance, in Amos Tutuola’s The Palm Wine Drinkard, the author tried to replicate the traditional storytelling, maintaining “the integrity of the oral voice as much as possible,” employing “stylistic and rhetorical idiosyncrasies in the text” (Spencer-Walters 1998, 6). In a highly acclaimed novel, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, the same goal is achieved by the liberal use of elements such as African proverbs, extended metaphors, situational ironies, and lyrical grace. The reader is immediately transported to precolonial Igbo society. According to Harryette Mullen, a creative version of orality that she refers to as “the tradition of visionary literacy” (Mullen 1996, 673) can be witnessed in the narratives of some freeborn and liberated Africans in the 1700s and 1800s. These “narratives become repositories for elements of African ancestor-worship in the New World and the visionary artist takes on the persona of the ‘spirit medium.’” Textualizing orality is found throughout Africa, the Caribbean, and elsewhere in the African diaspora in the form of poetry, novels, short stories, and more. LANGUAGE AS RESISTANCE TO COLONIAL HEGEMONY While Spencer-Walters was a Fulbright Scholar in Zimbabwe, he presented a paper at the 2000 Conference of the Association of the University English Teachers of South Africa. In the paper, he presents multiple examples of how Caribbean writers have used language as resistance to the hegemonic pressures of the French colonialists in the West Indies. After admonishing the colonists for the violence they perpetrated on the various Island populations, he states that “indigenous African languages and epistemologies were suppressed, so that the dominant European languages and cultures would flourish. The psychic costs for this hegemony were enormous” (Spencer-Walters 2000, 28–29). This background helps us to understand why the very act of speaking an African language or creole in a public place was considered defiance. However, the creole languages that developed were, and are, the

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products of a syncretic process that gave the West Indians new identities. Spencer-Walters explains that, “Jamaicans, for example, have resisted the complete obliteration of their culture and violations of their psychic space by defiantly making Jamaican Creole the primary medium for spoken discourse in the country” (28). In addition, “subversion of English became a strategy of resistance to restore the identity, voice and subjectivity of the West Indian.” Just as African and African diasporan writers have been shown to use different techniques for integrating orality into written texts, here Spencer-Walters introduces the notion that the mere use of creole language in literature is subversion to the dominant European culture and reaffirmation of one’s ancestral culture. In relation to the desire of Caribbean women to join in this broadening of the literary canon, Spencer-Walters concludes, “Perhaps their utilization of Creole found greater cultural expression in Caribbean literature not only because it foregrounds a traditionally marginalized perspective, but because it mirrors an uncompromising desire to make art responsive to the social realities of the people” (33). RECLAMATION OF KRIO LANGUAGE AS “AFRICAN” Spencer-Walters is playing a leading role in reclaiming, describing, and analyzing Krio language and culture as a significant part of the history of Africa and the creolization of African diasporan societies. A forthcoming book (Spencer-Walters and Williams, forthcoming) which is intended to be the most complete description of Krio language and culture ever written promises to elevate the language to a new level and provide multiple audiences with the opportunity to greatly expand their knowledge of and engagement with Sierra Leone Krio. Krio descendants living outside of Sierra Leone in particular, will benefit tremendously as they attempt to reclaim their heritage. COMMITMENT TO THEORY AND PRACTICE While Spencer-Walters has been recognized for his scholarship on the debate between literacy and orality, his insightful explications of Krio Language and culture, and his provocative analyses of African and African diasporan literature, he should also be commended for his demonstrated commitment to the concept of theory and practice. In each of the areas of his scholarship he has demonstrated active practice. He has engaged in teaching standard English writing, often from a bi-lingual perspective to students whose first languages were not Standard English. He has taught Sierra Leone Krio to college students, Peace Corps volunteers, and Krio descendants outside of Sierra

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Leone. One of his signature applications of theory and practice has been his creation and editorship of Kapu Sɛns, a literary journal for students that has given voice to many students who had not considered themselves capable or authorized to express themselves using their own, authentic voice. Tom Spencer-Walters is admired by his students, revered by his colleagues, and highly respected by his international partners. He has truly been a liberating force for all who have met him. REFERENCES Achebe, Chinua. 1958. Things Fall Apart. Great Britain: Heinemann. Blyden, Edward Wilmot. 2003. Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race. Second edition. (First edition, 1888.) Baltimore, MD: Black Classic Press. deCerteau, Michel. 1988. The History of the World. New York: Tr. Tom Conley. Dixon-Fyle, Mac, and Gibril Cole, eds. 2006. New Perspectives on the Sierra Leone Krio. New York: Peter Lang. Du Bois, W. E. B. 1930. Africa, Its Geography, People and Products and Its Place in Modern History. Girard, KS: Little Blue Books, no. 1505. ———. 1947. The World and Africa. Viking Press. Fyle, Clifford N., and Eldred D. Jones. 1980. A Krio-English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press and Sierra Leone University Press. Kenyatta, Jomo. 1938. Facing Mount Kenya. London: Secker and Warburg. Mullen, Harryette. 1996. “African Signs and Spirit Writing.” Callaloo 9 (3): 670–89. Scheub, Harold. 1985. “A Review of African Oral Traditions and Literature. African studies Review 28 (2/3): 1–72. Spencer-Walters, Tom. 1998. Orality, Literacy and the Fictive Imagination: African and Diasporan Literatures. Troy, MI: Bedford Publishers Inc. ———. 2006. “Creolization and Kriodom: (Re)Visioning the Sierra Leone Experiment.” In New Perspectives on the Sierra Leone Krio, edited by Mac Dixon-Fyle and Gibril Cole, 223–55. New York: Peter Lang. Spencer-Walters, Tom, and Daphne W. Ntiri. 2000. “Issues in African and African American Oral and Literate Communications.” Journal of African Studies 17 (1): 109–23. Tutuola, Amos. 1953. The Palm-Wine Drinkard and his Dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Dead’s Town. New York: Grove. West, Earle H. 1972. The Black American and Education. Columbus, OH: Charles E. Merrill Publishing Company. Williams, Selase W. 1993. “Substantive Africanisms at the End of the African Linguistic Diaspora.” In Africanisms in Afro-American Language Varieties, edited by Salikoko S. Mufwene, 406–22. Athens: University of Georgia Press. ———. 2005. “The African Character of African American Language: Insights from the Creole Connection.” In Africanisms in American Culture (second edition), edited by Joseph E. Holloway, 397–426. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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Williams, Selase W., and Tom Spencer-Walters. 1977. Kapu Sɛns Nɔ Kapu Wɔd. Unpublished manuscript. ———. Forthcoming. Sierra Leone Krio Language, Culture and Traditions.

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Terms Matter The Use of “Tribe” in African Studies Jennifer L. De Maio and Daniel N. Posner

Terms matter—especially when, as with the term “tribe,” they carry connotations that extend well beyond an author’s intended meaning. For decades, many scholars of African affairs have used the term “tribe” to refer to the continent’s social categories, and the term “tribal” to refer to the tendency for memberships in those categories to shape behaviors and outcomes. Most scholars who employ such language do so without contemplating the implications of their choice, taking their cues either from older literatures and journalistic accounts that use these terms or from the language that many Africans themselves employ to describe their social attachments and their countries’ political affairs. But the choice matters: using the term “tribe” or its derivations is deeply problematic. A product of colonialism, the label connotes backwardness, reinforces stereotypes about African exceptionalism, and contributes to the tendency for African society and politics to be seen through a “tribal” lens. These critiques have been made by others (Southall 1970; Mafeje 1971; Rich 1974; Fluehr-Lobban, Loban, and Zangari 1976; Lowe 2008).1 Our contribution is to go beyond the observation that “tribe” is a problematic term to wrestle with the surprisingly thorny question of what term scholars should actually use. We present data from fifty years of African studies publications on the use of the word “tribe” and its most common substitute, “ethnic group.” We then use these findings to motivate a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of adopting “ethnic group” as the preferred label for African cultural communities. We argue that, while replacing “tribe” with “ethnic group” solves some problems, it introduces others—notably the imposition, by outsiders, of yet another foreign term that Africans do not generally use. 17

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We suggest that the challenge lies in balancing the desirability of avoiding a problematic term with respect for the ways Africans themselves speak about group memberships, while recognizing that these ways are products of Western classificatory schemes that were internalized by Africans through Western-influenced education, media, and socialization (Achebe 1973; Said 1978; Ngũgĩ 1986; Smith 2012). “TRIBE” AS LABEL; “TRIBE” AS LENS The term “tribe” is a European import. Most African languages have no equivalent for the English word “tribe” (Ngũgĩ 2009; Mafeje 1971), and the earliest European writings about Africa referred to the continent’s communities not as “tribes” but as “nations,” “states,” “countries,” or “kingdoms” (Fluehr-Lobban, Loban, and Zangari 1976). It was not until the eighteenth century, when a scientific racist ideology had come to dominate European understandings of Africans and their indigenous forms of social organization, that Africans began being referred to as belonging to “tribes.” A comparison of the language used by European explorers of different eras is instructive of this shift. When Mungo Park wrote about his explorations in the Niger basin in 1790s, he referred to the people he encountered as “nations” and “states.” By the time David Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanley were conducting their journeys more than half a century later, during the high era of colonization, the lexicon had changed: their diaries are full of references to the “tribes” they encountered. Such terminology was echoed in the writings of leading anthropologists and colonial officials during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who wrote extensively about African “tribes” and “tribal societies” (Mafeje 1971; Mamdani 1996; Young 1997). The adoption of “tribe” as a label for African communities was not simply a benign choice of terms. Labeling Africans in this way served to justify their subjugation by the European colonizers. Designating African social organizations as “tribes,” and Africans as “tribal” people, suggested that they were primitive and backward. This designation allowed the Europeans to think of themselves as civilizing and Christianizing the people they were colonizing.2 The substitution of “tribe” for “nation,” “state,” or “kingdom”—terms historically given to European groups—also conveyed the implicit message that African social communities, and by extension Africans themselves, were of a lesser order than European peoples. Indeed, because the terms “tribe” and “tribal” tend not to be used to describe people or processes in the Global North, their use in writing about Africa perpetuates the idea that group memberships and intergroup competition are somehow different in Africa than elsewhere in the world.

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Equally significant as the importation of the label “tribe” was the reification of “tribe” as the lens through which Africans—and Africa—came to be viewed. Prior to the colonial era, Africans saw themselves as belonging to multiple social groupings: lineages, clans, villages, towns, chiefdoms, language groups, and states, with the relevant identities shifting from situation to situation. As Iliffe writes, “identities shaded into one another, for people speaking the same language might belong to different chiefdoms, while one chiefdom might embrace people speaking several languages. It was an immensely complex social order” (2007, 239). The colonizers took this complexity and shoehorned it into a simpler framework, with “tribes” as the fundamental units. The Europeans arrived in Africa with the pre-supposition that Africans were naturally “tribal” people, and this was the lens through which they saw them and through which they fashioned their instruments of colonial rule. A key part of this process was the adoption of “tribes” as administrative units. Where “tribes” did not exist, the colonizers created them. Where they already existed, their salience as social categories was reified through their adoption as the units of colonial administration (Mamdani 1996; Young 1997). The Europeans “reduced Africa’s innumerable dialects to fewer written languages, each supposedly defining a tribe” (Iliffe 2007). They promoted narratives of divisions and ancient hatreds between and across “tribal” groups in an effort to divide and conquer (Gourevitch 1998). The result was the transformation of the African social space from one characterized by multiple overlapping community memberships to one in which affiliations with one’s “tribe” came to be viewed as the principal, defining source of social and political identification. Seeing Africa through a “tribal” lens was the product of these outsiders’ views, but the perspective came to be adopted, and even internalized, by Africans themselves.3 Many Africans exposed to the writings of European anthropologists, historians, and administrators came to adopt the view that their societies should be seen through the lens of “tribe.” As Ngũgĩ writes of African intellectuals: “they have come to see each other through the colonial invention of the tribe, tribalism, and tribal wars, elevating cultural marks of difference such as distinct rituals, and even languages, as the real basis of divisions and communal identity” (1981, 22). But it was not only educated elites who internalized this perspective. The adoption of “tribe” as a lens through which the world was seen extended to non-intellectuals as well. The organization of the colonial state, which endowed “tribal” chiefs with significant powers over land, development funds, and the administration of justice, also created incentives for regular, non-elite Africans to invest in their identifications with the “tribes” that provided access to these resources (Posner 2005, ch. 2).

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Like the negative connotations associated with labeling African social communities as “tribes,” viewing Africa through a “tribal” lens has significant problematic implications. By privileging “tribe” as an analytic lens, it causes many researchers to focus—or to focus first—on explanations in which ethnic identities play central roles. This approach leads to analyses that are biased toward concluding that ethnic factors caused the events in question, even when due consideration of other variables might generate alternative, and potentially more powerful, explanations. The fact that such other factors are more likely to be considered (and found to be salient) in non-African settings only reinforces the stereotype that African affairs are indeed “tribal.” For example, understanding the Rwandan genocide as the result of longstanding “tribal” rivalry between Hutu and Tutsi ignores the ways in which colonialism reified intergroup differences. Viewing the civil war in former Sudan as “tribal” overlooks the key role that oil and land played in the conflict. An important question to ask is whether similarly lazy explanations would be offered if the units in conflict were described not as “tribes” but as “interest groups,” as they might be in non-African settings. A legacy of colonialism, then, was the importation of a term for indigenous African social organizations that was laced with negative, infantilizing connotations and the imposition of a way of thinking about African society and politics—as revolving around “tribal” identities—that has biased the way both Africans and non-Africans think about the continent’s affairs. HOW “TRIBE” IS USED IN THE LITERATURE AND ON THE GROUND Because of the disparaging connotations of the term, many scholars in the African studies community have moved away from the term “tribe,” adopting instead the less problematic term “ethnic group.” We document this shift in figure 2.1, which presents data compiled from the first, second and third issue of every fifth volume of four leading African studies journals: African Affairs, Journal of Modern African Studies, African Studies Review, and Review of African Political Economy. For each article in these issues, we count appearances in the main body of the article of the word stems “trib” (to identify instances in which the author used the term “tribe,” “tribal,” “tribalist,” “tribalism,” “tribesman,” etc.)4 or “ethnic” (referring to “ethnicity,” “ethnic group,” or using “ethnic” as a modifier—as for example, in “ethnic politics” or “ethnic favoritism”). The figure reports, for every fifth year between 1965 and 2020, the share of articles including at least one mention of either “trib” or “ethnic.” In all, we coded 756 articles.5

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Trends in the use of the terms “tribe” and “ethnic” in top African studies journals, 1965–2020. Source: This figure is derived from the authors’ data analysis.

In the late 1960s, roughly 60 percent of articles published in these four top African studies journals included mentions of “tribe,” compared to roughly 30 percent that referred to “ethnic.” By the 2000s, this pattern had reversed, with occurrences of “ethnic” outnumbering occurrences of “tribe” by nearly two-to-one. In the most recent year surveyed, 2020, 55 percent of articles contained at least one mention of the word “ethnic,” compared to just 18 percent containing mentions of “tribe,” “tribalism,” and so on. While Ekeh’s reflection in 1990 that “it now appears that the term ‘ethnic group’ has replaced the disparaged concept of ‘tribe’ in African scholarship” (1990, 661) was somewhat premature, the movement has been clearly in that direction. The fact that “tribe” has not completely disappeared from use in academic outlets is noteworthy given the widespread recognition among African studies scholars of the problems associated with the use of the term. Equally significant is that, throughout the period surveyed, group memberships—whether referred to as “tribes” or “ethnic groups”—are mentioned in the majority of articles (see figure 2.2). With the exception of the outlier year of 2015, nearly two-thirds of all published articles mention “tribes” or “ethnicity/ ethnic groups.” One explanation for this pattern is that ethnicity is simply a central issue in African affairs, and so must be mentioned at least somewhere in the treatment of most topics of research. Another explanation is that the colonial emphasis on “tribes” as the basic building blocks of African society,

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and of “tribalism” as the lens through which African politics and society must be viewed, continues to cast a long shadow—a shadow reinforced by generations of postcolonial scholarship that puts ethnicity front and center in its analyses. By this explanation, scholars of Africa emphasize “tribe” or “ethnicity” not because of its fundamental importance to African politics and society but because this is the aspect of Africa they have been taught to see. Additional evidence for these trends comes from social media data collected in Kenya in the run-up to the 2017 elections. De Maio and Dionne (2021) analyzed more than fifteen thousand tweets by eighty-six candidates running for various levels of political office. Tweets containing the stem “trib” appeared more than ten times as frequently as those containing the word “ethnic.”6 This reinforces the point that, notwithstanding the substitution of “ethnicity” for “tribe” by many Africanist scholars, the term “tribe” (or its derivations) remains the preferred word among Africans, or at any rate among aspiring political candidates in Kenya. However, while “tribe” may be the term that was used, the frequency with which it was invoked suggests that “tribal” or “ethnic” issues were not the subject that the candidates sought to emphasize in their mobilizational messages: fewer than 2 percent of all tweets mentioned either term. To the extent that the contents of the tweets provide a window onto the issues that aspiring political candidates in Kenya saw as important in the run-up to the 2017 elections, ethnicity (however labeled) was not among them.7 This stands in

Articles mentioning “tribe” or “ethnic” in top African studies journals, 1965–2020.​​​​​​​ Source: This figure is derived from the authors’ data analysis.

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marked contrast to the preoccupations of many Africanist scholars, as highlighted in figure 2.2 above. WHAT, THEN, TO DO? To recognize that “tribe” is a foreign and problematic term and that the reification of the social categories to which it refers distorts explanations for political and social outcomes is not, however, to say that the term does not denote something real. The units referred to as “tribes” do play an important role in social and political life in many African countries. The correlations between “tribal” membership and voting patterns (Gibson and Long 2009), levels of trust (Biggs, Raturi, and Srivastava 2002; Kasara 2013), patterns of trade (Robinson 2016), flows of patronage goods (Burgess et al. 2015; Kramon and Posner 2016), and other important political and social outcomes are too robust to ignore “tribes” as meaningful social units simply because the term that is commonly used for such groups carries negative connotations. Even when causal attribution to “tribes” is misplaced—for example, when an episode of election violence is said to be caused by “tribal hatreds”—membership in a cultural identity group does often play a role (in such cases, as a tool used by local leaders to motivate people to act in ways that serve the leaders’ own political ends). In such situations, “tribal” memberships matter, even if not as direct causes of the outcome at issue and even if not to the degree that the literature’s preoccupation with “tribal” or “ethnic” explanations often suggests. Notwithstanding the problematic nature of the term that is ordinarily used to describe the phenomenon, “tribal” identity groups are, in fact, salient, in many aspects of social and political life in Africa. One response in the scholarly community has been to concede that “tribe” is an unfortunate term but then to use it anyway—sometimes employing quotes (as we have throughout this chapter) to signify the problematic nature of the label. Another approach is to explicitly discuss the negative connotations attached to “tribe,” provide a lengthy discussion of the colonial origins of the term, and, having done this, go on to use it in the rest of the book or article. This strategy has the advantage of clarifying the problematic character of the label, and sometimes also the fact that the “tribal” units that are discussed are not natural, atavistic attachments but invented administrative categories. Such discussions provide context that may allow readers to resist internalizing the negative associations with the terms “tribe” and “tribal.” However, the drawback of this approach is that it puts the burden on the reader to put the pieces together, and it risks having some consumers of the work read the part of the article or book that employs the term “tribe” without having read

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(or read carefully) the part that provides the necessary background discussion of the term’s origins and problematic nature. Another approach, whose adoption is evident in the pattern displayed in figure 2.1, is to eschew the word altogether, substituting the term “ethnic” or “ethnic group” for “tribal” or “tribe.” This strategy certainly solves the problem of using a term with negative connotations. It also addresses the issue of using different terms for the same concept in Africa and elsewhere. But, because “ethnic group” it is also an imported term, it does not solve the problem of lexical imperialism.8 Classifying African social communities as “ethnic groups” rather than “tribes” amounts to embracing another label, furnished yet again by outsiders, that Africans do not use to describe themselves. Insisting on using “ethnic group” rather than “tribe” is similar to insisting on using the term “Latinx” to refer to people of Hispanic, Latino, and Spanish origin in the United States. In the same way that “ethnic group” has been advocated as a substitute for the offensive label “tribe,” the term “Latinx” was coined by activists in an effort to provide a non-gendered, more politically correct label for Hispanic Americans. Notwithstanding these worthy intentions, public opinion data suggests that very few Hispanic adults have even heard of the term, and very few express interest in using it to describe their identity (Noe-Bustamante, Mora, and Lopez 2020; Newport 2022). Although we are unaware of similar polling on the use of the term “ethnic group” in Africa, our sense is that it would reveal similar unfamiliarity and disinterest among Africans in adopting it as a substitute for “tribe.” Indeed, a major response to the rejection of the word “tribe” in academic writing about Africa is that “tribe” is the term that Africans themselves use. In part as a consequence of the salience of communal identities in political and social affairs, and in part due to socialization to the use of the term, Africans do use the label “tribe” in everyday conversation and to describe themselves and others. References to “tribe” and “tribalism” regularly appear in newspaper headlines and in social media posts (Ojoye 2017; Daily Guide 2021; Kandimba and Musika 2022). As Ekeh notes, “while tribalism seems now abandoned in academic scholarship in African studies . . . paradoxically, the use of the term tribalism is enjoying unprecedented boom not only in everyday interactions among ordinary Africans but more especially among high-ranking Africans in government and university institutions” (1990, 661). The ubiquity of the use of the term by Africans raises challenging questions about the appropriateness of its use by (especially non-African) scholars. Does respect for Africans require eschewing use of the term “tribe” because of its negative connotations? Or does it, instead, require using the term that Africans themselves use to describe their world? By this latter view, insisting on replacing “tribe” with “ethnic group” should be seen not as an act of respect for Africans but as a rejection (or perhaps just an ignoring) of the

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terms that Africans themselves use in descriptions of their own affairs. At the extreme, it could be interpreted as an attempt by Western intellectuals to “reinscribe their power to define the world” (Smith 2012, 14)—that is, an attempt by scholars from the Global North to push upon Africans a term that those scholars have decided is appropriate to describe a set of social categories to which they do not themselves belong. To be clear: we do not believe that most non-African scholars who use the term “ethnic group” are doing so as a means of asserting their “power to define the world”; our impression is that most scholars have not thought very much about the fact that “ethnic group” constitutes yet another imported label. But whatever the intentions may be, the effect of using “ethnic group” instead of “tribe” does privilege an outsider’s view of what the “right” term should be over the terms that Africans themselves employ. The push-back to the push-back, however, is that the main reason that Africans themselves use the term “tribe” is because they were socialized into using it by Western-influenced educational curricula and administrative systems. This raises the thorny question of how much weight should be accorded to local usage, and whether deference to such usage may serve only to reinforce the socialization into the adoption of a highly problematic term. Is the right path to reject both “tribe” and “ethnic group” and instead revert to the labels “nation,” “state,” and “kingdom” that were used by Africans to refer to their communities prior to the arrival of the Europeans? A problem with this approach is that it blurs the salient distinction between ethnic communities whose precolonial manifestations were highly centralized, and thus can properly be labeled “states” or “kingdoms,” and those that were decentralized or that did not exist as coherent communities prior to their “creation” under colonialism (Vail 1989; Mamdani 1996; Werbner and Ranger 1996; Nathan 2019), for which designation by such terms may be misleading.9 An appropriate response to this dilemma could be an international conference at which African citizens and scholars come together to decide for themselves what term should be used to refer to the important but fraught concept of “tribal” communities. Non-Africanist scholars can then take their cues from what Africans themselves have decided, rather than impose yet another foreign label. Another, quite different, rationale for rejecting the term “ethnic group,” for at least some purposes, is that the label is often too broad in its meaning. Social identities in Africa are multidimensional, and if we are to study the conditions under which some social identities become salient rather than others, we need precise terms that distinguish between the many group designations that fall beneath the umbrella category of “ethnic.”10 For example, Posner’s work on ethnic politics in Zambia turns on the distinction between identity categories rooted in language group, region of origin, and what he

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calls “tribe,” by which he means the community defined by the boundaries of the Native authorities constructed by the Northern Rhodesian government during the colonial era (Posner 2005).11 While Posner could certainly have chosen another label for this third identity category, “ethnic group” would not have worked, as the common language understanding of the term encompasses all three of the categories that he seeks to distinguish from one another. In an influential essay on the use of the term “tribe,” Lowe (2008) writes: “If the term ‘tribe’ accurately conveyed and clarified truths better than other words . . . we should use it. But ‘tribe’ is vague, contradictory and confusing, not clarifying.” For some purposes, the term “ethnicity” may be equally vague. While the question of what to do about the term “tribe” may be unclear, the question of how to respond to the tendency to view Africa through a “tribal” lens is straightforward. Scholars of African affairs must be conscious of the tendency to privilege ethnic (or “tribal”) explanations and ask themselves: is there another account, not involving ethnic attachments, that provides an alternative, and perhaps even stronger, explanation for the phenomenon I am studying? Pushing back against the “tribal lens” does not imply ignoring ethnicity where it may be salient. But it means thinking hard about other factors that might account for the behaviors and processes we seek to explain. Doing so is not easy given the hold that ethnicity has come to have over many scholars’ views of African affairs. But it is necessary work if we are to truly understand the African experience.12 CONCLUSION Although its importance is sometimes overstated, membership in communal groups is a salient feature of many aspects of political, social, and economic life in Africa. As scholars of African affairs, we therefore need a term to describe such memberships. For reasons documented both in this essay and elsewhere, the term “tribe” is problematic for this purpose due to its colonial origins and its deeply negative connotations. However, substituting “ethnic group” for “tribe,” while an improvement in many respects, is an imperfect solution. Because Africans generally do not use the term, insisting on using “ethnic groups” to describe African cultural communities amounts to forcing another foreign term on Africans, albeit one with considerably less undesirable baggage. While we offer no concrete recommendation on the terms that should be used, our hope is that the foregoing discussion will put scholars in a stronger position to make this choice with a fuller understanding of the implications of their decision.

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NOTES 1. The broader subject of decolonizing language is discussed in Ngũgĩ (1986), Zeleza (2009), Smith (2012), and Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2018), among others. 2. The comparison between Park, who spoke highly of the intelligence of the people he encountered during his travels, and Livingstone and Stanley, who described the “tribes” they came across as “heathen,” “uncivilized,” and “primitive,” is again instructive of the shift in how Africans were perceived prior to and during the colonial era (Fluehr-Lobban, Loban, and Zangari 1976). 3. For a broader discussion of the impact of colonialism on internalized racism among Africans, see Hamilton (2021). 4. We are careful to rule out appearances of “trib” that do not refer to derivations of “tribe”—for example, “contribution,” “distribute,” “attribute,” and so forth. 5. Review of African Political Economy only began publishing in 1974, so the figures for 1965 and 1960 only include data from the four other journals. 6. Authors’ calculations. 7. Of course, it may be that ethnicity was, in fact, a preoccupation of many candidates but they felt it potentially damaging to emphasize this publicly, lest they be called out as “tribalist.” 8. Until recently, few African language dictionaries even had entries for the word “ethnic group.” 9. On the importance of the distinction between contemporary ethnic groups that do and do not trace their roots to precolonial states, see, among many others, Michalopoulas and Papaioannou (2013) and Wilfahrt (2021). 10. While “ethnic” identities are commonly distinguished from identities based on religion, race, gender, and socioeconomic status, they are usually understood to encompass identities rooted in language, region, shared culture, caste, and sect, as well as the category commonly referred to in the African context as “tribe.” 11. Posner (2005) provides an example of the approach, described above, of discussing the colonial origins of “tribal identities” at length in an early part of the manuscript and then using the term “tribe” later in the book, relying on readers to have read both parts to fully appreciate the meaning of the term in its later appearances. 12. See Wilfahrt (2021) for a recent example of a study that consciously pushes back against “ethnic” explanations.

REFERENCES Achebe, Chinua. 1973. “The Novelist as Teacher,” In African Writers on African Writing, edited by G. D. Killam, 67–73. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Biggs, Tyler, Mayank Raturi, and Pradeep Srivastava. 2002. “Ethnic Networks and Access to Credit: Evidence from the Manufacturing Sector in Kenya.” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 49: 473–86.

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Burgess, Robin, Remi Jedwab, Edward Miguel, Ameet Morajaria, and Gerard Padro I Miquel. 2015. “The Value of Democracy: Evidence from Road Building in Kenya.” American Economic Review 105 (6): 1817–51. Daily Guide (Ghana). 2021. “Chief Preaches Against Tribalism.” April 25. De Maio, Jennifer, and Kim Yi Dionne. 2021. “Contesting Power Online: Campaigning via Twitter in Kenya’s 2017 Elections.” Africa Today 68 (2): 29–56. Ekeh, Peter P. 1990. “Social Anthropology and Two Contrasting Uses of Tribalism in Africa.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 32, no. 4: 660–700. Fluehr-Lobban, Carolyn, Richard A Lobban, and Linda Zangari. 1976. “‘Tribe’: A Socio-Political Analysis.” Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies 7 (1): 143–65. Gibson, Clark, and James D. Long. 2009. “The Presidential and Parliamentary Elections in Kenya, December 2007.” Electoral Studies 28 (3): 487–502. Gourevitch, Philip. 1998. We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Hamilton, Jennifer. 2021. “The Effects of Internalized Racism on Political Accountability in Kenya.” Dissertation Prospectus, UCLA. Iliffe, John. 2007. Africans: The History of a Continent. New York: Cambridge University Press. Kandimba, Buttyson, and Chomba Musika. 2022. “Nakacinda Reported to Police Over Tribal Remarks.” Zambia Daily Mail, April 25. Kasara, Kimuli. 2013. “Separate and Suspicious: Local Social and Political Context and Ethnic Tolerance in Kenya.” Journal of Politics 75 (4): 921–36. Kramon, Eric, and Daniel N. Posner. 2016. “Ethnic Favoritism in Education in Kenya.” Quarterly Journal of Political Science 11 (1): 1–58. Lowe, Chris. 2008. “Talking about ‘Tribe’: Moving from Stereotypes to Analysis.” Africa Action. Mafeje, Archie. 1971. “The Ideology of ‘Tribalism.’” Journal of Modern African Studies 9 (2): 253–61. Mamdani, Mahmood. 1996. Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Michalopoulos Stelios, and Elias Papaioannou. 2013. “Pre-Colonial Ethnic Institutions and Contemporary African Development.” Econometrica 81 (1): 113–52. Nathan, Noah L. 2019. “Electoral Consequences of Colonial Invention: Brokers, Chiefs and Distribution in Northern Ghana.” World Politics 71(3): 417–56. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Sabelo J. 2018. “Metaphysical Empire, Linguicides, and Cultural Imperialism.” English Academy Review 35 (2): 96–115. Newport, Frank. 2022. “Controversy Over the Term ‘Latinx’: Public Opinion Context.” Polling Matters (blog), January 7. https:​//​news​.gallup​.com​/opinion​/polling​-matters​/388532​/controversy​-term​-latinx​-public​-opinion​-context​.aspx. Ngũgĩ, wa Thiong’o. 1986. Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. Oxford: James Currey. ———. 2009. “The Myth of Tribe in African Politics.” Transition 101: 16–23. Noe-Bustamante, Luis, Lauren Mora, and Mark Hugo Lopez. 2020. “About One-in-Four US Hispanics Have Heard of Latinx, but Just 3% Use it.” Pew

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Research Center Report. August 11. https:​//​www​.pewresearch​.org​/hispanic​/2020​ /08​/11​/about​-one​-in​-four​-u​-s​-hispanics​-have​-heard​-of​-latinx​-but​-just​-3​-use​-it​/. Ojoye, Taiwo. 2017. “Stop Being Tribal Leader, Ezekwesili tells Buhari.” Punch, September 14. Posner, Daniel N. 2005. Institutions and Ethnic Politics in Africa. New York: Cambridge University Press. Rich, Evelyn Jones. 1974. “Mind Your Language.” Africa Report (SeptemberOctober): 47–49. Robinson, Amanda. 2016. “Internal Borders: Ethnic-Based Market Segmentation in Malawi.” World Development 87: 371–84. Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. London: Vintage Books. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 2012. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books. Southall, Aiden. 1970. “The Illusion of Tribe.” In The Passing of Tribal Man in Africa, edited by Peter Gutkind, 28–50. Leiden: Brill. Vail, Leroy. 1989. The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Werbner, Richard, and Terence Ranger. 1996. Post-colonial Identities in Africa. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Zed Books. Wilfahrt, Martha. 2021. Precolonial Legacies in Postcolonial Politics: Representation and Redistribution in Decentralized West Africa. New York: Cambridge University Press. Young, Crawford. 1997. The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Zeleza, P. T. 2009. “What Happened to the African Renaissance? The Challenges of Development in the Twenty-First Century.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 29 (2): 155–70.

3

Speaking Africa Re-membering Africa through Language, Culture, and Aesthetics Sheba Lo

AFRICAN CULTURE AS A UNIFYING FORCE African writers and scholars point to African culture and history as the foundation for re-connecting and re-membering African people around the globe. Ayi Kwei Armah observes that a people who “[lose] sight of their origins are dead” (1973, xv). His remedy for the Arab and European structural and physical violence committed against African people is to “return to the way,” African people’s cultural way of life (43). Okot p’Bitek defines culture as “a philosophy as lived and celebrated in a society” (1986, 13). It is the full participation in the life of the community that makes us human (p’Bitek 1986). The beauty of life is in relationships and connectedness (Armah 1973, 316). These “unifying principles” of African culture, Marimba Ani says, are the ties that bind and identify all Black people as African. In fact, she says, until African people around the world emphasize the similarities among them, they will “be politically and ideologically confused” (Ani 1980, 1). Similarly, Munashe Furusa informs us that African culture, worldview, and historical knowledge are the “principal sources of the spiritual and emotional energy that African people need to rehabilitate their minds, cleanse their souls and regenerate their confidence to achieve their independence and development.” African culture and historical knowledge, he argues, must serve as the foundation to “develop plans, strategies, and approaches that are appropriate to [African people’s] needs and interests” (Furusa 2000, 32). 31

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During his tenure as a professor at California State University, Dominguez Hills, Furusa taught his students that in the African worldview, there are two levels of language: symbolic and literal. As a war veteran of the liberation struggle in Zimbabwe, he discussed many stories about the ways in which Zimbabweans utilized their culture and cultural expression to win their independence. The songs that Zimbabweans sang in their indigenous languages provided an economic and political education and motivated people to fight in a war against the colonial invaders. Songs, as cultural expression, spoke to the cultural sensibilities of African people; thus, they could be more powerful and meaningful than a political speech (Ntuli 2003). Songs were so influential that Alec Pongweni’s book about them was appropriately titled Songs that Won the War (1982). They were part and parcel of the physical and spiritual war against colonization because they galvanized freedom fighters. Zimbabwean songs highlighted the exploitation of the Zimbabwean food supply, raw materials, and African labor, calling the British “exploiters” who brought “nothing but empty stomachs,” and who “have no claim to anything” (Pongweni 1982, 12–14). Anti-colonial wars were also fought in Kenya and South Africa, motivated by songs and poetry that assessed the situation, provided guidance, and claimed victory. Reclamation of the land was a central issue in the struggle for liberation. In addition to its brutality, foreign occupation disrupted the cultural fabric of African communities because the land belongs to the ancestors in the African worldview. Its tremendous mineral and agricultural wealth would, in a communal society, benefit the entire community. Consequently, the Kenyan songs emphasized that Europeans “left their land to come to rob and oppress [Africans]” and that Africans must “[f]ight that [they] get [their] land back!” (Kinyatti 1990, 27). Similarly, Mzwakhe Mbuli’s popular poetry was performed to music during the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. His poetry was replete with declarations like “no one can fight crocodiles inside the river,” and “no regime can press over a hot lid of a boiling pot forever” (Mbuli 1989), pointing to the inevitable defeat of the apartheid state’s oppression of Africans on their own land. This was powerful imagery that allowed Black South Africans to envisage their freedom. The art of cultural workers like Mbuli fueled the fury of Black South Africans in both the physical and psychological war against apartheid. LANGUAGE AND CULTURE Ngugi wa Thiong’o discusses the “dual character” of language in being both a means of communication and a transmitter of the specific history and culture of a group of people. One important aspect of “language as culture,”

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he asserts, is its action as an “image-forming agent in the mind of the child” (Thiong’o 1981, 13–15). Language fashions imagery that clarifies one’s place in the community and the interrelationships with nature and the world. It carries the values of a people (16). According to Professor Furusa, Zimbabweans greeted each other during the liberation struggle with “Good morning, son of the soil! Good morning daughter of the soil!” (February 5, 2001, class meeting). This use of language underscored their ties to the land and each other. Emphasizing these relationships was imperative for people who were fighting both a cultural and physical war. In many ways, African people are still battling the cultural implications of the structural violence of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank’s policies in Africa as well as globalization through media and the marketplace. IsiZulu speakers greet each other daily with Sawubona! This greeting literally means “I see you.” Symbolically and culturally, it says, I, my ancestors, and my future lineage, we see you. This greeting is representative of the African worldview that celebrates time as cyclical. The ancestors, people of the “present,” and the children yet unborn are viewed as part of one community. The typical response, yebo, sawubona, or simply yebo (yes), emphasizes the intention of seeing someone in a way that symbolically says, I value you and acknowledge your humanity. It joins the humanity of the people who greet each other. The lesser-used siyabonana is the reflexive form of the greeting, meaning “we see each other” in the literal sense. The African worldview provides us with a deeper meaning: we acknowledge each other’s humanity, our common spirit, and the lived experiences that bind us together (Lo 2022). In Sénégal, when people greet each other, it generally begins with questions about one’s well-being, health, whether they spent the night in peace, the well-being of their families, and so much more. When these greetings seem to be completed, they may start all over again without any time limitations. People might even laugh about the repetition, but the joy is in the connectedness of the people who are greeting each other. Some might even tell you that you are a good person because you spend time with other people. The full participation in community life is what makes the exchange of buying and selling in the African marketplace so important. It acts as a space for relationship building—the longer the discussion goes on the better. Waxalé, or “bargaining exchange” for Wolof speakers, allows space for discussions, asking questions, and even praying for one another. Traditionally, the marketplace exchange, like any other exchange, operates on the African principle of reciprocity. There may some variation in the urban space, but these encounters still hold value. If there are no hard feelings about the monetary transaction, a friendship has now been created in the marketplace, where those involved in the interaction will again ask about each other’s families

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and their health and share the warmth of community. People remember each other, and they remember each other’s stories because relationships are central to African society. Having a guest is another opportunity to bond with others and participate fully in African society. The receiving family would want to bring out the best of everything they have at their home to demonstrate their joy. A typical gesture is to share a cup of ataya, a Moroccan tea. Expressions tend to follow each round of ataya that ask the visitor to stay for one more round such as “it is the second one that binds us together.” After the third round of tea, a guest might be asked if they will spend the night. When the guest must finally leave, the receiving family may repeat the guest’s last name over and over as they leave, while the guest repeats the surnames of the family they visited. This act praises the historical lineage from which the person emerges, shows respect for the person and their family, including their ancestors, and celebrates those yet unborn from that lineage. We may see this to a lesser extent with shifts in urban environments, but this practice continues. While cultural practices such as these may be shortened or eliminated altogether, the cultural values themselves are eradicated much more slowly, if at all, even under extreme external pressure. This is evident in the discovery of Sankofa symbols and beads buried with African people who were enslaved in New York (Kutz 1997). PAN-AFRICANISM AND THE BLACK AESTHETIC The sharing of symbols, music, aesthetics, rhythms, oral culture, and the battle for liberation operate as tangible illustrations of the spirit of Pan-Africanism among African peoples. Marcus Garvey’s US-based United Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League’s program of self-determination, self-reliance, and Back-to-Africa Movement gained more than 6 million members across forty-three countries at the start of the twentieth century. Black South Africans demonstrated a strong association with Black people in America during apartheid when some Black South Africans believed Garvey and African Americans would be their liberators. Garveyism was firmly entrenched in South Africa (Vinson 2006). Black South Africans sported Afros and the apparel of African Americans as James Brown’s song “Say It Loud: I’m Black and I’m Proud” (1968) helped to fuel the “Black is Beautiful” aesthetic around the African world. Black South Africans connected to jazz in part because it was music created by African Americans. Black South Africans raised their fists for freedom, and African Americans shouted Amandla! (power) at organizational meetings for Black liberation. More recently, the world saw Ghanaians protesting the police

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murder of George Floyd in 2020, chanting, “We are not free until we are all free” (BBC News 2020). African and African American freedom struggles were fought concurrently, often reflecting one another, so it is unsurprising that Africa was the spiritual and cultural source for the Black Arts Movement (BAM) and the Black Aesthetic of the 1960s and 1970s in the United States during the period when many African countries fought for and achieved liberation. Black Art, according to Larry Neal, is the “aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept.” Black art is necessarily connected to politics and social movements because, in the African worldview, these two are inseparable. Black Art, then should speak to the “spiritual and cultural needs of Black people,” and create a Black Aesthetic in which “your ethics and your aesthetics are one” (Neal 1972, 272–75). Amiri Baraka notes that African liberation movements were “gaining worldwide recognition” and he and other BAM artists protested the American and Belgian murder of Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba at the US Mission to the United Nations in 1961 (Baraka 2014, 11). This act of solidarity highlights the centrality of Africa within the Black Arts Movement, particularly because it took place so close to the independence of Ghana, the first African country to gain its independence from Europe in 1957. The essence of Black people, John O’Neal points out, is found in connecting to their African roots, the “common source” (1972, 51), from which they sustain themselves. In fact, he argues that the liberation struggle for Black people is and will be defined by “[t]he world, with Africa as a base” (54). America, on the other hand, has been an “oven” for Black people (50)—a hostile space that “sponsored the rape of Africa” (47). AFRICAN AMERICAN LANGUAGE One of the most salient aspects of the Black Aesthetic is the idea that artists should represent the people’s aspirations and give voice to their pain. Its charge was to “reshape the minds of the people” so that they can “create those organizations and institutions that will finally educate, employ, entertain and liberate [Black people]” (Baraka 2014, 17–19). For Julian Mayfield, the Black Aesthetic is found in the “racial memory and unshakable knowledge of who [Black people] are, where [they] have been . . . and where [they] are going (Mayfield 1972, 27). In this environment where Africa was the nourishment of the Black Aesthetic and the source of its value system, there was an intentional focus on the maintenance and institutionalization of African American Language (AAL). Geneva Smitherman argued for a national language policy for speakers of AAL as early as 1977 after both the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) and the Conference on College Composition and

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Communication (CCCC) passed policies to affirm AAL in 1974 (Smitherman 2002). In 1979, a court ruling in King v. Ann Arbor “[reaffirmed] the legitimacy” of AAL (Smitherman 2002, 167). In fact, national discussions of AAL began in the 1960s and lasted into the early 1980s and then “resurfaced” to the general American public in 1997 around the Oakland Ebonics Resolution, passed by the Oakland School Board, to provide an “equal opportunity for education” for AAL speakers to master what Smitherman calls European American Language (EAL) while maintaining their home language (Foster 2018, 653). While many outside the linguistic field engaged in public debates around the resolution, not much attention was paid to specific examples of the African linguistic structure of AAL, the history and culture inextricably tied to the language, or the language acquisition research that guided the Oakland School Board Resolution. Instead, discussions around respectability politics, or making Blackness palatable to Whites, emerged through public figures such as Bill Cosby, who described young Black people who speak AAL as “knuckleheads,” who are unwilling or unable to speak English, and who will not aspire to be doctors or pilots in his infamous “Pound Cake Speech” at a 2004 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People event (Serwer 2015). Other debates centered around whether AAL was a dialect of English or a separate language. Regardless of one’s perspective on AAL’s origin and language status, anyone involved in contemporary education understands that students cannot achieve their full potential when they are taught from a deficit model. Such models view AAL as something that needs to be corrected by teachers. However, a basic understanding of second language acquisition acknowledges the importance of affirming the first language and culture of a learner. The Oakland Resolution described AAL “as a legitimate, rich, and ‘primary language’” (Foster 2018, 660). Sonia Sanchez describes Black people as “word sorcerers” who “come with the magic of words.” She says that when Black people speak their language, they “are bringing forth the beauty of [their] souls” (Sanchez 2007, 96–97). This perspective would magnify the capacity of Black students to thrive in any school system. The celebration of Black people’s language along with identity affirmation and the historical and cultural connection to Africa is life-changing for Black students. Smitherman’s hope for a national language policy to support African American students’ learning has not yet been realized, but more publications have begun to focus on the impact of linguistic profiling of Black people who speak AAL in employment, housing, education, and the courtroom (Baugh 2021). Black ASL is also now part of the larger national conversation. Still, many are unaware that AAL is a complex, rule-governed language. One study (Jones et al. 2019) found that court reporters transcribed

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AAL accurately only 82.9 percent of the time. In this study, 31 percent of the transcriptions incorrectly noted the subject, time, place, and action. The consequences of such misinterpretations of meaning in AAL in a courtroom can be life-altering. While AAL is misunderstood in many environments, pieces of the language, along with hip-hop, have been appropriated and utilized for capitalist enterprise across corporate, entertainment, and social media. Social media, in particular, provides an opportunity for the global voyeurism of Black communication. Emboldened by corporate media’s appropriation, social media influencers and end users, for example, utilize expressions from AAL without the linguistic profiling faced by African American speakers of the language. Black creators are pushing back and posting social media threads pointing out the ungrammatical usage and mispronunciation of AAL. One such example is “whew chillaay.” It originated from a video of a White woman asking a Black man how to say “whew chile” (Sunny 2018). She read it “whew chillaay,” instead of the long /ī/ sound in the word “chile.” After the video went viral, Black people began to use “whew chillaay,” in place of “whew chile,” as a sort of common cultural acknowledgment of the constant misuse and appropriation of AAL from outside the Black community. Grammatical structures of language, like the deep cultural values of a people, are much slower to change over time. It is the words or lexicon of a language, the superficial aspect, that shifts through generational change and of course, colonial contact or external pressure. African American Language (AAL), which has also been called Ebonics, African American English, African American Vernacular English, and Black English, has been ridiculed and mislabeled as inferior English since it emerged from its creole origins in North America. African Americans have themselves been labeled inferior as the architects and directors of this language. The assumption that AAL is slang, grammatically incorrect, substandard, or improper English highlights both the lack of linguistic and historical knowledge among the general American public as well as the refusal to view African Americans as connected to Africa linguistically and culturally. There has been a longstanding debate around the origins of African American Language. According to Ernie Smith, African Americans have “retained a West and Niger-Congo African thought process” that shows up in their language. Black English, he says, “is an oxymoron” (cited in Rickford 2000, 170). John McWhorter, on the other hand, asserts that “there is not a single sentence structure in Black English that is traceable to West African Languages” and that one would be more likely to find the origin of AAL in the “countryside” of England (McWhorter 1998, 174–75). It can be argued that the deep structure of the language is not English at all. This is most evident in its tense and aspect system.

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AAL and Culture There is a general assumption that there is mutual intelligibility between English and contemporary AAL due to AAL’s English lexicon; however, the intent of the speaker is often completely missed. Studies have shown the unreliability of court reporting of AAL (Jones et al. 2019), so this assumption needs further study. Mutual intelligibility, a linguistic concept that helps to determine the relationship between spoken languages and varieties of languages, must go further than lexical intelligibility; it requires similar grammatical structures and cultural inferences so that the meanings are mutually understood even if there are some lexical and phonetic variations like in the case of British and American English. There are other factors that determine how a language obtains the language designation. These determinants are based on the political, social, and economic power a group holds in society, locally and globally. Indeed, this base of power is likely why some Latinderived European languages are considered languages and not dialects. These determinants alone are unreliable. We must also look to the plethora of cultural elements attached to AAL, including the African rhythms, stresses, pitches, and tones that give unique meanings to words and phrases so often misunderstood outside of the Black community- even appropriated as “internet slang” by Gen Z without the cultural context (Cil from Zenerations [now Good for Youth] 2021). Furthermore, the orality and discourse styles of AAL are extensive and require a great deal of timing and skills. There are cultural cues and inferences understood by the African American community. “Fityleben,” for example, is understood as a unit of measure. It describes a lot of the nouns that it precedes. It does not mean fifty-eleven. “All up in the KoolAid and don’t even know the flavor” means that the person or people are nosy (Smitherman 2006, 21). It does not have anything to do with a beverage, but there is a rhythmic style required for this phrase. Reciting the phrase without the exact timing would let Black people know instantaneously that one is not a fluent AAL speaker. In contemporary social media, there is a resurgence of pride in AAL. One can find various celebrations of African American Language through memes, posts, and live videos in circles that celebrate the language and culture of Black people. For example, a friend recently posted a meme on Facebook that said, “Say that isn’t any of my business, but in Black” (anonymous 2022). AAL’s cultural idioms operate in a creative and forever-generative space. There are facial responses and sounds that accompany these responses (or act alone) that are understood in the Black community, though some may be generation specific. There are also specific stresses and tones required. The responses all communicate that it is none of the speaker’s business.

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1.  Teef suck (sound) 2.  My name Bess 3.  My name Bennett 4.  You better than me 5.  You do you 6.  That’s wild 7.  Word? 8.  If you like it, I love it 9.  That’s on y’all 10.  Is that right? The worldview that conveys and understands the messages of African American Language also carries the rhythms of life of the people within the language and cultural community. Travels throughout the United States will highlight the many regional dialects of AAL. The varying lexicon circulates throughout the various dialects of AAL. Once they leave the Black community and are in general American (English) usage, they are often considered dead or unusable in AAL. Grammatical Elements of Wolof, AAL, and West African Pidgin English (WAPE) The similarities in deep structure among West African aspectual languages and AAL require a large-scale study and collaboration among linguists, specialists in African culture, Black studies scholars, historians, and others. The development of AAL can be understood as part of a language continuum rather than a linear progression from Wolof and other languages to West African Pidgin (English) (WAPE), and AAL. The centuries-long capture and enslavement of Africans meant that Africans continued to arrive on US soil with their languages and cultures, enriching and exchanging with other Africans they met. This section provides some examples that highlight the similarities among some of the grammatical structures of Wolof, the national language of Sénégal, and AAL, along with some aspectual markers of WAPE. Nouns and Plurality Both Wolof and AAL exhibit nouns unmarked for plurality; the number function is carried by the quantifier. In Wolof, the number can be carried by plural definite and indefinite markers. Wolof

Gis

naa

ñaari

xar.

see

1st sg. neutral perf. focus

two

sheep

I saw two sheep.

40 AAL

Sheba L De

gum

article

cost

fity

cent.

verb unmarked for tense

quantifier

noun unmarked for plurality

The gum costs fifty cents.

Subject and Verb Agreement In both Wolof and AAL, the subject and verb do not require agreement. In Wolof, the focus or aspectual marker carries the function of number and person. The verbs themselves are typically uninflected, with the exception of the past tense. The verbs are generally uninflected in AAL, making subject-verb agreement unviable. Wolof

Móódu

moo

dem.

Móódu

3rd sg. subj. focus

go; verb unmarked for tense

Móódu left. AAL

He

sick.

Subj. He is sick.

Verb unmarked for tense

Possessives Word order is used to indicate possession in both Wolof and AAL, though the word order differs. It is unknown whether this stems from other African languages or has been adopted from English. If the latter is the case, AAL has resisted the ‘s from English. Wolof

AAL

Kër

Fatou

house Fatou’s house

Fatou

Leila

car

Leila’s car

Zero Copula Both Wolof and AAL can operate without the existence of a traditional copula within their sentence structures; the examples below show parallel usage of locative phrases as well as other phrases that can operate as predicates. Wolof

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uses adjectival verbs and nouns that operate as predicates and aspectual markers for focus and number. Wolof

AAL

Góór

lañu.

man They are men.

3rd pl. compl. focus

She

a teacher. pred. noun phrase

She is a teacher. Wolof

New York

AAL

la

dëkk.

3rd sg. compl. focus He/She lives in New York.

reside

She

there.

over pred. locative phrase

She is over there.

Aspectual Markers Both Wolof and AAL mark aspect with an aspectual focus marker, followed by a verb, that is generally unmarked for tense. When a verb is marked for tense, it is usually the past tense for both Wolof and AAL. WAPE uses some aspectual markers in a way that parallels Wolof and AAL. They all use aspectual markers in the same syntactic location and manner. Wolof uses the neutral perfective aspect to denote a completed action. WAPE and AAL use the aspectual marker don to show completed action. An overt subject is not required by Wolof but is required by AAL and WAPE, likely due to English influence. Wolof

AAL

Lekk

na

eat He ate.

3rd sg. neutral perf. focus

Lajuan

don

finish his paper.

Resultative Lajuan just finished his paper. WAPE

king

i

tok

sey

yu

king he talks that you The king welcomed him. (Schneider 1966, 71)

don

kom.

completive

come

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In Wolof, the past tense suffix is used for added emphasis to show that the event is not only completed but that it was completed a long time ago. WAPE and AAL show that same aspect by using the aspectual marker bín. Wolof

Dama

lekk

-oon

ceebu jën.

1st sg. verb focus

eat

emph. past

national Senegalese dish of rice and fish

had eaten ceebu jën a long time ago. AAL

LaToya

bín

lef.

remote past LaToya left a long time ago. WAPE

I

bin

bi

fo

som

fan

kontri

fo

insai

Afrika.

he

past

be

in

Some

fine

country

in

inside

Africa

He lived in a beautiful part of Africa. (Schneider 1966, 71)

In Wolof, di is used as a continuative aspectual or focus marker and is placed before the verb that is unmarked for tense. In AAL be2, which is likely related to di, is used as the continuative aspectual marker and is placed before the verb that is only marked in the progressive tense. Some contend that di operates as a copula in addition to an imperfective marker in sentences (McLaughlin 2004, 248); nevertheless, it is commonly identified as one of the two most used habitual markers, along with -y. Unsurprisingly, WAPE, an intermediary between Wolof and AAL, also uses di as the continuative marker. It is important to note that the present progressive aspect of English is one of the more salient or prominent features for English learners. This could possibly account for the additional tense marking on the AAL verb. Wolof

Nit

ñi

di

dem

mees.

people

human pl. continuative go class. or habitual The people usually go to church.

AAL

Keane

be2

church

studyin.

habitual Keane is always studying. WAPE

I

di

kas

eni

man

fo

sens.

he

continuative

katch

any

man

for

sense

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Speaking Africa He was outwitting everyone. (Schneider 1966, 71)

Wolof uses forms of dina to indicate the future. AAL uses the aspectual marker gon for the future and often finna and bout ta for immediate future. WAPE uses gow as the future marker. The cultural perceptions of time are illustrated in the language of both Wolof and AAL. The immediate future can be now, five minutes from now, an hour from now, or much later. The meanings rely heavily on the context. Wolof

Dinaa

lekk

ceebu jën.

1st sg. person

eat

national Senegalese dish of rice and fish

I will eat ceebu jën. AAL

I’m

finna

go.

immediate future I’m leaving (at some point in the near future). AAL

Saida

gon

get her paper.

future Saida will get her money. WAPE

a

gow

was

-am.

I

future

wash

it

I’ll wash it. (Schneider 1966, 71)

Negative Concord Negation in Wolof and AAL work similarly. Every element that is indefinite must be conveyed as a negative. In AAL, auxiliaries may also be moved to the front of the sentence by a negative inversion rule. In WAPE, the negative marker and the aspectual marker precede the verb, but it does not appear to be as complex as Wolof or AAL. In the Wolof example, kenn can mean someone or no one. Its meaning is made negative because of the rules of negative concord. Wolof

Kenn

am

-ul

dara.

no one

have

neg. 3rd sg. neutral perf. focus

nothing

No one has anything. AAL

Don’t

nobody

want

nothing.

Do+neg

anybody+neg

verb

anything+neg

44

Sheba L Nobody wants anything.

WAPE

A

no

de

wok.

I

neg.

continuative

work

I’m not working. (Dwyer 1966, 134)

Some elements of inflectional morphology differ between Wolof and African American Language because of English influence, but the contribution of other African languages should also be considered. Since WAPE and AAL use aspectual markers in similar ways, AAL undoubtedly retained these markers from WAPE. AAL has taken some English elements, such as the unstressed bin, certain adverbial elements, and some progressive, past, or verb forms, and transformed them to have new meanings within a West African language structure. Though these elements appear to be English, they are used to maintain African language continuity. The similarity in negative concord, subject-verb agreement, zero copula, and possession highlight the genetic relationship between Wolof and other West African aspectual languages and African American Language as well as some dissimilarities between AAL and English. In addition to the limited tense and aspect elements discussed here, there are cultural aspects, regional dialects, and an underlying structure and sound system that make AAL a full-fledged, rulegoverned language on its own. The Pan-African Boomerang Fadda Freddy of the Sénégalese hip-hop group Daara J believes that hip-hop, like jazz and blues, started in Africa and went around the world and returned to Africa like a boomerang “that was thrown from the motherland and is now back home” (NPR 2005). The role of the griot and the art of tassu, or rhymes performed with clapping, are discussed frequently in Sénégal as the genesis of hip-hop. Many hip-hop artists such as Da Brains see their role as a continuation of that of the griot, who is a caretaker of the culture, historian, mediator, social critic, and much more (Herson 2008). The griot used colorful, expressive, and innovative language; Sénégalese hip-hop artists are equally innovative linguistically, creating new semantic and lexical structures. Traditionally, tassu was largely performed by women and could be communal, political, personal, and autobiographical (McNee 2000). It is highly rhythmic and like other African forms of performance, relies on both call and response and invites everyone to be a participant. Both tassu and the griot were important to social critiques. Contemporary Sénégalese hip-hop artists have largely taken on the role of agents of social and political change (Lo 2014).

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Hip-hop acts as a continuous vehicle of exchange among continental Africans and African people born in America, whom many Sénégalese admire and respect. There is a strong spirit of Pan-Africanism found among those in the Sénégalese hip-hop community. Many see hip-hop as a tool of resistance, so it is unsurprising to find musical trends in Sénégalese hip-hop like Dirty South and clothing that pays homage to the African (American) creators of hip-hop in the US. In between US and Sénégalese hip-hop artists primarily use Wolof, the national language of Sénegal. When they do use English, it is often AAL, and not EAL or British English. The song “Against Impunity” (gabyvideoclips 2012), for example, was created to be both a call to action to Gambians and a warning to the Former Gambian president Yahya Jammeh, whom the Gambian and Sénégalese artists, call a dictator. Djily Bagdad calls the people to action. While English is at least his third language, he, like many African American speakers, moves between EAL and AAL. This is most obvious in lines 1 and 2 where there is no apparent copula used in his sentences. 1.  Why leaving our future in one man’s hand/No rules at all . . . 2.  The population running scared / Living in misery 3.  Stand up for our rights and let freedom ring / Let’s knock this dictator out of the ring 4.  A message of hope, this is what we bring / Democracy in The Gambia is what the caged bird sings Bagdad’s final line is an intentional nod to Maya Angelou, an African American literary and cultural icon. In line 4, he uses a copula. It would be interesting to know if this is systemic or accidental. In the same song, Xuman uses the phrase “lépp nice” (gabyvideoclips 2012). Lépp means everything. The use of the word “nice” carries the connotation of “cool,” an African (American) term. It can be translated as “it’s all good.” It is a divergence from Wolof, in which a more youthful person might respond lépp jàmm or everything is peaceful, as a response to someone’s greeting. It is also common to hear a young person use a grammatically-innovative phrase like, “Yaa ngi cool?” or are you cool? There are many other examples of intentional connections Sénégalese artists have made with their African (American) brothers and sisters through language and aesthetics. Hip-hop is institutionalized in Dakar, Sénégal, and hip-hop has become a connective force for people of African descent around the world to share their joys, challenges, and solidarity even as the specific contexts among them differ.

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THE BOOMERANG EFFECT AND RE-MEMBERING Some African (American) hip-hop artists like Africa Bambaata, X-Clan, and Arrested Development proudly connect themselves to Africa. In the song “I’m a African,” Dead Prez (2000) contend that they are African and not African American, asserting their biological, spiritual, and cultural African heritage. While these sorts of messages do not appear commonly in mainstream, corporate-controlled hip-hop, the spirit exists. In 2005, a handwritten message was seen on the walls of La Maison des Esclaves, “the house of slaves,” on Gorée Island, Sénégal. Written in French and attributed to Latyr Ndiaye it said, “My brother of the Diaspora, history has separated us.” La Maison des Esclaves is one of many dungeons along the East and West Coasts of Africa, where Black people from around the world pay homage to and re-member their ancestors who were held captive by Arab and European enslavers. The Door of No Return would have been the last time that African people would touch African soil. Hence, the boldly written inscription on the wall of the dungeon acted as a deeply emotional re-connection for people of African descent who have made this return to Africa. This inscription, the messages of hip-hop, the Sankofa symbols and beads buried in the African Burial Ground National Monument in New York, and Black people speaking languages that carry African rhythms and grammatical elements are all powerful representations of the global African act of re-membering. The act of re-membering necessarily operates on a Pan-African paradigm. It is the piecing together of those forcibly scattered fragments around the world and celebrating them as one. It is the sharing of energies, expressions, dreams, pain, and pride. It is a celebration of one’s authentic self, the way of being and doing—the Africanness of Black people everywhere. It is a celebration of Africa within. Like Munashe Furusa, Ayi Kwei Armah sees Pan-Africanism and African culture as the source of the development of Africa and a guide for African people worldwide. That we the black people are one we know . . . Remembrance has not escaped us. . . . We, people of the fertile time before these schisms; we, life’s people, people of the way, trapped now in our smallest self, that is our vocation: to find our larger, our healing self, we the black people. (Armah 1973, 24–32)

African culture is the “fabric of mental, emotional, and physical activities whose threads hold a people together within and across generations” (Chinweizu 1987, 215). Then the elevation of African languages is necessary for African people’s decolonization and development, including their expansion to describe new technologies. To “return to the [African] way,” (Armah 1973, 43) African people must displace foreign systems, languages,

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structures, and institutions from African soil and psyche. Africa’s tremendous youth potential—its artists and intellectuals, emerging economies, vast mineral and agriculture wealth, and rich human history dictate that those who wish to do business or exchange with the continent do so in African languages, honoring African cultural values. African worldview and culture must underpin the future of technology and development in the African world. The decolonization of the global African psyche clears the way for the re-membering of African people who speak and re-member Africa through African and African-based rhythmic languages around the world. REFERENCES African Underground: Democracy in Dakar. 2008. DVD. Directed by Christopher Moore, Magee McIlvaine Ben Herson. Produced by Christopher Moore, Magee McIlvaine Ben Herson. Nomadic Wax. Amandla! A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony. 2003. DVD. Directed by Lee Hirsch. Produced by Sherry Simpson. Performed by Sifiso Ntuli. Artisan Entertainment. Ani, Marimba. 1980. Let the Circle Be Unbroken: The Implications of African Spirituality in the Diaspora. Atlanta: Nkonimfo Publications. Armah, Ayi Kwei. 1973. Two Thousand Seasons. Popenguine, Senegal: Per Ankh. Baraka, Amiri. 2014. “The Black Arts Movement.” In SOS—Calling All Black People: A Black Arts Movement Reader, edited by John H. Bracey, Sonia Sanchez, and James Smethurst, 11–22. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Baugh, John. 2021. “SWB (Speaking While Black): Linguistic Profiling and Discrimination Based on Speech As a Surrogate for Race against Speakers of African American Vernacular English.” In The Oxford handbook of African American Language, by Sonja Lanehart, 755–69. New York: Oxford University Press. BBC News. 2020. June 8. Accessed April 7, 2022. https:​//​www​.bbc​.com​/news​/world​ -africa​-52969895. Brown, James. 1968. “Say It Loud: I’m Black and I’m Proud.” Comp. James and Ellis, Pee Wee Brown. Chinweizu. 1987. Decolonising the African Mind. London: Sundoor. Dead Prez. 2000. “I’m a African.” Track 2 on Let’s Get Free. Loud Records, CD. Dwyer, D. 1966. Introduction to West African Pidgin English. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University. Foster, Tryphenia B. Peele-Eady and Michèle L. 2018. “The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same: African American English, Language Policy, and African American Learners.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 31 (8): 652–66. Furusa, Munashe. 2000. “African Culture and African People’s Agenda for Liberation and Development.” International Journal of Africana Studies 6 (1): 30–42.

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gabyvideoclips. 2012. Against Impunity. iris Audiovisuel. December 14. Accessed December 2014. https:​//​www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=w7I81EK​-​_JE. Jones, Taylor, Jessica Rose Kalbfeld, Ryan Hancock, and Robin Clark. 2019. “Testifying While Black: An Experimental Study of Court Reporter Accuracy in Transcription of African American English.” Language 95 (2): e216–52. http:​//​doi​ .org​/10​.1353​/lan​.2019​.0042. Kinyatti, Maina wa. 1990. Thunder from the Mountains: Mau Mau Patriotic Songs. Edited by Maina wa Kinyatti. Trenton: Africa World Press. Lo, Sheba. 2014. In Ni Wakati: Hip-hop and Social Change in Africa, edited by Msia Kibona Clark and Mickie Mwanzia Koster, 27–47. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. ———. 2022. Homepage. Siyabonana: The Journal of Africana Studies. Accessed December 1, 2022. https:​//​www​.journalofafricanastudies​.com. Mayfield, Julian. 1972. “You Touch My Black Aesthetic and I’ll Touch Yours.” In The Black Aesthetic, edited by Addison Gayle Jr., 23–37. New York: Anchor Books. Mbuli, Mzwakhe. 1989. “Crocodiles.” Track 1 on Unbroken Spirit, Shifty Records. CD.. McLaughlin, Fiona. 2004. “Is There an Adjective Clause in Wolof? Adjective Classes: A Cross-Linguistic Typology,” January. 242–62. Accessed July 3, 2022. https:​//​www​.researchgate​.net​/publication​/301690347. McNee, Lisa. 2000. Selfish Gifts: Senegalese Women’s Autobiographical Discourses. Albany: State University of New York University Press. McWhorter, John. 1998. Word on the Street: Fact and Fable About American English. New York: Basic Books. Neal, Larry. 1972. “The Black Arts Movement.” Drama Review: 273–75. NPR. 2005. 2005. “Daara J: Senegalese Hip-Hop.” All Things Considered, May 20. https:​//​www​.npr​.org​/2005​/05​/20​/4660446​/daara​-j- senegalese-hip-hop. O’Neal, John. 1972. “Black Arts: Notebook.” In The Black Aesthetic, edited by Jr. Addison Gayle, 46–56. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books. p’Bitek, Okot. 1986. The Artist the Ruler: Essays on Art, Culture, and Values. Nairobi: Heinemann Limited. Pongweni, Alec J. 1982. Songs that Won the Liberation War. Harare, Zimbabwe: College Press. Rickford, John R., and Rickford, Russel, J. 2000. Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English. New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc. Sanchez, Sonia. 2007. “Sounds Bouncin Off Paper.” In Talkin Black Talk, edited by H. Samy Alim and John Baugh, 92–99. New York: Teachers College Press. Schneider, G. D. 1966. West African Pidgin-English: A Descriptive Analysis with Texts and Glossary from the Cameroon Area. Athens, OH: Hartford Seminary Foundation. Serwer, Adam. 2015. BuzzFeed News. July 9. https:​//​www​.buzzfeednews​.com​/article​ /adamserwer​/bill​-cosby​-pound​-for​-pound. Accessed April 7, 2022. Slavery’s Buried Past. 1997. DVD. Directed by David and Bedell, Molly Kutz. Produced by Bill Kurtis. A&E. Smitherman, Geneva. 1997. “‘The Chain Remain the Same’: Communicative Practices in the Hip-hop Nation.” Journal of Black Studies 28 (1): 3–25.

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Smitherman, Geneva. 2002. “Towards a National Public Policy on Language.” In The Skin that We Speak, edited by Lisa Delpit, 163–78. New York: The New Press. ———. 2006. Word from the Mother: Language and African Americans. New York: Routledge. Sunny. 2018. Facepalm Moment: White Girl Asks Black Guy How You Say “Whew Chile!” November 14. Accessed July 13, 2022. https:​ //​ w o r l d s t a r h i p h o p ​ . c o m ​ / v i d e o s ​ / w s h h h 1 p g 1 3 w Q z W 1 F N 9 e g ​ / f a c e p a l m​ -moment- white-girl-asks-black-guy-how-you-say-quotwhew-chilequot. Thiong’o, Ngugi wa. 1981. Decolonising the Mind. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Vinson, Robert Trent. 2006. “‘Sea Kaffirs’: ‘American Negroes’ and the Gospel of Garveyism in Early Twentieth Century Cape Town.” The Journal of African History 47 (2): 281–303. Zenerations. 2021. February 10. https:​//​zenerations​.org​/2021​/02​/10​/dear​-gen​-z​-aave​ -is​-not​-internet​-slang​/. Accessed February 10, 2021.

4

“Africa for the Africans” Garvey and African Transnationality The Idea of Flexible Citizenship W. Gabriel Selassie I

On August 3, 1920, Marcus Mosiah Garvey (1887–1940), president general of the largest Black organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) founded in 1914, appeared before an exuberant crowd in a fully packed Liberty Hall on West 138th street in Harlem of New York City. The assembly hall was crowded with people of African descent that came to Harlem as delegates and attendees of the UNIA’s First International Convention of the Negro People of the World. Garvey articulated the purpose of the day: “As you view this assemblage you will find it composed of men and women delegates who have been sent from different parts of the world to attend this, our first annual convention.” He went on: We are assembled for the purpose of discussing the great problems that confront us as a race and as a people. We are assembled for the purpose of framing a constitution that will govern the Negro peoples of the world. We are assembled as delegates to this convention for the purpose of framing the Bill of Rights of the Negro peoples of the world. We are here because, as a suffering people, we desire freedom. We are here because we are tired of being abused by the other powers and races of the world. We are here because we desire to make Africa a great power and the greatest power in the world. (Cheers.) We are here out of eighty-two years of slavery—those of you from the West Indies. We are here out of fifty-odd years of slavery in America—those of us who are Americans. All of us, whether West Indians or Americans, being Negroes, have been separated from Africa for the last three hundred years, and we are now united into 51

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one solid body under the colors of the red, the black, and green to declare the freedom of Africa. (Tumultuous applause.)1

Garvey articulated his position regarding the unification of the Black race by stating, “OUR UNION MUST KNOW NO CLIME, BOUNDARY, or NATIONALITY.”2 The single most important document to come out of the convention was an overwhelmingly adopted “Declaration of Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World.”3 The Declaration is a powerful international manifesto asserting the rights and grievances of people of African descent: Be it Resolved, That the Negro people of the world, through their chosen representatives in convention assembled in Liberty Hall, in the City of New York and United States of America, from August 1 to August 31, in the year of our Lord, one thousand nine hundred and twenty, protest against the wrongs and injustices they are suffering at the hands of their white brethren, and state what they deem their fair and just rights, as well as the treatment they propose to demand of all men in the future.4

What Garvey and members of the UNIA were proposing was a form of transnational or “flexible citizenship” for members of the African race. The Declaration of Rights, Article XII-1, asserted, among other demands: Be it known to all men that whereas, all men are created equal and entitled to the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and because of this we, the duly elected representatives of the Negro peoples of the world, invoking the aid of the just and Almighty God do declare all men, women and children of our blood throughout the world free citizens, and do claim them as free citizens of Africa, the Motherland of all Negroes.5 (Emphasis added)

The declaration came at a time of unprecedented upheaval in world affairs. World War I (1914–1918) and the Paris Peace Conference (1919–1920) laid bare the rumblings of colonized people of the world and a real belief that self-determination was finally at hand. Garvey, sensing the political winds were blowing in a new direction, articulated a belief shared among many people of African descent that there must be a rekindling of the ancestral ties that bound Africa to Africans in the diaspora. Despite Garvey’s self-proclaimed ascendancy as leader of the “Negro peoples of the world,” Garvey summed up one of the most important twentieth-century existential proclamations when he wrote his Pan-African manifesto “Africa for the Africans at home and abroad.”6 African diasporans displaced centuries ago from the transatlantic slave trade, in a sense, have never left Africa. From the beginnings of enslavement, people of African descent sought reunification to Africa, their eternal

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homeland. Martin Delaney (1812–1883), Alexander Crummell (1814–1898), Henry Highland Garnett (1815–1882), Edward Wilmot Blyden (1832–1912), and James T. Holly (1829–1911) all supported or proposed some form of repatriation to Africa. They never questioned that they were, despite not having been born in Africa, in fact “citizens” of Africa. The long-awaited Pan-African goal of a reunification with Africa faced insurmountable obstacles, that could not have been overcome by the masses, given the cultural and political factors shaping geopolitics. Furthermore, many middle-class African Americans were unwilling or unable to realize Garvey’s and other Black pro-emigrations dreams of a return. Yet, Garvey’s call to emigrate would become a rallying mantra among successive generations of people of African descent—from colonial freedom struggles of the late twentieth century, the global Rastafari movement, or from the golden age of hip hop, (representative rap artists such as KRS-One and Afrika Bambaataa & the Universal Zulu Nation, echoed Garvey’s proclamation), the call for a return is ideologically imbedded in an assemblage of Afrocentric cultural expressions. African diasporians, particularly in the United States, are in an unenviable position. They are “forced citizens” of nations whose liability for enslavement of Africans and erecting racial-apartheid type barriers to personal and group progress is well documented.7 Furthermore, African diasporians have lived in a state of perpetual liminality—being physically in one location, but whose warring soul resides in another—neither completely here nor there. The result is a specter of one’s Africanness is, no matter how fleeting, ever present but unknowable. This Du Boisian fictive duality exists as an anomaly without any historical example to model one’s behavior to overcome this loss of true self-consciousness. This split when viewed through the lens of double consciousness,8 creates what Paul Gilroy articulated as the Western Black conundrum of being locked in an “antagonistic relationship” two cultural worlds shaped by the “Manichean dynamic” of Black and White.9 Only through diligence and perseverance have African Americans (and, by connection, Afro-Caribbean and Latin) populations managed to survive this antagonistic relationship, albeit at a heavy physical and psychological cost. The cost of living behind the veil, in a liminal state, between—Africa and the United States, has forced many, particularly middle-class Blacks, to reconsider the psychological and physiological cost of remining in the United States in lieu of repatriation to Africa.

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THE IDEA OF AN AFRICAN OR TRANSNATIONAL FLEXIBLE CITIZENSHIP In her insightful work Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (1999), Aihwa Ong defines or links “flexible citizenship” to “the cultural logics of capital accumulation, travel and displacement that induces subjects to respond fluidly and opportunistically to the changing political-economic conditions.”10 Ong’s conceptualization of the ability of people to move between nations to reap the benefits offered from modern systems of capital is bound up with transnationality. Ong defines transnationality as “both moving through space or across lines, as well as changing the nature of something.” To Ong this not only means “new relations between nation-states and capital” but also “alludes to the transversal the transactional, the translational and the transgressive aspects of contemporary behavior and imagination that are incited, enabled and regulated by the changing logics of states and capital.”11 Ong’s definition when applied to people of African descent is only modified by time and location. Garvey’s and other Africanists schemes at repatriation were always about finding ways to disrupt the relationship between people of African descent, western nation-states and capital. The most dramatic solution to enable this disruption was linking African repatriation with Black entrepreneurship. Garvey’s scheme was based on a rearrangement of Black labor and capital. Whereby the “Black Atlantic World,” would serve as the arena by which Black labor and capital would move through space and across lines. Garvey’s Blackstar Line Steamship Corporation, incorporated on June 27, 1919, is representative of Ong’s and Gilroy’s presentations. The Blackstar Line, a shipping venture created not only to transport goods between African nations, but also to provide a racist free transportation environment for its Black passengers. Historian Tony Martin argued that “in the Black Star Line story, we also see, more clearly than probably in any other aspect of the movement’s history, the amazing sacrifices that Black people were willing to make for a racial movement they perceived as being seriously about the business of effecting their emancipation.”12 As Martin suggests the Black Star Line appealed to a wide swath of diasporans, “African and West Indian merchants saw in it a hope of independence from racist White companies, missionaries saw in it an end of the long trip via Europe to get to Africa, Liberians saw in it the hope of a coastwise service between Liberia and Sierra Leone, and most saw in it a triumph of for black self-esteem.”13 As previously mentioned, for Ong (Asian) transnationalism is linked with capital accumulation. For people of African descent, it is not solely about the “disciplinary norms of capitalism” but about “the escape from the norms of white racism.”14

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But beyond the necessity of disruption, the Blackstar Line and other repatriation ventures represented for Garvey, his followers and Pan-Africanists in general, a spiritual reconnection to Mother Africa. It was seen as spiritually (psychological) necessary to mitigate the horrendous damage to their psyche from having been violently ripped form their ancestral home. The spiritual/ psycho damage is illustrated in numerous Black literatures from Du Bois’s double consciousness to Richard Wright’s Bigger Thomas in his Native Son to Maya Angelou’s older brother Bailey. These examples represent the existential crisis of loss of place (familial detachment, loss of heritage, etc.)15 Garvey before Gilroy, understood that “The image of the ship-a living micro-cultural, micro-political system in motion is especially important for historical and theoretical reasons. . . . Ships immediately focus adoption on the middle passage, on the various projects for redemptive return to an African homeland, on the circulation of ideas and activists as well as the movement of key cultural and political artefacts: tracts, books, gramophone records and choirs.”16 The Black diasporan middle-class, particularly the Black intelligentsia, ridiculed Garvey for his schemes. They were insistent they were Americans and not Africans and any scheme for repatriation would be a betrayal of their steadfast belief in their American identity. The Black Star Line and his scheme for repatriation died with the deportation of Garvey from the United States in 1927 and the resulting implosion of the Garvey movement. Yet, Garvey’s idea of a return never completely died. Matter-of-factly, as noted earlier in this essay, Garvey’s call to repatriate found fuller expression among the African American inner-city youth and Rastafari in the Caribbean and in North America who maintained the promise of repatriation in the form of diasporic cultural mytho-forms that gave rise two inter-connected but historically and spatially connected cousins: reggae and hip-hop. A testament to Garvey’s vision of a return to the motherland17 is illustrated in the struggle of the Shashamane Rastafari “pilgrims” that have attempted to establish deep cultural roots in Ethiopia. AFRICA: THE RIGHT OF RETURN In 2015, the National African American Reparations Commission (NAARC) rolled out a plan for African Americans to return to the country of their choice.18 The NAARC stated, as part of their Ten-Point Reparations Program: The descendants of the millions of Africans who were stolen from Africa and transported to the strange lands of the “Americas” against their will to enrich their captors have a right to return to the motherland to an African nation of their choice. Africans in America who choose to exercise the right to return will

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be provided with sufficient monetary resources to become productive citizens in their new home and shall be aided in their resettlement by a Black controlled agency funded by the federal government to perform this function.19

Ironically, as African nations ignore or ponder repatriation, Africans from the continent are taking advantage of relaxed immigration laws in the United States. African immigrations to the United States are playing out Ong’s thesis on transnationality. The Pew Research Center noted that there were 4.6 million Black immigrants in the United States. This amounted to a 19 percent growth in the Black population. 58 percent of the Black immigrant population came after 2000. While Black immigrants are coming from around the diaspora (South America, Caribbean, and Central America and Mexico) nearly 43 percent were from Africa from 2010 to 2019.20 Furthermore, according to the Pew Research Center, nearly a third of Black immigrants, twenty-five and older had at least a college degree, adding to the overall knowledge-based economy in the United States. A logical question to ask is about the reciprocal movement of Black diasporans to Africa. There are around 200 million people in the Americas identifying themselves as of African descent, according to the United Nations.21 This mass of displaced people has the potential to re-write the history and shape the future of the continent. Among these descendants of Africa are several groups that have pushed for support for reparations, that includes some form of repatriation. Extending citizenship to the millions of African diasporans would result in a monumental cleavage in geopolitics and capital. The possible financial outcomes are potentially staggering. Sources vary, but Black spending power in the United States in 2021 was $1.6 trillion dollars (even though it declined by 14 percent).22 A logical and necessary question is, how could Africa benefit from Black spending power and an infusion of Black, educated arrivals? While the question of Black repatriation looms over the diaspora, there are more than 1 million Chinese workers in Africa. The capital relationship between China and Africa began back in 1996 when President Jian Zemin, in a brilliant soft power move suggested the creation of the Forum on China–Africa Cooperation (FOCAC). With China, presumptively leading the FOCAC, it pledged $5 billion toward an African development fund. According to Howard W. French, between 2001 and 2010 the China’s Export-Import Bank has provided $67 billion in loans to African countries.23 Not only are the Chinese lending money but they are also integrating into the local fabric of the country, albeit, at times, with difficulty because of language and culture. In a sense, Africa has opened her doors and arms to China. While there are some potential positive outcomes with dealing with China and others, this strategy alone neglects its very own talents abroad.

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What I propose is the African Union negotiate and execute a declaration, among the African nations, for the repatriation of its African diasporic citizens. The economic benefits of extending flexible citizenship to African diasporans would be an enormous gain for the continent. The overtures for repatriation are historic and steady. But how have Africa nations historically responded to overtures for repatriation? In 2019, Ghana’s announced an initiative to encourage people of African descent to settle and invest in the country. The year 2019 was symbolic because it commemorated the four hundred years since the first enslaved Africans arrived in the Virginia colony of Jamestown. There were, according to 2014 estimates, already between three thousand and five thousand African Americans and Caribbean living in Ghana before the Ghanian initiative. There has been at least one private endeavor to bring about an awareness of Ghana’s goals. For example, in 2019, African Ancestry Family Reunions (AAFR) launched the inaugural Ghana African Ancestry Family reunion.24 The yearly reunions are part of Ghana’s efforts to showcase its country and to welcome Black diasporians. If one were to be pessimistic, Ghana’s overture amounted to a form of “silent” reparations.25 Not exactly what I think reparations groups such as the NAARC would have heralded as a re-shaping of African geopolitics. The legislation to bring about Ghana’s goal was Section 17(1)(b) of the Immigration Act 2000, (Act 573) which grants “to a person of African descent in the Diaspora”26 “Rights to Abode” may be granted to those that can meet a set of criteria. The effect, according to the Ghanaian government boasted that its amended immigration act has been a $1.9 billion boon to the economy.27 Yet, the work of repatriation is largely still more of a dream than reality. Ghana marked the year of return but to what end? At the moment, Ghana offers the right to apply for citizenship after people move to the country. But this could be extended to account for the fact that many people in the Americas may not have the ability to permanently resettle. African governments should accommodate a more flexible pathway for citizenship. For one the ability to remit or travel to the country could have a positive effect on the country. As noted earlier in a sense people of African descent have been moving to the continent for generations, if not in body, in spirt. At no other time in our collective diasporic histories are people of African descent more ready for a collective reckoning with their African identity. We see this play out in real time. Recent events such as the murder of Black men at the hands of the police and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement coupled with a festering sense that America is an unredeemable nation has caused an uptick in Blacks moving to Africa. In 2006, actor Isaiah Washington became the first person to use DNA to gain citizenship from an African country. Washington’s DNA reveled he was of Temne/Mende ancestry.28 Washington has established a charity foundation to fund a school in the country. Washington is

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a manifestation of Garvey’s desire to build economic relations with Africa. DNA has enabled African diasporians to explore and pinpoint, with some accuracy, their African ancestry. There are fundamental issues that would need addressing. For example, any wealth imbalances can be mitigated over the long term by intermarriage, and the movement of social and intellectual capital that would undoubtedly enrich both continents. In the same way that the American civil rights movement inspired revolutionary movements across Africa or the South African struggle for freedom inspired Black Americans to pressure the United States government to decouple itself from the South African apartheid regime. Any issues can be mitigated by a shared common sense of purpose and African identity. Garvey’s African for the Africans may be anachronistic given the diversity of many African nation’s populations but certainly now is the time that the “right of citizenship” should replace the right of return. Africa owes this debt to its Diasporans, it’s time for Africa to hear the call of its people and extend, as a form of reparations, flexible citizenship to all Africans. NOTES 1. “Report of a Meeting at Liberty Hall,” Negro World Convention Bulletin, August 2, 1920. Robert Hill, ed., The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association, vol. 2, August 27, 1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 494–95. 2. Robert A. Hill, ed., Marcus Garvey: Life and Lessons (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 5. 3. The “Declaration of Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World” will hereafter be referred to as the Declaration or The Declaration of Rights. 4. For the complete document of the Declaration of Rights see Robert Hill, ed., The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, vol. 2, August 27, 1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 571–75. 5. See: UNIA Declaration of The Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World (1920). 6. According to Robert Hill the manifesto “Africa for the Africans at home and abroad,” was made popular by Marcus Garvey in 1925. See, Robert Hill, ed., The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association, vol. 1, 1826–August 1919 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), fn. 110, lxx. 7. Ta-Nehisi Coates “The Case for Reparations,” The Atlantic, June 2014, https:​//​ www​.theatlantic​.com​/magazine​/archive​/2014​/06​/the​-case​-for​-reparations. 8. The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Souls of Black Folk, by W. E. B. Du Bois, “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” originally published in 1903. https:​//​www​.gutenberg​.org​ /files​/408​/408​-h​/408​-h​.htm. Dubois describes “double consciousness” as “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his

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twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” 9. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 1. 10. Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 6. 11. Ong, Flexible Citizenship, 4. 12. Tony Martin, Race First: The Ideological and Organizational Struggles of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (Dover: The Majority Press, 1976), 152. 13. Martin, Race First, 152. 14. Ong, Flexible Citizenship, 19. 15. For the psycho-spiritual effects of loss of land see: C. E. Lambert, J. R. Holley, K. A. McComas, N. P. Snider, G. K. Tucker, “Eroding Land and Erasing Place: A Qualitative Study of Place Attachment, Risk Perception, and Coastal Land Loss in Southern Louisiana,” Sustainability 13 (2021), 6269; Susan P. Pattie, “Longing and Belonging: Issues of Homeland in Armenian Diaspora,” Political and Legal Anthropology Review 22 (2) (November, 1999). 16. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 4. 17. Rastafari have been emigrating to Ethiopia since H. I. M. Haile Selassie I, provided roughly two hundred hectares of land for settlement. The community is known as Shashamane. 18. The National African American Reparations Commission (NAARC), Preliminary 10-Point Reparations Plan at Congressional Black Caucus Conference, 2015. https:​//​ibw21​.org​/initiative​-posts​/naarc​-posts​/naarc​-rolls​-out​-preliminary​-10​-point​ -reparations​-plan​/. 19. The National African American Reparations Commission (NAARC). 20. Christine Tamir, “Key findings about Black immigrants in the US,” Pew Research Center, January 27, 2022, https:​//​www​.pewresearch​.org​/fact​-tank​/2022​/01​ /27​/key​-findings​-about​-black​-immigrants​-in​-the​-u​-s. 21. Efam Dovi, “African Americans Resettle in Africa,” Africa Renewal, April 2015, https:​//​www​.un​.org​/africarenewal​/magazine​/april​-2015​/african​-americans​ -resettle​-africa. 22. Frank Holland, “Black Spending Power Reaches Record $1.6 Trillion, but Net Worth,” February 1, 2022, CNBC, https:​//​www​.cnbc​.com​/video​/2022​/02​/01​/black​ -spending​-power​-reaches​-record​-1​-point​-6​-trillion​-but​-net​-worth​-falls​.html. 23. Howard W. French, “Why 1 Million Chinese Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa,” Quartz, June 10, 2014, https:​//​qz​.com​/217597​/how​-a​-million​ -chinese​-migrants​-are​-building​-a​-new​-empire​-in​-africa. 24. “African Ancestry Family Reunion in Ghana is the ultimate birthright journey,” Ghana Web, October 27, 2022, https:​//​www​.ghanaweb​.com​/GhanaHomePage​/ NewsArchive​/African​-Ancestry​-Family​-Reunion​-in​-Ghana​-is​-the​-ultimate​-birthright​ -journey​-1651490.

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25. The Ghana initiative launched by President Nana Akufo-Addo was never announced as a form of reparations but one of the objectives was to “rebuild the lost past for these 400 years.” 26. Ministry of the Interior, Republic of Ghana website, https:​//​www​.mint​.gov​.gh​/ services​/right​-of​-abode​/. 27. Ridwan Karim Dini-Osman, “This Is Where I Should Be’: 1,500 Black Americans Make Ghana Their New Home,” The World, September 7, 2022, https:​//​theworld​ .org​/stories​/2022​-09​-07​/where​-i​-should​-be​-1500​-black​-americans​-make​-ghana​-their​ -new​-home. 28. Essence Magazine, “Isaiah Washington: Actor Granted Sierra Leone Citizenship,” October 29, 2020, https:​//​www​.essence​.com​/news​/isaiah​-washington​-actor​ -granted​-sierra​-l​/; Vickie Remoe, “Reclaiming the Middle Passage: African American Actor Isaiah Washington Becomes First to Use DNA Testing to Gain Citizenship to an African Nation (Sierra Leone),” SwitSalone.com, https:​//​www​.switsalone​.com​/9858​ _reclaiming​-middle​-passage​-african.

REFERENCES Coates, Ta-Nehisi. “The Case for Reparations,” The Atlantic, June 2014. Dini-Osman, Ridwan Karim. “This Is Where I Should Be’: 1,500 Black Americans Make Ghana Their New Home,” The World, September 7, 2022. https:​//​theworld​ .org​/stories​/2022​-09​-07​/where​-i​-should​-be​-1500​-black​-americans​-make​-ghana​ -their​-new​-home. Dovi, Efam. “African Americans Resettle in Africa,” Africa Renewal, April 2015, https:​//​www​.un​.org​/africarenewal​/magazine​/april​-2015​/african​-americans​-resettle​ -africa. Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. Project Guttenberg eBook. Originally published in 1903. Essence Magazine. “Isaiah Washington: Actor Granted Sierra Leone Citizenship.” October 29, 2020. https:​//​www​.essence​.com​/news​/isaiah​-washington​-actor​-granted​ -sierra​-l. French, Howard W. “Why 1 Million Chinese Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa.” Quartz, June 10, 2014. https:​//​qz​.com​/217597​/how​-a​-million​-chinese​ -migrants​-are​-building​-a​-new​-empire​-in​-africa. Ghana Web. “African Ancestry Family Reunion in Ghana Is the Ultimate Birthright Journey.” October 27, 2022. https:​//​www​.ghanaweb​.com​/GhanaHomePage​ /NewsArchive​ / African ​ - Ancestry ​ - Family ​ - Reunion ​ - in ​ - Ghana ​ - is ​ - the ​ - ultimate​ -birthright​-journey​-1651490. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Hill, Robert A. ed. The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association, volume 1, 1826–August 1919. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. ———. The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, vol. 2, 27–August 1920. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.

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———. Marcus Garvey: Life and Lessons. Berkeley and Los Angeles: The University of California Press, 1987. Holland, Frank. “Black Spending Power Reaches Record $1.6 Trillion, but Net Worth.” CNBC, February 1, 2022. https:​//​www​.cnbc​.com​/video​/2022​/02​/01​/black​ -spending​-power​-reaches​-record​-1​-point​-6​-trillion​-but​-net​-worth​-falls​.html. Lambert, C. E, J.R. Holley, K. A. McComas, N. P. Snider, and G. K. Tucker. “Eroding Land and Erasing Place: A Qualitative Study of Place Attachment, Risk Perception, and Coastal Land Loss in Southern Louisiana.” Sustainability 13, no. 11 (2021): 6269; https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.3390​/su13116269. Martin, Tony. Race First: The Ideological and Organizational Struggles of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Dover, MA: The Majority Press, 1976. NAARC. “The National African American Reparations Commission, Preliminary 10-Point Reparations Plan at Congressional Black Caucus Conference, 2015.” https:​//​ibw21​.org​/initiative​-posts​/naarc​-posts​/naarc​-rolls​-out​-preliminary​-10​-point​ -reparations​-plan. Accessed November 21, 2022. Ong, Aihwa. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999. Pattie, Susan P. “Longing and Belonging: Issues of Homeland in Armenian Diaspora.” Political and Legal Anthropology Review 22, no. 2 (1999). Republic of Ghana, Ministry of the Interior. “Right of Abode.” https:​//​www​.mint​.gov​ .gh​/services​/right​-of​-abode​/. Accessed January 12, 2022. Tamir, Christine. “Key findings about Black immigrants in the US.” Pew Research Center, January 27, 2022. https:​//​www​.pewresearch​.org​/fact​-tank​/2022​/01​/27​/key​ -findings​-about​-black​-immigrants​-in​-the​-u​-s.

5

“Back Home This Never Would Have Happened” Imagining Tradition and Modernity among Ugandan Pentecostals in Los Angeles Kevin Zemlicka

As with most variations of Christianity, Pentecostalism is a highly processed form of the religion. Initially conceived at a time of great social and political upheaval in the United States, it was first reworked to reflect those realities. As it was exported around the world it continued to be manipulated to reflect a variety of social, cultural, and political contexts. In an increasingly globalized economy, many people migrate to the West, some of whom bring Pentecostalism with them to be reworked yet again. This journey is itself a unique social, cultural, and political context, and the religion cannot help but be transformed further by the individuals and groups whose sending location lives combine with experiences of migration and settlement to test the malleability of their belief and practice. Over the course of one year, from 2011 to 2012, I conducted ethnographic research among a transnational community of Ugandans with a focus on their experiences of bringing Pentecostalism “home” to the city of its birth, Los Angeles, California. In bringing the religion home to Los Angeles, my participants must also adjust to a new social landscape, and as one would expect, they come to rely heavily on faith-based strategies in this endeavor. My research attempted to illustrate how Pentecostalism is mediated by the new setting, how it is reworked, and then employed by recent arrivals from Uganda to ameliorate the difficulties associated with integration into the receiving location. I 63

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sought to demonstrate that the church becomes both the physical and social space where this happens. One of the primary goals twelve years ago was to track the ways in which Pentecostal belief and practice were flexed to facilitate more successful navigation of and emplacement within the social stratification of Los Angeles. I argued at the time that this occurred through the complex work of continually re-imagining past and present, and sending and receiving locations, which in turn became semantically aligned for my participants with notions of “tradition” and “modernity.” Indeed, their emphasis on tradition and modernity was so ubiquitous as to become my theoretical playground throughout the research and analysis. This did not occur without discomfort for a burgeoning anthropologist, frightened of the proximity these terms had with antiquated anthropological explanations of unilinear evolution, or more recently development and modernization theories. However, within a Pentecostal framework, tradition and modernity was simply the preferred conceptual space for my participants as they sought to imagine their place in the new environment. It is where they engaged in what Appadurai (1996) has termed, the “work of the imagination” that is required of transnational migrants under a condition of heightened globalization. Nevertheless, the concept of “modernity,” is accompanied by a tremendous amount of baggage to be unpacked before it can be employed freely. Use of the term “modernity” in this work or in the minds of my participants does not refer to a specific temporal period, though there is a long history of defining it this way in social scientific scholarship (Hardt and Negri 2000, 70–87). In attempting to make sense of modernity expressed through an ever-evolving cultural form like Ugandan Pentecostalism in Los Angeles, I have had to struggle with several issues. First, there is the notion of polarizing my participants in dichotomous constructions of traditional and modern, subordinate and dominant, or global and local. Anthropology today debates the extent to which modernist or development theories are Eurocentric. However, even the most well-intentioned analyses of globalization and power relationships can unwittingly reproduce dualisms positing Western forms of economic and political organization as superior and non-Western forms inferior. Added to this is often the a priori assumption that “modern” cultural forms emerged in Europe and, depending upon the era of anthropology one draws from, either diffused outward or were imposed on the global south by the global north (Wade 2007, 52). To avoid these pitfalls when introducing modernity to the discussion I am drawn to the theoretical paradigm suggested by Wade (2007, 53), which sees all forms of periodization and historicization that bolster existing hierarchies of knowledge and power, whether analytical or “popular,” as constructions with obvious political effects.” In this way, notions of modernity that are spatially and temporally based in the global

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north have clear implications for “the realms of power and knowledge” in research employing them for discussions of the global south (Wade 2007, 53). Therefore, in an attempt to provide a working definition for modernity I chose a broad description that I believe captures the spirit of the term well enough for me and my participants. In this chapter, modernity refers to all that “results from the diversified impact of capitalism on social formations across the world” (Moreiras 2001, 3). While this definition does little to capture the religious spirit with which my participants use the term, it does acknowledge the type of unequal distribution of goods and services that they use to characterize “traditional” Uganda and “modern” Los Angeles. However, my research also borrows from globalization theories and the attendant processes of resignification and hybridization. I intend to demonstrate that the members of my field site, Holy Fire Ministries (HFM), “adapt objects, ideas, and symbols from global circuits of production, consumption, and knowledge” (Wade 2007, 51), and then indigenize, resignify, appropriate, and hybridize them in the creation of “multiple” or “alternative” modernities (Comaroff and Comaroff 1993; Inda and Rosaldo 2002). This approach acknowledges that modernity for my participants is marked by elasticity, and is just as likely to result in homogenization as it is heterogenization, while more often than not falling somewhere in the middle. Take the desire for an expensive new car as an example. Pastor Robert Akello at HFM employs the prosperity gospel in his sermons to equate material wealth with being “right with God.” This ideological positioning in Christianity occurs around the world but has gained extraordinary popularity in many African Pentecostal churches. So while there is clearly a desire for most residents of the city to own a reliable and comfortable vehicle to navigate the urban landscape of Los Angeles, within this particular brand of Pentecostalism the new car represents more than comfort, reliability, or status. Instead, it represents absolute proof of strict adherence to God’s word, and of being in God’s favor. In other words, acquiring the new Lexus is highly unlikely without assistance from the spiritual realm (a contradiction of major proportions to those in the West who associate modernity with increased secularism). The point is that even when members of HFM express wanting to leave the muddy roads of Kampala behind for the paved roads of Los Angeles, and they frequently do, Uganda remains entirely present in their material and spiritual lives. Women in particular often find themselves in that liminal space between tradition and modernity when the expectations of homeland and diaspora appear to clash. For example, expectations of socializing children into the “traditional” culture may clash with receiving location expectations of employment both within and outside the home. I argue that women play a key role in defining modernity and its discourse at my field site. Transnational

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migration and settlement in Los Angeles forces them to consider new experiences such as the appropriateness of dropping their children off at a daycare center, or of asking husbands to stay home with the children. There is as Geertz claimed in 1973, well before modern globalization theories, “no simple progression from ‘traditional’ to ‘modern,’ but a twisting, spasmodic, unmethodical movement, which turns as often toward repossessing the . . . past as disowning it” (1973, 319). In revisiting my master’s thesis, for which this research was initially conducted, I will admit that the repeated emphasis on “achieving modernity” made me uncomfortable. I worried about bringing the concepts of “traditional” and “modern” into my current academic life. For all of my attempts twelve years ago to craft an ethnographic narrative that privileged the interpretations of my participants, I still felt uneasy with language that sounded suspiciously as if it had emerged from classic modernization theory. However, after reflecting on my own pathway through academia to reach intellectual maturity, I came to consider that the highly dualistic Pentecostal worldview had informed every aspect of the symbolic and literal terrain of my participants’ journeys: whether they are described as moving from Uganda to the United States, from poor to rich, or inevitably from traditional to modern. I remembered that, in anthropology, we too like to think in dualisms, and that we are prone to examining the space in between them. A favorite anthropological dualism is that we are interested in what people actually do rather than what they say they do, which may be employed here to illuminate the Pentecostal reasoning of my participants. Indeed, this dualism informs the very concept of ethnography with a fervor and commitment that rivals the religious motivations of Pentecostals the world over. It is in the tension that exists in that space in between, in the discrepancies between what folks say and do that anthropologists are concerned, and where I focus my attention now, nearly twelve years on from my first ethnographic experience as a graduate student. In this way, in the spirit of reflexivity, this chapter represents another layer of “re-membering Africa” through revisiting my field notes and all of the other textual data collected and analyzed so long ago. In short, this chapter offers reflections and insights from the year I spent with the Ugandan transnational community at Holy Fire Ministries (HFM), a modest yet powerful Pentecostal church located in a suburb of Los Angeles, California. Through the sharing of a series of vignettes, portions of field notes, and other data from this research period, I focus on how Pentecostal belief and practice can mediate between past and present, sending and receiving locations, and, yes, traditional and modern. I will argue that in many ways Pentecostalism serves to domesticate the past, and ease the tension involved in moving on, so that Africa can be remembered even as folks work

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to facilitate emplacement into the social, cultural, and political landscapes of the receiving location. To this end, there is a rather sizable focus on women’s experience simply because they do the lion’s share of imagining past and present for the community. Women’s experiences of empowerment through Pentecostal belief and practice provide the primary lens through which to view the space in between tradition and modernity as it is encountered and creatively managed in the transnational setting. I identify women as key agents in the work of imagining tradition, modernity, and emplacement. I further argue that my participants utilize the physical and social space of HFM to construct identities built upon Western notions of modernity through application of the gospel of prosperity, and “traditional” notions of Ugandan personhood through the reproduction (re-invention) of ethnicity taking place at church functions. Ultimately, I argue that by flexing the religion in the transnational context my participants invariably rethink cultural norms as well, and gain discursive control over how they are perceived, both at the level of the individual and of the community. This discursive control through Pentecostal belief and practice allows members to simultaneously engage with past and present, to domesticate the past when necessary, and to contest marginalizing pressures commonly associated with immigration and settlement. CONTEXTUALIZING PENTECOSTAL CHRISTIANITY Pentecostalism is a form of Christianity that emphasizes the role of the Holy Spirit in the experience of its members, including possession by the spirit, leading to ecstatic and altered states of consciousness such as speaking in tongues, healing and prophesying (Aihiokhai 2010, 250). Pentecostalism is also characterized by exorcism, spontaneous prayer, exuberant liturgical expression, a belief in the efficacy of dream interpretation, and visions (Ukah 2003, 9–10). A key component of the belief system is the notion of voluntary conversion based on powerful experiences (also known as being “born again”), and the responsibility of Pentecostals to actively convert others (Robbins 2004, 120). Pentecostalism has distinctly American origins, stemming from the “Holiness” tradition within the Methodist denomination in the nineteenth century and an event commonly referred to by theologians as “the Azusa revival” in Los Angeles in 1906. To discuss the history of the spread of Pentecostalism globally, or even throughout Africa, is well beyond the scope of this chapter, as is an adequate discussion of the historical context of women within Pentecostalism. However, as I will be discussing the religion in terms of its liberatory potential for women, it is important to note that a key aspect of this lies in

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the concept of spiritual autonomy. Spiritual autonomy, the right of women to worship as they choose, had extraordinary benefits for women within Pentecostalism, including the right to minister, the right to travel in order to preach the gospel, the right to associate with men and women outside of their socioeconomic class and race, and ultimately the right to receive the gifts of the Spirit in ways that were equal to men: all modes of behavior quite rare for women in the early part of the twentieth century. As will become evident, the women at my field site make full use of the spiritual autonomy granted to them. Yet, there are frustrating paradoxes both historically and presently for Pentecostal women, who despite their spiritual autonomy must contend with entrenched patriarchal structures. For historical context, see the work of Vivian Deno (2004), who does a marvelous job highlighting the life history of turn-of-the-century pastor Florence Crawford. While the heightened role of women in Protestant traditions, or the way that religions in general have a history of interrupting dominant social discourses may not be extraordinary observations, they are relevant to the discussion of women’s empowerment at my field site, as this quote from a thirty-six-year-old Ugandan female illustrates. Note here how the transnational setting facilitates code switching between gender norms from sending and receiving locations: I guess they [roles] are changing here because of the times, and because our responsibilities here change. Here both man and wife have to get out of the house and work. Because with one income it is hard to sustain the whole family. And also as women here we have opportunities to go to school, become educated, and to use our education in the corporate world. Here we are out there working together. So now our responsibilities are challenged. We don’t have enough time to stay at home and be the women we want to be . . . to raise our children and instill the cultural values that we received, to be the women we were raised to be. We are dropping our children off to daycare. There is no one there to instill our culture and everything we were taught. . . . That is our biggest challenge. And also it becomes a challenge in our marriages because we were taught back home that a man is the head of the house, and whether wrong or right, no matter what, we are supposed to respect him. But when we come here we adopt the culture. So the culture here says we are equal, and that becomes a big challenge in our marriages. The men are not always ready to accept this westernized woman. And I guess sometimes we overdo it, and we abuse it and it raises challenges in our marriages. But as we go to churches of our own culture, as they preach . . . they try to take us back to those roots.1

This quote says a great deal about life in the transnational setting. First, it speaks directly to the ways in which women must bridge the sometimes large gap between past and present. It reveals a woman attempting to adjust

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to changing circumstances without losing her sense of personhood. She must reconcile the new expectations placed upon her in Los Angeles with her clear desire to maintain traditional notions of what it means to be a Ugandan woman. This quote illustrates that the women of HFM must skillfully imagine themselves in different ways in order to maintain a sense of self in Los Angeles. I argue that this work of the imagination (Appadurai 1996) is required of the entire HFM community as a strategy for emplacing themselves in the new location. Appadurai tells us that: the imagination has become an organized field of social practices, a form of work (in the sense of both labor and culturally organized practice), and a form of negotiation between sites of agency (individuals) and globally defined fields of possibility . . . the imagination is now central to all forms of agency, is itself a social fact, and is the key component of the new global order. (1996, 31)

Perhaps nowhere is this more relevant than in the context of transnational migration, in which there is a great deal of work to be done remembering homeland by reproducing symbols of ethnicity and interpreting and finding one’s place in the symbols of the new location. As my participant’s quote above illustrates, among the community of HFM, this verges on becoming yet another form of “women’s work.” BREAK WITH THE PAST Robbins (2010) argues that an important characteristic of Pentecostalism is the manner in which it drastically alters the way that converts interact with non-Pentecostals, and that it calls for a type of change which promotes “radical discontinuity with what has come before” (2010, 159). Birgit Meyer (1998) argues that African Pentecostals both embrace and distance themselves from traditional African ways of knowing in order to emplace themselves within a Pentecostal vision of modernity. The quote from my participant above suggests that women of HFM simultaneously embrace and distance themselves from Ugandan gender roles as they work to emplace themselves within a particular vision of modernity and within Los Angeles. Meyer (1998) famously documents this “break with the past” in her work among Ghanaian Pentecostals. Converts must discontinue the relationships with people and traditions from their past, which are not conducive to receiving the Pentecostal message. This break with the past quickly manifests in every facet of the convert’s life. Indeed, it is even claimed that deliverance from the sins of one’s ancestors is required before prosperity can be achieved (Meyer 1998, 323–24), which serves to demonize traditional African

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relationships and ways of knowing. This demonization is taken quite literally, as Pentecostalism espouses a belief in the corporeality of demons, which become conveniently associated with traditional healers, diviners, and other “occultists,” and oftentimes even with family members who maintain ties to traditional African beliefs. This aspect of the break with the past is problematized for members of HFM in Los Angeles. On one Sunday in March of 2011, a second event took place following the regular church service. On this occasion, members of the Ugandan community from all around Los Angeles and Riverside Counties met at 5:00 p.m. at HFM to discuss matters of great urgency to the community and to join together in prayer. The meeting had been called by a member of HFM to address a recent scandal, in which a prominent Ugandan community member had been arrested for fraudulent business practices. This arrest was quite disturbing to my participants, causing them and other Ugandan religious groups around town to question the efficacy of religious leaders in providing the community with a moral compass. The prayer meeting and discussion included speakers from a variety of churches and notably an imam from a local mosque. As each religious leader took the pulpit to address the need for prayer, especially for the youth growing up in the new setting, a predictable theme of salvation through Christ was quickly established. When the imam spoke, however, he led a prayer and praised Allah from the pulpit in HFM, which raised a few eyebrows but failed to draw any vocal criticism. Later that evening as I drove one of the women of HFM home, I commended her and the other members of HFM for this example of religious pluralism within the confines of their church. The woman responded: This is a product of being here. Frankly, I was shocked, and I think some others were shocked as well, but we said nothing. Back home this would never have happened. People of different faiths get along in Uganda but to praise Allah in the church . . . this would make many people uncomfortable (in Uganda).2

The feeling that some line had been transgressed came through in the conversation, but there was also the feeling that social pressures in Los Angeles had mediated the experience. This female HFM member intimated that a certain “Western” model of religious tolerance had played a role in the prayer meeting. Without going into the obvious critiques of “on-the-ground” realities of religious tolerance in the West, the dominant historical narrative of religious freedom in the United States had clearly impacted her perception of the event. This incident speaks to ways in which Pentecostal ideology at HFM is re-imagined in the transnational setting. Members of HFM felt it was highly unusual to allow the imam to praise Allah in the church; however, consenting to the prayer with very little fuss, even privately, exemplifies how my

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participants are engaged in Appadurai’s (1996) “work of the imagination.” They are interpreting symbols in the new locale, in this case religious pluralism, and imbuing them with connotations of modernity. Eck’s (2006) definition of pluralism is in play here. Eck sees pluralism as involving meaningful engagement with the “other” rather than just the presence of diversity. This woman and others agreed that acceptance of the imam’s prayer in the church setting would have been shocking by sending location standards, and also agreed that acceptance of this sort is rooted in Western, or “modern” modes of thought. Contrary to Meyer’s (1998) observations, the members of HFM did not feel the need to “break” the connection with the imam that day, which I argue represents a re-imagining of Ugandan neo-Pentecostalism to align with the perceived modernity of the United States. So, while in this case we don’t see Meyer’s (1998) theory of breaking ties with non-Pentecostals hold up in the transnational setting, other aspects of her theory do retain their viability. To elaborate I first examine a portion of Meyer’s (1998) fieldwork in Ghana that addresses the uneasy relationship between neo-Pentecostals and traditional African culture and discuss ways in which that uneasiness manifests among my participants as they endeavor to imagine/remember Uganda. In 1998 in Ghana, a national campaign to reclaim indigenous tradition and ritual culture was enacted, most notably in schools and other public arenas. Throughout her ethnographic research, Meyer (1998) provides examples of the Pentecostal resistance to this campaign. Converts refuted both the traditions of their families and family members who refuse to accept the Pentecostal message. The Ghanaian government’s effort to maintain a national identity rooted in the traditions of the past was symbolized by the image of a sankofa bird (which is known to turn his head in order to look back from where it has been) with the accompanying phrase, “Go back and take it” (Meyer 1998, 316–17). This attempt to infuse tradition into national identity was an effort to hold back the tide of Westernizing processes of globalization. This was perceived differently by the established Catholic and Protestant mainline churches than it was by Pentecostals. The mainline churches confronted the move toward traditional ceremonies from a place of synthesis with Christianity, while Pentecostals rejected “the revaluation of [Ghanaian] tradition and culture” (Meyer 1998, 317). Meyer explains the rejection of the past this way: The appeal to time as an epistemological category enables Pentecostalists to draw a rift between “us” and “them,” “now” and “then,” “modern” and “traditional,” and, of course, “God” and the “Devil.” In this way Pentecostalist discourse takes up the language of modernity as it spoke to Africans through colonialization, missionization, and after independence, modernization theory. (1998, 317)

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This appeal to time as an epistemological category is evidenced in Pentecostal belief and practice at HFM. The past becomes equated with Uganda, and modernity with Los Angeles as evidenced by this quote from pastor Akello: What can we say about a nation whose number one mode of transport is the motorbike. Those of you from Uganda know what I am talking about. Why are there so many cars in some countries and motorbikes in Uganda. It is only through embracing the word of Christ as a nation that we will see breakthrough in Uganda. . . . The nation has to become mature in Christ to improve, and it is our responsibility to bring that maturity in our words and actions when we go home.3

As this excerpt from his sermon illustrates, Pentecostalism and modernity are often conceived as markers of proximity to centers of dominance, like the United States. Conversely, Uganda (or a Ugandan past), while valued, is also suspect. More often than not it is thought of as an impediment to financial breakthrough and the acquisition of Western accoutrements of modernity. Pastor Akello’s words could have been lifted directly from classic modernization theory, yet it is significant that he identifies religion as the variable for achieving modernity. What is more, he sees it as the responsibility of members of HFM to bring modernity back home when they go to visit friends and family (which in reality very few of them have the resources or immigration status to do). Pastor Akello promotes imagination as a culturally organized practice within the community. He is imagining homeland, and the community’s relationship to modernity, simultaneously through the symbol of the motorbike and the automobile, and demonstrating that Meyer’s (1998) theory weaves in and out of the transnational Pentecostal setting. METHODS The research that informs this chapter was conducted over a period of one year from January 2011 to February 2012. For the name of the church, the pastor, and all participants identified, I have used pseudonyms. Ethnographic methods included participant observation, twenty-five thirty-to-sixty-minute semi-structured interviews, thirty unstructured interviews lasting anywhere from fifteen to thirty minutes, one forty-five-minute focus group, textual analysis of weekly church bulletins, and a comprehensive literature review. Data collected from field notes, interviews, and focus groups was coded and analyzed using a grounded theory approach to identify patterns and prevailing themes. This research was carried out toward the completion of my master’s

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degree in anthropology and accompanying thesis requirement at California State University Northridge. FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF HFM My first visit to Holy Fire Ministries (HFM), a Pentecostal church with a Ugandan pastor and predominantly Ugandan congregation occurred at 10:00 a.m. on a Sunday in January of 2011. As I drove through the neighborhood that houses the office building, which in turn houses HFM, my first thought was “where are all the Ugandans?” I had been referred to the church by a Ugandan security guard from my university who claimed to live close by, but my initial drive through the neighborhood showed no signs of a Ugandan presence. Through the course of the research, I came to realize that unlike other ethnic and immigrant enclaves in Los Angeles (e.g., Koreatown, Little Saigon, Little Ethiopia, Thaitown, and Filipinotown), Ugandans have not yet claimed a geographical space in the city. HFM is located in a predominantly working-class, Latino neighborhood. The area surrounding the church is marked by signage that is almost exclusively in Spanish. Street vendors, vegetable trucks, and taquerias add to the ambiance of what is clearly a Latin American enclave. A number of storefront Spanish-speaking Pentecostal churches can be found in the neighborhood as well, mirroring the rise of Pentecostalism throughout Latin America. A larger Catholic Church down the street from HFM advertises multiple services conducted in Spanish, which further substantiates the Latino presence in the neighborhood. On any given weekend, one can walk the streets of this section of the city and hear loud, predominantly Mexican music coming from many apartments and homes. All of this seems to deny the possibility of a large African presence in the neighborhood. This left me to wonder what I would find when I entered the church. The office building that houses HFM takes up an entire corner of the intersection and is situated next to a recycling center that receives a good deal of business. As I approached the building on the first day of my fieldwork, I walked alongside an elderly Latina woman pushing a shopping cart filled with cans to be redeemed. The door to the building was propped open with a brick, and as I stepped inside, I could hear music and singing coming from upstairs. I took an elevator to the second floor, and as the doors opened, I was hit with a wall of sound. I followed the music down the hall and entered the church, where I was overwhelmed by sound once again. At this point, I knew I had found the African scene that had been invisible in the surrounding neighborhood. HFM was the Ugandan enclave I had been looking for.

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The term “enclave” denotes a distinct territorial, cultural, or social unit enclosed within foreign territory (Merriam-Webster 2013) and HFM is certainly that. Although Ugandans may lack an association with a distinct geographical space in Los Angeles, complete with its own city-approved signage, HFM is a micro-territory that draws Ugandan transnational migrants from all over the county to participate in the worship and community building that takes place there (some travel up to sixty miles to attend Sunday services and to participate in other activities hosted at the church). As I walked in to HFM on that first day, a middle-aged man who I would come to know as Mr. Jones handed me a card to fill out. Mr. Jones is the head usher of the church and acts as the right-hand man to pastor Robert Akello. He rarely sits and is kept busy by the various needs of the pastor and parishioners. Mr. Jones always seems to know when someone in the church needs a weekly bulletin, a bible, or a bottle of water. The remainder of his time is spent adjusting the temperature of the space, greeting new arrivals, and hurrying to catch members just before they collapse when they are “taken” by the Spirit. Upon entering, I made my way to the rear to sit in what would become my place for the next year. Mr. Jones was mildly perturbed that I had not taken his suggestion and sat in the front, where visitors are customarily welcomed and honored, but he still collected my name card so that the pastor could formally welcome me to the congregation once the service began. The church interior is rectangular and has rows of chairs on both sides of a center aisle. The pulpit at the front of the church has a dais, which the pastor rarely uses as he prefers to weave his way up and down the aisle while preaching. On that first day I counted twenty-three women and ten men, including myself, Mr. Jones, the pastor, and the musicians. As I would come to discover, the first row of seats on the left, which appear a little nicer and more comfortable than the rest, are reserved for the pastor, his wife (referred to as the “First Lady”), and important visitors such as visiting pastors from Uganda or other parts of Los Angeles. The front row to the right of the room is always occupied by Mama Sarah, the mother of the First Lady, and her husband. The rest of the community occupies the remaining seats. This body of people is made up almost entirely of Ugandan immigrants, a few other East Africans from Kenya, and one woman from the Democratic Republic of Congo. There are also four regularly attending African Americans (three women and one man) in the community. Sunday services at HFM officially last from 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., although in reality they are rarely over before 1:30 or 2:00 p.m. Pastor Robert Akello leads the services. The first two hours of the service consists of singing and dancing, also known as “praise and worship.” HFM features three outstanding female singers and three male musicians. The female singers lead

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the congregation in praise and worship before the pastor officially takes over. After many visits to the church, I came to see that the praise and worship portion of the service has many functions. It is the means by which attendees “wake up” and become ready to receive the message Pastor Akello has prepared. It is also a necessary part of becoming ready to receive the gifts of the Spirit, usually in the form of glossolalia (speaking in tongues). Just before the pastor is ready to take over and begin preaching, the music and singing build to a crescendo, causing several attendees to begin speaking in tongues. Praise and worship is also used as a means of accommodating late attendees. Pastor Akello rarely begins his sermon unless the hall is reasonably filled. On the average, thirty people attend each Sunday, although I have seen as few as eighteen, and as many as sixty participants over the course of the year. Songs are primarily sung in English, although occasionally a song in Luganda (the language of the Baganda people of Uganda) is included in the weekly repertoire. Initially, I was surprised to find that the female singers actually spend more time leading the congregation in prayer than the pastor. Indeed, on several occasions the weekly bulletin included “ministry from the praise and worship team” as a scheduled portion of the service. As I continued my fieldwork, however, I found that women play an integral role in almost every activity taking place at HFM. In terms of service attendance, women outnumbered the men by at least two to one every Sunday (and often it is more than this). Bible study and the intensive prayer services on Wednesday and Friday are made up almost entirely of women. In other words, women filled nearly every key role at HFM. Their role in shaping the physical and social space where transnationals come to work things out cannot be overstated. Services are characterized by a great deal of interaction between the pastor and the congregants, and responses are solicited and expected from him. For example, several times throughout a service pastor Akello concludes his message with “Praising of the Lord.” The phrase “Praising of the Lord” requires a response of “Amen.” If the pastor deems that the response is unsatisfactory, he re-phrases it as a question: “Praising of the Lord?” He repeats this question until a sufficient number of congregants answer with “amen.” At the same time, women in attendance frequently and spontaneously shout out “Amen,” “Hallelujah,” and “Praise the Lord.” Mr. Jones is one of the few men who contribute liberally in this regard as well. Pastor Akello comes prepared each Sunday to preach a particular sermon but always leaves room for the influence of the Holy Spirit to guide the service in another direction. For example, on at least three occasions by the end of praise and worship, several of the congregants were already experiencing glossolalia, and so the pastor allowed for the remainder of the time that day to be devoted to receiving the gifts of the Spirit. Ordinarily though, the first portion of the service is a time set aside for congregants to testify.

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On that first day of fieldwork, I was immediately drawn to the power of giving testimony and to the ways it seemed to empower individuals. This feature of the Sunday service, in which church members take the microphone in order to discuss how God has worked in their lives, has tremendous and obvious therapeutic value, as evidenced by the following example from a forty-eightyear-old Ugandan woman: He is an awesome God! All the power and the glory are his! I want to thank God for taking an interest in my life! [Each time the woman mentions God she points a finger upward.] Two weeks ago I was experiencing lower abdominal pain. You all know how scared I was. Not just the physical pain, but scared about not being here any longer! The doctor ran a series of tests. The prognosis was not good. I’m here to tell you today that God made all those tests negative. I am sticking around! God answered my prayers and got involved in my life. Hallelujah!4

After this powerful testimony the woman was cheered by all in attendance. Then the pastor spoke to her and to all of us: Jesus is a mighty God! I am reminded of Uganda. Some of you know what I mean when I talk about the muddy roads there. Your car can get stuck . . . the more you push the gas the more stuck in the mud you become. Back home we must call a bulldozer to get the car out of the mud. I tell you Jesus is that bulldozer. You may ask why does God allow suffering . . . but every storm has a reason. Praise God!5

The pastor’s decision to connect this woman’s trials and the trials involved in navigating muddy, unpaved roads in Uganda seemed strange to me that day. As I would come to find, however, Uganda, although usually remembered fondly by members of the church, is often framed in church discourse as a place that lacks infrastructure and “modernity.” Conversely, Los Angeles is often discussed as the model of modernity, where through strict adherence to God’s plan, everyone can experience an economic “breakthrough.” The message that comes across is that modernity cannot be achieved solely through migration to Los Angeles. Instead, it is achieved only by those who seek it in Jesus’s name. This discursive strategy allows members to view successful emplacement within the new economic and social landscape as analogous to their commitment and participation at HFM. While there is a strong focus on becoming “modern” in Los Angeles running through Pentecostal discourse at HFM, the path from traditional to modern is not so simple. A break with the muddy roads of Uganda can be employed as a metaphor for achieving success (modernity) one day, while on others the importance of maintaining language, food practices, music, and other traditional cultural forms is equally valued.

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It is common for the pastor to acknowledge the tension between past and present in his sermons and to skillfully engage the community in the management of both by keeping connections to homeland (physically and spiritually) available through the church, while also promoting upward mobility in the receiving location. CONNECTIONS TO UGANDA The members of HFM are a transnational community of individuals who are not easily defined, and who sustain connections to Uganda in meaningful ways. Take the case of Captain John, a well-respected member of the community and a captain in the US Army. Captain John maintains a hospital in rural Uganda that cares for families without access to healthcare. Ugandans are said to travel hundreds of miles to receive the services of Captain John’s hospital. Through this hospital Captain John has developed a connection with the Kabaka (King) of Uganda and has been encouraged to run for political office there. Captain John is the ultimate transmigrant in that his loyalty to the US Army has earned him a good living with promotions and assignments all over the United States while also allowing him to influence political machinations back home in Uganda. Captain John’s transnational life illustrates the difficulty in viewing the participants of HFM in terms of spatial limitations. Semi-regular visits from visiting Ugandan pastors and prophets represent another transnational link exemplified by HFM. Pastor Akello, with churches in Hong Kong, Uganda, and the United States, maintains direct ties to multiple locations, further problematizing the boundedness of the community. Visiting pastors and prophets are a huge draw for the growing community of HFM, desperate for Pentecostal worship with an African flair. These visits are accompanied by additional requests for money to be “given to God,” with the intention of funding the visitor’s travel or a church building/renovation project back “home.” Visits from well-known prophets carry an added significance. It was explained to me that prophets from Africa are highly regarded for their abilities and, indeed, the members of HFM tend to believe that the type of prophecy (and Pentecostal worship) that they value really only exists in an African context. So while Pastor Akello fills that need and is regarded as a pastor with extraordinary powers for healing, there are additional spiritual needs that require the maintenance of ties with Uganda. A final aspect of transnational ties with Africa exists in the spiritual realm. Belief in witchcraft allows for the possibility that a member of HFM can be targeted from across the ocean. In the year I have been conducting participantobservation at HFM, I have documented four cases of witchcraft with roots in Africa, three of which did not require physical travel by the afflicted party.

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In one case, a trip home to Uganda resulted in a member becoming the victim of a witchcraft spell based in jealousy, which required identification and exorcism from Pastor Akello back in Los Angeles. In the other three cases, however, witchcraft spells made the transnational journey independent of the victims, illustrating that the spiritual realm represents yet another aspect of the transnational lives of my participants. A visiting Ugandan female pastor spoke one day at HFM on this issue, stating that each nation had demons that were indigenous to the culture. She claimed to be one of the few experts on the demons associated with the United States. As she preached on the respective demonologies of Uganda and the United States, a central component of the sermon was the ability of those demons to transgress the boundaries of nation-states, illustrating one more way in which my participants “construct and reconstitute their simultaneous embeddedness in more than one society” (Glick-Schiller et al. 1995, 48). WOMEN AS “MAKERS AND BREAKERS” OF TRADITION AND MODERNITY Women represent the majority of members at HFM, but their influence goes beyond their numbers. They are the facilitators of nearly every church event, the most likely to receive the gift of tongues, and key players in the reproduction and reimagining of ethnicity and tradition. Women are also the greatest proponents of HFM, promoting the pastor and his ability as a healer at jobs, bus stops, and to an ever-increasing flow of Ugandans to Los Angeles. In considering how this community imagines and actualizes modernity, it is crucial to have some understanding of these experiences from the point of view of its most active members. In this next section I remember women’s experiences with Pentecostalism at HFM and what this meant in terms of their own marginalization as both immigrants and women. I begin by discussing women’s roles in the practice of giving testimony at Sunday services, which is fundamental to imagining tradition and modernity in Los Angeles. Next, I discuss the role of the Holy Spirit in the lives of women and make the case that domestication of the past and the movement towards modernity in the new setting are achieved largely through facilitation of this relationship. Finally, I examine women’s roles as “makers and breakers” (De Boeck and Honwana 2005) of tradition and modernity in the transnational setting through an analysis of their experiences challenging the men in the congregation to recognize that not all Ugandan gender roles remain salient in Los Angeles. This work involves negotiating with the past and its associated cultural norms and traditions to determine how they should be maintained, stretched, or altered in the new location: hence the borrowed phrase “makers and breakers.”

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Women’s Experiences with Giving Testimony Through the course of my interviews all of the women characterized the role of giving testimony as a way of letting God know that you are thankful for all that he has done. Testimonies at HFM are “offered up to God” after the praise and worship portion of the service, just before the official sermon begins. Folklorist Elaine Lawless has analyzed women’s speech in church during Pentecostal services and concluded that “women sing, women pray, women testify, women even preach. However, for all this activity, women manipulate the creative force of their verbal art only in the performances of their testimonies” (1983, 435). Lawless, although skeptical of the liberatory potential of Pentecostalism for women, does acknowledge that women can often “take over” a service through the creative use of testimony. At HFM there are women to whom the pastor is reluctant to hand the microphone because of their tendency to take over the service with their testimony. One such woman is Mama Sarah, a sixty-five-year-old who has lived in the United States for the last eleven years. Mama Sarah’s testimonies can last anywhere from ten to twenty minutes if she is not mildly admonished by the pastor to keep it short, and she often excites the members of the church in the same way as the pastor’s sermons. This woman is something of a matriarch at HFM, and her experience of claiming a voice within the genre of testimony is but one of many. The following testimony from my field notes provides a glimpse into one woman’s experience doing the work of the imagination in the transnational setting. In it she refers to the practice at HFM of making lists to be prayed over by the pastor on New Year’s Eve: Many of you know I was in Uganda recently. In the church in Uganda they don’t make lists to pray over. I did it anyway because last year pastor told us to make a list and when he prayed over my list so many things came to pass. Our pastor is really special isn’t he? I remembered his words and so I brought my list to the church in Uganda even though their pastor doesn’t do this. I kept it in my pocket and I prayed over it all night until the new year came. Do you know, five days later my siblings received their visas. They are coming here. Praise Jesus!6

This woman’s testimony demonstrates one way in which Pentecostal practice has been altered in the transnational setting: specifically, the practice of praying over a list of hopes for the New Year. The story that was told about this event, whether by this woman, by her siblings, or by friends in the Ugandan church represents a particular global flow, an ethnoscape (Appadurai 1996) with the power to influence ritual practice in both Los Angeles and Uganda. By demonstrating that transnational religious practices can be returned to

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Uganda as social remittances, Mama Sarah is taking an active role in defining what it means to be a Ugandan transnational Pentecostal in both locations. In the context of Los Angeles this testimony acts to bolster the reputation of the small transnational church, with the implication that it knows things that larger churches in Uganda still have not figured out. A dichotomy emerges as to the efficacy of Pentecostal ritual practice in the two settings, with implications for the modernity of practice at HFM. Finally, this story reveals a concrete way that Pentecostal practice at HFM works in the lives of women. As a result of “doing” transnational Pentecostalism, Mama Sarah experienced empowerment through the legitimization of the power of prayer in her life and well-being from the knowledge that her family would soon be reunited. This testimony, and many like it, are evidence that women at HFM are involved in the work of the imagination that gives meaning to both homeland and the transnational setting. The Holy Spirit When asked about the role of the Holy Spirit in their lives in a general sense, each of my ten respondents became animated and seemed pleased to discuss the topic. Prevailing themes included the following: the Holy Spirit is God or the person of God; the Holy Spirit is the soft voice in the back of your head to whom you may or may not listen; the Holy Spirit is God but also an instrument of God that he uses to communicate with us, to heal us, and to save us; the Holy Spirit is a gift. In one incredibly touching statement, a female respondent characterized the Spirit as “the mother of all of us.” The prevailing theme was that the Spirit operates in every aspect of their lives at all times. However, it is significant that each woman recognized the voluntary nature of her relationship with the Holy Spirit, indicating that she makes an informed decision whether or not to accept the positive influence of the Spirit in her life. Experiences of being “filled with the Spirit,” including speaking in tongues, healing and being healed, and receiving prophetic voice, were described as powerful, life sustaining, and invigorating. One woman stated that speaking in tongues feels like “being one with God,” while another claimed that “it is the reason I know I am worthy in God’s eyes.” Other women were adamant that “the Spirit is God . . . it is God Personified . . . it is the way God speaks to us and through us . . . to speak through God is a powerful thing.” Without exception, the women interviewed expressed that it was a great physical and spiritual joy to be filled with the Spirit. When asked about any lasting impact of these experiences, the prevailing theme was of confidence. One woman gave this answer: “One day I knew I had to speak to my boss about the way he was treating me. The Sunday before I went to work I was filled with the

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Spirit several times. I received the gift of tongues many times that day. I left church feeling good. I was no longer scared to talk to my boss. The next day I did, and I made sure that he heard me. Things got better for me. This is the power of prayer, the power of the Spirit in my life.”7 This example of the perceived power of the Holy Spirit extending into the secular arena was something that came up often in my interviews and in casual conversation; indeed, I witnessed it firsthand in a profound way one afternoon during an anointing ceremony. Anointing the forehead with oil is a fairly common rite in many Pentecostal churches. Anointing may be done to mark the installation of elders or deacons, ordination, or as is often the case at HFM, for healing and/or prophecy. Although healing sometimes takes place, at HFM, anointing ceremonies are marked by an expectation that Pastor Akello will receive prophetic voice. I was present for a total of five anointing ceremonies at HFM, and each time the pastor claimed to receive direct messages through the Spirit concerning each attendee that day. Anointing at HFM takes place on particular Sundays, as well as on holidays such as New Year’s Eve. When an anointing ceremony has been announced in advance it is a major factor in drawing attendees to church. One Sunday in October, 2011, I participated in an anointing ceremony that took place at the close of the service. I observed what was later described to me as the Spirit working to heal a woman of an affliction. The following account (in italics) is taken directly from my field notes, written down during the event: The pastor called us all up for the anointing ceremony (this was not in the bulletin). About twenty of us stood lined up around the pulpit waiting our turn for the pastor to give us a direct message from God concerning our lives. This is the first time I have joined the others for an anointing. I was anxious about what message the pastor would receive about me. I watched quietly as he approached fifteen people before me with Kyaligonza holding the oil and speaking in tongues behind him. The pastor placed his right hand on the forehead of each person and closed his eyes before speaking the message. . . . Before me, he called two young women together and told them the discomfort they were experiencing before their periods was not normal, that it was the work of a demon. He began speaking in tongues as he anointed each of them. One fell down afterward, was caught by Mr. Jones, and then had her legs covered by Mama Mary with a shiny, blue modesty cloth. The other did not fall out but walked away with a smile on her face. . . . After anointing me and speaking my message from God, the pastor moved on to the woman standing next to me. I don’t know her. I only know that she has recently arrived from Uganda. She looks to be in her late twenties or early thirties. As the pastor walked up, she was already crying. He placed his hand on her head for about three or four minutes before

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speaking. He then said “I am getting a message from God. He says that the things your aunts did to you, the things they did to your body, and what they let happen to your body and your heart . . . these are things they did out of jealousy. This was a demon who came to afflict you. A demon that your aunts allowed in to torment you. We will release the demon today.” Once the pastor began speaking about a demon and alluding to what was done to her body, several women gathered around her and began pounding their fists into their palms. Kyaligonza has handed the oil to a male usher and is speaking in tongues very loudly while pounding her fists. The women all seem to be watching her as they also pray and pound their fists into their palms. At this point, the pastor yelled very loudly and pushed the woman’s head back. Mr. Jones was standing behind her. Suddenly and violently, she began to lose control, flailing backward as Mr. Jones follows skillfully. Even though he is accustomed to caring for those who receive the Spirit in this way he cannot stop her from knocking over chairs as she makes her way to the rear of the church. She almost steps on a small child playing near the back of the church, but someone picks him up just in time. She is crying uncontrollably and the pastor is still praying and attempting to keep his hand on her forehead. Kyaligonza and the women have followed them all the way to the rear of the church where the woman finally falls to the floor. The pastor removes his sportscoat to cover her himself and then returns to the pulpit where about four more people await anointing. Kyaligonza and four other women are furiously praying in a circle around her as they continue to pound their fists into their palms. I don’t pay attention to the remaining anointings as I am transfixed by this scene. The woman remained unconscious for about ten minutes, and then got up and walked with Kyaligonza and the other women to the front of the church to sit down. She had a smile on her face as she walked by. Though I don’t know for sure, I strongly suspect that the young woman has suffered some form of sexual abuse. I am crying as I write this. It seems like the women rallied around her and protected her, all the while pounding out the demons of sexual abuse.8

I include this powerful scene from my field notes first because it exemplifies ways in which women view a relationship with the Holy Spirit as a vehicle for health and healing. Additionally, we see how the church community provides the space and the tools for women to actively support one another. When I asked one of the women later about the pounding fists, she informed me that it is a way of releasing the fire of the Holy Spirit; that the pounding created the spark, which allowed the pastor to receive the prophetic voice required to properly identify the ailment in the young woman. My participants all believed that through this action they played a role in healing the new arrival from Uganda. Although I did not speak to the young woman described above that day, I did interview her briefly a few weeks after the incident. She did not disclose the nature of her predicament except to say that she had been the victim of a witchcraft spell that had originated in Uganda. However, she

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did inform me that she had been victimized by a demon unleashed through witchcraft for a number of years, and that the experience during the anointing ceremony had released her. Her symptoms had included nightmares, depression, and an inability to receive the gifts of the Spirit. She now claims to be rid of the symptoms and gives all the credit for her spiritual release to the Holy Spirit, to the pastor’s abilities as a harnesser of the Spirit’s healing power, and significantly to the community of women who continued to support her long after the incident. Although none of the women interviewed considered themselves to be feminists, they nevertheless work to support and protect each other in ways that mirror feminist discursive models. Embedded within this vignette is a powerful testimony concerning Pentecostalism and its negotiation of tradition and modernity. This woman from HFM and her deliverance from the “demons” unleashed in Uganda represent an ideal case study on how Pentecostalism acts as a mediator of modernity. Modernity for my participants is not so much a matter of building on the past as it is one of domesticating the past “so that mnemonics, remembrance and forgetting are turned into a politics of nostalgia” (van Dijk 2001, 216). Pentecostal belief and practice at HFM regulate my participants’ remembrance of homeland through the politics of nostalgia. For the woman healed in the anointing ceremony, a painful, threatening, and altogether haunting past was not easily domesticated. If modernity demands taking control of the past, then these women’s embrace of Pentecostalism “can be seen as creating the ritual practices and discourses that negotiate with ‘tense pasts’ within the context of modernity” (van Dijk 2001, 217). This woman’s commitment to a relationship with the Holy Spirit relegated what was clearly severe trauma to the past, domesticating the memory by reframing it within the Pentecostal dualistic worldview. The trauma (whether sexual, psychological, or of course spiritual) became another of Satan’s losses in the perennial battle between good and evil. This woman has now begun to situate herself within the new modern social landscape of the transnational setting by finding steady employment, whereas before she was prevented from doing so by depression and chronic nightmares. Women play an enormous role in every aspect of the functioning of HFM. Women are the driving force of HFM as an institution not only because they represent the majority of members attending each week, but also because of the multitude of roles they fill. Women clean the physical space; they organize special events and prepare and serve the meals; they pray over the physical space before Sunday services and care for the children’s space and Sunday school activities; they organize and actively proselytize to bring new members into the fold; their stories make up the bulk of testimonies and, as singers, they preach and skillfully guide members to ecstatic states; and they are active agents working to change traditional attitudes about their

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own emplacement in the transnational setting. If, as I argue, the members of HFM flex Pentecostalism to emplace themselves within a particular vision of modernity (and thus life in Los Angeles), then women’s role in this cannot be overstated. The women of HFM are both promoting and taking control of Pentecostal belief and practice to craft HFM’s vision of what it means to be modern in Christ. Significantly, the women of HFM are engaged in a type of dual emplacement within modernity. As African immigrants they must inscribe their modernity for the host of reasons previously discussed (in relation to the dominant culture, in relation to other immigrants, etc.), but as Ugandan women in the diaspora they face other internal challenges as well. In describing their traditional roles in Uganda, the women of HFM spoke of supporting their husbands (significantly whether he is wrong or right), raising and instilling traditional values in their children (teaching culture), and being respectful women in the community. Sometimes these expectations may clash with the realities of life in the new setting, as when children are dropped at daycare centers so that women can work outside the home. This causes anxiety for many women who feel as if they are not fulfilling the fundamental role of teaching their children manners, language, how to do chores, and other aspects of Baganda culture. However, the church provides ways of ameliorating that anxiety by functioning as a safe space from which to begin making sense of tradition and modernity. For example, women run the Sunday school classes, which give them the opportunity to manage the spiritual instruction of children at HFM. This provides a time and space that is set aside for “doing” traditional gender, and there is never a shortage of volunteers. However, at other times women express a desire for men to “catch up” with changing gender roles in the new location, as they need help with children and housework after working all day. This point in particular receives consistent support from the pulpit when pastor Akello talks about helping his wife with the children, which the women are quite proud of. Women also celebrate the fact that the First Lady of HFM has a college degree and a good job as proof that roles are changing. They see themselves as involved with a religion that accepts and promotes these changes. That anxiety exists or identity is problematized in the transnational location is unsurprising, but it is significant that HFM is where these women find solutions to that anxiety. Appadurai (1996, 6–7, cited in Meyer 2010, 117) notes that one of the most salient aspects of globalization is the “possibility for people to deploy alternative imaginaries that give rise to new kinds of public cultures.” In this way, transnational religious and ethnic groups are mobilizing and making sense of their environments in ways that go beyond national identity.

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On one Sunday I observed the pastor admonishing the men in the room. He was making the point that he was tired of men asking to speak with him because they were concerned their wives were unfaithful. Now when your wife is out working, don’t come to me the next day and say pastor I had a dream about my wife doing this and that. I tell you God wants your wife to work! There may come a time when God has given you that breakthrough that allows her to stay home, amen? (Responses of amen.) But until then you need to help her, to support her. God says that man is the ruler in the home, but that means we have a greater responsibility. Do you know I help with the children? I know when the First Lady is tired, and I know when to step in.9

In the uncomfortable silence that followed, the women in the room masked their smiles, and the men remained silent. After the service that day I conducted only one interview after most of the congregants had gone home. When asked about the pastor’s comment, the woman smiled at me and said “Back home this never would have happened.” Women of HFM are imagining and crafting new identities with the help of Pentecostalism. Though proud to be Ugandan, they believe that the United States is where God wants them to be. In treating ethnicity as a discourse, they are able to culturally code switch; more importantly, they are able to use the physical and social space of HFM to forge new identities which, like themselves, are not fixed either spatially or temporally. They are becoming situated into the landscape of Los Angeles through the construction of these new imaginaries, which become infallible when complemented by the Pentecostal dualistic view of the world. Every experience, from the personal to the political, can be neatly placed into the dualistic cosmology of Pentecostalism. Women use the mutually constitutive nature of HFM’s vision of good and evil to identify all manner of misfortune and to provide the necessary protection. The pastor’s support for women that day was meaningful in that it provided justification for women’s empowerment through that Pentecostal vision. A small victory perhaps, but one that reinforced their conviction that belief and practice at HFM carries with it the possibilities of salvation and a new beginning. CONCLUSION Religion has always been a form of culture through which individuals and communities define themselves and carve out their place in society. Within the community of HFM religion is the testing ground upon which modernity is fashioned and acted out, both in relation to the lives that were left behind

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and the lives in the new setting. Religion is not a static entity, no matter how often or how forcefully some groups will claim it is. Instead, it evolves as it shapes and is shaped by the cultures with which it comes into contact. Pentecostalism at HFM is a highly processed form of religion. Originally fashioned at a time of great social change in the United States, it reflected that change in remarkable ways such as increased opportunities for women and other marginalized minority groups to interact with one another and to experience the gifts of the Spirit equally. As it was exported around the world it was processed further, reflecting the changing cultural dynamics and political processes encountered along the way. Within modern global frameworks the structure of the religion has been described as ideally suited to helping people cope with the differential access to goods and resources and failure of post-colonial states under the neo-liberal project that has accompanied globalization. I have argued that Pentecostalism in the transnational setting is malleable and that my participants have transformed it into a template of sorts, well suited for doing the collective work of imagining new identities within the competing logics of tradition and modernity that characterize their lives. NOTES 1. Interview with church member Florence (pseudonym) from May, 2011. 2. Interview with church member Patricia (pseudonym) from March, 2011. 3. Excerpt from sermon by Pastor Akello (pseudonym) from February, 2011. 4. Excerpt from testimony in church given by Siima (pseudonym) from May, 2011. 5. Excerpt from sermon by Pastor Akello (pseudonym) from May, 2011. 6. Excerpt from testimony in church given by Mama Sarah (pseudonym) from January, 2011. 7. Interview with church member Solange (pseudonym) from July, 2011. 8. Excerpt from author’s field notes from October, 2011. 9. Excerpt from sermon by Pastor Akello (pseudonym) from July, 2011.

REFERENCES Aihiokhai, Simonmary Assese. 2010. “Pentecostalism and Political Empowerment: The Nigerian Phenomenon.” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 45 (2): 249–64. Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Brusco, Elizabeth. 1993. “The Reformation of Machismo: Asceticism and Masculinity among Colombian Evangelicals.” In Rethinking Protestantism in Latin America,

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edited by Virginia Gerrad Brunett and David Stoll, 143–58. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Chesnut, Andrew. 1997. Born Again in Brazil: the Pentecostal Boom and the Pathogens of Poverty. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Coakley, Sarah. 1993. “Why Three? Some Further Reflections on the Doctrine of the Trinity.” In The Making and Remaking of Christian Doctrine: Essays in Honour of Maurice Wiles, edited by Sarah Coakley and David Pailin, 29–56. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Comaroff, Jean, and John Comaroff. 1993. Modernity and its Malcontents: Ritual and Power in Postcolonial Africa. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. De Boeck, Filip, and Alcinda Honwana. 2005. “Introduction: Children and Youth in Africa: Agency, Identity and Place.” In Makers and Breakers: Children and Youth in Post-Colonial Africa, edited by Felip De Boeck and Alicia Honwana, 1–18. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press Inc. Deno, Vivian, 2004. “God, Authority, and the Home: Gender, Race, and US Pentecostals, 1900–1926.” Journal of Women’s History 16 (3): 83–105. Eck, Diana L. 2006. “What is Pluralism?” The Pluralism Project at Harvard University. Fraser, Meredith. 2003. “A Feminist Theorethical Analysis of White Pentecostal Australian Women and Marital Abuse.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 19 (2): 145–67. Geertz, Clifford.1973. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books. Glick-Schiller, Nina, Linda Basch, and Cristina Szanton Blanc. 1995. “From Immigrant to Transmigrant: Theorizing Transnational Migration.” Anthropological Quarterly 68 (1): 48–63. Inda, Jonathan Xavier, and Renato Rosaldo. 2002. “Introduction: A World in Motion.” In The Anthropology of Globalization: A Reader, edited by Johnathan Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo, 1–34. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Inda, Jonathan Xavier, and Renato Rosaldo. 2002. “Introduction: A World in Motion.” In The Anthropology of Globalization: A Reader, edited by Johnathan Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo, 1–34. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Lawless, Elaine J. 1983. “Shouting for the Lord: The Power of Women’s Speech in the Pentecostal Religious Service.” The Journal of American Folklore 96 (382): 434–59 Meyer, Birgit. 1998. “‘Make a complete break with the past’: Memory and Post-colonial Modernity in Ghanaian Pentecostalist Discourse.” Journal of Religion in Africa 28 (3): 316–49. ———. 2010. “Pentecostalism and Globalization.” In Studying Global Pentecostalism: Theories and Methods, edited by Allan Anderson, Michael Bergunder, Andre Droogers, and Cornelis van der Laan, 113–32. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Moreiras, Alberto. 2001. The Exhaustion of Difference: The Politics of Latin American Cultural Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Robbins, Joel. 2004. “The Globalization of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity.” Annual Review of Anthropology 33: 117–43. ———. 2010. “Anthropology of Religion.” In Studying Global Pentecostalism: Theories and Methods, edited by Allan Anderson, Michael Bergunder, Andre Droogers, and Cornelis van der Laan, 156–78. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Robeck, Cecil M. 2006. The Azusa Street Mission and Revival: The Birth of the Global Pentecostal Movement. Nashville, TN: Nelson Reference & Electronic. Sadgrove, Jo. 2007. “‘Keeping Up Appearances’: Sex and Religion Amongst University Students in Uganda.” Journal of Religion in Africa 37 (1): 116–44. van Dijk, Rijk. 2001. “Time and Transcultural Technologies of the Self in the Ghanaian Pentecostal Diaspora.” In Between Babel and Pentecost: Transnational Pentecostalism in Africa and Latin America, edited by Andre Corten and Ruth R. Marshall-Fratani. 216–34. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Ukah, Asonzeh. 2003. “Advertising God: Nigerian Christian Video-films and the Power of Consumer Culture.” Journal of Religion in Africa 33 (2): 203–31. Wade, Peter. 2007. “Modernity and Tradition: Shifting Boundaries, Shifting Contexts.” In When Was Latin America Modern? edited by Stephen Hart and Nicola Miller, 49–68. London: Palgrave.

PART II

Humanistic Approach

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Bumuntu Humanism and “Values Discourse” Reflection on the Importance of African Studies in Our Tumultuous Time Mutombo Nkulu-N’Sengha

In his introduction to the edited volume, Memory and the Narrative Imagination in the African and Diaspora Experience (2011), Tom Spencer-Walters makes a statement of great significance for our time. “We are operating,” writes Spencer-Walters, “from the perspective that memory allows us to use the past to accord meaning, power, and influence to the present, which provides us with a basis for imagining and crafting the future of our communities” (7). The restoration of African memory about ancestral values and wisdom has been one of the tasks of African studies to which Spencer-Walters dedicated several decades of his work. Four schools of thought have had a lasting impact in this regard: Negritude and “Présence Africaine,” Pan-Africanism, Afrocentricity, and the Kemetic School of African Egyptologists. Although some individual pioneers wrote between 1860 and 1960, African and African American Studies emerged in the late 1960s, about half a century ago, as an organic educational way of combating epistemic enslavement and the colonization of the mind which is fostered by the colonization of knowledge generated by the hegemony of Eurocentric teaching and Eurocentric scholarship with its vast network of “colonial and colonizing libraries.” Following the sociopolitical conditions and events that developed in Africa and in the United States between 1945 and 1965, African and African American studies emerged with, among others, the goal “to study society and the world in order to change them” (Karenga 2002). The memory of 91

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this struggle is captured in the monumental eight volumes of the UNESCO’s General History of Africa, in the Encyclopedia “Africana” edited by the Harvard team of Henry Louis Gates and Kwame Anthony Appiah, and in the publications of the Afrocentric school of Philadelphia’s Temple University, among others. What memory do students and—perhaps—teachers have about the African past and present? What memory do we have about past and present scholarship about Africa? Since the 1970s, alternative studies to the prevailing colonialist or Eurocentric Programs were developed, notably within women studies, Chicano studies, African and African American studies, in order to correct the myopia and distortion of previous epistemic paradigms. And yet, in the twenty-first century, we witness a growing opposition to affirmative action and many decry “critical race theory.” Progress pertaining to ethnic studies and multiculturalism has been quite low and slow, especially pertaining to the source of values of African civilization. In my own teaching profession over the last twenty-five years, I have noticed that the negative picture of Africa spread by mass media, Eurocentric scholarship, and Western movies is deeply ingrained in the vast majority of students. For many of them, Africa is bereft of decent moral values and remains the very antithesis of civilization itself. Indeed, they are surprised and shocked when they read texts on Bumuntu. This is why it is fitting to address the issue of values in African tradition. The social and geopolitical events of this first half of the twenty-first century and the visceral reactions to “African immigrants in Europe,” “critical race theory,” the “woke” movement, and the global “Black Lives Matter” movement have brought to the fore a new reality that challenges old certainties about progress and postcoloniality. The years “2000–2025” will be remembered in history as a generation of “la peur en Occident” to borrow Jean Delumeau’s expression (1978). Between the fourteenth and eighteenth century, Europe was struck by fear. That fear of plague and the devil fostered the persecution of Jews, women, and “witches.” Now there is the return of another kind of fear. The twenty-first century opened up as tumultuous time marked by the 9/11 attack on sacred symbols of American power, the economic collapse of 2008, the earth-shattering COVID-19 pandemic, the dramatic “insurrection” of January 6 in the United States, the “Ukrainian war,” and the growing economic rise of China threatening to supplant Europe and the United States. With the loss of certainties in American invulnerability and European stability, social angst and widespread fear in the West paves the way to the rise of “cultural wars” and the scapegoating of feminist studies, social justice movements, ethnic studies, postcolonial studies, and antiracist movements as forces of division and instability. Hence a backlash against African and African American studies has emerged supported by the rise of

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vociferous discourses about the defense of Western values. It is in this context that this chapter intends to explore the notion of “African values” as a counterpower to neocolonial values discourses. This chapter does not intend to provide an exhaustive survey of the evolution of African and African American studies on the subject. Our chapter has the modest aim of highlighting in broad strokes the necessity of memory about African values in African and African American studies in light of the growing backlash. It is hoped that the unavoidable lacunae of our chapter can stimulate fruitful reflection on issues and perspectives not addressed herein. This chapter reflects on the importance of memory of African history and ancestral wisdom in our educational process and the role of African studies in the context of a new scramble for African natural and human resources, a rising cold war between China and the Western world, and growing resistance to humanistic scholarship that intends to correct the colonial and neocolonial distortion and falsification of African history and African contribution to world civilization. The analysis draws from my teaching experiences in four American universities and colleges, over the past twenty-five years, and my field trips and research in Central Africa over the past eight years. My reflection on “values discourse” stems mainly from research in religious studies, philosophy, history, sociology, anthropology, political economy, and geopolitics. In the pages below, the discussion shall proceed as follows: after an excursus on “the garden and the jungle” discourse and “the idea of Africa,” we shall explore the notion of “our common ancestral origin” as source of the values of universal brotherhood and sisterhood. We will then address the corpus of “African values” through the Bumuntu paradigm and its implication for religious tolerance and for politics or the “Sage King” political tradition. Finally, we shall briefly reflect on the loss of memory and the low and slow progress in the process of decolonization of knowledge in African studies in Africa and in the American diaspora. Status Quaestionis: “The Garden and the Jungle” Discourse and “The Idea of Africa” We live in a time of widespread amnesia, increasing uncertainty and social dislocation that requires more than ever before a secure memory of those crucial values that shape human dignity, bind societies together, and provide stability and prosperity to people. It is our understanding that in the current state of world affairs and geopolitical turmoil, the memory of “African values” seems flimsy at the very moment that the ubiquitous discourse of “Western values” is increasingly deafening. Indeed, very recently, in October 2022, Josep Borrell Fontelles (European Union’s high representative for foreign

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affairs and security policy) gave opening remarks to the European Diplomatic Academy in which he made this astonishing utterance: Yes, Europe is a garden. We have built a garden. Everything works. It is the best combination of political freedom, economic prosperity and social cohesion that the humankind has been able to build—the three things together. . . . The rest of the world is not exactly a garden. Most of the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden. (Borrell 2022)

He went on to stress that Europe must tame the rest of the world to avoid being invaded by the jungle: “The jungle has a strong growth capacity, and the wall will never be high enough to protect the garden. . . . The gardeners have to go to the jungle. Europeans have to be much more engaged with the rest of the world. Otherwise, the rest of the world will invade us, by different ways and means.” And yet, even Samuel Huntington, the high priest of Westernization, confessed that “The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion . . . but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. . . . Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do” (Huntington 1996, 51). It is significant that Borrell’s discourse on the “fear of the jungle” comes at a time when the growing anti-immigrant wave in Europe and the United States has resurrected the “replacement theory” and its corollary xenophobia articulated for centuries by Renaud Camus, Madison Grant, Gobineau, the notorious Rassenpapst Hans Friedrich Karl Günther, and a vast galaxy of colorful Eurocentric philosophers, anthropologists, scientists, lawyers, physicians, and theologians since the time of Aristotle. Borrell’s speech stands as a peculiar case of the performance of “memory as a public discourse,” an atavism of “colonialism’s culture” and “the rhetoric of empire” so well-articulated by Aimé Césaire (2013), Kwame Nkrumah (1965), Cheikh Anta Diop (1967), Jean-Paul Sartre (2006), Edward Saïd (1978 and 1993), Nicholas Thomas (1994), and David Spur (1993), to name but a few. For many analysts of geopolitics, Borrell just stated bluntly and blatantly what many think sotto voce in most Western ruling classes. Borrell is no exception in this regard, nor is his opinion the voice of an inoffensive fringe in Western intelligentsia. Similar abstruse and obtuse views of “alterity” and “subalternity” are found in ubiquitous “values discourses” relentlessly proclaimed urbi et orbi by Ursula von der Leyen, David Maria Sassoli (president of the European Parliament, 2019–2022) and countless public intellectuals, historians, journalists, and politicians in the West, especially in the post-9/11 era. On July 27, 2007, French president Nicolas Sarkozy delivered at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar a conspicuously neocolonial discourse that many viewed as scandalous for the continent and blasphemous to the memory

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of Cheikh Anta Diop. Echoing that “Grand Manitou” of Eurocentric historians from Oxford, professor Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper, Sarkozy stated that “the tragedy of Africa is that the African has not fully entered into history . . . Africans have never really launched themselves into the future . . . for thousands of years the idea of progress never found its place in Africa” (Adi 2018, 19). What Borrell and Sarkozy illustrate is the enduring presence in our “postcolonial” age of tacit colonial axioms of the imperial imagination about the “ignoble savages.” Borrell’s “jungle perception” of the non-Western world is what I have termed “the Hegelian paradigm.” It is an exemplary case of epistemic violence. It is a dogmatic and relentlessly scornful refusal to acknowledge the obvious existence of values in non-Western cultures and social organizations. This peculiarly dualistic view of the world, and Africa in particular, goes back to Aristotle’s “calore-colore” paradigm. The Hegelian paradigm rests on colonialism, racism, and geographic determinism, which claims that people living in warm climate under the tropics are deficient in intellect and moral character (see Bancel 2002; Bernasconi 2003; Colas 2004; Eze 1997; Goldberg 1993; Herrnstein 1994; Levin 1997; Mudimbe 1994; Outlaw 1996). Deemed essential to Western construction of its identity, the Hegelian paradigm was repackaged by several philosophers, theologians, and scientists since the Renaissance and systematically articulated by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) in his philosophy of world history, in a section titled “the Geographic Basis of History.” It is worth noting that the current “values discourse,” with its categorical imperative of teaching Africans Freedom, Democracy, and Human Rights, is predicated upon a peculiar understanding of the nature of Africans as human beings bereft of some fundamental qualities, a view already formulated by Hegel in the crudest language imaginable: Negroes are enslaved by Europeans and sold to America. Bad as this may be, their lot in their own land is even worse, since there a slavery quite as absolute exists. . . . Slavery is in and for itself injustice, for the essence of humanity is freedom; but for this man must be matured. The gradual abolition of slavery is therefore wiser and more equitable than its sudden removal. (Hegel 1994, 209)

Hegel divided Africa in three radically separated zones: North Africa that he attached to Europe, Black Africa he termed “Africa proper,” and Egypt that did not, in his view, belong to the Africa spirit. Africa proper, he claimed is bereft of history and civilization. For him, the African “exhibits the natural man in his completely wild and untamed state,” subsequently Africans, according to Hegel, have no notion of the Supreme Being, no notion of the immortality of the soul, and no knowledge of morality or law; among them,

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Tyranny is regarded as not wrong and cannibalism is looked upon as quite customary and proper. And he adds, “We may conclude slavery to have been the occasion of the increase of human feeling among the Negroes” (Hegel 1994, 207–9). The Hegelian paradigm did not disappear with the abolition of slave trade. We find it again in the “civilizing mission” ideology of colonial empires articulated in the documents of the “International African Association” of King Leopold II and in the acts of the Berlin conference itself. It also reverberates in Borrell’s “jungle discourse.” The persistence of this view points, in some sense, to the loss of memory about the abundant work produced by scholars in the area of postcolonial studies. It is precisely to counter this “colonization of world history” that African and African American studies were, in part, created to overcome what Carter Godwin Woodson (1875–1950)—the legendary creator of what is now widely celebrated “Black History Month” and one of the pioneers of the decolonization of the mind—termed “miseducation” in 1933. Focusing on Africa, Ngugi wa Thiong’o articulated this pattern of deconstructionism in his famed “decolonizing the Mind.” In 1990, thirty years after the independence of many African countries, African theologians pointed out that the education system inherited from the colonial system has generated the tragic system of paupérisme anthropologique and specified that in Africa, “School has been a huge industry of cultural demolition, depersonalization, and anthropological pauperization” (Abraham 1990, 35–36). It is in this context that we can understand the relevance of African studies. The question of human values cannot be separated from that of the origin of humanity itself. OUR COMMON HUMANITY AND OUR COMMON AFRICAN ANCESTRY For centuries, the origin of humankind was the battleground between two schools of thought: polygenism and monogenism. In each camp we could find theologians, philosophers, and scientists. Although the debate continues in some circles, it is worth noting that the notion of a common origin of humanity has gained some “mainstream” status and credibility. The idea of a common origin of humanity is found in African traditional religions where creation myths highlight our common origin and therefore “universal brotherhood and sisterhood.” It is also supported by the discoveries of modern science, especially paleontology and genetics, since the pioneering work of “the Leakey paleontological dynasty,” Donald Johanson, and Yves Coppens (member of the Pontifical Academy of Science). In Die Geschichte der Welt, his recent book on world history, published in 2017, Prof. Dr. Ewald

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Frie (German historian at Die Universität Tübingen) proclaimed that we are all African (“Wir sind also alle Afrikaner”). After the introductory chapter on “Raum und Zeit,” the author begins the book with Afrika (2017, 45–58). At the end of the section titled “Die ersten Menschen,” he writes, “Wir sind also alle Afrikaner, egal ob wir in Europa, Asien, Australien oder Amerika leben” (Frie 2017, 50). This is preceded by a map showing how people left Africa to go to Europe and Asia. This historian returns to Africa from the land of Neanderthal in order to offer a comprehensive synthesis of archaeological, paleontological, and genetic studies done by countless Western experts over a century (1920–2020) on the African origin of Homo sapiens. Previously, another scholar, Stephen Oppenheimer (a British geneticist, trained in medicine at Oxford) published his magistral The Real Eve: Modern Man’s Journey Out of Africa (2003) based on recent genetic studies. While paleontological studies flourished after the First World War, genetic studies proving the African origins of humanity took their impetus in 1987 with the publication in “Nature” of Allan C. Wilson’s groundbreaking article “Mitochondrial DNA and human evolution,” which paved the way for what journalists came to promote as “African Eve” theory. A professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and the world authority on “molecular evolution,” Allan C. Wilson is a scientist who revolutionized the field of evolutionary biology with his work employing protein and DNA sequences as “molecular clocks” to chart the evolution of life on earth. He worked for more than ten years on an analysis of mitochondrial DNA from people of various races. He and his colleagues then hypothesized that all humans living today have mitochondria traceable to a common ancestor who lived around 200,000 years ago in an African population. This scientific theory of “the African mother of us all” led prominent scientists such as Tim D. White (paleoanthropologist, professor of integrative biology, and director of the Human Evolution Research Center at UC Berkeley), Richard Dawkins (British evolutionary biologist professor at Oxford University, now emeritus), and many others to publicly proclaim that “We are all African.” In 2013, Professor Vanessa Hayes (head of the Human Comparative Genomics Group) organized conferences on “We are all African—Tracing Modern Human History Through our DNA Code.” In France, in 2016, paleontologist Michel Brunet of the prestigious Collège de France and Sorbonne published an entire book on the topic, explicitly titled Nous sommes tous des Africains. Despite lingering ideological dissenting voices and byzantine quarrels on details among scholars, the emerging “big picture” among a great many scientists is the consensus on the African origin of humankind. As a Kirkus review of Oppenheimer’s book The Real Eve put it, “the out-of-Africa thesis of our species’ ancestry is tested, found solid, and approved for consumption.” .

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Encyclopedia Britannica concurs when, in its entries on Africa, it states that “Africa is thought of as the place where humans first developed about 315,000 years ago.” Africa, the land of most genetic diversity in the world, is the birthplace not only of ancient Hominidae but also of the anatomically modern humans that are believed to have appeared as early as 200,000 or 300,000 years ago. The realization of this historical memory leads to two important conclusions. The first was formulated, with some poetic tincture, by Spencer Wells: You and I, in fact everyone all over the world, we’re all literally African under the skin; Brothers and sisters separated by a mere 2,000 generations. Old fashioned concepts of race are not only socially divisive, but scientifically wrong. It’s only when we’ve fully taken this onboard, that we can say with any conviction that the journey our ancestors launched all those years ago, is complete. (Wells 2002)

Second, the memory of this scientific understanding of human origins developed over one hundred years places our contemporary “values debate” in new light. The persistent idea that Africa is bereft of civilizational values is a figment of colonial imagination and neocolonial forma mentis. As Robert Baum points out regarding spiritual values: “If archaeologists are correct in believing that the first human beings came from Africa, then it stands to reason that the first religions also originated there. . . . It is possible that, as the earliest humans slowly migrated to other continents of the world, they carried with them religious ideas and practices that originated in Africa” (Baum 2007, 15–17). AFRICAN STUDIES AND THE QUESTION OF CIVILIZATION AND RELIGIOUS VALUES In the field of African studies, we find a powerful trend of African Egyptologists led by Cheikh Anta Diop (of Senegal), Théophile Obenga (of the Congo), and Molefi Kete Asante (of Temple University, Philadelphia). Ancient Egypt and Nubia, they argue, is to Africa what Athenian Greece and ancient Rome are to the West. In 1957, Serge Sauneron (French Egyptologist) published a book in which he reminded scholars that some prominent ancient Greek philosophers and scientists, including Pythagoras and Plato studied in Egypt for five, ten, or even twenty years. Prior to Sauneron’s revelation, James Bennett Pritchard published in 1950 at Princeton University Press his famous ANET, which revealed the influence of some ancient Egyptian religious texts on the Bible. According to the Bible itself, Moses, the lawgiver, the architect of the ten

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commandments, “was taught all the wisdom of the Egyptians and became a man with power both in his speech and his actions” (The Jerusalem Bible, Acts 7:17–22). Adopted by the daughter of the Egyptian pharaoh, who raised him as her own child, this Moses grew up in Egypt and married a Kushite or Ethiopian woman (Numbers 12:1–5). Most importantly, the ten commandments—the heart of Western values and Western moral standards—found an earlier formulation in the Egyptian Maatic principles of the Book of the Dead where, during the last judgement, the dead can enjoy eternal life only if he is proven innocent. The religion of Isis and Osiris, Maat and Ra, Amun and Atum, offers us principles of high moral standards more than two thousand years before Christianity and almost three thousand years before the birth of Islam and its Koran. According to Dr. Goelet, “the origins of the Book of the Dead may be traced back to the Pyramid Texts, which appear at the end of the Fifth Dynasty in Egypt’s Age of the Pyramids (ca. 2400 BC).” For African Egyptologists, Egypt therefore reveals Africa as one of the oldest sources of human values, in terms of religious moral values and philosophical ethic. The Egyptian declaration of innocence during the last judgement gives us a glimpse into the ethical principles of Africans of Nile Valley civilization: I have not done crimes against people, I have not robbed the poor, I have not caused pain, I have not caused tears, I have not killed, I have not ordered to kill, I have not made anyone suffer . . . I am pure, I am pure, I am pure, I am pure . . . I have done what the gods are pleased with. . . . I have given bread to the hungry, water to the thirsty, clothes to the naked, a ferryboat to the boatless . . . I was a husband to the widow and father to the orphan. (Von Dassow 1994, ch. 125)

The Egyptian instruction to King Merikare articulates the “imago dei” doctrine quite explicitly: Well tended is mankind—God’s cattle. . . . They (human beings) are his images, who came from his body, When they weep he hears. (Lichtheim 1976, 106)

In The Coffin Texts (1130 and 1031), God declares the following: I made every man like his fellow; and I did not command that they do wrong. It is their hearts that disobey what I have said. I have created the gods from my sweat, and the people from the tears of my eye. (Lichtheim 1976, 132)

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Regarding ethics in government, the instructions to King Merikare reminds the rulers to do justice, to not punish wrongfully, to not kill people, to calm the weeper, to not oppress the widow, and to be humans of “good nature.” Struck by the high moral standards of ancient Egypt, Norbert Lohfink (a Jesuit biblical scholar) had this to say: The gods listened to the cry of the poor, especially the sun god. According to the affection people had toward the poor, the gods blessed them or cursed them. The force of this theme is so strong that, after spending some time with this kind of text and then returning to the study of the Bible, it seemed difficult to me to find there anything not already known from other sources. Nearly every motif, even the words, seemed to be part of a common heritage. (Lohfink 1991, 34–50)

This view is shared by many other scholars who identified many other features of the contribution of ancient Egypt to Judaism, Christianity, ancient Greece, and Rome. Relying on more than a century of Egyptological studies that reveal the debt that Greece and Rome owe to Egypt, a great many scholars have moved beyond the Hegelian paradigm to acknowledge that ancient Egypt produced genuine philosophical thought, a sound legal system and even articulated a concept of human dignity and human rights. The study of Théodoridès (1971, 291) on the concept of law in Ancient Egypt is important in this regard. According the Encyclopedia Britannica, the existence of law in ancient Egypt goes back to the early foundation of the Egyptian State. The encyclopedia states that by the concept of “Egyptian Law,” scholars mean that “law that originated with the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under King Menes (c. 2925 BC) and grew and developed until the Roman occupation of Egypt in 30 BC.” The encyclopedia goes on to stress the contribution of Egyptian law to Western notions of human rights: The history of Egyptian law is longer than that of any other civilization . . . the Greek lawgiver Solon (6th century BC.) visited Egypt and adapted aspects of the legal system to his own ideas for Athens. Egyptian law continued to influence Greek law during the Hellenistic period, and its effects on Roman imperial law may still be felt today.

In so far as Greece is viewed as Mater et Magistra of Western civilization, the origin of what is regarded as “Western values” can be examined cautiously and in less ethnocentric or nationalistic fashion. The wisdom of ancient Egypt is worth mentioning because of its written records and because of its anteriority to the golden age of ancient Greece, and most importantly its anteriority to Christianity and Islam, which it influenced in various ways.

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But civilizational values are found not only along the Nile, but also along the Niger River, the Congo River and the civilizations of Zambezi and Limpopo. In Central Africa and Southern Africa, we find the notion of Bumuntu (or Ubuntu) at the heart of what it means to be a genuine human being. An important value of African traditional religions is the fundamental belief that all human beings are created by the same God and therefore are brothers and sisters. African societies have produced more than one thousand creation myths, the most widely known in the world being those by the Dogon of Mali and the Yoruba of Nigeria. These myths stress the common origin of all human beings, and subsequently their worth and dignity. As God’s creatures, humans are required to behave according to their creator whose essential qualities are, among others, purity (Vidye kadi katonye, Vidye utoka), love (buswe), compassion (buntu), kindness (kanye) according to the lexicon of the Baluba people. The Dogon memory of the origins of the world maintains that God created all human beings and all the races but used the light of the moon “to cook the bodies of White people” whereas he used the light of the sun for those of Black people. Other myths maintain that God used clay of different colors. In sum, God is the universal creator, father and mother, of all human beings, of the poor and the rich, the fortunate and the unfortunate. Moreover, in the creation process, God used the same matter to mold all human beings. Thus, despite the differences of character and personality among people, human nature has a common ground that is founded upon the equality of all human beings, men and women, people of different ethnicities and races. This is also why Africa has largely enjoyed a positive attitude toward other races, unlike race taxonomies developed by some of the most venerable Western scholars and scientists over the last five centuries. Among the Baluba, Shakapanga is not the creator of one single clan, race, or nation but the father of every creature that exists. From this notion of a common origin of humankind, Africa drew the ethical principle of universal brotherhood. According to the Yoruba creation myth, the Yoruba God as father of the whole universe created Black and White people, albinos and hunchbacks, the Yoruba people, and all other nations as well (Abimbola 1990, 137, 145). As a result, the Yoruba regard all human beings as kin, so much so that most prayers and invocations offered in Ile-Ife are deemed incomplete until prayers are offered for the people of the entire universe (agbala crye gbogbo), who are regarded as having had their origin in Ile-Ife (Abimbola 1990, 137–38). The Yoruba religion is not an exception in this regard. When we move from West Africa to East Africa, we find the same theology in Kenya, where a “Meru Prayer” reminds the devotee who prays for his family or his country to conclude with this astonishing statement of universality: “And also the trouble of the other lands that I do not know, remove” (Magesa 1997, 197–98). In Yoruba religion, the High

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God Orinsala, the molder of human bodies, is praised as “the husband of hunchback” (Oko abuke), “the husband of lame” (Oko aro), and “the husband of dwarf with a big fat head” (Oko arara bori pete’) (Abimbola 1994, 111). The divine nature of foreigners, people with disabilities, the sick, and the marginalized is also grounded in the fundamental feature of African traditional religions: the veneration of the ancestors. Thus, the Bulsa treat strangers, orphaned, handicapped people, beggars, and lepers well because of their belief that their ancestors visit them in these forms (Olikenyi 2001, 105). This connection between hospitality and the vision of ancestry is widespread in Africa. The Fang people of Gabon believe that an ancestor passes by in the person of a stranger and, therefore, a stranger should be given kind and warm treatment (Olikenyi 2001, 105). BUMUNTU I have written extensively on the Bumuntu paradigm (Nkulu-N’Sengha 2018, 127–70). Here I shall limit myself to some key points. In my own teaching, I have come to realize that most of the literature about decolonization of knowledge is largely unknown or simply ignored. This is why it is worth highlighting the importance of the Bumuntu paradigm. African ethical canon was not limited to the Egyptian Maat. Elsewhere in Africa we find the same fundamental idea: to be human and humane is to be ethical. Such is the notion of Bumuntu. It is based on the Luba “Muntu– Kintu” contrast, known as “Tiboa–Aboa” among the Akan. Good character stands as the hallmark of authentic mode of being. According to Yoruba wisdom, “A man may be very, very handsome; handsome as a fish within the water; But if he has no character, he is no more than a wooden doll. . . . Iwa Lesin! Good character is the essence of religion” (Anastaplo 1995, 176; and Abimbola 1994, 113). From West Africa to South Africa, there is the widespread belief that people of bad character are not truly human. In Nigeria, the Yoruba say, Ki I se eniyan (He/she is not a person). In South Africa, we find the expression Ga se Motho, and the Baluba people of Central Africa say, Yao Ke Muntu (He is not human) or I mufu unanga (He is a dead body walking). There are three fundamental concepts—Muntu, Kintu, and Bumuntu—involved in the definition of a human being in the African context. In Kiluba language, a human being (man or woman) is referred to as a Muntu (plural: Bantu). Muntu is not an ethnic concept but a generic term for every human being. It is found in closely related variants in other Bantu languages. The word Kintu refers to things, and to human beings who have lost their dignity. All over Africa, we find a clear distinction between genuine humans and bad ones.

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Thus, to the fundamental existential question, “What is a human being?” Africans respond, Bumuntu. This notion conveys the fundamental African understanding of genuine personhood (i.e., authentic humanity). Bumuntu means the quintessence of personhood, that fundamental authentic mode of being humane. Bumuntu stands for the content of a Muntu, the moral character, the essence of genuine humanity, the essence of a deeply humane being. This word is widespread among Bantu languages. Ubuntu is another variant of Bumuntu found in the southern part of Africa. Bumuntu is that good character that believes in a universal bond of sharing that connects all humanity. It is the ontological authenticity that governs the African quest for well-being and the African celebration of the humanity of other fellow humans. Such solidarity is not a superficial condescension. It stems from the understanding of the common origin of humanity as defined in African cosmologies. Creation myths indicate that Bumuntu derives from the transcendent origin of human beings. As an Akan proverb has it, “All human beings are children of God, no one is a child of the earth” (Nnipa nyinaa ye Onyame mma, obi nnye asase ba). For the Baluba people, as for the Akan, all human beings are Bantu ba Leza (God’s people) and Bana ba Vidye Mukulu (children of the Great Spirit). In Kiluba language, ethics is expressed by Mwikadilo muyampe (A good way of being in the world) or Mwendelo muyampe (A good way of walking on the path of life). Bumuntu is manifested in four basic ways: good thought and good heart (mucima muya), good speech (ludimi luya), good actions (bilongwa biya), and a good way of looking at people and the world. The notion of good heart (Mucima muyampe) includes virtues such as buntu (generosity), butundaile (hospitality), bukwashi (helpfulness), butalale (being peaceful, calm), bwanahabo (freedom, autodetermination), buleme (respect, dignity, integrity), lusa (compassion), buswe (love), kanye (sensitive heart), boloke (righteousness, rectitude), and Ngenyi (intelligence, wisdom). As for vices, the notion of Mucima mubi (evil heart) includes things such as bwivi (theft, robbery), mwino (selfishness), buzazangi (hypocrisy), mushikwa (hatred), bubela (lie), ntondo (discrimination), lwiso (lust), malaka (envy), bulobo, bukalabale, or nsungu (violence, anger), kwihaya (killing), butshi (witchcraft), kibengo (insolence), buhika (enslavement), busekese (sexual misconduct), makoji (adultery), and bulembakane (stupidity). A similar vision of ethics is found among the Akan in Ghana. Like the Yoruba, the Akan have a sophisticated ethical system that has been well articulated by Kwame Gyekye. This system is based upon three basic concepts, Suban (character), Tiboa (conscience) and the “Papa-bone” antithesis (moral goodness versus evil). At the center of the Akan conception of personhood stands the concept of Suban (character) which also means “goodness” and plays a crucial role in the Akan vision of morality. According to Gyekye, the Akan maintain that every

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human being possesses a Tiboa (conscience or the inward voice) that guides his sense of right and wrong. Talking about somebody who constantly misbehaves the Akan say that the person in question is somebody whose “Tiboa is dead.” For the Akan, it is mainly the way a person listens to his conscience which determines his character. Like the Baluba, the Akan make a distinction between two categories of human beings, the person with conscience (Tiboa) and a beast (Aboa) or a person without conscience. This Tiboa–Aboa paradigm shows that the Muntu–Kintu paradigm of Luba religion is not a unique case without similarities in other African societies. The Akan notion of owo suban pa refers to a person who “has morals” and stands as the antithesis of onni suban pa (a person who “has no morals”). Being a good person (onipa pa) and having a good character (suban pa) are considered identical. Among things regarded as praiseworthy in Akan ethics, we find Mmobrohunu (compassion), Ayamyie (kindness, generosity), Nokwaredi, (truthfulness, honesty), Ahooye or Adoe (hospitality), Ahomeka (dignity), and anuonyam ne obuo ba (that which brings respect). The list can be completed by various attributes of God such as love, justice, forgiveness, and so forth. Evil is distinguished into two categories: “bone” which encompasses “ordinary evils” such as theft, adultery, lying, backbiting (kokonsa), and so on; and musuo or “indelible evil” (ade a woye a wompepa da) viewed with particular abhorrence and revulsion. This type of evil is so disgusting and rare that it is remembered and referred to by people even several years after the death of the doer. According to Gyekye, these “extraordinary” evils are so horrible that they provoke the wrath of supernatural beings and are considered “taboos” (akyiwade: abominations). They include rape, incest, and murder (Gyekye 1995, 133). In Uganda and Kenya, we also find an important ethical code systematized by John Mbiti, one of the foremost specialists of African traditional religion. For Mbiti, African virtues include truth and rectitude, justice, generosity, hospitality, protecting the poor and weak, giving honor and respect to older people, chastity before marriage and faithfulness during marriage, avoiding hypocrisy, avoiding stealing, and avoiding falsehood. Vices include selfishness, incest, adultery, murder, rape, lies, backbiting, bad language, theft, laughing at a cripple, and many others (Mbiti 1990, 208). These virtues and vices point to one essential point, the prohibition against violating human dignity and, subsequently, human rights. Thus, the prohibition to steal points to “property rights.” Similarly, the prohibition to kill or to commit rape witnesses an awareness of human rights. All these studies point to the centrality of the virtues of love, compassion, respect, and protection of life, self-control, politeness, moderation, humility, friendship, goodness, and kindness in the African understanding of a “good person.” Such is the vision

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of African moral values which make a human being truly humane, an ideal aspiration people have to strive for. Another important component of African philosophical anthropology is the delicate balance between the individual and the community. A genuine human being is the one who succeeds in maintaining that delicate balance between individuality and the sense of community, for a genuine Muntu is, in the expression of the Mande, a “Fadenya-Badenya” (Karp 1987, 14–16)—that is, an individual and collective being. Fadenya (“father-childness”) is the centrifugal force of individuality. It orients human actions toward individual reputation and renown. However, because the search for personal fame can easily lead to selfishness, self-aggrandizing passions, and anti-social behavior, the individual can find equilibrium only with the intervention of a counterpower, the centripetal force known as Badenya (“mother-childness”). This is a force of stability and cooperation; it brings the child to the mother’s womb. From Badenya arises social solidarity, benevolence, and altruism. Fadenya and Badenya stand as two sides of the coin that is the Bumuntu. RELIGIOUS TOLERANCE Another important value of African traditional religions is found in the area of religious tolerance so beautifully articulated in “Tolerant Gods” by the Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka. According to the Catholic theologian, Benezet Bujo (1992, 55), religious wars were unknown in African traditional society. Likewise, Ali Mazrui, a Muslim scholar, concurs:Of the three principal religious legacies of Africa (indigenous, Islamic, and Christian), the most tolerant on record must be the indigenous tradition. (Mazrui 1995, 77)

This traditional spirit of tolerance has influenced even Christianity and Islam in such a way that, in comparison to the situation in other parts of the world, sub-Saharan Africa emerges clearly “above average” in religious tolerance. It should be noted that this tolerance characterizes African traditional religions in general and is based on African understanding of God, humans, and truth. Writing from the perspective of the Yoruba religion of Nigeria, Abimbola observes that the Yoruba religion starts with myths of creation which maintains the idea of a universal common descent of all human beings from the same God creator, Obatala, which leads to the search for peaceful coexistence (Abimbola 1990, 138, 145).

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POLITICAL POWER AND “SAGE-KING” TRADITION Throughout the twentieth century, Eurocentric scholarship defined the history of Africa as the proverbial heart of darkness, the sempiternal state of nature where, since time immemorial, only the Hobbesian homo homini lupus Weltanschauung and the Kafkaesque Bellum omnium contra omnes politics reigned. And yet, organized kingdoms and empires flourished in Africa, and it is from Africa that one of the earliest Christian articulations of political theology came. St. Augustine (354–430) highlighted the necessity of ethics in politics when he stated in The City of God (book IV) that kingdoms without justice are mere robberies. Converted to Christianity from “Paganism,” Augustine echoes in Christian terms a long African tradition of “Sage kingship.” On May 12, 2000, Kofi Annan, the secretary general of the United Nations, rejected the argument often held by African dictators and war lords, and accepted by many scholars and policymakers in the West, that dictatorial postcolonial politics in Africa obey the spirit of the traditional African conception of power. In an interview published by Barbara Crossette in the New York Times, Kofi Annan rejected the view that someone who makes himself president for life reflects traditional African tribal culture, arguing that among the Ashanti, for instance, the king could be removed “for wrongdoing, incompetence or lack of leadership” (Crossette 2000). Indeed, the Asante people de-stooled King Osei Kwame in 1799 for endangering the security of the nation in failing to perform his religious duties. In 1874, they impeached Karikari for extravagance, among other failings. Another king, Mensa Bonsu, was de-stooled for excessively taxing the Asante people. Mr. Annan, who was the head of the peacekeeping mission at the United Nations before becoming the first sub-Saharan African (after the Egyptian Boutros Boutros Ghali) to lead the UN as secretary general, is familiar not only with the nature of corruption in African politics, senseless wars, and the crisis of leadership in postcolonial politics but also with the aspirations of the African people for good and accountable governance, which are enshrined in the Bumuntu tradition. In 1978, in one of the first systematic elaborations of an African Liberation Theology, Monsignor Bakole wa Ilunga observed that “If our ancestors could return and see what is going on in our society, they would not believe they were in Africa, nor would they recognize their descendants.” Why? Because, Bakole explains, “We are far from being true Africans . . . there is nothing authentic about the way in which the masses and the leaders of society, especially in the cities, are living today. . . . That shows how far we have lost our grasp of deeper meaning and of the values that supported the life and ways

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of our real ancestors” (Bakole 1984, 17). And Bakole concludes, along with many other theologians, with an appeal to a rediscovery of traditional values, most importantly the traditional vision of power for the people. In 2009, UNESCO inscribed on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity the “Manden Charter,” which was proclaimed in Kurukan Fuga in the early thirteenth century AD by the founder of the Mandingo Empire and the assembly of his wise men, following a major military victory. This charter is one of the oldest constitutions in the world, albeit mainly in oral form. It contains a preamble of seven chapters advocating social peace in diversity, the inviolability of the human being, education, the integrity of the motherland, food security, the abolition of slavery by razzia (or raid), and freedom of expression and trade. Traditional authorities see it as a source of law and as promoting a message of love, peace, and fraternity, which has survived through the ages. It is also viewed as the basis of the values and social identity. Elsewhere in Africa we find similar “oral constitutions.” A proverb from the ancient Luba empire states that Bulopwe I Bantu” (True Power resides in the consent of the people). Paramount to Luba thought is the notion of good governance. The distinction between Mulopwe (good king) and Kilopwe (bad king) was based on the way the people were treated by their rulers. Thus, some kings are celebrated while the name of others cannot even be pronounced loudly because they are “Bantu ba malwa,” monsters who bring misfortune. In various investiture, kings are reminded that the raison d’être of political power is the welfare of the people. Most importantly, the Mulopwe ruled according to an Oral constitution beyond his control, a constitution protected by a religious “supreme court” body of Bambudye, which had the power to check on the King and impeach him in case of abuses, even to condemn him to capital punishment and execute him (Reefe 1981, 205). It was understood that the power of the Luba King should be limited and controlled in order to guarantee the protection of human rights. Luba empire was not unique in this regard. Similar approaches to political power have been identified by scholars elsewhere such as among the Yoruba, Asante, Mende, Temne, and Bambara. MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING? Where do we go from here? African studies are now, at least, half a century old. The question that arises is whether its major objectives have been achieved? What about the decolonization of knowledge and liberation from “mental slavery”? How much progress has been made? In the American diaspora, progress seems to have been staggering in just half a century. Neurosurgeons, astronauts, inventors, millionaires, four-star

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generals . . . supreme court justices . . . and, indeed, an “Obama” . . . African Americans have risen from the ashes of history . . . and yet in many professions of great significance, we only find 0.5 to 4 percent of African Americans, which is dramatically low for people who constitute about 12 percent of US population. Moreover, the very small progress has generated tremendous backlash. Ironically it is only in the Army that we find a significant representation of people of African descent, those heroes who are ready to die to defend “our values, our liberty, our democracy and our sacred way of life.” Surveys published periodically by the American Academy of Religion on “Education in Religion and Theology” in American universities (Tilley 2003) reveal an alarming state of affairs that Terrence W. Tilley summarized in 2003, at the AAR Annual Meeting, as follows: “In what we study and who we are, we are predominantly White (90 percent of faculty, 75 percent of doctoral program graduates), male (75 percent of both faculty and doctoral program graduates), and Christian (at least 75 percent of students’ major areas of concentration).” Statistics published on academic degrees conferred by American universities and the courses frequently taught and required for majors show less progress. Regarding race and the production of knowledge about religion, the number of research doctorates conferred in the United States in religion, theology, and humanities from 1983 to 1992 shows the following picture: Whites who were then 72 percent of the US population got 91.7 percent of doctorates in theology, 90.5 percent in religion, and 88.8 percent in humanities, while Black Americans who constituted 12 percent of the American population got only 1.9 percent of doctorates in theology, 3.1 percent in religion, and 2.7 percent in the humanities. In the Academic year 2001–2, at the graduate level, Caucasians constituted 90.2 percent of the faculty members and African Americans 5.1 percent. According to Frank Crouch, the picture of progress regarding US doctorates conferred on women in religious studies and in theology is rather poor. Among religion PhDs, percentages improved only marginally from 18 percent in 1986 to 23 percent in 1991. The situation is even worse for theology. In 1986 and 1987, women received only 14 percent of the research doctorates in theology. From 1988 through 1991, that number reached and remained fixed at l6 percent. In religious studies, in 1991, 77 percent of PhDs were conferred to men and only 23 percent to women. There is also less progress regarding educational institutions and the number of courses offered. Most institutions offer large courses in Christianity and the Bible. Courses in other religions are very few; also few are the institutions that offer them. Among undergraduate religion courses offered in 1999–2000 in the United States and Canada, more than three thousand courses (11 percent) were offered in Christianity and only 170 in indigenous religions (0.5 percent). Moreover, only 366 courses (1.2 percent) were offered in women’s studies, and 222 courses (0.7 percent) in

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racial and ethnic studies. Moreover, among courses needed for a major in a department or program in 1999–2000, Christianity is required in more than 52 percent of institutions, Women’s studies in 5.4 percent of institutions and indigenous religions in 2.6 percent of institutions. Regarding the number of departments that offered courses in 1999–2000, Christianity–New Testament was offered in 83.6 percent of institutions, women’s studies in 32.8 percent of institutions, and indigenous religions in 18.5 percent of institutions. Given that religion plays a crucial role in the production of “values” in our society, this meagre presence of Africans and African Americans in the academic production of knowledge has implication for the perpetuation of negative memory about African values. Moreover, African religions, which are the main source of the values of African civilization, are still largely marginalized in American Universities and not widely studied in Africa itself. In 1993, thirty years after the creation of the Organization of African Union (OAU) by independent African countries, the American Academy of Religion dedicated its “Spotlight on Teaching” to the status of African religions in American universities. In this issue, Robert M. Baum described a bleak picture of the prevailing perception of African religions: Within the field of religious studies, African religions remain a residual category, variously characterized as traditional, primal, primitive, oral, non-literate, etc., as opposed to world religions, scriptural religions, etc. What this category has most fundamentally in common is the relatively recent experience of its adherents who have been conquered by Europeans and whose religious systems have been regarded as less complex, less reflective, less theoretical, and in certain ways, even less spiritual by their conqueror. Most religious studies programs concentrate on Western or Eastern religions (southern is a non category here) and ignore African religions, relegating them to study by another discipline, anthropology, before utilizing theoretical insights gleaned by anthropologists in the study of religions of “simple” societies to shed light on the work of comparative religionists on religion in “advanced” societies. (Baum 1993, 2)

Robert B. Fisher (1988) observed the continuing exclusion of African religions from “world religions” as a primal religion without revelation, philosophic speculations, and high spirituality. This vision is also widespread in popular imagination by exotic novels and films about Voodoo “witchcraft.” African traditional religions are still by and large studied in terms of witchcraft, magic, fetishism, divination, and circumcision rituals, dance, and spirit possessions. The fundamental values of religion as a path of becoming humane (Bumuntu) are largely neglected, especially by those who view such an enterprise as a misguided attempt to “Christianize African religions.” And yet those moral values are authentically African from ancient Maatic moral standards to the Bumuntu paradigm of Bantu cultures. It is worth noting here

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that the perennial African wisdom contained in African proverbs and which have gained a worldwide appreciation, is a product of African traditional religions, as well as the meaning of African names that parents give to their children. And these are essential elements of African identity. As Roger Bastide confesses, there is in Africa an entire “civilization of spirituality” (cited in Zahan 1979, 126). Such is the point that needs to be addressed in education in order to overcome the enduring colonial perception of African religions as “satanic voodooism” or harmful witchcraft. In Africa, the situation of African traditional religions is not brilliant either. While African traditional religions undergo some revival in the Americas and in Afrocentric scholarship, African traditional religions are largely studied in Christian Faculties of Theology for the sake of the Africanization of Christianity. In the society at large, a great many Christians and Muslims view traditional religions with suspicion and their priests as dangerous witches. Modernization, globalization, Christianization, and Islamization have contributed to some degree to the loss of memory about ancestral values. Surveys by the American Academy of Religion and the views expressed by Robert Baum and Robert Fisher reflect what I have witnessed in American classrooms in my twenty years of teaching profession. More than 95 percent of my students had never had a serious course dealing with Africa, neither in high school nor at thecollege level. Some had sporadic references—often negative—to Africa in courses not focused on Africa. None of them had ever had a course in African traditional religions. Their idea of Africa comes largely from Hollywood movies and some television news. Their view of Africa is overwhelmingly negative and caricatural. However, they manifest an acute sense of justice, rejection of racism, and colonialism and are receptive to the kind of knowledge produced in the area of postcolonial studies. Conclusion In Kamina, January 2015, while doing research on Bumuntu and the path of interreligious dialogue, we got the following observation from Mr. Mwembo Lumbila Ngoie, the president of the organization of Luba culture in Lubaland: In ten years, when electricity and the internet are installed in these villages of our Lubaland, when one can be exposed to all the images on the television, the people will not appear like Baluba anymore, they will appear like Westerners, Americans, or Europeans. And the Baluba will disappear bit by bit, until finally we will be finished. (Nkulu-N’Sengha 2005)

The Senegalese novelist Sembene Ousmane, made a similar point in 1981 in The Last of the Empire:

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“Exactly,” exclaimed Djia Umrel. “What model of society are we offered through the media? We’re made to swallow outdated values, no longer accepted in their countries of origin. Our television and radio programmes are stupid. And our leaders, instead of foreseeing and planning for the future, evade their duty. Russia, America, Europe, and Asia are no longer examples or models for us.” “It would be a dangerous step backwards, to revert to our traditions—” “That’s not what I’m saying, Joom Galle,” she interrupted. “We must achieve a synthesis. . . . Yes, a synthesis. I don’t mean a step backwards . . . a new type of society,” she ended, blinking. There followed a brief silence. (Ousmane 1984, 134–35)

Sembene Ousmane points to a real problem regarding the consequences of the disparition of African values. Indeed, much of the tragedy that Africa faces nowadays is due to the loss of memory about the ancestral “Bumuntu art of becoming humane” and the inability to fully embrace positive values produced in Africa for millennia. As a result, life for many Africans is increasingly becoming disconsolate at the hands of ubu-esque kinglets of Caligulan proportion, ruthless merchants of “prosperity Gospel,” and heartless henchmen of neoliberal singularity and their fables of illusory development and pseudo-progress. By saying that Africans have become “capitalists without capital and nationalists without a nation,” African people recognize the dire situation of a post-colonial context dominated by Kafkaesque bureaucracies, grotesque Machiavellian politics, and the progressive loss of traditional Bumuntu values of humanism, dignity, solidarity, hospitality, and religious tolerance. The loss of memory occurs at various levels: memory of the historical achievements and African contribution to world civilization, memory of past and present danger to the dignity and survival of Africans. My research in Africa has shown that major works produced on the decolonization of knowledge are largely unknown in many schools. Moreover, in Africa as well as in the United States, the vast literature produced in postcolonial studies is largely ignored or not well used beyond the limited circles of ethnic studies and a small cluster of “Africanists.” This loss of “academic memory” has tremendous implications for education and for the rise of reactionary paradigms antithetical to progress and well-being of those that Fanon called “the wretched of the earth” (1963). In this age of anti–critical race theory and anti-affirmative action, it is critical to tackle structures of epistemic violence. To Borrell’s “jungle” discourse it is worth opposing this other illuminating testimony of John Paul II: “Although Africa is very rich in natural resources, it remains economically poor. At the same time, it is endowed with a wealth of cultural values and

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priceless human qualities which it can offer to the Churches and to humanity as a whole. . . . They are values which can contribute to an effective reversal of the Continent’s dramatic situation and facilitate that worldwide revival on which the desired development of individual nations depends” (Browne 1996, 245). As our brief survey of Bumuntu values has shown, we are far from the bewildering suppurations of Borrell’s “jungle view” of the world. Indeed, there is more in African tradition than the superficial Hobbesian “state of nature.” The elucubrations of Hegel and other apologists of colonialism and neocolonialism do not stand the test of a careful diachronic investigation of global history. The main problem however is the loss of memory about such history. There is certainly no unanimity among specialists of African Studies on what constitutes “African values” nor on the best path for keeping alive the memory of African past and present wisdom. Out of the vast diversity of perspectives emerge, among others, five influential schools of thought: the Négritude movement of “Présence Africaine,” the school of Westernizers (some of them being Afropessimists, even to the point of Afrophobia), the school of Pan-Africanists, the school of Afrocentrists, and the Renaissance school of African Egyptologists, all offering competing—and sometimes overlapping—visions of what it means to be an “authentic African.” Now that the new cold war and the new scramble for Africa force Africans to choose between “The West” and “The Rest,” or, more precisely, between the West and Russia-cum-China, it is worth pondering the struggle that many nations coming in contact with the West face. There are lessons to learn from the history of Africa itself as well as that of China and Russia. The long history of controversy, in the Land of Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin, between “Eurasianists” and more importantly between Russian Westernizers and Russian Slavophiles is very instructive in this regard. In 1836, Pyotr Yakovlevich Chaadayev (1794–1856), philosopher and one of the Russian Schellingians published in the periodical Teleskop his “Lettres Philosophiques” in which he made this astonishing claim: Standing alone in the world, we have given nothing to the world, we have learnt nothing from the world, we have not added a single idea to the mass of human ideas; we have made no contribution to the progress of the human spirit, and everything that has come to us from that spirit, we have disfigured. . . . Today we form a gap in the intellectual order. (Seton-Watson, Hugh and Nicholas V. Riasanovsky)

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Replacing Russians with Africans, we easily find similar echoes in “civilizing mission” discourses of modernization, progress, globalization, free market, liberty, democracy, and human rights. The reaction of Tsar Nicholas is very instructive. “He declared that Chaadayev must be mad and gave orders that he should be confined to his house and regularly visited by a doctor.” Teaching and writing about Africa can easily be shaped by the vision the researcher or the teacher has about African history and the African Da-sein, that meaning of “being-African-in-the-world.” The Hegelian paradigm and the Chaadayevian perspective on Westernization are instructive on “the woes of wit” that shape the ongoing epistemological debates among Afrocentrists, Pan-Africanists, and Westernizers. The fundamental question that arises is: Who can provide a better “guide to the perplexed” in this age of the “praise of folly,” and how can one better be the guardian of African historical memory, without being confined, like Chaadayev, to the asylum of mental illness? Although our analysis has highlighted the low progress achieved and the obtuseness of the vitriolic backlash, the educational project of African and African American studies remains vital to dialogue among civilizations and to the understanding of the history of African people and people of African descent and their contribution to world civilizations. In so doing, they contribute to world peace and the well-being of the African people worldwide, for as the ancient African philosophical “Know thyself” precept from the Temple of Luxor has it, “knowing oneself” is the beginning of wisdom and healing. Through the decolonization of our educational systems and the decolonization of knowledge, one overcomes alienation and becomes a productive citizen in and of the world. REFERENCES Abimbola, Wande. 1990. “The Attitude of Yoruba Religion Toward Non-Yoruba Religion” In Attitudes of Religions and Ideologies Toward the Outsider, edited by Leonard Swidler and Paul Mojzes, 138. Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press. Abimbola, Wande. 1994. “Ifa: A West African Cosmological System.” In Religion in Africa: Experience and Expression, edited by Thomas D. Blakely et al., Portsmouth, NH: James Currey and Heinemann. Abraham, K. C., ed. 1990. Third World Theologies: Commonalities and Divergences. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Adi, Hakim. 2018. Histoire du Panafricanisme. Paris: Présence Africaine. Anastaplo, George. 1995. “An Introduction to ‘Ancient’ African Thought.” In The Great Ideas Today, 1995; Great Books of the Western World, Encyclopedia Britannica, 176.

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Appiah, Kwame Anthony, and Gates, Henry Louis, eds., 1999. Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience. New York: Basic Civitas Books. Asante, Molefi, and Ama Mazama, eds., 2005. Encyclopedia of Black Studies. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Asante, Molefi, and Abu S. Abarry, eds., African Intellectual Heritage: A Book of Sources. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Assmann, Jan. 1997. Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Augustine, Saint. 1984 [1984]. The City of God (book IV). London: Penguin. Bakole Wa Ilunga, 1984. Paths of liberation, Third World Spirituality. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Bancal, Nicolas et al. 2002. Zoos humains, XIXe et XXe siecles: De la venus hottentote aux reality shows. Paris: Editions la découverte. Bates, Robert H., Mudimbe, V. Y., and Jean O’Barr, eds. 1993. Africa and the Disciplines: The Contributions of Research in Africa to the Social Sciences and Humanities. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Baum, Robert M. 1993. “Teaching the History of African Religions” Spotlight on Teaching. American Academy of Religion 1 (2): 2. Baum, Robert M. 2007. “Indigenous Religious Traditions.” In A Concise Introduction to World Religions, edited by Willard G. Oxtoby and Alan F. Segal, 15–17. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bernal, Martin. 1987. “Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization.” The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785–1985, vol. 1. London: Free Association Books. Bernasconi, Robert, ed. 2003. Race and Racism in Continental Philosophy. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Borrell, Josep, Opening Speech at the European Diplomatic Academy (Bruges, October 13, 2022), EU Ambassadors Annual Conference 2022, https:​//​www​.eeas​ .europa​.eu​/eeas​/eu​-ambassadors​-annual​-conference​-2022​-opening​-speech​-high​ -representative​-josep​-borrell​_en. Accessed on December 5, 2022. Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. 2002. “Pyotr Yakovlevich Chaadayev.”  Encyclopedia Britannica, June 3. https:​//​www​.britannica​.com​/ biography​/Pyotr​-Yakovlevich​-Chaadayev. Accessed January 27, 2023. ———. 1994. “Egyptian Law.” The New Encylopedia Britannica, vol. 4, Micropaedia. Fifteenth edition, 392. Browne, Maura, ed., 1996. The African Synod: Documents, Reflections, Perspectives. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Bujo, Bénézet. 1992. African Theology in Its Social Context. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Césaire, Aimé. 2013. Discours sur le colonialisme, Suivi de Discours sur la Négritude. Paris: Présence Africaine. Crossette, Barbara. 2000. “UN Chief Faults Reluctance of US to Help in Africa.” The New York Times, Saturday, May 13: A1 and A8. Delumeau, Jean. 1978. La peur en Occident. Paris: Fayard.

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Spencer-Walters, Tom, ed. 2011. Memory and The Narrative Imaginatioon in the African and Diaspora Experience. Troy, MI: Bedford Publishers. Théodoridès, A. 1971. “The Concept of Law in Ancient Egypt.” In The Legacy of Egypt, J. R. Harris. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Thomas Pakenham. 1991. The Scramble for Africa: White Man’s Conquest of the Dark Continent from 1876 to 1912. New York: Avon Books. Tshiamalenga Ntumba. 1982. “Les droits de l’homme dans la tradition ethico-anthropologique luba.” In Philosophie et Droits de l’Homme: Actes de la 5ème Semaine Philosophique de Kinshasa du 26 avril au 1er mai 1981. Kinshasa: Faculté de Théologie Catholique. Von Dassow, Eva, ed. 1994. The Egyptian Book of the Dead. San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books. Von der Leyen, Ursula Gertrud. 2023. Keynote speech by President von der Leyen at the book launch of La saggezza e l’audacia. Discorsi per l’Italia e per l’Europa with selected speeches of the late president of the European Parliament David Sassoli. https:​//​ec​.europa​.eu​/commission​/presscorner​/detail​/en​/speech​_23​_81. Accessed on January 23, 2023. Wa Thiong’o, Ngugi. 1986. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. Portsmouth, NH: James Currey and Heinemann. Wells, Spencer. 2002. The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey. New York: Random House. Williams, Ronald J. 1971. “Egypt and Israel.” In The Legacy of Egypt second edition, edited by J. R. Harris. Oxford: Oxford at the Clarendon Press. Woodson, Carter Godwin. 1933. The Mis-Education of the Negro. Washington, DC: Associated Publishers. Zahan, Dominique. 1979. The Religion, Spirituality, and Thought of Traditional Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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“Working the Past” Memory, Language, and Echoes of Slavery in Ama Ata Aidoo’s The Dilemma of a Ghost and Anowa Raquel Kennon

The sometimes complex relationship between history and memory is inevitable in literature because writers frequently evoke history in their quest to seek and reconstruct the past. Working the past allows them to capture and reconstruct narratives that imaginatively bring to life elements of individual and societal trauma that historical narratives may not be designed—or want—to show. —Tom Spencer-Walters, Memory and the Narrative Imagination in the African and Diaspora Experience Therefore, when we talk about a syncretic relationship between orality and literacy, we will be talking about oral art forms which have evolved as, or have been creatively absorbed and transformed into, literary representations in the written texts. —Tom Spencer-Walters, Orality, Literacy and the Fictive Imagination: African and Diasporan Literatures

Reflecting on Tom Spencer-Walters’s extraordinary academic career and pathbreaking scholarship on orality, memory, language, history, and storytelling in African and African diaspora literary studies offers a felicitous occasion to return to Ama Ata Aidoo’s classic early plays, The Dilemma of 119

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a Ghost (1965) and Anowa (1970).1 In the epigraphs above, Spencer-Walters advances two crucial, interlocking theorizations. In Orality, Literacy and the Fictive Imagination: African and Diasporan Literatures, he argues in the introduction that varied, plural art forms have evolved from and symbiotically transformed oral and written literatures (1998, 1). Building on the notion of an aesthetic continuity between the past and present rooted in African culture, Spencer-Walters contends in Memory and the Narrative Imagination in the African and Diaspora Experience that the writer’s task of “working the past” evokes, reconstructs, and construes meaning from individual and collective memories of traumatic histories (2011, 11–12). The fictive imagination, then, at once represents the convergence of oral and written art forms and exemplifies the syncretic, creative artistic expressions of the African and diasporic literary tradition. Aidoo’s theatrical reinventions in her most widely acclaimed drama reveal how she brilliantly interweaves formal elements of orature and literature to bridge history and memory, that is, to “work the past.” Following the pioneering scholarship of Isidore Okpewho (1990; 1992; 2003) on orality and the epic, Spencer-Walters’s theoretical framework demonstrates how African oral traditions, written expressions, and collective memory intertwine to fuel the literary imagination (2011, 7). The Dilemma of a Ghost, written and first performed in 1964 when Aidoo was an honors undergraduate student at the University of Ghana at Legon, in the post-independence era, and Anowa, published six years later, reckon with the complexities of shared national history, traditional culture, the role of women within the family, the intergenerational preservation of Akan folklore, the global impact of slavery’s past, the promises and challenges of the postcolonial era and the diasporic connection to Africa as ancestral homeland. Part of the flourishing Anglophone West African theatrical tradition, both early plays highlight, in ways distinct from Aidoo’s fiction and poetry, how dramas centered on occasionally turbulent family dynamics might also constitute powerful treatises on regional, national, international, continental, and hemispheric African and diasporic sociocultural, aesthetic, and political concerns of the past, present, and future. This chapter reads closely The Dilemma while referencing Anowa as a contrasting touchstone to attend to the following questions: How do Aidoo’s characters confront historical memory and wrestle with the fundamental concerns of the past and present? What storytelling and hybrid linguistic traditions do her protagonists call upon to articulate African and diasporic cultural engagements with collective memory across time and space? As dramatist, what inventive forms does Aidoo employ to reveal what Michel-Rolph Trouillot calls the “continuous creation of the past” that accrues “retrospective significance” in the process of producing history (2015, 16 and 26)?

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More broadly, what is the relationship between the trope of slavery as a reverberating spectral literary presence and what Wole Soyinka considers the “self-censored history of the African past” (2010, 112)?2 Instead of existing in a static, sentimental past, Yogita Goyal posits “the sign of Africa speaks as directly to dreams of redemption and return to a lost homeland, as it does to the politics of fighting racism and imperialism” (2010, 8). If The Dilemma centers questions of history, family, tradition, voice, and memory through its conventional five-act dramatic structure and nearly realist dialogue interspersed with children’s play song lyrics, then Anowa transmutes these themes into mythology, legend, and ritual. While The Dilemma explicitly engages with slavery’s past and its memorial afterlife, Anowa, with its use of the chorus and supernatural elements, constructs a theatrical universe that experimentally represents the specter of slavery and colonialism through allegory. BLACK HAUNTOLOGIES AND THEORIES OF MEMORY Connecting the historical past to the geopolitical present in his 2010 article, “Between Truths and Indulgence,” Soyinka simultaneously focuses on “Africa’s role in the slave trade and its consequences” and what he calls a diasporic, particularly from some US thinkers, “stubborn resistance” to “aspects of truths that narrate the origins of their dispersal” (115). He expounds on his thoughts from the 1999 essay collection, The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness, reiterating this assertion: that self-censored history of the African past has nonetheless obtruded itself as a recurring reference point, inescapable as Africa’s humanity struggles to understand why notions such as “independence,” “self-governance,” “liberation,” etc., have failed to alter attitudes between one ruling class and the ruled, between one “master race” and the subservient, be all such designated by class or race, as products of external origination or local in-breeding or self-perpetuation. (Soyinka 2010, 112)

Whereas self-censorship and what we might consider willful denials exist on both sides of the Atlantic—with bidirectional “vectors of memory,” as Nancy Wood puts it, evidencing the ways in which African and African diasporic writers often engage obliquely—the painful memory of the slave trade resurfaces in the discourse of contemporary political struggles of African nations. Slavery, then, is the “dark reality of the African past” that “has become a political reference point, a quasi-metaphor, in addressing the many ills of the continent—from the most benign forms of leadership alienation to crude despotism, genocide, internal colonialism, and, indeed, even racism within

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the acknowledged homeland of the black race” (2010, 112). In Burden of Memory, Soyinka traces what he terms a “diabolical continuity” and perhaps even “inevitability” between “[t]he crimes that the African continent commits against her kind” and the way in which they “constantly provoke memories of the historic wrongs inflicted on that continent by others” (1999, 19). The violence and terror of slavery serve as metaphorical reference points for humanitarian injustices of the present. Indeed, recurrence, inescapability, inevitability, and continuity are Soyinka’s key words that register the impossibility of disentangling the memory of slavery and ongoing anti-imperialist and neocolonialist struggles. Analogizing twentieth-century despots and past agents in the slave trade, Soyinka argues, “The ancient slave stockades do not seem even to have vanished; they appear more to have expanded, occupying indiscriminate spaces that often appear contingent with national boundaries” (1999, 19–20). Thus, there has been a transtemporal importation of the physical artifacts, metaphorical reference points, metonyms, and other figurations of slavery into the urgent political rhetoric of the contemporary era. In Memory and the Narrative Imagination, Spencer-Walters similarly underscores the continuity between “the tragic consequences of slavery, colonialism, and the partitioning of the continent for economic, strategic, and hegemonic reasons” (2011, 1). “Artificial borders,” Spencer-Walters elucidates, “divided communities, marginalized well-established indigenous languages in favor of colonial languages, and significantly transformed historical memories while promoting cultural amnesia, all of which have been devastating to the African psychosocial equilibrium. It was no longer that easy to answer, who or what is African?” (1). Drawing upon Ngũgĩ’s polemics around the politics of language, Spencer-Walters argues for the necessity of writing in indigenous languages “in order to preserve the codifications of African culture and, in the process, invest in the power of the narrative imagination to communicate a shared ancestry” (2).3 In contrast to the expressive limitations of colonial languages, indigenous African languages encode the complex cadences, lexical nuances, and expansive semantic richness of the African storytelling tradition that are silenced or rendered incoherent in the language of the colonizer (4). Spencer-Walters points out that manifold reasons and motivations—from exposing the “exigencies of colonialism” to uncovering political errors in the postcolonial period—account for what is being remembered or “deliberately forgotten” in the work of Black authors summoning the past (2). As Ngũgĩ establishes in the foreword to the book and elsewhere, the creation and propagation of fractured and distorted memories have been “the work of the European bourgeoisie, desirous of the conquest, not just of the body, but the mind as well” (vii). This encroachment of empire into the metaphysical realm

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of memory constitutes one of the most nefarious vestiges of colonial hegemony, or what might be considered the imperial “ruses of memory,” to extend Tavia Nyong’o phrase.4 In Something Torn and New: An African Renaissance, Ngũgĩ upholds the idea of the interconnectedness of slavery’s memory and Africa’s current sociopolitical condition. In it, he deploys the provocative metaphor of dismemberment—also a pun on memory—to describe the fracturing of the African body and argues that this dismemberment occurred in two interrelated phases: (1) “the African personhood was divided into two halves: the continent and its diaspora,” and (2) the Berlin Conference of 1884 which divided Africa into “a series of colonial plantations owned by many of the same European powers” as the slave plantations (2009, 5–6). Ayi Kwei Armah reiterates that the first step in “removing the divisive Berlin barriers” is to “remember our dismembered heritage,” foregrounding the continental “dismemberment” or attempted cultural amputations caused by partition (2010, 38). Spencer-Walters, in turn, focuses on the richness of the narrative imagination of Black writers and the salience of literature and the arts more generally as vehicle to remember, counter depredating colonial histories, and achieve wholeness after the psychic fragmentation resulting from the brutal legacies of slavery and colonialism. To echo Ngũgĩ’s trenchant pronouncement, this is a “battle of the collective mind of a people” (vii). Imagining boldly on the frontlines of this metaphysical battle are the African and African diasporic poets, dramatists, novelists, and griots whose creative artforms generate stunning counter-narratives which provide “ontological significance through unrestricted and authoritative access to the past and the freedom to reconstruct our present ‘in our own images’” (4). “Create dangerously” is Edwidge Danticat’s unflinching injunction to storytellers, taken from an English translation of Albert Camus’s L’artiste et son temps (10).5 For Spencer-Walters, this narrative imaginative freedom and flexibility are essential for delving into the traumatic memories of the past, scrutinizing the willful silences and omissions, and pliantly working and reworking history to produce narratives that recall and reconstruct an African past, however distant, ruptured, or lacerating the memories might be (3). Calling on Mudimbe, following Spencer-Walters, this constitutes historical production as “an invention of the present” (10).6 Ron Eyerman, too, describes the “present as an unfolding of the past” (2004, 162). Narrativizing is “the literary and cultural imperative of the African Diaspora,” and as such, is the nexus to reconstituting self, claiming cultural identity, uplifting communities, (re)making the nation, exposing past horrors, celebrating victories, and anticipating longed for futures (3, 6–7). Often, this generative work requires the writer to “exhume a shameful, glossed-over history as a warning for the future” as Soyinka describes the unpalatable past” (2010, 112). Soyinka’s use of the word “exhume” here is especially noteworthy because of the presence

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of ghosts or “black hauntologies,” to borrow Kimberly W. Benston’s critical term, as a central thematic in Aidoo’s dramatic work. Spencer-Walters also recalls Toni Morrison’s Beloved and reminds us that the work of the creative imagination is to “dig deeper into the African-American past, even into the haunting, sometimes mystifying, interiority of ruptured African memories” (5). REMEMBERING YOUR MOTHER IN AMA ATA AIDOO’S THE DILEMMA OF A GHOST The early and only dramatic works of Ama Ata Aidoo, “one of the continent’s most beloved voices,” show how the internationally renowned writer confronts what Spencer-Walters terms the “haunting, sometimes mystifying, interiority of ruptured African memories” as a way of reckoning with the past. Reflecting on the “consummate storyteller,” Abena Busia observes, “We do not so much ‘read’ her stories as listen to them, or rather, overhear them” (New African 2012). Ama Ata Aidoo considers the process of creating meaning from splintered memories a vital task of Africans and African descended peoples across the globe. Invoking the haunting motif in an interview, she urges confrontation with slavery’s memory: “And I think in a way it’s a pity because until we deal with it, you know, we’ll just let ourselves be haunted, on both sides of the Atlantic” (Walling 2006). Calling on Spencer-Walters’s dual theories of the transformative poetic integration of the oral tradition into literary works and the primacy of African writer’s narrative imagination for creatively “working the past” and making meaning, I revisit The Dilemma of a Ghost (1965) and Anowa (1970) in the twenty-first century to explore questions of family, especially the role of the mother, belonging, inheritance, language, and the memory of the slave trade, while probing Aidoo’s use of various formal techniques and nuanced oral registers. Ghana, the first sub-Saharan African nation to gain independence and shed her colonial name, the Gold Coast, transitioned from British colonial rule to self-governance after tireless political organizing, the formation of political parties, and demonstrations of civil disobedience with Dr. Kwame Nkrumah assuming the role of prime minister in 1957. Strikingly, Aidoo’s literary thematization of slavery in this post-independence era of nation building coheres around the motifs of mothering and motherhood. In her deployment of écriture féminine, Aidoo’s drama echoes this fundamental emphasis on the mother, accenting in her work a matrilineal, intergenerational framework that ties cultural memory to a woman’s fertility and ability to produce the next generation of children to populate the newly independent nation. Both The Dilemma of a Ghost (1965) and Anowa (1970) reveal in varying tone and

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style, the traumatic memory of the slave trade and its relation to the figure of the African mother as cultural forebear whose representation here exceeds the romanticized, nostalgic portrayal of lush and sensuous Mother Africa in the Négritude poetry of the previous generous, most notably, Léopold Sédar Senghor’s “Femme Noire” (“Black Woman”) (Innes 1992, 130–31). Born on March 23, 1942, in Abeadzi Kyiakor, southern region of the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana), Christina Ama Ata Aidoo was raised in a Fanti royal family as her father, Nana Yaw Fama, was chief of this region. Her mother, Maame Abba Abasema, was a purveyor of Ghanaian and African oral traditions and taught her daughter songs that would serve as the imaginative framework of her first two dramas. Her father supported education for girls and financed his daughter’s Western education which enabled Aidoo to attend the Wesley Girls High School in Cape Coast, Ghana, and later receive a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Ghana at Legon. It was during her undergraduate years as an honors student that she staged her first play, The Dilemma of a Ghost, in 1964 and began to work with the founder of the Ghana Drama Studio, dramatist Efua Sutherland. Notably, Ivor Agyeman-Duah explains that The Dilemma is Aidoo’s “literary trademark” and “better known to Ghanaians than Anowa, No Sweetness Here, or her first novel, Our Sister Killjoy,” in large part because “it became for years a standard text-book of the West Africa Examinations Council” and for its “historical confrontation” of independence and the Civil Rights Movement “as a dimension of the slave trade” (2012, 409). Aidoo followed in the family’s tradition—what she called “a long line of fighters”—and became politically involved, mostly in issues related to the modern African woman and questions about the legitimacy of Western feminism for African women.7 Although her first language was Fante, Aidoo wrote all of her plays, poetry, short stories, novels (including the semi-autobiographical novel, Our Sister Killjoy; or, Reflections from a Black-Eyed Squint (1978) and the subsequent 1991 novel Changes), and critical essays and reviews in English. As one of the preeminent African woman writers, Aidoo has held many distinguished scholarly and political positions including serving as Ghana’s Minister of Education in 1982, and teaching in Cape Coast, Zimbabwe, and the United States as visiting professor at Brown University from 2008 to 2010. Arguably one of the most explicit treatments of the legacies of slavery in modern African literature in the same circle with Amos Tutuola’s My Life in a Bush of Ghosts (1954) and Ayi Kwei Armah’s Two Thousand Seasons (1973), Aidoo’s first play The Dilemma of a Ghost—which was staged, as mentioned earlier, at the University of Ghana in 1964 and published the following year in post-independence-era Ghana, centers around the story of an educated young Ghanaian man, Ato Yawson, who marries an African American woman named Eulalie Rush he meets while studying abroad at a

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US university and returns home with her, much to his family’s incredulous dismay. It is important to note here that Aidoo rejects the term postcolonial and has famously quipped during an interview, “post-what? because it has not gone yet” (George 1993, 298). Within this political and historical context, the play relates, in a somewhat realist mode, the process of the family working through the disturbance of an outsider (Eulalie) joining the family, the resistance to accept this new reality primarily from Ato’s mother (Esi Kom), grandmother (Nana) and sister (Monka) and the cultural shock that ensues as each side grasps for mutual understanding. Commenting on the origins of the play and her decision to write about a strained love story between a Ghanaian man and an African American woman, Aidoo revealed her creative process during a 2006 interview with Michael Walling, artistic director of Border Crossings Theater Company: AA: The idea of the play came from the children’s play song; I mean a child’s play song. This whole idea of somebody not knowing whether to go left or right. The whole dilemma thing. I don’t know why, and I can’t explain it. But, when . . . I just one evening . . . first I remembered the song from when I was growing up in Takoradi, and then immediately, I mean just thinking of the song, and then in the next moment I knew I was going to do something with the song, and in the third moment I knew it was going to be a play. I mean, it just happened, you know like an incredible sequence.

Here, Aidoo explains her choice of genre. It is important to note that it is both a play and a children’s song, one that she remembered from her childhood. The vestigial remembrances of slavery emerge in Aidoo’s latent childhood memory of this song: “Do I go to Cape Coast? Do I go to Elmina?” and her decision to build a play around this impactful musical memory. Notably, Aidoo’s second play, Anowa (1970) is also based on a song her mother taught her during childhood.8 As Irele has suggested, “oral literature thus represents the basic intertext of the African imagination” (1990, 56). Here, Aidoo transforms the Western literary form of drama and reshapes it, adds the child’s song as its structural foundation, to support the story she must tell. Aidoo hones new discursive practices in her recurrent attention to history of enslavement, or as Modupe Olaogun puts it, her sustained “interest in the etiology of slavery” (2002, 175). This is the narrative imagination at work, as Spencer-Walters delineates, working and reworking the past to seek meaning and healing. If Aidoo inventively dramatizes the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade and its impact on shaping the African diaspora vis-à-vis the aftermath of a marriage between Ato and Eulalie who hail from Ghana and the United States respectively, then what does the return to Ghana signify for the two main

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characters? How does the education obtained abroad complicate Ato’s feelings about home and the family he seeks to build? How does the language that Aidoo gives her characters convey cultural differences? Most importantly, how does Esi Kom’s acknowledgement of the “ghost” of Eulalie’s deceased mother become the center of gravity at once enabling her daughter-in-law’s acceptance into the family and, more broadly, signaling the possibility of diasporic reunification in Ghana and symbolic reintegration into an ancestral African family? If the traumatic rupture of the Middle Passage is akin to “losing your mother,” as Saidiya V. Hartman comes to understand during her research of the Atlantic slave trade in Ghana, then Esi Kom’s powerful final words to Eulalie, “Come, my child,” imagine what it might mean to find your mother again after centuries of forced separation.9 If losing your mother signifies being “denied your kin, country, and identity. To lose your mother was to forget your past,” then this poignant expression of invitation and welcome, “come, my child” from surrogate mother to daughter both acknowledges and collapses the time of violent abduction, enslavement, displacement, and dispossession (Hartman 2007, 85). As Aidoo explains her choice of an African American woman and a Ghanaian man as the relational focal point of the drama, she makes a fascinating intertextual allusion to the Western literary tradition: AA: What seemed to me really worth exploring was a relationship between an African and somebody from the diaspora. MW: [. . .] A ghost is a slave, isn’t it? AA: Yes. In fact, I only realized later, much later, by reading critics, I mean all these postcolonial critics [MW laughs], African and non-African alike, who pointed out that in actual fact, I am, you know, one African writer who had, you know, kind of concentrated on this issue. MW: And not many do. AA: Not many do. Not many do. And as usual my response is, “you know me . . . fools rush in where angels fear to tread.” What I’m saying is these are very sensitive issues. . . . And of course, when I tell people, they think I am just trying to be funny. But, I’m not when I say that, to a certain extent, I am very glad that I wrote The Dilemma when I wrote The Dilemma because I’m not so sure that now or later I would have had the courage to write it. (Walling 2006)

When Walling probes the reason for this selection, Aidoo equates her selection of the slavery theme, and specifically her decision to explore the interaction between what she calls “Africans and the children of the African exile” with the famous line 625 from English poet Alexander Pope’s 1711 An Essay

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on Criticism, “Fools rush in where Angels fear to tread.” Within Horace’s tradition of the verse-essay and composed of heroic couplets, An Essay on Criticism not only points out the limitations of the critic and rules of taste but also offers a self-reflexive assessment of himself as poet. It is intriguing, then, that Aidoo would use this much-quoted expression from an English poet to explain her drama set in the former British colony. Perhaps it simply did not matter to her because the line is ingrained in popular lexicon. Alternatively, it could be precisely because of this reason that Aidoo used this phrase, again showing the continuities between the African and Western tradition. Aidoo alludes to the Western canon to demonstrate her mastery in this tradition and to show how her art expands and departs from these Western literary forms to create something new. What also resonates in this interview, besides Aidoo’s artistic commitment to confronting the brutality of slavery, the slave trade, and her appeal for global recognition, is just how challenging the subject is from the dramatist’s perspective. That it was a combination of youthful exuberance and naïveté that enabled her to address slavery as a theme and that she may not have had the “courage” to write about this later adds a compelling backdrop to the play. Pushing herself creatively, she claims that writing about an interracial love story would be “too easy” in comparison to writing a love story that spans across the African diaspora. It is true, a Ghanaian retelling of the Othello plot, for example, would fit securely within a tradition of interracial literature that often imagines conflict in stark differences between Black and White skin. It is fascinating that, by the early 1960s, Aidoo would find the interracial marriage plot too facile or conventional to pose a serious creative challenge. Instead, she penned a story that centers on the problems that could possibly arise in a union between two people of the same “race,” with different national origins, two countries in an asymmetrical hegemonic relationship. The Dilemma, then, is a cross-cultural drama, between a Ghanaian man and a Black American woman, who both were born with Black skin, yet struggle to come together due to familial pressure and expectations.10 In the opening scenes, this drama seems to show that shared Black skin, that is, belonging to the same “race” based on phenotypic designation, is not enough to guarantee a connection between Eulalie and Ato’s family. It is this basic plot that draws out all of the complexities of history, language, abandonment, cultural clashes, and the profound shame and guilt around slavery simmering right beneath the surface of interactions between the characters. As noted in the previous section, this drama employs the “slavery-as-haunting” trope fictionalized most famously in Morrison’s Beloved.11 At first inspection, the drama seems to reveal, before the dénouement, the constructedness of the imagined communities of “race” and “African diaspora” by demonstrating that there

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is no intrinsic connection or ruptured unity between Black peoples across the Atlantic, only awaiting suturing. Without the “Come, my child” maternal reconciliation at the end of the play which renders possible reunification, the plot either challenges Ngũgĩ’s theory of the dismembered Black body or confirms the idea that the limbs of the metaphorical Black body have been strewn so far apart that they can hardly be reconnected. In all these ways, The Dilemma is a nuanced variation of the star-crossed lovers theme that forces us to re-examine these “truths” about the African diaspora we hold to be self-evident. Since their publication, vibrant scholarship on Aidoo’s only two plays has run the interpretive gamut from examinations of petit bourgeoisie ideology and colonial elitism to meditations on neocolonialism to formalist readings of its structure to the study of “ecological discourse.”12 What most interests me here, however, is what “gynocentric” readings might open up and reveal about the function of the theme of slavery in these plays.13 It is important to note that many African women writers, including Aidoo herself, have resisted a certain “feminist” label, in an effort to distance themselves from perceptions of a rigid, antagonistic, elitist Western brand of feminism. Aidoo once remarked in an interview: “I shall not protest if you call me a feminist. But I am not a feminist because I write about women. Are men writer’s male chauvinist pigs just because they write about men? Or is a writer an African nationalist just by writing about Africans? Or a revolutionary for writing about poor oppressed humanity? Obviously not . . . no writer, female or male, is a feminist just by writing about women.”14 Clearly, for Aidoo and other African women writers like Flora Nwapa, the “accusation” of being a feminist is an affront that places them in an extremist, anti-male camp. Author Buchi Emecheta called for a softer feminism “with a small f.”15 Searching for an appropriate lexicon that addresses the concerns of women in these texts, Chikwenye Ogunyemi coined the term “African womanism” to differentiate an African theoretical model from Western feminism on the one hand and Alice Walker’s African American womanism on the other hand, as she argued that each denied peculiarities of the African context.16 Although Aidoo is an avowed African feminist, in the following textual analysis, following Ogunyemi’s African womanist approach, I will engage with the figure of the mother and her relationship to familial expectations around fertility and reproduction to explore how ruptured memories might be inscribed on and produced by the woman’s body. While several critics have established the female body as a charged site of control with motherhood and biological childbearing unquestionably extolled within African and “Third World” literature, several critics have read slavery through the lens of the maternal figure.17 In what follows, I turn my attention to the sign of the mother, the inescapability of the mandates of the cisgender woman’s body within this

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cultural context and, particularly, the familial surveillance of the womb as a lens through which to explore instances in which African texts reflectively engage with the traumatic memory of slavery. Marked by its incisive concision, the five-act “problem play” or dilemma tale succinctly reworks our initial metaphor, via Ngũgĩ, of continental Africa and the African diaspora as the dismembered Black body and destabilizes the icon of the mother.18 The intercultural marriage between recent university graduates, Ghanaian Ato and African-American Eulalie (Eu), and their relocation to Ato’s homeland in Ghana to rejoin his matriarchal family is the basis of the play’s central conflict. Bernth Lindfors criticized its length and character development in an early review: “[t]he pace of the play is too slow, the climax too weak, and too many characters spend too much time feeling sorry themselves. Miss Aidoo’s heart is in the right place, but her art is missing.”19 To be sure, the play is concise but, I contend, necessarily and artfully so. The Dilemma insists that the transatlantic story of slavery’s memory remain open for reader participation and, hopefully, activism. Concision is part of Aidoo’s aesthetic artistry. In comparison to Armah’s exhaustive and didactic Two Thousand Seasons, Aidoo’s trenchant text fosters a hermeneutics of suspicion. While it highlights the importance of cross-cultural understanding with respect to slavery, it also remains unfinished; it refuses to conclude or deliver a clear moral to the reader. For critical theorists Bennett and Royle, this is the very definition of literature itself: “Literature is a place of ghosts, of what’s unfinished, unhealed and even untellable.”20 Again, the malleable ghost trope arises where the ghost equals slavery, memory, trauma, and literature writ large. The Dilemma, then, deploys a plurality of maternal metaphors, definitions of motherhood and ways of mothering to illuminate the relationship between Africa and members of the African diaspora vis-à-vis the trauma of slavery. Who has a mother? Who can be a mother? What does she represent? Dilemma poses these crucial questions and forces us to rethink the pervasive maternal metaphor. As Nasta demonstrates, “The idea of motherlands, mothercultures, mothertongues” effectively allows the demythologizing of colonial motherland while enabling the development of new aesthetic forms and genres (1992, xix). From the two nameless women who constitute the chorus—one infertile and childless called FirstWoman and the other a mother to many children called Second Woman—to our main protagonists—Eulalie Rush, who lacks a mother and Ato Yawson, who has an abundance of mothers, Esi Kom/Maami (his mother), Nana (his grandmother), and then his sisters and aunts—the polarity between those who have/are a mother and those who have not/are not one animates the drama. As critics Obioma Nnaemeka and Cynthia Ward have suggested, either a woman is a mother or an Other in this literary world.21 For the anonymous chorus women, their female

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body and ability to bear children define them. In the central narrative, the dichotomy between motherhood and otherhood for the Eu and Ato plays itself out as a series of encounters between Eulalie, motherless and childless, and the judgment of Ato’s proliferation of mothers. The scenes of confrontation between Eu and Ato’s family and Ato and his family disclose the assumptions about the history of the slave trade and suspicion from both sides of the black Atlantic. There are four significant themes that I will focus on in the discussion that follows: (1) cultural clashes, mutual distrust, and willful misreadings; (2) the role of the women of the chorus to discuss infertility; (3) maternal surrogacy as vehicle for the reckoning with slavery; and (4) framing of the children’s play song, haunting and Ato’s reckoning with slavery’s past. On one interpretive level, The Dilemma of a Ghost is a play about cross-cultural misreadings. Eulalie harbors certain stereotypes about Ato and his family, and likewise Ato, to a certain extent, maintains certain beliefs and presumptions about Eu’s upbringing in New York. However, the playful pointing out of cultural differences becomes quite serious when family becomes involved. The polarity of experience with Ato’s abundant family ties—he belongs to the formidable Odumna Clan—and Eu’s rootlessness— even her mother is dead—arouse suspicion on both sides. At the center of this transatlantic familial impasse hovers contestation around the history of slavery, memory, guilt, and acceptance. Ato, too, experiences the cultural clash of returning home and trying to reintegrate into home life after being irrevocably changed by his academic journey in the United States. His family certainly has no qualms about pointing out how his acquired Western (mis)education has changed him. Before delving into the numerous misreadings among the characters, I would first like to explore Aidoo’s seemingly willful misrepresentation of her own character, Eulalie, and how this comes to bear on the larger issue of the relationship between Africa and the African diaspora and subsequent misinterpretations between characters. Aidoo’s process of Othering Eulalie is evident from the opening of the play. Eulalie’s stilted first lines, “Graduation! Ah well, that too isn’t bad. But who’s a graduate? What sort of creature is it? Why should I have supposed that mere graduation is a passport to happiness?” convey a tone that is slightly amiss (8). As Odamtten postulates in a footnote to his essay, “A Bird of the Wayside Sings,” “[g]iven that Aidoo had not yet been to the United States and was herself writing from Ghanaian ideological assumptions about AfricanAmericans, the representation of Eulalie is slightly de-centered throughout the play.”22 While the fact that Aidoo was only twenty-one years old when she wrote this play and had never traveled to the United States may account for some of tonal dissonance, I would argue, however, that this is a purposeful de-centering and Othering of the African American women’s voice to highlight interethnic communication issues. In fact, this first scene precisely

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consists of Ato’s critique of Eulalie’s voice and manner of talking which he disparagingly calls a “running-tap drawl” to which Eu defensively responds, “I suppose African women don’t talk?” and later, “Well, what did you mean by running-tap drawl? I only speak like I was born to speak—like an American! (8–9). Ironically, Aidoo deprives Eu of any consistency in her “American” speech patterns in her efforts to differentiate the African American woman’s voice from the African woman’s voice. Starting the drama with Ato’s “running-tap drawl” mocking insult highlights cross-cultural stereotypes and the stigmatization of the Black American woman’s speech, particularly, that she unabashedly talks back, vociferously and persistently. Although the play operates in the realist mode of African drama as Jeyifo has established, there is something unmistakably implausible about Eu’s language that shifts from the formalism of these opening lines to an increasingly more pronounced exaggeration of an African American vernacular. 23 Aidoo’s rendering of Eulalie’s variety of African American language further reveals the complexities of writing difference. De-centering and destabilizing Eulalie, a representative of African Americans and the ills of the West and US empire by proxy, inversely centers and stabilizes Ghana and therefore, Africa. Critics agree that Aidoo achieves this discursive inversion of the image of Africa and the Western world in greatest measure in her novel, Our Sister Killjoy (1977), a direct answer to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which depicts the experiences and reflections of a Ghanaian woman, Sissie, who travels to Germany.24 A few lines down, when Eu excitedly imagines Ato’s home as a place with “palm trees, the azure sea, the sun and golden beaches,” Ato asks her, “Where did you get a hold of a tourist brochure?” then corrects her and says there are only coconut trees where they will live (9). Eu’s language here reflects a slight change as she admits, “Ah well, I don’t know the difference, and I don’t care neither. Coconut palms, palm-palms, aren’t they all the same? And anyway, why should I go and see your folks?” (9). In this exchange, the once reflective graduate relaxes her grammar and reveals her own cultural biases, in turn, Othering Ato’s family. As Eu grows more disillusioned with the way of life in Ato’s hometown, her African American dialect becomes increasingly exaggerated, almost a caricature at times. After Eu has lived with Ato in Ghana for over one year, her emotional deterioration peaks when, at the beginning of Act 5, she refuses to attend the Thanksgiving Service of a cousin who recently passed away and says, half drunk, “Of course you’d only have to come back here to sleep. [She giggles.] I would, only I repeat ‘I ain’t coming’ eh. Or you are too British you canna hear me Yankee lingo?” (46). But, this “Yankee lingo” shifts and twists. Interestingly, Eu calls Ato “too British,” aligning him with the standard, pristine English of the colonizer. As if the alcohol stimulates some type of lexical reversion in Eu, the following exchange takes place:

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ATO: [Miserably] Eulalie, you’ve been drinking! EU: Sure, Moses. ATO: Again? [In a horrified voice] And on a Sunday morning? EU: Poor darling Moses. Sure, I have been drinking and on a Sunday morning: How dreadful? But surely Moses, it ain’t matters on which God’s day a girl gets soaked, eh? ATO: [Anguished] Eulalie! EU: Yeah. . . . That jus whar yar beautiful wife as com teh, Soaking on God’s holy day. . . . My lord, whar a morning! [Hums “My Lord what a Morning.”] ATO: [Looking tenderly at her] Sweetie Pie. EU: [Laughing again] Ain’t you going teh say Poor Sweetie Pie? Ain’t I poorer here as I would ave been in New York City? [In pathetic imitation of ATO] ‘Eulalie, my people say it is not good for a woman to take alcohol. Eulalie, my people say they are not pleased to see you smoke . . . Eulalie, my people say. . . . My people. . . . My people. . . . ’ Damned rotten coward of a Moses [ATO winces] I have been drinking in spite of what your people say. [She sits on the terrace facing the audience] Who married me, you or your goddam people? (46–47)

This hyperbolic, antebellum or Reconstruction-era Black vernacular, like dialect transplanted from a Charles Chesnutt short story, confirms the ambiguity of Eulalie’s unsettled voice. While it could be argued that Eu uses this stereotypical Negro dialect to perform the difference Ato’s family imposes upon her, there is no stage direction to confirm this claim. Possessing a Black female body and the “same blood” does not automatically engender a connection between author and character. To be sure, Eulalie plays with language in compelling ways, but Aidoo’s lack of intervention, by way of stage direction, leaves the reader wondering, in the first instance, if Eu’s shifting voice is only evidence of mischaracterization of the Black American woman’s speech and a widening gap of misunderstanding between a West African woman writer and her African American woman subject. Derek Wright is one of the few critics who writes about these idiomatic improbabilities that mark Eu’s speech.25 Eulalie’s linguistic destabilization, then, enacts the difficulty of Black women writing each other across the diaspora. However, a more complex and fascinating possible reading emerges, one that locates Eu’s somewhat peculiar speech patterns as Aidoo’s silent representation of creolized diasporic idioms that foreshadow Eu’s eventual acceptance into the family, and into a nation that would hold such significance for diasporic Africans.

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Within the action of the play, cultural clashes abound between Ato’s family and Eulalie. There are two key episodes—Ato’s admission of his marriage to his family and several name changes—that illustrate the precarious negotiations around the memory of slavery. In the scene when Ato “confesses” to his family that he is already married, his family erupts into confusion and asks him a string of questions: ATO: [Casually] But I am already married, Maami. ALL: You are married? Married! Married! ESI: [Overlapping] Who is your wife? AKYERE: [Overlapping] When did you marry? MANSA: Who is your wife? MONKA: [Overlapping] What is her name? ESI: Where does she come from? [Everyone repeats her words to create confusion](16)

The women in Ato’s family interrogate him about the origins of his wife. The last two questions, “What is her name?” and, “Where does she come from?” are particularly poignant as they encapsulate the distinction between Africans and those in the diaspora: the ability to definitively identify ancestral place of origin and family name. Does she know the people from whom she descends? In the next moment when they ask her name again, Ato tells them “Eulalie” and they hear and translate it to “Hurere” (16). Slowly uncovering the truth, he explains to them that she is not Fanti and belongs to no tribe. NANA: [Looking up at him] She has no tribe? The story you are telling us is too sweet, my grand-child. Since I was born, I have not heard of a human being born out of the womb of a woman who has no tribe. Are there trees which never have any roots? PETU: Ato, where does your wife come from? [A short silence, All look at ATO] ATO: But no one is prepared to listen to me. My wife comes from . . . America. ESI: [Putting her hands on her head] Oh Esi! You have an unkind soul. We always hear of other women’s sons going to the white man’s country. Why should my own go and marry a white woman? . . . ATO: [Very nervously] But who says I have married a white woman? Is everyone in America white? In that country there are white men and black men.

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AKROMA: Nephew, you must tell us properly. We do not know. ATO: But you will not listen to me. [All quiet. Eyes are focused on ATO] I say my wife is as black as we all are. [Sighs of relaxation] (17)

Ato’s decision to unfold slowly the details of his wife’s country of birth adds to the high drama of the scene. His family’s line of questing reveals the particular logics of ancestry and belonging that seemingly do not account for Blacks in the diaspora. His grandmother, Nana, reveals her incredulity about an African woman being born “out of a womb” without “roots” or tribal affiliation. When he admits that his wife comes from America, they assume she is a White woman. Although Aidoo wanted to avoid the “easy” interracial plot, Ato’s family still initially codes Eu’s difference on interracial terms and America as the “white man’s country.” Ato emphasizes Eu’s sameness—“I say my wife is as black as we all are” (17)—and attempts to recall to their minds the history of the slave trade: “Eulalie’s ancestors were of our ancestors. But [warming up] as you all know, the white people came and took some away in ships to be slaves” (18). Nana interprets this as a shameful mark upon their house and bemoans the atrocity to the two anonymous chorus women: “My grand-child has gone and brought home the offspring of slaves. [Women’s faces indicate horror] A slave, I say” (19). Ato’s family and especially the women (Nana, Esi, Monka) simply refuse to understand Eu’s difference and she responds with matching disapproval and criticism, filtered through her increasingly caustic verbal exchanges with her husband. Nana’s contempt for Ato’s choice of wife is more personal. She worries what she will report to her “Royal Dead” when the “spirit Mother” comes for her (19). Simply put, intermarriage with the descendent of an enslaved African is a disgrace. Even the second chorus woman refers to Eu as the “black-white woman” and “a stranger and a slave” (22). Like the emphasis on the structure of the Odumna Clan house and the physical boundaries and dividing walls between the old building and the new wing built for Ato’s return, linguistic borders are erected. At some point, both sides come to an impasse. Ato’s family frowns upon what they deem Eu’s excessive consumption. Although living in Ghana, she still participates in an America consumerist culture; she drinks Coca-Cola, uses unfamiliar “machines” to assist with cooking and cleaning, and violates the cultural taboo of a woman smoking by enjoying cigarettes. Yet, the snails delicacy that Esi Kom gives Ato for Eu to prepare, she immediately throws away. This moment symbolizes Eu’s resistance to understanding and incorporating the traditions of Ato’s family. At the climax of these intercultural conflicts, Eulalie notably cannot speak for herself due to the language barrier. As a result, Ato must act as the mediator/translator between the two sides of the Atlantic. Although it is assumed that

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he and his family converse in Fante, all the language is presented in English, perhaps signaling the complexities or even impossibility of fully rending orature on the written page.26 Fante is rendered very subtly; the reader learns at one point that Eu doesn’t understand what they are saying. Although he assures his family, “since she will not understand it, you tell me and I will tell her everything,” Ato is not a reliable intermediary (43). One demonstration of the language games centers on Eulalie’s name. Since her name is nonsensical to the family, they give her another name, Africanized perhaps, still strange to them, but easier to pronounce, Hurere. As Abu Shardow Abarry convincingly argues, “The significance attached to names and naming in Ghanaian society is remarkable” and serves as a “dramaturgical device in Ghanaian imaginative literature.”27 Thus, calling their daughter-in-law Hurere, a name that carries no meaning in Fante, further alienates Eulalie from the family. Mocking their son’s foreign, Western education, his family teasingly calls him “our master, the white man himself,” foreshadowing the conflation of all things American with whiteness (14). Notably, Eulalie’s pet names for Ato are “native boy” and “Moses.” While “native boy” displays Eu’s irreverence and reliance on Conradian vitriol—in a last fit of anger she calls his family members “savages”—to counter their attacks, “Moses” registers as a term of endearment, still playing with the “offspring of slaves” label. Ato serves as Eulalie’s Moses, delivering her from the former slave status and shepherding her into this Ghanaian promised land, right into his mother’s arms in the romantic country of “palm trees, the azure sea, the sun and golden beaches” she fantasizes about at the beginning (9). Like Moses, Ato never reaches the promised land in the last scene. Eu enters the old house with his mother, but he is left behind, standing outside. Childlessness is the focal point of the play. The concerns of First Woman and Second Woman of the chorus echo many of the questions about the figure of the mother and Eu’s fertility in the story-within-the-story. Neither woman can transcend the materiality of her body, and therefore each is beholden to the social expectation to reproduce. First Woman, for example, “whose house is teeming with children,” calls her household overflowing with children a curse. In a striking statement in the form of a free verse prose poem, she complains that no one in her large family helps her: “If the courtyard must be swept, / It is Aba’s job. If the ampesi must be cooked, / It is Aba’s job. / And since the common slave was away all day / There was no drop in the pot / To cool the parched throat. / I am telling you, my sister, / Sometimes we feel you are luckier / Who are childless” (11). This is the only time in the play when the word “slave” is used not in reference to Eu or her genealogy. Although it is ambiguous, it seems that either Aba is a domestic servant whom Second Woman calls a “common slave,” or she is likening the role of the mother, and therefore herself, to the position of a household slave. In

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either case, she compares the domestic chores and responsibility, relegated to the mother or mother’s helper, to forced servitude. However, First Woman is disillusioned as well. In her case, she laments her lonely condition and empathetically weeps for Eu’s perceived barrenness (although she only assumes Eu is also infertile). Reduced to the viability of their wombs as biological machines, First Woman and Second Woman in this embedded subplot, and their namelessness, suggest a critique of the blind valorization of the fertile female body and the denigration of the infertile body or body that does not produce children. When Eu defies local practice and refuses to have her bare belly washed by Ato’s family with medicine to promote fertility and heal her “receded womb,” this represents a symbolic resistance for the women of the chorus as well to the biological mandate for childbirth. Still, the urgent social pressure to produce a child leads to the explosive final argument between the married couple. Ato and Eu embody the challenge of reaching a transatlantic understanding of slavery, endorsed by both sides of the oceanic divide. EU: [Contemptuously] I thought you could do better than clichés. Since you can preach so well, can’t you preach to your people to try and have just a little bit of understanding for the things they don’t know anything about yet? ATO: Shut up! How much does the American negro know? EU: Do you compare these bastards, these stupid narrow-minded savages with us? Do you dare . . . ? [Like the action of lightning, ATO smacks her on the cheek and goes out of the house going by the path on the left. EULALIE, stunned, holds her cheeks in her hands for several seconds. She tries to speak but the words do not come. She crumples, her body shaking violently with silent tears, into the nearest chair. This goes on for a while and then the lights go out.]

It is important to note that they both rely on and rehearse the virulently racist arguments of White supremacy. Ato says the American Negro knows nothing while Eu calls his family bastards and “savages.” Interesting, too, that Eu would call them bastards when she is the one, by her own admission, without a mother or a father, who could not “even point to [Ato] a beggar in the streets as [her] father or mother” (9). After all the manipulation of language, Ato’s unreliable work as cultural interpreter and Eu’s shifting, unsteady voice, words fail and Ato uses violence to (mis)communicate his grievances. Ultimately, the parallel moments of mothering for Eulalie—hearing the voice of her disembodied biological mother and her embodied, “ancestral”/ surrogate/mother-in-law, Esi Kom—begin to heal the ruptured memories and the physical and psychic bruises of willful forgetting. During a soliloquy about her first impressions of Ghana, Eu exclaims: “Ma, I’ve come to the very source. I’ve come to Africa and I hope that where’er you are, you sort

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of know and approve” (24). Her deceased mother’s accented voice interrupts the soliloquy with encouraging words about black pride and having it all. The death of her mother operates on two symbolic planes: Eu possesses no blood relatives and therefore symbolically exists in a limbo between America and Africa. That is why it is all the more meaningful when she returns at the very end to the family house, emotionally and physically battered, and finally receives a kind word from her mother-in-law. When Ato at last confesses to his mother the joint decision to postpone pregnancy, having allowed Eu to take the blame for their childlessness and then striking her in the last scene, Esi Kom tells her son, “You have not dealt with us well. And you have not dealt with your wife well in this” (51–52). And we must be careful with your wife You tell us her mother is dead. If she had any tenderness, Her ghost must be keeping watch over All which happen to her . . . [There is a short silence, then clearly to EULALIE.] Come, my child. [And with that, ESI KOM supports EULALIE through the door that leads into the old house. ATO merely stares after them. When they finally disappear, he crosses to his own door, pauses for a second, then runs back towards the door leading to the family house, stands there for some time and finally moves to the middle of the courtyard. He looks bewildered and lost. Then suddenly, like an echo from his own mind the voices of the children break out.](52)

With the symbolic act of ushering Eulalie into the “old house” and saying the three simplest, but most important words of the play, “Come, my child,” Esi Kom undoes the greatest injury of all, the refusal to remember the slave trade (52). At last, she remembers and honors Eu’s mother, and chastises her son for his partial disclosure of the truth. This is the moment of empathetic engagement with slavery’s memory in the play. Like Eu’s romantic wish at the start of the play, Ato’s mother, Esi Kom and Ghana, are “sort of [her] Ma too” (9). Throughout, the children’s play song, the theme of haunting, and the protagonists’ deferment of parenthood are linked to the memory of slavery. At the beginning of Act 3, a boy and girl sing the play song, “The Ghost.” Speaking to his elder Uncle Petu, Ato says, “I dreamt that there were two children in this courtyard singing that song about the ghost who did not know whether to go to Elmina or to Cape Coast” (30). The song, itself a ghost that haunts Ato’s nightmare about “Elmina” and “Cape Castle,” is also the song that ends the play:

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Shall I go to Cape Coast Shall I go to Elmina? I can’t tell Shall I? I can’t tell I can’t tell I can’t tell I can’t tell . . . [The voices fade gradually and the lights dim on him, gradually too.](52–52)

Homegoings and returns are complicated events. Here, the repetition of “I can’t tell” signals the inexpressibility of this traumatic history. It is the story that does not reveal itself. There is the final moment of reconciliation between mother and daughter-in-law, but no closure. At the end, Ato still seems to be in turmoil about his separation from the family induced by his Western education; he stands right in the liminal space between the old and the new buildings of his family’s house. When Esi accepts Eu with “Come, my child,” it is the physical support and embrace that brings them together more so than any words ever could. It is this ultimate undecidability on the part of the wayfarer (formerly enslaved) of where to go (the dilemma of going right or going left?; Cape Coast or Elmina?) and the people of the ancestral home, to recognize or not, that opens up rather than closes the final scene of the play. SHARED VISIONS OF AFRICA AND THE DIASPORA Ama Ata Aidoo’s The Dilemma of a Ghost (1965) represents the reverberations of slavery in African literature through the incisive dialogue of a family straining to carve out meaning from painful history and the echoes of children’s song; the style and genre necessitate distillation to the dramatic core of a scene, probing the afterlives of slavery through the lives of the protagonists. By contrast, Ayi Kwei Armah’s elaborately expansive prose style in Two Thousand Seasons, for example, uses the compelling orature of the “we-narrator” to take on the ambitious task of dramatizing the historical origins of the Arab and European invasion and slave trade on the African continent. The legendary Anowa story in Ghanaian tradition is the lyrical connective tissue in both Aidoo’s and Armah’s texts. Indeed, Adéléke Adéèkó has shown that oral poetry, praise poetry, and lineage poetry sing of rebellion, resistance, and capture in the oral literary tradition (2005, 12, 139). Still, like other traumatic histories, slavery seems to defy definitive expression in language. As Spencer-Walter’s theorizes about the inspiring translations from

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oral to written literature, the orature project demands that African writers and artists continue to grapple with and work the past. Christel N. Temple continues this idea, arguing that the preservation of Black cultural mythology based on “geography, relocation, cultural identity, worldview, and detailed narratives of saga” is essential to “equip us with knowledge from which to narrate a comprehensive history of survival and cultural memory” (2020, 114). Indeed, our survival depends on courageous dramatists, poets, novelists, and authors who devote themselves to creating dangerously. Our cultural survival depends on their boundless narrative imaginations and creative interweaving of the oral and written. As Odamtten advises, “We must place the text in the real world and comprehend it as part of the creative rendering of historical processes that have not yet ended” (1994, 43). Aidoo has embraced this directive to shape and interpret memory and histories that are constantly evolving and shifting into new forms. Perhaps these lines from Abena Busia’s praise poem in honor of Aidoo’s literary genius and creativity sum it up best: “You gave us someone talking to sometime/To banish the dilemma of a ghost” (2012, 403). Incorporating key words from Aidoo’s work throughout the poem, Busia’s imagery and content express immense gratitude for giving us a figure and a language to go back and retrieve knowledge from the past, Sankofa, the Twi word symbolized by the mythical bird, absorbed into global Black studies as a guiding critical concept. We observe the spirit of Sankofa, too, in the remarkable living legacy of Dr. Tom Spencer-Walters: esteemed scholar, professor, mentor, and colleague. His work as distinguished editor of the two critical anthologies examined in this chapter, Orality, Literacy and the Fictive Imagination: African and Diasporan Literatures and Memory and the Narrative Imagination in the African and Diaspora Experience, among his numerous other books and scholarly publications, evidence his careerlong intellectual and disciplinary commitments to valorizing African and diasporic oral and written literatures, demonstrating how those literary modes intersect in profound ways with the writer’s task to imaginatively excavate historical memories as a means of “working the past.” Although it would be impossible to catalog all his accomplishments here, generations of students, colleagues, and faculty worldwide have benefitted immeasurably from his generous and genial mentorship, multidisciplinary scholarship in African and Africana studies, wide-ranging academic training in the fields of communications, linguistics, and comparative literature, his “shared vision” for the future of rhetoric and composition in ethnic studies departments, his institution-building work as co-founder of the Interdisciplinary Studies of Africa Minor Program, relentless leadership in the development of countless curricular changes in Africana studies, particularly in the humanities and arts specialization, his discerning leadership as the longest serving department chair in Africana studies (then Pan-African

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studies) at California State University Northridge, visionary director of the Writing Program, and trusted college ombudsperson. It is only fitting, then, that when he founded his literary review journal, the longest standing venue of its kind at any university, he named it after the Krio aphorism, Kapu Sens. Thank you, Dr. Spencer-Walters, for so expertly modeling for us how to “grasp knowledge.” NOTES 1. Ama Ata Aidoo, Two Plays: The Dilemma of a Ghost/Anowa (New York: Longman, 2004). All parenthetical citations for both plays are taken from this edition. 2. For more on the representation of slavery, the transatlantic slave trade, and colonialism in African literature and history, see, for example, Modupe Olaogun, Sandra E. Greene, Kwasi Konadu, Adéléke Adéèkó, Laura Murphy, Taiwo Adetunji Osinubi, and Olúfémi Táíwò. 3. See, for example, Ngũgĩ’s Moving the Centre on the politics of language and power, and the conditions of external conquest which “deform” the culture under domination. 4. It should be noted that Tavia Nyong’o uses this critical term in the context of US racial hierarchies and questions of miscegenation. 5. Edwidge Danticat emphasizes the power of immigrant art in this collection titled after Camus’s in which writing is “revolt against silence” (11). Danticat poignantly recounts: “One of the first things the despot Duvalier tried to take away” from Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin, the two young men publicly executed in 1964 for engaging in guerrilla war in an attempt overthrow the dictatorship, “was the mythic element of their stories” (7). 6. For the original source text, see Mudimbe 1994. 7. Sisterhood is Global: The International Women’s Movement Anthology, edited by Robin Morgan (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984), 265. Ada Uzoamaka Azodo and Gay Wilentz, Emerging Perspectives on Ama Ata Aidoo (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1999). 8. Marian Aguiar, “Ama Ata Aidoo, 1942-,” Encyclopedia of Africa, vol. 1, edited by Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 75. 9. Hartman retells the encounter of receiving handwritten notes from young Ghanaian boys at the entrance of Elmina Castle, each missive emphasizing “one Africa,” shared ancestry, and familial separation through slavery: “‘Because of the slave trade you lose your mother, if you know your history, you know where you come from’” (2007, 85). 10. The dramatic tension between Eulalie and Ato recalls the scenes exploring the cultural differences between African American Beneatha and her Nigerian boyfriend, Joseph Asagai in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959), the first drama authored by a Black woman to be produced on Broadway. One wonders if this play

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and the 1961 film starring Sidney Poitier had any influence on Aidoo’s composition of The Dilemma of a Ghost, which she was likely writing during those years and would publish in 1965. For more on this topic, see Gῖchingiri Ndῖgῖrῖgῖ 2011 and Raquel Kennon 2021. 11. For an investigation of the trope of slavery as haunting in the Caribbean context, see Jenny Sharpe, Ghosts of Slavery: A Literary Archaeology of Black Women’s Lives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Geordie Buxton, Haunted Plantations: Ghosts of Slavery and Legends of the Cotton Kingdoms (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2007); Slavery’s Ghost: The Problem of Freedom in the Age of Emancipation, edited by Richard Follett, Eric Foner, and Walter Johnson (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 2011). 12. For book-length studies on the politics of gender and women writers in Africa, see for starters, Women Writers in Black Africa, by Lloyd Brown (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1981); Female Novelists in Modern Africa, by Oladele Taiwo (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984); Ngambika: Studies of Women in African Literature, edited by Carole Boyce Davies and Anne Adams Graves (Trenton, NJ: World Africa Press, 1986); Women in African Literature Today, edited by Eldred Durosini Jones, Eustace Palmer, and Marjorie Jones (Trenton, NJ: World Africa Press, 1987); Women in Africa and the African Diaspora, edited by Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, Sharon Harley, and Andrea Bonton Rushing (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1987); In their Own Voices: African Women Writers Talk, edited by Adeola James (London: James Curey; Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1990); Diverse Voices: Essays on Twentieth-Century Women Writers in English, edited by Harriet Devine Jump (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991); Black Women’s Writing, edited by Gina Wisker (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993); The Art of Ama Ata Aidoo: Polylectics and Reading against Neocolonialism, by Vincent Odamtten (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994); Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender, by Florence Stratton (New York: Routledge, 1994); Gender in African Women’s Writing: Identity, Sexuality, and Difference, by Juliana Makuchi Nfah-Abbenyi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); Postcolonial African Writers: A Bio-Biographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Pushpa Naidu Parekh and Siga Fatima Jagne (London and New York: Routledge, 1998); Emerging Perspectives on Ama Ata Aidoo, edited by Ada Uzoamaka Azodo and Gay Wilentz (Trenton, NJ: World Africa Press, 1999); World Authors 1990–1995, edited by Clifford Thompson and Mari Rich (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1999); New Directions in African Literature: A Review, edited by Ernest N. Emenyonu (Oxford: James Currey; Trenton, NJ: World Africa Press; Ibadan, Nigeria: Heinemann, 2006). For a discussion of key themes in Aidoo’s works, see the essays Lloyd W. Brown, C. L. Innes, and Vincent O. Odamtten in Modern African Drama, edited by Biodun Jeyifo (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002); Lloyd W. Brown’s “The African Woman as Writer,” Canadian Journal of African Studies 9, no. 3 (1975): 493–501; Modupe Olaogun’s “Slavery and Etiological Discourse in the Writing of Ama Ata Aidoo, Bessie Head, and Buchi Emecheta,” Research in African Literatures 33, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 171–91. 13. Popular among critics developing an African feminist approach to literature have been two novels from the Igbo literary tradition: Flor Nwapa’s Efuru (1966)

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and Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood (1979). See Stéphanie Robolin, “Gendered Hauntings: The Joys of Motherhood, Interpretive Acts, and Postcolonial Theory,” Research in African Literatures 35, no. 3 (Autumn 2004): 76–92; Susan Z. Andrade, “Rewriting History, Motherhood, and Rebellion: Naming an African Woman’s Literary Tradition,” Research in African Literatures 21, no. 1, Critical Theory and African Literature (Spring 1990): 91–110; Eustace Palmer, “The Feminine Point of View: Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood,” African Literature Today 13 (1983): 38–57. 14. “Perspectives on African feminism: defining and classifying African-feminist literatures,” Agenda 54 (2002). 15. Buchi Emecheta, “Feminism with a small ‘f’!” Criticism and Ideology: Second African Writers Conference, Stockholm, edited by Kirsten Holst Petersen (Uppsala: Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 1986), 173–80. 16. Ogunyemi explains her thoughts on womanism: “When I was thinking about womanism, I was thinking about those areas that are relevant for Africans but not for blacks in America—issues like extreme poverty and in-law problems, older women oppressing younger women, women oppressing their co-wives, or men oppressing their wives. Religious fundamentalism is another African problem that is not really relevant to African Americans—Islam, some Christian denominations, and also African traditional religions. These are problems that have to my mind to be covered from an African-womanist perspective. So I thought it was necessary to develop a theory to accommodate these differences.” Susan Arndt, “African Gender Trouble and African Womanism: Chikwenye Ogunyemi and Wanjira Muthoni,” Signs 25, no. 3 (Spring 2000): 709–26. See also Clenora Hudson-Weems, Africana Womanism: Reclaiming Ourselves (New York: Routledge, 2019). 17. Susheila Nasta, ed., Motherlands: Black Women’s Writing from Africa, the Caribbean, and South Asia (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992); The Politics of (M)othering: Womanhood, Identity and Resistance in African Literature, edited by Obioma Nnaemeka (New York: Routledge, 1997); Teresa N. Washington, Our Mothers, Our Powers, Our Texts: Manifestations of Àjé in Africana Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006). In the African diaspora, for another another book solely on motherhood, see Andrea O’Reilly, Toni Morrison and Motherhood: A Politics of theHheart (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004). Related to motherhood and womanhood, see also Ketu H. Katrak, Politics of the Female Body: Postcolonial Women Writers: Postcolonial Women Writers of the Third World (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006). For an article on this topic, see Liz Gunner, “Mothers, Daughters and Madness in Works by Four Women Writers: Bessie Head, Jean Rhys, Tsitsi Dangarembga and Ama Ata Aidoo,” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 14 (1994): 136–51. 18. For compelling readings of the The Dilemma of a Ghost as a classic dilemma tale, see Vincent O. Odamtten’s essay “A Bird of the Wayside Sings” in Modern African Drama, edited by Biodun Jeyifo (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 590–601. For insightful interpretations that highlight the Black feminist and diasporic elements, see Yogita Goyal and Samantha Pinto. 19. Bernth Lindfors, Books Abroad 40, no. 3 (Summer 1966): 358–59.

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20. Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory, second edition (London: Prentice Hall Group, 1999), 136. Quoted in Hildegard Hoeller’s “Ama Ata Aidoo’s ‘Heart of Darkness,’” Research in African Literatures 35, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 130–47. 21. In addition to The Politics of (M)othering: Womanhood, Identity and Resistance in African Literature, edited by Obioma Nnaemeka (New York: Routledge, 1997), see also Cynthia Ward, “What They Told Buchi Emecheta: Oral Subjectivity and the Joys of ‘Otherhood,’” PMLA 105, no 1, Special Topic: African and African American Literature (January 1990): 83–97. 22. Vincent O. Odamtten, “A Bird of the Wayside Sings,” in Modern African Drama, edited by Biodun Jeyifo (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 594. 23. Biodun Jeyifo, The Truthful Life: Essays in a Sociology of African Drama (London: New Beacon, 1985). 24. See for example, Hoeller Hildegard (2004). 25. Some critics have discussed the perceived “flaws” in Aidoo’s representation of Eulalie’s “American” vernacular. Dapo Adelugba writes about the different linguistic registers in the drama, but does not suggest the faulty structure of Eu’s speech is possibly due to Aidoo’s lack of exposure to American speech. See Dapo Adelugba, “Language and Drama: Ama Ata Aidoo,” Ghanaian Literatures, edited by Richard K. Priebe (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988). For a book-length study on Aidoo’s oeuvre, including an extended discussion on the complexities of a multi-layered reading (or what Odamtten calls a “polylectic” reading) that is helpful for an understanding of voice and barriers to communication in this play, see Vincent O. Odamtten, The Art of Ama Ata Aidoo: Polylectics and Reading Against Neocolonialism (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994). 26. This is a problem akin to the impossibility of “writing music.” Something is always left undone in these translations of African orature into the traditional Western dramatic form. 27. Abu Shardow Abarry, “The Significance of Names in Ghanaian Drama,” Journal of Black Studies 22, no. 2 (December 1991): 156, 165.

REFERENCES Abarry, Abu Shardow. 1991. “The Significance of Names in Ghanaian Drama.” Journal of Black Studies 22 (2): 157–67. Adéèkó, Adéléke. 2005. Slave’s Rebellion: Literature, History, Orature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Adams, Anne V., ed. 2012. Essays in Honour of Ama Ata Aidoo at 70: A Reader in African Cultural Studies. Oxford: Ayebia Clarke Publishing. Adelugba, Dapo. 1976. “Language and Drama: Ama Ata Aidoo.” African Literature Today 8: 137–50. Agyeman-Duah, Ivor. 2012. “Ama Ata Aidoo: Whose Dilemma Could It Be?” In Essays in Honour of Ama Ata Aidoo at 70: A Reader in African Cultural Studies, edited by Anne V. Adams, 407–14. Oxford: Ayebia Clarke Publishing.

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Aidoo, Ama Ata. 2004. Two Plays: The Dilemma of a Ghost and Anowa. New York: Longman. Akyeampong, Emmanuel. 2001. “History, Memory, Slave-Trade and Slavery in Anlo (Ghana).” Slavery and Abolition 22 (3): 1–24. “Ama Ata Aidoo at 70.” 2012. New African Magazine, January 3. https:​//​newafricanmagazine​.com​/3015​/. Armah, Ayi Kwei. 2000. Two Thousand Seasons: A Novel. Popenguine, Senegal: Per Ankh. ———. 2010. Remembering the Dismembered Continent. Popenguine, Senegal: Per Ankh. Azodo, Ada Uzoamaka, and Gay Wilentz, eds. 1999. Emerging Perspectives on Ama Ata Aidoo. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Benston, Kimberly W. “Black Hauntologies, Slavery, Modernity, Photography.” Lecture, W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, Harvard University, 20 April 2011. The Alain LeRoy Locke Lectures. Busia, Abena P. A. 2012. “For the Eagle Who Taught the Chickens the Meaning of Flight.” In Essays in Honour of Ama Ata Aidoo at 70: A Reader in African Cultural Studies, edited by Anne V. Adams, 403. Oxford: Ayebia Clarke Publishing. Chapman, Karen C. 1979. “Introduction to Ama Ata Aidoo’s Dilemma of a Ghost.” In Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature, edited by R.P. Bell et al., 25–38. New York: Anchor Books. Conde, Maryse. 1972. “Three Female Writers in Modern Africa: Flora Nwapa, Ama Ata Aidoo and Grace Ogot.” Présence Africaine 82 (2nd Quarterly): 132–43. Danticat, Edwidge. 2010. Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work. New York: Vantage Books. Davies, Carol Boyce, and Anne Adams Graves, eds. 1986. Ngambika: Studies of Women in African Literature. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Elder, Arlene. 1987. “Ama Ata Aidoo and the Oral Tradition: A Paradox of Form and Substance.” African Literature Today 15: 109–18. Eyerman, Ron. 2004. “The Past in the Present: Culture and the Transmission of Memory.” Acta Sociologica 47 (2): 159–69. George, Olakunle. 2017. African Literature and Social Change: Tribe, Nation, Race. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. George, Rosemary Marangoly, and Helen Scott. 1993. “‘A New Tail to an Old Tale’: An Interview with Ama Ata Aidoo.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 26 (3): 297–308. https:​//​www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/1345838. Goyal, Yogita. 2010. Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Greene, Sandra E. 2011. West African Narratives of Slavery: Texts from Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Ghana. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hartman, Saidiya V. 2007. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Hoeller, Hildegard. 2004. “Ama Ata Aidoo’s ‘Heart of Darkness.’” Research in African Literatures 35 (1): 130–47.

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Innes, C.L. 1992 “Mothers or Sisters? Identity, Discourse and Audience in the Writing of Ama Ata Aidoo and Mariama Bâ.” In Motherlands: Black Women’s Writing from Africa, the Caribbean, and South Asia, edited by Susheila Nasta, 129–51. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Irele, F. Abiola. 1990. “The African Imagination.” Research in African Literatures 21 (1), Critical Theory and African Literature: 49–67. Jeyifo, Biodun, ed. 2002. Modern African Drama. New York: W. W. Norton. Kennon, Raquel. 2021. “Africa Claiming Her Own”: Unveiling Natural Hair and African Diasporic Identity in Lorraine Hansberry’s Unabridged A Raisin in the Sun.” Modern Drama 64 (3): 283–308. doi: 10.3138/md-64-3-1120. Konadu, Kwasi. 2014. Transatlantic Africa, 1440–1888. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Migraine-George, Thérèse. 2003. “Ama Ata Aidoo’s Orphan Ghosts: African Literature and Aesthetic Postmodernity.” Research in African Literatures 34 (4): 83–89. Mudimbe, V. Y. 1994. The Idea of Africa. London: James Currey. Murphy, Laura T. 2012. Metaphor and the Slave Trade in West African Literature. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. Nasta, Susheila, ed. 1992. Motherlands: Black Women’s Writing from Africa, the Caribbean, and South Asia. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Ndῖgῖrῖgῖ, Gῖchingiri. 2011. “Discrepant Cosmopolitanisms in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun.” In Memory and the Narrative Imagination in the African and Diaspora Experience, by Tom Spencer-Walters, 91–116. Troy, MI: Bedford Publishers.Nfah-Abbenyi, Juliana Makuchi. 1997. Gender in African Women’s Writing: Identity, Sexuality, and Difference. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Ngũgĩ, wa Thiong’o. 1993. Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms. London: James Currey. ———. 2009. Something Torn and New: An African Renaissance. New York: Basic Civitas Books. Nnaemeka, Obioma, ed. 1997. The Politics of (M)othering: Womanhood, Identity and Resistance in African Literature. New York: Routledge. Nyong’o, Tavia. The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Odamtten, Vincent O. 1994. The Art of Ama Ata Aidoo: Polylectics and Reading Against Neocolonialism. Gainesville, FL: Univ. Press of Florida. 2002. “A Bird of the Wayside Sings.” In Modern African Drama, edited by Biodun Jeyifo, 590–601. New York: W. W. Norton. Okpewho, Isidore. 1990. “The Primacy of Performance in Oral Discourse.” Research in African Literatures 21 (4): 121–28. ———. 1992. African Oral Literature: Backgrounds, Character, and Continuity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2003. “Oral Tradition: Do Storytellers Lie?” Journal of Folklore Research 40 (3): 215–32.

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Olaogun, Modupe. 2002. “Slavery and Etiological Discourse in the Writing of Ama Ata Aidoo, Bessie Head, and Buchi Emecheta.” Research in African Literatures 33 (2): 171–91. Opoku-Agyemang, Naana Jane. 1993. “A Reading of Ama Ata Aidoo’s Anowa.” The International Journal of Africana Studies: The Journal of the National Council for Black Studies 2 (2): 70–83. Osinubi, Taiwo Adetunji. 2017. “An Intellectual History of African Literary Studies?” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 4 (2): 296–306. Pinto, Samantha. 2013. Difficult Diasporas: The Transnational Feminist Aesthetic of the Black Atlantic. New York: New York University Press. Soyinka, Wole. 2010. “Between Truths and Indulgences.” Transition (103): 110–17. https:​//​www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/10​.2979​/trs​.2010​.​-​.103​.110. ———. 1999. The Burden of Memory, The Muse of Forgiveness. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Spencer-Walters, Tom, ed. 1998. Orality, Literacy and the Fictive Imagination: African and Diasporan Literatures. Troy, MI: Bedford Publishers. ———, ed. 2011. Memory and the Narrative Imagination in the African and Diaspora Experience. Troy, MI: Bedford Publishers. Táíwò, Olúfémi. 2010. How Colonialism Preempted Modernity in Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Temple, Christel N. 2020. Black Cultural Mythology. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 2015. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Twentieth Anniversary Edition. Boston: Beacon Press. Walling, Michael. 2006. “Interview with Ama Ata Aidoo.” Border Crossings Theatre Company. Youtube.com, July 19., Accra, Ghana. http:​//​www​.youtube​.com​/watch​ ?v​=VuxPvJqQp0I. ———. 2007. Theatre and Slavery: Ghosts at the Crossroads. Enfield: Border Crossings. Wood, Nancy. 1999. Vectors of Memory: Legacies of Trauma in Postwar Europe. Oxford: Berg Publishers.

8

The Power of Memory and Language Counter-Stories as Oppositional Re-Membering Renee M. Moreno

My collaboration with Dr. Tom Spencer-Walters, whose work as a scholar and teacher, has inspired our friendship. He is also a great mentor. Through his perspective, I have come to understand the power of memory and language, story, and storytelling—ways of looking at the world through ethnic studies, diasporic, and African lenses. Spencer-Walters has been instrumental to my development as a scholar-activist and as a fighter, for we understand the fight for inclusion in higher education well, as internally colonized and colonized peoples,1 as women and folks of color, who are from working-class backgrounds or from African backgrounds like Spencer-Walters is. We fight for the right to students’ own home languages in classrooms, for their right to be literate subjects, and for them to participate in higher education, no matter their educational preparation. To elaborate, I will tell “counter-stories” that reflect the work we do in composition classrooms on behalf of students’ literacy. I reflect on SpencerWalters’s unique African perspectives and his understanding of the “power of story,” of language, of counter-memory,2 and of re-membering, and finally, I share important insights when he talked about a king and a storyteller, harkening to African traditions of remembering and storytelling. I am relying on George Lipsitz’s ideas of counter-memory throughout this chapter, especially his idea that “story-tellers from diverse oral traditions . . . have advanced a consistent body of principles about communication and action in their battles 149

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against dominant narratives. These principles have privileged empathy over individualism, emotion over analysis, and effects over intentions.”3 Lipsitz’s ideas are connected to the theme of this volume because the particular and personal stories I tell, the discussion I engage, relies on how African and African American (diasporic) scholars and writers (like Spencer-Walters, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Toni Morrison, and Robin D. G. Kelley) are engaging memory (collective memory), story, and literacy to subvert dominant narratives. They are “Remembering Africa” in their particular iterations of story and storytelling, but they are also remembering us and our shared struggles to subvert dominant narratives and engage counter-memory.4 For their work, alongside the work of Chicana/o writers and scholars (Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Juan Felipe Herrera, Rudy Acuña, and others), remembers place (Africa/the Americas), confronts power, and challenges the powerful. Further, these connections with other disciplines allows me to think through how our collective consciousness weaves together. These scholars, I argue, pave the way us to think about how a community’s language grounds storytelling, how people tell stories, and how storytelling can reclaim literacy and memory in the teaching of writing. Morrison, for instance, talks about the tangibility of story and memory, what she refers to in Beloved as “re-memory”—characters’ imagined, real, and reconstructed “rememories” that they bump into as they try to heal and recover.5 Sethe, the main character, for example, struggles to re-member forgotten pain and trauma; she struggles to heal from that trauma, which might allow her to love and to live without the (real) ghosts that haunt her. In her storytelling, Sethe recalls the beauty of Sweet Home alongside the horrors of that place; what she may have forgotten is present in her every day.6 The students who populate our writing courses are first generation, low income, and underrepresented and bring with them their own pain and trauma; reclaiming literacy, therefore, is not such an easy task. “Bumping” into real and imagined “rememories” (that are often reminiscent of pain and trauma) is at the heart of our work in college-level writing classrooms when we seek to reclaim literacy. Literacy, counter-stories, and memory, I argue, coalesce the struggle for inclusion in higher education. Further, for us as teachers, the struggle for inclusion is a delicate dance of working within the confines of administratively defined boundaries, testing the boundaries of language and literacy, and often transgressing into something else to move students toward critical literacy. We are engaged in a kind of hybridity, “born out of linguistic necessity.” As Tcho Mbaimba Caulker, who is writing about Sierra Leonian playwright Thomas Decker (whose own transgressive act was to translate Shakespeare’s Julius Cesar into the Krio language of Sierra Leone), observes:

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This form of hybridity is not characterized as one of separation, but instead, as one of unification that includes the bridging of cultural divides. Krio itself was born out of the linguistic necessity of communication, and as a matter of practicality became indigenous to Sierra Leone. Tom Spencer-Walters makes the wise observation that “[b]ecause Krio is the lingua franca of the country, the Krio cannot take exclusive ownership of the language. Ironically, it is this mixing, this fluidity, and this openness that have so far sustained the strength and resilience” of Krio (226). As a result, the Krio language can be characterized as a product of Sierra Leone that is part of the national identity and culture, and a language that belongs to the nation itself.7

What is powerful about Caulker’s observation is the emphasis on hybridity and fluidity and mixing at the heart of language and is instructive for anyone engaged in critical literacy, acts of resistance and transformation.8 WHAT HISTORY TEACHES Throughout this chapter, I explain the development of my own ideas about the role of story and storytelling in teaching, as I reflect on my own educational experiences, especially the politics that birthed (and still is birthing) ethnic studies at California State University, Northridge (CSUN) and beyond. The histories of ethnic studies have always included a rich internationalist perspective, for ethnic studies scholars saw the fight for inclusion as global. For example, Rodolfo “Rudy” Acuña and others often looked to the Americas and the many popular movements there to shape their thinking. While I am not a 1960s and 1970s civil rights activist, like many of my colleagues, I am a product of their thinking and a (grateful) recipient of their gains; my whole education has been to prepare to carry on their work. I attended the University of Michigan during a time when the Michigan Mandate and its unabashed Affirmative Action policies (and the fight afterward to retain these policies) opened elite universities to working-class people like me—and paid for most (if not all) of my education.9 That education would have been financially out of reach for me and my family; even my time as an undergraduate and MA student at the University of Colorado, Denver, would have been unattainable but for similar policies that enabled more people like me to attend university and earn degrees (even when the Auraria campus displaced a large Chicana/o community to build the campus and)—even when it took time to figure out my own goals, which is something today’s students do not get enough time to do. For instance, our first-year students are pressured to declare a major (part of the CSU’s 2025 Initiative to

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move more students along the graduation pipeline) and often choose one that reflects their parents’ values or desires, like business or accounting.10 Moreover, my parents, especially my father’s influence as a labor leader and activist-artist (although I doubt that he would use that term) in the Chicana/o Arts and Chicana/o Movement in Denver, had a direct impact on my thinking of Chicanas/os as an aggrieved community—with much to contribute to the larger society, as my father’s art and activism taught me. For people like my parents, Spencer-Walters, and the veteranas/os of our departments are dreamers; they imagined us and they created places and pedagogical spaces for all of us to thrive. As my colleague Christina Ayala-Alcantar recently observed, “Rudy [Acuña] dreamed our department! We are here because of him and his willingness to see you.”11 Acuña’s and Spencer-Walters’s willingness to see and to engage existing norms envisioned freedom—whole curriculum, departments, students, and faculty—as they challenged the status quo to engage us as literate, complete subjects in our own thinking and vision of what the present and future could be. My father’s art and work as an artist and my recovery work (storytelling) to understand his roles in the Labor Movement and Chicana/o Arts Movement paved a natural way for my teaching in Chicana/o studies, although I was educated in traditional subject areas, like English, and only later in ethnic and American studies. My father’s ideas of cooperation and community from his work as a labor leader inscribed the work that I would do with Spencer-Walters and other colleagues, often across our differences, much like my father did during his lifetime. As a result of my own experiences, these activists’ (including my father’s) losses, sacrifices, and gains gave me unique insights into literacy education, and those perspectives allowed my thinking and understanding about story to coalesce with Spencer-Walters’s, especially understanding why the teaching of writing is a site of contestation and why literacy is another site of civil rights that is worth fighting for. Or to put in another way as Rodolfo Acuña states, “Opposition is a form of learning.”12 Moreover, as a methodology and practice, counter-story has roots in critical race theory (CRT), which has become the latest menace to society but is a form of telling stories from disenfranchised groups, whose voices are often absented from larger society.13 George Lipsitz emphasizes the power of storytelling in aggrieved communities in Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture, when he writes, It is the oppressions of history—of gender, of race, and of class—that make aggrieved populations suspicious of dominant narratives. The radical subjectivity that [Zora Neale] Hurston describes, where the dream is the truth and where people act and do things accordingly, can only provide momentary refuge from the consequences of history. Story-telling that leaves history to the oppressor,

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that imagines a world of desire detached from the world of necessity, cannot challenge the hegemony of dominant discourse. But storytelling that combines subjectivity and objectivity, that employs insights and passions of myth and folklore in the service of revising history, can be a powerful tool of contestation.14 (Emphasis added)

For aggrieved groups, counter-memory, counter-story, and storytelling work to create alternative threads of knowing and understanding and can be inserted into master narratives of American history (even master narratives in classrooms), signifying another site of contestation and struggled, which is why CRT is under attack from the misinformed right. In my work with the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), we have become aware of the real threat to teachers as they engage and challenge dominant narratives with counter-memory and race and CRT in their classrooms.15 Teachers have been fired for teaching about race, have been excoriated before school boards and their communities to defend their teaching, have been followed from work by parents and even radicalized outsiders, and have had their families threatened with violence—for teaching ideas, for choosing certain books, and for having their students read certain authors like the ones I cite. Writing about the banning of his book The Circle (and other books) for containing descriptions of sex, Dave Eggers underscores how easily political interests turn to serve the bidding of a small but powerful group who can control the narrative, instilling fear and distrust: But the coronavirus pandemic and an influx of new school board members have drastically changed the atmosphere for teachers in the district. I visited Rapid City in May and spoke to twenty-five teachers spread across the district’s three high schools. Uniformly, they said that their work had become far more difficult in the last two years, and that the book ban was yet one more sign that their jobs were becoming untenable. At the school board meeting I attended on May 17, multiple speakers lamented the “mass exodus” of teachers. There are currently 157 vacant positions in a district that employs 1,680. Eighty-eight of the open positions are for classroom teachers. Parents and students say the district is “disintegrating” and “imploding. . . . ” How all this happened is instructive. In fact, it might be a blueprint for how any school district can be overtaken by the narrow interests of people and groups without a direct stake in the schools.16

Eggers’ observations point to the culture wars fueled by White power movements that have curtailed hard-fought civil and human rights that the activists I referenced paid dearly for.17 Even at the university level, some groups have been searching for key phrases (like CRT or race) on professors’ syllabi and

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called them out in certain kinds of forums that propagate more hate than knowledge, and that books are being destroyed for what they contain and burned in some cases should send a chill down our collective spines. Such attacks may be a clarion call for mass participation, activism, and organizing, and our teaching and the curriculum we develop in the face of this outright assault on teachers can give hope that literacy counters this divisiveness to develop students’ critical consciousness. There are calls to action here to inspire and challenge such backwards thinking, such as California’s movement to include ethnic studies in K–12 curriculum and the fight waged at CSUN to establish Section F in general education (ensuring that students take ethnic studies classes).18 The lessons we have learned in the struggle, the strides that we have made, should fill us with resolve to undo the harmful outcomes of a nation divided along lines of othering, fear, and censorship. My hope is that we can continue to understand and remember the past to see what a progressive future might hold for us. As Kelley invites us to ponder, “How do we produce a vision that enables us to see beyond out immediate ordeals? How do we transcend bitterness and cynicism and embrace love, hope, and an all-encompassing dream of freedom, especially in these rough times?”19 Kelley’s questions allow me to imagine and engage counter-memory and counter-storytelling and to explain why storytelling is essential to remembering. ETHNIC STUDIES AS A SITE OF TRANSFORMATION At our university, writing is taught across seven departments, with a significant number of the writing courses taught in ethnic studies departments.20 Our role as writing teachers in ethnic studies was purposeful, deliberate, and, I would argue, a subversive decision because the iconic members of our departments—like Spencer-Walters and Johnny Scott (in Africana studies); Acuña, Mary Pardo, Lorenzo Flores (in Chicana/o studies), and Maria Turnmeyer (in Asian American studies)—understood the importance of teaching writing (and therefore, literacy) from an ethnic studies perspective. Spencer-Walters’ own unique perspective as an African scholar, who has thought deeply about “the Krio lingua franca of Sierra Leone,” understands how language and literacy work to “bridge cultural divides” that can bring us together toward common goals—as has been the history of shared literacy goals in teaching writing from an ethnic studies point of view.21 As Kelley observes, “Progressive social movements [such as those that led to the development of ethnic studies and Africana and Chicana/o studies at CSUN] do not simply produce statistics and narratives of oppression; rather, the best ones do what

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great poetry always does: transport us to another place, compel us to relive horrors and, more importantly, enable us to imagine a new society.”22 This site of our “confluencia,” where communities come together and coalesce around language and (critical) literacies, is one that challenges dominant pedagogies in higher education, calls out racialized state violence (when violence happens in the classroom or on the street). Ethnic studies, as a pedagogy, seeks justice for people of color based on cooperation, love, and community. Moreover, Chicana/o studies, like Africana studies, is an ecology, a “place and space,” a way of being and understanding and seeing that functions as a site of “pedagogical resistance.”23 The everyday literacy teaching that happens in our classrooms begins in our individual and collective imagination before we step foot into the classroom. We think deeply about our pedagogical approaches that engage our students, as we develop curriculum that might reflect and build upon students’ “funds of knowledge” and the rich histories that they bring with them to the classroom.24 As Acuña observes, identity has been an important component of Chicana/o Studies. The subject matter and the production of knowledge are critical to the courses that form Chicana/o Studies. But in my opinion, the soul of Chicana/o Studies is its pedagogy. I came into Chicana/o Studies because I wanted to teach students to love learning. I wanted to complete their literacy. I wanted to give them an alternative to gangs and the underground economy. As much as Chicana/o Studies is a content field, it is a pedagogical tool. Pedagogy is still very important to a community where over 60 percent of its students drop out of school.25

Chicana/o studies and Africana studies were (and still are) at the forefront of transforming the higher educational landscapes that Acuña described. Our departments were “one of the real homes of sustained student activism” in the 1960s and 1970s. That activism was “quelled by police batons, mass arrest, and . . . felony charges,” as Spencer-Walters often reminds us. We cannot forget that their suffering was born out of, as Kelley observes, “[t]he civil rights movement demanded freedom for all and believed that it had to win through love and moral suasion. Those committed to the philosophy of nonviolence saw their suffering as redemptive.”26 The real sacrifices that Black students made in their struggles for our departments got them arrested, expelled, and banned from campus; many of them served time in prison on felony charges—all so that we could have a space to learn and study and struggle. Spencer-Walters stated that the University used to consciously care about Black students making up a significant portion of the campus student body—even when these students lived outside of CSUN’s recruitment area. African American students, he stated, once comprised 30 percent of the student body at CSUN, but in recent years, it dipped as low as 5.9 percent.27

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As our departments work together to include, to transform, and to develop curriculum that speaks to and represents our communities, these stories (and histories) should not be lost in/on the classroom of today. COUNTER-STORYTELLING IN COMMUNITY (CHALLENGING DOMINANT NARRATIVES) At the National Council of Teachers of English virtual conference in November 2020 (in the thick of the pandemic and separation of our communities), the writer Kali Fajardo-Anstine28 and the US Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera,29 in their keynotes, spoke about the privileged position that home, story, and storytelling occupies in Chicana/o/Latinx culture and language. Fajardo-Anstine and Herrera talked about story as weaving together threads of ideas and experiences, as gems that reflect a people’s languages, histories, journeys, and activism.30 These every day, even quotidian, stories are often tied to the very survival of communities and can fill gaps in the public consciousness that often belittle and dismiss us (or see us as threats). Fajardo-Anstine’s stories and Herrera’s poetry are powerful interventions as they respond to the absences and gaps in knowledge. In an interview with The New Yorker, Morrison similarly observes like these writers, “What was driving me to write was the silence—so many stories untold and unexamined. There was a wide [purposeful?] vacuum in the literature. I was inspired by the silence and absences in the literature.”31 Herrera’s poem, “Let Me Tell You What a Poem Brings,” emphasizes language’s ability to transform and transport; he states, “Before you go further, / let me tell you what a poem brings, / first, you must know the secret, there is no poem/ to speak of, / it is a way to attain a life without boundaries.”32 In her presentation, Fajardo-Anstine, who is from Denver, as I am, talked about the purposeful absenting of people and their experiences and talked about the vacuum of stories that gets created in Denver’s efforts to gentrify and to re-member (as in rearrange and reassemble) the city differently. As Joern Langhorst reminds us, “it is more than that; it is remaking the physical-material and spatial dimensions of ‘place’ to remake identity— Denver as a vibrant, hip, thriving, expensive, high-end ‘Blabla’ real estate developer’s Mecca.”33 In writing her stories, she says, she imagines the places people grew up and importantly remembers the names of these places and neighborhoods. To write her collection of short stories, Fajardo-Anstine says, “I listened to a lot of oral histories. I interviewed elders. I looked through historical documents and photographs” to reconstruct the lives of people she knew and grew up with—at least the idea of these people and the place

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they live. She continues, “It’s important to realize that there are people who live in a place before [newcomers] and they have a history that’s attached to a place . . . when you change the name of the place where the people come from, in a way, you are erasing the history of the people who were already there.”34 Her short stories in Sabrina and Corina act as an intervention— where she can actively remember and recall. This is an important distinction in the short stories of Latina writers (even in the novels and poetry of writers of color): they actively remember. She tells a story about Confluence Park in Denver and a reimagined history there. In the remaking of Denver’s history by the upwardly mobile, mostly White crowd who has amplified the city’s gentrification, certain histories are absented and then reimagined. For example, on walking tours of the city, people can use their cellphones to gain access to a history that erases people and place from their homes and histories. Fajardo-Anstine talks about the Cheyenne, Arapahoe, Mexican, and African American peoples who settled near Confluence Park—stories that her grandmother and mother shared in re-membering and reconstructing history, their own “re-memories.” Importantly, Spencer-Walters and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, even as Lipsitz observes about Hurston, link counter-story to women’s memory and their “radical” subjectivity.35 My own grandmother told similar stories, especially during floods at the site of the Cherry Creek and South Platte River confluence, about Native peoples’ reluctance to settle too close to the confluence, something “gabachos” (as my grandmother would term White people) either ignore or somehow “forget,” as many structures continue to be built close to the confluence of the two bodies of water that will flood again in a fifty- or hundred-year flood: The 1965 South Platte flood has been described as “decades of haphazard urban growth and myopic planning.” The disaster became a trigger for long-delayed flood control projects, ambitious urban renewal plans, and a renaissance along the South Platte itself. . . . The waterways seemed placid, so the new arrivals gave little consideration to the floodplain. Yet Arapaho and Cheyenne sources warned that the South Platte could be dangerous at times, including a flood in 1844 when the river had risen twenty feet.36

Indeed, the confluence of the two bodies of water was the inspiration for NCTE president Alfredo Lujan’s call to convention, because we were scheduled to be in Denver (cancelled due to the pandemic and moved to an online format). Lujan recalled another important part of Denver’s history, citing the Chicana/o Movement, which began in the city, and calling attention to this “confluencia” of people in his thinking and planning.37

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While the cellphone history Fajardo-Anstine cites is imagined after all, there are other examples of imagined history all over Denver—like the renaming of Denver’s once diverse and vibrant African American and Latinx neighborhoods to suit the tastes of a lame sameness, like “HiLo,” “LoDo,” and “Sunnyside.” When I refer to his neighborhood as the “Northside,” Langhorst often reminds me, “Not anymore. Diversity here is a safe and entertaining encounter with a tamed, whitewashed version of ‘the other’”—from “handhelds” (empañadas) to hipster ice cream (helados).38 Another example is “Life House,” Denver’s newest “themed hotel,” walkable to Confluence Park and Denver’s historic (now hipster) Northside (which probably makes the hotel destination worthy and), which imagines a “western pioneer’s Victorian homestead with a wildflower inspired cocktail bar and restaurant.”39 For who can make that up, if not some psychotic hipster marketing person? Yet I invite people to read history that documents the Mexicans who were lynched throughout the Southwest during that very time period, the brutal histories of the Texas Rangers, the intimate links between Denver’s politicians and their Klan membership, the real stories of terror wrought upon African American communities and Mexican and Native communities, who predated any White Victorian western pioneers (as if that term is not problematic enough). Denver is (and has been for some time, like many cities) in the midst of economic, “cultural,” and population shifts, that attract affluent, White people who often displace established Latinos and African Americans from their neighborhoods. In that process, they too often transformation place (metaphorically and not so) into the Life House imaginary. While there are more stories about how Denver’s elite imagines and reimagines the city’s histories and about the absences, the people not included in the master narratives of Denver, Life House is a practice of the colonizer, of settler colonialism, which Robin D. G. Kelley has referenced as the process of gentrification).40 Replacing imaginaries with the stories of people and place is what we teach in our literacy, in our privileging of storytelling in classrooms, as the next story illustrates. “THE STORYTELLER IS JUST AS IMPORTANT AS THE KING” In 2014, to celebrate the forty-fifth anniversary of the founding of Chicana/o and Africana studies, the writer and scholar Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o visited CSUN for a talk that was widely attended and attracted the attention of many people on campus, including the University president, who took the time out of her schedule to attend.41 Spencer-Walters (a good friend of Ngũgĩ’s) arranged the visit, convincing Ngũgĩ to take time out of his own busy schedule to visit. At

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the time, he had made the short list for the Nobel Prize in Literature, so he was incredibly busy with giving interviews. We shook money trees to get him paid, not matching his usual speaker’s fee, but still he came to campus—out of respect and admiration for Spencer-Walters’s years of friendship. In tow was Ngũgĩ’s driver about whom he had written an (unpublished) short piece, which he gave us, and the four of us (Ngũgĩ, his taxi driver, Tom, and I) spent time talking about his work and his life and talking to his taxi driver about work and life as a taxi driver. Time was ticking as we had to make a short trek across campus to the auditorium where Ngũgĩ would give his talk. What Ngũgĩ did not tell us at the time was that he had a condition, which made walking slow and painful. As time ticked by, he stopped to take a phone call, he paused, and he sat down—what would have been a ten-minute walk across campus turned into a thirty-minute walk. We should have enlisted the help of the many electric vehicles that sprint to and fro on our campus, but we didn’t. Instead, we were incredibly late! My cell phone exploded with frantic calls from God and the world, asking, “Where are you? The president is waiting!” When we walked in, the auditorium was packed floor to ceiling with impatient people. But everyone was relieved, although the white shirt I had worn that day had turned into a sweaty mess—both from the slow walk in the Valley heat and the anxiety I had built up from ignoring the phone calls. Spencer-Walters and Ngũgĩ were unphased. We all made our way to the stage and the talk proceeded as if nothing had happened. As I sat down, a frantic, sweaty mess about the late start and keeping the president waiting, Spencer-Walters turned to me and said, “Don’t worry Renee. In our [Sierra Leonian/African] cultures the storyteller always comes in last; the storyteller is important to the king. The king will wait for the storyteller.” Later, he elaborated, saying that according to his elders, the storyteller is the repository of a community’s collective memory(ies). The king cannot make decisions or pass judgments without consulting the storyteller. As the repository of memory, history, and culture, the king depends on the storyteller’s knowledge. Not everyone, therefore, can be a storyteller, because story depends on memory and details of a community’s history and culture. I retell this counter-memory to emphasize what Spencer-Walters said, “the storyteller is important to the king, the king will wait for the storyteller,” as a way to reclaim a “radical subjectivity.”42 Our literacy works to subvert and inform, for it can make understandable the ecological frameworks from which we operate and see the world around us. Spencer-Walters’s observation signifies a framework that supports a way of thinking and doing, at the same time it calls attention to the ways that we are historically (even administratively)

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situated so that we can subvert language, literacy, and writing. His attention to another way of seeing and another way of framing pedagogies places both storytelling and stories (of all kinds) at the center of what happens in our classrooms—perhaps one of those ways of seeing is never to get too uptight about making a president wait for a storyteller, especially when that storyteller is Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. For me, “the king will wait for the storyteller” has been a guiding light of Spencer-Walters’s tutelage; his ability to see the storyteller as essential to literacy means privileging storytelling in our classrooms and in our advocacy. “BLAST ITS RACIST STRAITJACKET” In my capacity as the writing coordinator for Chicana/o studies, I have worked closely with Spencer-Walters on the University Writing Council. We have had many conversations about writing, reading, and history as we have engaged in the real struggle to make writing matter, to make literacy matter in our lives and students’ lives. For our students, writing and literacy matters, and that both matter is often illustrated through the fights that we engage in with an administration that does not always understand the histories of why we teach writing in Ethnic studies departments. In our day-to-day work, we are acutely aware of the university’s neoliberal landscape. Our emphasis on critical thinking, literacy, and writing is nothing less than essential and foundational to students’ intellectual development and their success (or failure) in academia. For alongside their ethnic studies faculty, students face administrative obstacles that make traversing the academic pipeline43 difficult for them—from conversations with administration about how students are (and should be) “placed” into the writing classes to various faculty-developed programs that are implemented (and ignored or defunded) to help students with their reading, writing, and critical thinking development. Spencer-Walters understands the important critical skills being taught in our classrooms and has called attention to “mundane” (yet onerous) policies implemented in writing classrooms. The CSU Chancellor’s Office Executive Order 665, for example, mandated that students pass their first-year writing courses in the first two semesters of their admission to university or risk being “stopped out” if they fail. After that mandate, EO 1110 uses “multiple placements” to place students in first year writing, yet multiple placements have less to do with gauging students’ writing abilities and more to do with moving them along despite their preparation for first year writing. Overall, the seemingly “ordinary and subtle” outcomes from executive orders have had devastating effects for students. Too often, students are advised to take writing courses for which their writing skills are not matched, and then they fail

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when they cannot not complete the courses. The long-term effect of students’ failure may change the demographic of our students, certainly at the upper division when first year students do not pass their courses.44 In a conversation that I had with Spencer-Walters, which became another influencing moment in envisioning the writing programs as well as my professional work with NCTE, he said, “the teaching of writing is getting more complex, not less so” and went on to explain that while students may not be getting their literacy needs met from their K–12 schooling experiences, we also face certain obstacles at the university, in higher education, which make our job harder.45 More importantly, he stated, we must be vigilant of obstacles we face when teaching writing to the populations of student in most need of literacy development. The point of that comment wasn’t to overwhelm or imagine insurmountable obstacles but to remember who we teach and why we teach. Spencer-Walters invites us to remember that literacy is important to the struggle for equality, for justice, for a better university. And a better life for us and our students. As Sharon Klein once said during a meeting, “We know this, right?” We do know this, and we do know the vigilance it takes to teach writing in the university where most of our students are first generation, of color, and from working-class backgrounds. Or to put it another way, “When asked how to write in a world dominated by a white culture, Toni Morrison once responded, ‘By trying to alter language, simply to free it up, not to repress it or confine it. . . . Tease it. Blast its racist straitjacket.’”46 Morrison’s observation renders the promise and difficulties of literacy side by side. The idea is that we are complete in our work when we can tell our stories—and not just any stories, but those stories that infuse us and circles us back to early lessons learned, to our histories, our repositories, our storytellers. Little moments that became big moments characterizes the work I did (and others did) with Spencer-Walters, as I learned from him. The conversations, the laughter, the shared frustrations, and the determination to do something about them have all coalesced into our shared stories and histories. Yan Dominic Searcy, of the College of Social and Behavior Sciences, has referred to Tom as a gentleman, as a calming influence. But I also want to add: let us not be fooled. Tom is a force of nature. He is one of the strongest people I know. He reminds me that I must persist in this struggle, for it is a struggle. I cannot think of a better way to underscore our persistence in this struggle than our friend Ngugi wa Thiongo’s own words, from his epic book about human liberation, Decolonising the Mind (I would also add that the last words of the book are the best in any book I have read): “Struggle. Struggle makes history. Struggle makes us. In struggle is our history, our language, our being. That struggle begins wherever we are; in whatever we do: then we become

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part of those millions whom Martin Carter once saw sleeping not to dream but dreaming to change the world.”47 These words encapsulate who we are, for the many dreamers in both our departments have changed and are changing the world. NOTES 1.Rodolfo F. Acuña. Occupied America: The Chicano’s Struggle Toward Liberation (San Francisco: Canfield Press, 1972), 3. Acuña describes Chicanas/os as internally colonized peoples, stating I feel that the parallels between the Chicanos’ experience in the United States and the colonization of other Third World peoples are too similar to dismiss. Attendant to the definition of colonization are the following conditions: 1. The land of one people is invaded by people from another country, who later use military force to gain and maintain control. 2. The original inhabitants become subjects of the conquerors involuntarily. 3. The conquered have an alien culture and government imposed upon them. 4. The conquered become the victims of racism and cultural genocide and are relegated to a submerged status.

2. George Lipsitz, “History, Myth, and Counter-Memory: Narrative and Desire in Popular Novels,” Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 214. http:​//​www​.jstor​.org​/stable​ /10​.5749​/j​.cttttz1b. I also think about that reverberating idea of “re-membering,” which I interpret as bringing us back together (in that face of who/what has been intentionally displaced/ torn apart), and I would be remiss if I did not also acknowledge, as Lipsitz states, that the work of counter-memory is “dangerous terrain.” And indeed, it is. Acuña, for example, writes about the work the he and James Dennis (chair of Pan-African studies) struggled to accomplish when they established Chicana/o and Pan-African studies at San Fernando Valley State College. They intentionally linked the fates of our departments together—in the face of students being forcefully arrested and charged with felony trespassing, which garnered many of them prison sentences. I might also add that the protests at San Francisco State to establish ethnic studies is the oft-cited protest that began the ethnic studies wave, but the students at San Fernando were protesting and taking to the streets and organizing their communities before that important moment. There are also lots of others I can cite here, such as Native American writers Louise Erdrich, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Tommy Orange, who write about counter-memory as something that literally saved nations of Native peoples. Similarly, Kelley writes about settler colonialism as the desire to erase peoples, and I cannot help but think of

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displacement of native peoples—and even of what is happening in Denver to Black and Brown inhabitants of once diverse neighborhoods. 3. Lipsitz, Time Passages, 213. 4. Paul Gilroy, in The Black Atlantic, advances the idea of the Black diaspora. Gilroy contends that African peoples across the diaspora share strains, if not outright culture, practices, which have much to do with where people of African descent came from but also their shared experiences of racial trauma. That Gilroy links shared racial trauma to other colonized groups of people is also important and helps me establish that link to “remembering Africa” and the Latinx writers I cite here. 5. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Vintage Books, 1987). 6. This idea of healing from pain, acknowledging the pain and trauma of living life as a person of color in the United States, is something that comes up later, which Kelley reminds us is important in the step to recovery and to imagining justice and a future free from pain and trauma. 7. Tcho Mbaimba Caulker, “Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in Sierra Leone: Thomas Decker’s Juliohs Siza, Roman Politics, and the Emergence of a Postcolonial African State,” Research in African Literatures 40, no. 2 (Summer 2009): 208–27, https:​//​libproxy​.csun​.edu​/login​?url​=https:​//​www​.proquest​.com​/scholarly​-journals​/ shakespeares​-julius​-caesar​-sierra​-leone​-thomas​/docview​/207629759​/se​-2​?accountid​ =7285. 8. Mikhail M. Bakhtin and Michael Holquist, Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Dialogic Imagination (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981). Thanks to Joern Langhorst for pointing out that what I was describing is Bakhtin’s idea of heteroglossia. See specifically the chapter on “Discourse in the Novel,” where Bakhtin critiques the focus on stylistics of the novel that “ignores the social life of discourse outside the artist’s study, discourse in the open spaces of public squares, streets, cities and villages, of social groups, generations and epochs” (259). 9. Patricia Gurin, Jeffrey S Lehman, and Earl Lewis, Defending Diversity: Affirmative Action at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.3998​/mpub​.17844. 10. Maybe it is not accidental but a purposeful outcome of students choosing their majors before they have had time to explore their own lives and interests that we have seen a drop in students declaring majors in ethnic studies. They often come to us a little late, and potentially choosing a major in their junior or senior year has an impact of the numbers of FTES among students and therefore the first-year writing classes that we are allocated. 11. Renee Moreno, unpublished letter in author’s possession, February 8, 2022. 12. Rudolfo Acuna, The Making of Chicana/o Studies: In the Trenches of Academe (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011), Kindle, location 2168. 13. Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (New York: New York University Press, 2012). 14. George Lipsitz, “History, Myth, and Counter-Memory: Narrative and Desire in Popular Novels,” Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 212–13, http:​//​www​.jstor​.org​/ stable​/10​.5749​/j​.cttttz1b.

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15. Susi Long, Katrina Bartow Jacobs, Renée Wilmot, Lynsey Burkins, and Becky Sipe, Educators’ Right and Responsibilities to Engage in Antiracist Teaching, National Council of Teachers of English, March 7, 2022, https:​//​ncte​.org​/statement​/ antiracist​-teaching​/. 16. Dave Eggers, “Anatomy of a Book Banning,” Washington Post, June 24, 2022, pars. 2–3, https:​//​www​.washingtonpost​.com​/outlook​/2022​/06​/24​/dave​-eggers​-book​ -bans​-south​-dakota​/. 17. One of our last NCTE Annual conferences in Atlanta took me and my friend Valerie to a trip to the Civil Rights Museum in the city. This trip was at the height of Trump’s power and control over the body politic in the United States, and Valeria and I were looking for confirmation and respite in the museum. And indeed, it was beautiful and powerful, but then we ended our visit, confronting the last exhibit hall, showing the faces and stories of people who had paid with their lives to seek the gains of civil rights. Thinking we had read the handful of stories about these brave martyrs, we rounded the corner only to be confronted with a roomful of stories about people who had died so that our dreams of an equal society could be realized—people who are still being lost. We should not forget these stories. 18. The Clever Agency, “Ethnic Studies Interactive,” Ethnic Studies Interactive, https:​//​www​.ethnicstudiesinteractive​.com​/, accessed June 30, 2022. The work of colleagues across the CSU, especially the work of Dr. Dale Allender and others and their interactive scholarship with teachers across K–12 schooling has been compiled into their valuable and comprehensive website “Ethnic Studies Interactive.” 19. Robin D. G. Kelley, “‘Preface,” Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), x. 20. Locating writing courses in our departments is a constant back and forth with CSUN administration that conveniently remembers and forgets institutional histories. Certain administrators have cited that law or medical schools “prefer” their students to take first year writing in the English Department; recently, policy changes in the allocation of writing courses in departments with larger FTS, inevitably locates the majority of writing courses to CSUN’s English Department. We must push back against policy. We must be smart in recalling history; we have to remember the stories about why teaching writing in ethnic studies departments is unique and necessary. 21. Caulker, “Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar,” 208, 211. 22. Robin D. G. Kelley, “‘When History Sleeps’: A Beginning.” Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), 9. 23. Joern Langhorst, “Understanding Space and Identity: Toward Critical Spatial Humanities and Critical Pedagogies” (lecture, California State University, Northridge, Northridge, CA, April 14, 2022). 24. Luis C. Moll, “Tapping Into the ‘Hidden’ Home and Community Resources of Students,” Kappa Delta Pi Record 51, no. 3 (2015): 114–17, https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1080​ /00228958​.2015​.1056661. 25. Rudolfo Acuna, The Making of Chicana/o Studies: In the Trenches of Academe, (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011), Kindle, location 40. 26. Kelley. Freedom Dreams, xi.

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27. Luis Rivas. “African American Enrollment Drops,” Daily Sundial, December 3, 2013, https:​//​sundial​.csun​.edu​/73592​/news​/african​-american​-enrollment​-drops​/. 28. Kali Fajardo-Anstine. Sabrina and Corina (New York: One World, 2020). 2926 Lisa Fink, “Celebrate Juan Felipe Herrera,” Literacy and NCTE (blog), December 27, 2022, https:​//​ncte​.org​/blog​/2022​/12​/celebrate​-juan​-felipe​-herrera​/. 30. K. Fajardo-Anstine and J. F. Herrera, “Confluencia: Friday General Session,” National Council of Teachers of English, Virtual Annual Convention, November 20, 2020. 31. Hilton Als, “Toni Morrison and the Ghosts in the House,” New Yorker, October 19, 2003, https:​//​www​.newyorker​.com​/magazine​/2003​/10​/27​/ghosts​-in​-the​-house. 32. Juan Felipe Herrera, “Let Me Tell You What a Poem Brings,” Poetry Foundation, December 2022, https:​//​www​.poetryfoundation​.org​/poems​/52286​/let​-me​-tell​ -you​-what​-a​-poem​-brings. 33. Joern Langhorst, email message to author, July 7, 2022. 34. Mike Grady, “New Book of Short Stories Aims to Preserve Denver’s Roots,” 9News, April 3, 2019, https:​//​www​.9news​.com​/article​/news​/local​/new​-book​-of​-short​ -stories​-aims​-to​-keep​-denver​-denver​/73​-f7204eb6​-a05d​-4f8c​-aed3​-867fb732a566. 35. Tom Spencer-Walters, “Orality and Patriarchal Domination in Buchi Emecheta’s The Slave Girl,” in Emerging Perspectives on Buchi Emecheta, edited by Maria Umeh, 125–37 (Trenton: African World Press, Inc., 1996). https://archive.org/details/ emergingperspect0000unse_a8t0/page/n9/mode/2up. 36. Alan Pendergast. “South Platte Flood of 1965,” History Colorado, Colorado Encyclopedia, March 13, 2020, https:​//​coloradoencyclopedia​.org​/article​/south​-platte​ -flood​-1965, accessed June 25, 2022, 37. Alfredo Lujan, “Confluencia,” email message to author, May 7, 2019. Lujan states, I have loved the word confluencia for at least 30 years. Its English translation— confluence—also slides off the tongue. A confluencia is literally the merging of waters—the junction of two rivers. But a confluence is, of course, figurative too: the joining and/or reunion of ideas, genres, philosophies, songs, cultures, terrains, wafts, teachers and students of English, pedagogies. Hmmm: NCTE. . . . I was able to meet with Renee, Juan, and Diana for a night cap. We chatted about Denver, Corky Gonzales (I Am Joaquin/Yo Soy Joaquín), the Civil Rights Movement, and the theme for the Denver conference. 38. Joern Lanhorst, email message to author, July 8, 2022. 39. Life House, “The Story,” https:​//​www​.lifehousehotels​.com​/hotels​/denver​/lower​ -highlands. 40. Robin D. G. Kelley. “The Rest of Us: Rethinking Settler and Native,” American Quarterly 69, no. 2 (2017): 267–76, doi:10.1353/aq.2017.0020. 41. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, “Languages as Bridges: Resisting Metaphysical Empires,” lecture, California State University, Northridge. Northridge, CA, November 7, 2014. 42. Lipsitz, Time Passages, 212. 43. Tara J. Yasso and Daniel G. Solórzano, “Leaks in the Chicana and Chicano Educational Pipeline,” Latino Policy & Issues Brief, no. 13 (March 2006): 1–4, https:​ //​eric​.ed​.gov​/​?id​=ED493404.

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44. Many students take first year writing at local community colleges. When EO 665 was implemented, students not passing first year writing faced the arduous task of retaking first year writing, either at CSUN or another CSU or at community college, then reenrolling at CSUN. If their grades were low, which was often the case, they also had to rebuild their GPA (grade point average) to qualifying for readmission to the university. Other executive orders used the logic that if students were taking basic courses at community colleges, why bother with offering first year writing (and maybe other basic courses) at the CSU? Dual enrollment courses also addressed some of these concerns, where students could take a college level first year writing course at their high school. But again, I would argue, that defeats the purpose that many of our founding members of ethnic studies envisioned by offering first year writing in our departments. Again, I would also argue that the site of contestation is purposeful. Undermining the teaching of writing in ethnic studies through students’ own attrition and failure has the effect of pushing us out of this teaching and enforcing an argument to locate the teaching of writing in a more traditional department like English. Caulker’s article, referenced above, with its emphasis on appropriating and re-envisioning a canonical text like Julius Cesar is brilliant because Thomas Decker was taking a page from the playbook of Chicana/o and African American activist academics. In essence, we continue the tradition of appropriating, reappropriating, and reimagining how the teaching of language and literacy can happen from our point of view. That is powerful, strong, and resilient, I think. 45. Tom Spencer-Walters, personal communication with author, March 2013. 46. Kit Fan, “Nightcrawling by Leila Mottley Review—a Dazzling Debut,” The Guardian, June 2, 2022, https:​//​www​.theguardian​.com​/books​/2022​/jun​/02​/ nightcrawling​-by​-leila​-mottley​-review​-a​-dazzling​-debut. 47. Ngũgĩ wa Thiongʼo. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (Nairobi: James Currey, 1986), 110.

REFERENCES Acuña, Rodolfo F. Occupied America: The Chicano’s Struggle Toward Liberation. San Francisco, CA: Canfield Press, 1972. ———. The Making of Chicana/o Studies: In the Trenches of Academe. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011. Kindle. Als, Hilton. “Toni Morrison and the Ghosts in the House,” New Yorker, October 19, 2003. https:​//​www​.newyorker​.com​/magazine​/2003​/10​/27​/ghosts​-in​-the​-house. Bakhtin, Mikhail M., and Michael Holquist. Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Dialogic Imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Caulker, Tcho Mbaimba. “Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in Sierra Leone: Thomas Decker’s Juliohs Siza, Roman Politics, and the Emergence of a Postcolonial African State.” Research in African Literatures 40, no. 2 (Summer 2009): 208–27. Delgado, Richard, and Jean Stefancic. Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. New York: New York University Press, 2012.

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Eggers, Dave. “Anatomy of a Book Banning.” Washington Post, June 24, 2022. https:​ //​www​.washingtonpost​.com​/outlook​/2022​/06​/24​/dave​-eggers ​-book​-bans​-south​ -dakota​/. Fajardo-Anstine, Kali. Sabrina and Corina. New York: One World, 2020. Fajardo-Anstine, K., and J. F. Herrera. “Confluencia: Friday General Session.” National Council of Teachers of English, Virtual Annual Convention, November 20, 2020. Fan, Kit. “Nightcrawling by Leila Mottley Review—a Dazzling Debut.” The Guardian, June 2, 2022. https:​//​www​.theguardian​.com​/books​/2022​/jun​/02​/nightcrawling​-by​-leila​-mottley​-review​-a​-dazzling​-debut. Fink, Lisa. “Celebrate Juan Felipe Herrera.” Literacy and NCTE (blog), December 27, 2022. https:​//​ncte​.org​/blog​/2022​/12​/celebrate​-juan​-felipe​-herrera​/. Grady, Mike. “New Book of Short Stories Aims to Preserve Denver’s Roots.” 9News, April 3, 2019. https:​//​www​.9news​.com​/article​/news​/local​/new​-book​-of​-short​ -stories​-aims​-to​-keep​-denver​-denver​/73​-f7204eb6​-a05d​-4f8c​-aed3​-867fb732a566. Gurin, Patricia, Jeffrey S Lehman, and Earl Lewis. Defending Diversity: Affirmative Action at the University of Michigan. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010. https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.3998​/mpub​.17844. Herrera, Juan Felipe. “Let Me Tell You What a Poem Brings.” Poetry Foundation, December 2022. https:​//​www​.poetryfoundation​.org​/poems​/52286​/let​-me​-tell​-you​ -what​-a​-poem​-brings. Kelley, Robin D. G. “The Rest of Us: Rethinking Settler and Native.” American Quarterly 69, no. 2 (2017): 267–76. doi:10.1353/aq.2017.0020. Kelley, Robin D. G. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Boston: Beacon Press, 2002. Langhorst, Joern. “Understanding Space and Identity: Toward Critical Spatial Humanities and Critical Pedagogies.” Lecture, California State University, Northridge, Northridge, CA, April 14, 2022. Life House. “The Story: A Western Pioneer’s Victorian Homestead.” Life House Boutique Hotels. Advertisement. Lipsitz, George. Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990. Long, Susi Long, Katrina Bartow Jacobs, Renée Wilmot, Lynsey Burkins, and Becky Sipe. “Educators’ Right and Responsibilities to Engage in Antiracist Teaching.” National Council of Teachers of English, March 7, 2022. Moll, Luis C. “Tapping Into the ‘Hidden’ Home and Community Resources of Students.” Kappa Delta Pi Record 51, no. 3 (2015): 114–17. https:​//​doi​.org​/10​ .1080​/00228958​.2015​.1056661. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Vintage Books, 1987. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. “Languages as Bridges: Resisting Metaphysical Empires.” Lecture, California State University, Northridge. Northridge, CA. November 7, 2014. Ngũgĩ wa Thiongʼo. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. Nairobi: James Currey, 1986.

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Pendergast, Alan. “South Platte Flood of 1965.” History Colorado, Colorado Encyclopedia, March 13, 2020. https:​//​coloradoencyclopedia​.org​/article​/south​ -platte​-flood​-1965. Accessed June 25, 2022. The Clever Agency. “Ethnic Studies Interactive.” Ethnic Studies Interactive. https:​//​ www​.ethnicstudiesinteractive​.com​/. Accessed June 30, 2022. Rivas, Luis. “African American Enrollment Drops.” Daily Sundial, December 3, 2013. https:​//​sundial​.csun​.edu​/73592​/news​/african​-american​-enrollment​-drops​/. Spencer-Walters, Tom. “Orality and Patriarchal Domination in Buchi Emecheta’s The Slave Girl.” Umeh, 125–37. Yasso, Tara J., and Daniel G. Solórzano. “Leaks in the Chicana and Chicano Educational Pipeline,” Latino Policy & Issues Brief, no. 13 (March 2006). https:​//​ eric​.ed​.gov​/​?id​=ED493404.

9

Marché Sandaga The Language of the Built Environment in Remembering and Re-Membering Africa Suzanne Scheld

In this chapter, I examine the role of the built environment in re-membering Africa and discuss Marché Sandaga in Dakar, Senegal, as an example of buildings that tell a story. I begin this discussion with a vignette: Marché Sandaga was a special place. It was located in the heart of Dakar’s downtown in between Avenue du President Lamine Gueye, Avenue Emile Badiane, and Rue Sandinieri. The market was known for its particular architectural style, referred to neo-Sudanese or Sudano-Sahelian style, which blends the geometric features of art deco and characteristics of mud architecture associated with structures found in the Sahel region. Specifically, the market featured scaffolding-like poles protruding from the walls, a decorative parapet, and boxy minarets. Few structures in Dakar have similar features. When entering the marketplace, one often needed to squeeze between the bana-bana, itinerate vendors selling stacks of goods on low, rickety wooden tables, who packed themselves into the open space in front of the market hall. Sometimes it was necessary to twist and duck while approaching the entrance so as to avoid the spokes of dust-covered umbrellas that provided shade to street vendors. Entering Sandaga required an awareness of space on all sides of the body. Sandaga was also a place to experience sensory overload. The market was often jam-packed with people; a leisurely stroll through the market was impossible. Colors abounded as merchandise covered countertops and doorways and hung from wires strung across vending stalls. Even the ground was 169

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colorful. The scraps of vibrant African prints littered the floor, discarded by tailors as they pushed their fabrics between the bobbing needles and their electric sewing machines. The smell of burned plastic from irons used to affix embroidery wafted in the air, as well as the smell of burning coals that brewed bitter Chinese tea, and the scent of churaay, a locally-made incense that shopkeepers burned to attract customers and mask unsavory scents that emanated from unrefrigerated fish, meat, and rapidly maturing mangoes. Mbalax, a style of music that mixes African drums, jazz, and the electric guitar, roared at high volumes and overpowered the sound of feet shuffling across the dusty market aisles, as well as conversation, including reminders from companions to be aware of pickpockets. I fondly remember socializing with friendly vendors selling men’s pret-a-porter, knockoff Senegalese soccer jerseys, Darling, a locally-produced hair weave, and music cassettes by Youssou N’dour, Thione Seck, Positive Black Soul, and Fatou Gewel. Vendors were welcoming and hospitable, offering stools to rest on and conversing with me and others passing by in Wolof, Puular, Serer, French, English, Spanish, Arabic, and other local and international languages. Conversations covered everything: domestic and international politics, fashion trends, market prices, well-being advice, and market gossip, among other topics. The market was where one could research how to become branché, a local expression youth used to refer to being in style. It was also a place where one could become “plugged in” to much more too, including news about the city and beyond. Despite business competitions within the market, Marché Sandaga was a vibrant place that fostered social and economic networks, cultural innovation, and an identification with Dakar, a symbol of Senegalese nationalism and Pan-Africanism in West Africa. When news about the municipality’s plans to demolish the market began to circulate in the early 2010s, many vendors didn’t believe that the building would even be torn down and many refused to leave. Even though the cement walls were increasingly pockmarked, with pieces crumbling off and rebar exposed in places, vendors refused to relocate. The market was closed for a period of time in 2013 due to an unexplained fire which some assumed was a strategy to move vendors out. Vendors returned to their stalls, however. Eventually, the local traders’ association persuaded vendors to relocate; however, other Senegalese citizens, such as consumers who relied on the market and Senegalese leaders in cultural heritage, were not consulted. Bull dozers razed the building on August 4, 2020. Itinerate vendors continued to sell goods on the periphery of the marketplace as if the building were still there.

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In September of 2022, the Supreme Court of Senegal annulled the decision to demolish the market, but it was too late to save the building. *** The Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1990) argues that speaking one’s native language is key to re-membering Africa. By “re-membering,” he refers to the need to piece African knowledge and social memory back together again. Centuries of the transatlantic slave trade, followed by decades of European colonization, resulted in destroying African language, culture, and history. During the colonial period, African languages were framed as inferior forms of communication. Their use was undermined and endangered by their distortion, censoring, and fragmentation. Through the privileging of European languages, European colonizers sought to control Africans in explicit and tacit ways. Thiong’o considers it important to promote African languages. He sees using African languages as an act of resistance and an effort to restore social memory and re-member Africa. He put this idea into practice by writing several works of fiction in Kikuyu, his native tongue. Once such piece of fiction he wrote on bits of toilet paper while imprisoned in Kenya for his political activism (see Caitani Mutharabaini [1981], translated as “Devil on a Cross”). To write or not write in one’s native language has been debated for many years. A robust literature documents this debate (see Mlama 1990). Some argue that writing in local languages limits one’s audience and, by extension,

Marché Sandaga in Dakar, Senegal. Source: Picture taken by author.

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one’s power. Others argue, local languages aren’t mere systems of communication but complex human innovations that embody cultural identities and mechanisms for keeping communities intact. Their protection is a human rights obligation (De Varennes 2001; UNESCO 2022). Tom Spencer-Walters (2011) builds on Thiong’o’s call to re-member Africa through the use of African languages by elaborating on the issues of power associated with the narrative imagination. He notes that stories about the past have become a popular way for reaching a host of contradictory goals with respect to Africa, including unifying community, nation-state building, and pacifying people through social amnesia (2011, 2–4). In other words, the details, delivery, language used, and purpose of telling stories have consequences. However, the politicization of language and storytelling cannot undo linguicide and its deleterious effects on individual and community identities, histories, and notions of belonging. In this chapter, I relate notions of language and re-membering Africa to the built environment in Dakar, Senegal. Specifically, I examine the “biography” of Marché Sandaga, which until recently was a prominent building in the city. Now it is gone. Forms in the built environment have “social lives” (Appadurai 1986; Kopytoff 1986) that are created through the social interactions and that take place within them and the discourse about them. The biographies of buildings shape their reputations and aura, which has an effect on human lives. Thus, a biographical approach emphasizes the relationships, attachments, and forms of identity that people develop with the built environment and portrays a robust picture of what forms in the built environment mean to a community. In this chapter, I also join Spencer-Walters’s perspective on storytelling, the diverse forms of power behind them, and their effects on social memory. Biographies are similar to stories in that they convey a narrative about a person’s life based on the accumulation of a person’s experiences and relationships. Marché Sandaga’s biography is fragmented. Much of the market’s past has not been documented, and existing documents are hard to find. Bits of the market’s biography provide a window onto a fragmented urban society as well. Fragmentation, then, makes the market a mythical place, and invites diverse storytellers to narrate its story. How the story of Marché Sandaga will be told depends upon the positionality of the storyteller in the urban landscape. This discussion is based on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork in Dakar between 1996 and the present, and thwarted efforts to obtain documents that characterize the market. In the mid-1990s, I studied youth fashion, identity, and globalization in Dakar, and therefore spent a lot of time undertaking participant observation and interviewing traders in a variety of markets in the city and the suburbs. Prior to the beginning of this research, I had married

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into a transnational Senegalese family that had members who worked in Dakar’s clothing trade. During my field stays, I was often asked to follow up on business communication with partners in Marché Sandaga. These requests afforded me the opportunity to spend many hours in the market and to see the social life of the market through the eyes of those who relied on it for their livelihood and those who relied on it for procuring goods central to their social identity and status. In these circumstances, I always explained my research agenda to those with whom I spoke. This helped to clarify the mixture of goals that brought me to the market and why I was often unaccompanied by family or friends. This discussion is also informed by field experiences that occurred while searching for archival material about the market. It was challenging to locate information about the market and its relationship to the city’s economy. Indeed, one search for a report led me to the bedroom of a state employee who claimed that due to limited storage space in her office, employees were safeguarding documents in their homes. She lifted up the mattress, and underneath an old copy of Marie Claire and a smashed hair weave was a study of Marché Sandaga undertaken by a nongovernmental organization. The report was missing a number of pages. This instance, while both humorous and concerning, resonates with the experiences that others have had while researching the history of urban Africa. The Ghanaian historian, Samuel Ntewusu, for example, describes his experiences researching the history of transportation in Ghana in a number of archives spread across the state (2014, 417–23). He describes feeling sad by the lack of care that is given to archival material. Due to limited storage at the archives in Tamale, for example, valuable historical documents were stored on the verandah, while others were stored in rooms that lacked reliable air conditioning. He wondered whether he would find the documents he was consulting if he ever returned to the archives in the future. This story and my own illustrate that despite efforts to preserve history in official archives, many archives are fragmented, and valuable documents are missing pages and are not well cared for. Yet researchers access records in serendipitous ways, underscoring the fragmented nature of urban history in Africa. LANGUAGE AND THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT A number of theoretical ideas and debates help to demonstrate why the biography of buildings relate to re-membering Africa. Although the notion of re-membering initially referred to language and memory intersections, forms of the built environment are also vehicles of social memory for they are often conceived as metaphorically and literally possessing language. Architects, for

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example, view symbols in the design features, styles, and materials of a built form as a type of grammar that “speaks” about society as it is positioned in points in time (de Botton 2007). Sometimes the design features of a building, also referred to as the architectonics, can be read for clues about the past; sometimes they announce the aspirations of a community. Architectonics are generally conceived as expressing a harmonic or a unified message, not fragmented communication (Greer 2020). Reading Marché Sandaga through the lens of architectonics tells an intriguing story about processes of dismemberment underlining a mirage of re-membering during the colonial period. In post-colonial times, the style of the marketplace did not change, however, the structure began to fall apart. This then was a literal fragmentation of the market, which revealed the story of a market under the stewardship of the municipality and state. Place-naming is another form of language that shapes the built environment and makes inroads to re-membering Africa. Place-naming orients people to a time and a place and provides connections to stories that convey information and provide guidance for a community. In Spatializing Culture: The Ethnography of Space and Place (2017), Setha Low reviews several examples of place-naming studies, including a study of violence and memory in Medellín, Columbia, where place-names evoke social critique, and a study of place-names in Poland in 1949 to 1957, which were used to legitimize the Communist Party (see Pilar Riano-Alcalá [2002] and Lebow [1999] in Low 2017, 121–22). In the case of Marché Sandaga, a place-naming perspective reveals how the marketplace has shaped the surrounding commercial district, which is also referred to as “Sandaga,” reflecting the expansive nature of the marketplace’s aura that has brought together swaths of urban space and communities. The power of place-naming is also observed in the ways that others construct space in the diaspora as contiguous to Dakar and specifically the neighborhood Sandaga, which surrounds the market hall Sandaga. This is achieved by African emigrant businesses in the Global North naming their shops after the marketplace and neighorhood.11 But these new forms of local and transnational integration overlay a space which Beeckmanns and Bigon point out was once an African village prior to the construction of the market hall (2016, 416). These people and their histories have been forgotten in the processes of urbanization, highlighting the power of architectural language to bury, create, and re-create social memory. The language of the built environment may also be observed in and interpreted as the sounds that buildings make as they settle into the ground or vibrate in the wind. Such notes prompt some to argue that the built environment can speak and has agentive capabilities (see Doucett and Cupers 2009). The notion that buildings literally communicate is controversial, especially since sounds can only signal a condition of the built environment. They are

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not innovated by an animate being with a mind and consciousness. Instead, inanimate buildings appear to speak in so much as people assign meanings to their whooshes, gurgles, and creaks. That said, some perceive buildings as enacting power in planned and unplanned ways by channeling people to move and interact in particular ways. Forms in the built environment can have actual effects on people’s lives and the social life of city as well. Some perceived Marché Sandaga to be exerting a negative effect on people and the urban environment, thus, they advocated for it to be removed. In contrast, some saw the removal of the building as more than the loss of an inanimate structure that stored symbolic cultural information, but a violent act against people whose identities and sense of belonging in the city and nation-state was embedded within the structure. The demolition of the market hall is akin to erasing whole communities from the urban landscape, and is a severe form of dismembering Africa. Studies of urbicide remind us that communities have vital attachments to forms in the built environment; identities, purpose, and a sense of belonging are embedded within space through place-making processes (Coward 2009; Low 2017, 76–78). For this reason, key monuments, buildings, and built forms are deliberately destroyed in the context of war and conflict (Gordillo 2004; Schneider and Susser 2003). Erasing history is a deliberate means of debilitating a community. In this sense, the loss of a historic urban market is like the loss of a human language. Cultural knowledge, memory, and social relations embedded in each cease to exist, leaving other dynamics to defining memory to fill the void. EMERGENCE OF THE MARKET Marché Sandaga began as a European colonial invention. Beeckmanns and Bigon (2016), provide a compelling analysis of the marketplace’s early history. They reveal that the marketplace was one of two markets to appear on the 1862 plan of Dakar. Marché Sandaga was situated along a caravan route. But more importantly, it was planned as a counterpoint to Marché Kermel, a neo-Moorish style market hall located in Plateau, the center of the town in the nineteenth century. Marché Kermel was considered to be the more prominent market at the time and was predominantly frequented by European settlers. In contrast, Marché Sandaga was laid out on top of an African village whose name, “Santiaba,” inspired the name for the marketplace (Beeckmanns and Bigon 2016, 415). Beeckmanns and Bigon note that the two markets were intentionally spaced apart so as to informally keep Africans from co-mingling with Europeans.

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Over time and as the town grew, Marché Sandaga became the more important market in Dakar, especially when the market hall was constructed in 1934. At the time, there were not many buildings in the city with an art deco, neo-Sudanese style. Thus, the building stood out in the landscape. It was also considered to be an interesting place to visit because in its early days public events were held in the market. For example, an elder whom I interviewed in the mid-2000s recalled watching boxing matches in the market.22 According to Bigon, there were several additional reasons for constructing the market hall. First, Dakar was initially a sleepy town (Betts 1970), but it was gaining prominence as it had become the capital of the Afrique-Occidentale française (AOF) in 1902. In light, of its growing importance in the region and in the French colonial empire, the town was in need of impressive architecture. Constructing Marché Sandaga contributed to enlivening the town and boosting its reputation. Second, during the interwar period, the French colonial administration shifted its approach to maintaining control over its colonies. In the early stages of colonizing West Africa, the French approached Africans as people who needed to be assimilated into French ways of speaking and thinking. For this reason, Africans were pressured to use French. Dakarois elders recall heavy-handed approaches to inculcating the French language within the minds of school-aged youth in Catholic schools, even after Independence in 1960. For example, children were required to play a game whereby a bone necklace was placed on the student who slipped into speaking their native language instead of French while playing at recess. There were other approaches to reinforcing the use of French that involved corporal punishment. Schoolyards, then, were fertile grounds for dismembering Africa. In the interwar period, however, French colonial administrators attempted to implement a philosophy of “association” in order to engage Africans while also dominating them. This new approach entailed minimal recognition of African language and culture to engender buy-in to the authority of the colonial administration (Betts 1970; Bigon 2016, 153–54). The architectural style of Marché Sandaga reflected the spirit of “association” as French colonial architects thought it was important to design an African-looking market which would frame the administration as reaching out to Africans and their way of life. Bigon calls this the “protector style” (154). Bigon points out that the neo-Sudanese mud architectural style was an ironic choice of architectural styles if one were attempting to reach out to Africans in Cap Vert, the peninsula of Dakar. The geography of the peninsula would not have supported this style of architecture, thus it was somewhat culturally irrelevant to Africans in Dakar. Europeans, however, were fascinated by this style and deemed it to be exotic and representative of African architecture. In other words, European colonial architects designed a plan for the market that reflected their notions

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of African culture in addition to their need to involve Africans in the colony while also keeping Africans and Europeans separate from one another. This “Africanized” monumental architecture was used to pacify and control Africans, underscoring the dismembering capabilities of the language of architecture when employed by Europeans that sought to dominate Africans in “their” colony. A third reason for building Marché Sandaga is tied to the Colonial Exhibitions in France. These exhibitions sought to celebrate the accomplishments of Europeans in the colonies and were used to promote justifications for remaining in the colonies. Colonial exhibitions entailed the display of artefacts and images of architectural feats, as well as the re-creation of villages and scenery from Africa. Performances and demonstrations of artisan craftsmanship were often a part of the exhibitions as well. Shamefully, many exhibitions used Africans as props in the displays. They were not given a choice about their participation in the exhibitions or provided adequate accommodations during their stay in Europe. Marché Sandaga was an outcome of this uncomfortable history which highlights the spatial and social dismemberment of Dakar in the colonial period. A fourth reason for building the market had to do with the repurposing of materials used in the Marseille expositions in 1922. The metal structures that comprised the walls of Marché Sandaga in Dakar were fabricated in France for the AOF pavilion at the exposition. The metal frame was then shipped to Dakar for use in the construction of an actual market twelve years later (Bigon 2016, 163). This detail in the history of Marché Sandaga underscores the extent to which the marketplace was a highly fragmented piece of the urban fabric. Imagined and built in Europe for European consumption, then shipped to Dakar for segregating the city, pacifying, and controlling Africans, the history of Marché Sandaga brings into relief the layered processes of dismemberment. The long-lasting effects of these processes are articulated in the lament of some Dakarois who feel the demolition of the market constitutes the loss of an example of African architecture in the city. Such laments call to mind Gayatri Spivak’s notion of “worlding” (1985), which she develops to explain how Indian minds were colonized by European literary frameworks and uses of language. Spivak suggests Europeans’ presentations of their travels and visions of the world (i.e., colonies) articulated through their written records, archives, and literary works encouraged the colonized to emotionally identify with their representations and reproduce their values. I broaden the list of linguistic approaches that compelled individuals to cathect with the imagery of European travelers to include public discourse about the built environment. In this manner, the worlding of Marché Sandaga captured local African minds, which fostered support for dismembering Africa.

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THE AFRICAN AFRICANIZATION OF THE MARKET After World War II and up until the mid-1960s, Marché Sandaga was dominated by Lebanese traders. The market place was situated in an unofficial buffer zone between the living quarters of Europeans and Medina, the African quarters that lie slightly north of Marché Sandaga. Lebanese traders were encouraged to live in this in-between space, which meant many lived close to Marché Sandaga. Soon after Independence, the Senegalese government sought to Africanize many sectors of the economy, including the agricultural sector and groundnut transportation, which is where many Lebanese-Senegalese had employment. The Africanization of the economy also propelled many Lebanese-Senegalese to shift out of transportation and into urban market vending. This helped to diminish conflicts with the Senegalese government who did not always treat Lebanese-Senegalese favorably, even though many were officially Senegalese citizens. Marché Sandaga further transformed in the late 1970s and early 1980s due to the rise of Murid trading in Senegal and its extended network into many other cities around the world. The Murid brotherhood is an Islamic sect indigenous to Senegal. It was founded in the nineteenth century by Amadou Bamba Mbacké, who was celebrated for challenging the French colonial administration’s efforts to take control over the groundnut economy. Many farmers were drawn to the sect because of the security Murid leaders provided those who resisted European colonization. Eventually, Murid leaders developed close ties with French colonial administrators and Senegalese political leaders after Independence. These relations afforded Murid imams to retain a good deal of power in Senegal, especially over the region of Touba, the holy city of the Murid religion located in the interior of the country. In Touba, for example, imams blocked the state from opening up public schools. Instead, youth attended schools supported by the brotherhoods and with curriculum delivered in Arabic instead of French. This, in addition to other arrangements that religious leaders had with government authorities in Senegal during the colonial and postcolonial periods, permitted the religion to rapidly grow and to become associated with specific spaces in the nation, such as Touba, several neighborhoods in Dakar, and Marché Sandaga. According to the Senegalese historian Mamdou Diouf (2000), Murids had always migrated to Dakar; however, the flow of migration began to increase in the 1940s as evidenced by the rise of neighborhoods bearing religious names such as Touba, Colobane, and Gouye Mouride. Drought in the 1970s prompted another significant flow of Murids to Dakar. During this time, many took up work in Marché Sandaga and became known as savvy migrants who knew how to economize, coordinate within religious networks, and use

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commerce as a means to amass capital. Given the large number of Murids who worked in Marché Sandaga and the surrounding neighborhood, traders organized religious events in the market to bring the community together. Cheikh Anta Mbacké Babou (2007) describes the formation of prayer circles in the market and pilgrimages from the marketplace and through the nearby streets in honor of Cheikh Amadou Bamba, a prophet of Muridism. Cheikh Amadou Bamba is said to have walked through the neighborhood on his way into exile in Gabon, therefore traders in the market wanted to retrace his historical walk within Sandaga. Indeed, the image of Cheikh Amadou Bamba is painted on the many walls in the neighborhood (as well as elsewhere in the city), and references to him are painted on the sides of Kar Rapids, vehicles of a bus-like system of transportation.3 Given the presence of place-naming references and stories related to Murid religion in and around Marché Sandaga, one could sense the market had become a place of re-membering Africa. It was a place where rural citizens were able to emplace themselves legibly within the city. It was also a place where the roots of Senegal’s independence afforded by the Murid community was also rendered visible within Senegal. In the 1980s, the global spread of neoliberalism led countries in the Global North to relax border policies, which resulted in increased Murid migration to Dakar and beyond. Marché Sandaga was perceived as a site where one could quickly raise enough money for a plane ticket and connect with courtiers who would help to facilitate visas for emigration to New York, Toronto, Rome, or Canberra, among other cities. In turn, the function of the market shifted. Whereas Marché Sandaga was originally was a place to buy foodstuff and textiles, due to Murid traders’ transnational networks, the market became a place to buy globally trending ready-made clothing and electronics imported from Hong Kong, Jeddah, New York, and various parts of Europe. At the time, scholars were both fascinated by and romanticized the success of enterprising rural Murid traders who appeared to have more economic success than many highly educated individuals. Jokes about the abilities the modou-modou a hustling Murid trader, were plentiful. For example, many commonly joked that rural Murid merchants were trying to trade on the moon. In sum, the view of Marché Sandaga as symbol of Murid trading and Senegalese transnationalism was cemented by this time. Some successful Murid traders worked their way into Dakar’s urban hierarchy and used economic gains fostered through networks in Marché Sandaga and the Diaspora to emigrate. Upon their return to Senegal, they also had enough capital to build new and luxurious homes in Las Almadies, a neighborhood on the outskirts of Dakar that was once inhabited by well-to-do European and American expatriates. One could add that the Marché Sandaga was then an important mechanism for re-membering Africa.

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URBAN DEVELOPMENT IN DAKAR IN THE 2000S Marché Sandaga’s role in re-membering Africa is significantly threatened in the 2000s due to an uptick in Dakar’s urbanization, which puts pressure on the city’s infrastructure. In 2000, Dakar’s population was 1,862,000, and by 2020 it had increased to 3,140,000 (United Nations 2022), for example. In the case of Marché Sandaga, there was much conversation about the need to take down the building as it was beginning to fall apart. Indeed, the building was afforded very little protection from forms of misuse. In 2012, I was given a tour of the building and was brought to the rooftop for a view of the city’s skyline. The zinc sheets covering the roof were loaded down with broken card board boxes, polyester sacks, cans, and other packing trash left behind. Evidently, traders used the roof for staging their work, but they didn’t develop a system for disposing materials they no longer needed. In addition to this, some traders slept on the roof when they had no other accommodations. The roof did not look like a safe environment for people or merchandise. In 2002, the need to renovate infrastructure in the city increased when Senegal was selected to host the Eleventh Session of the Islamic Summit Conference in Dakar. This set in motion plans for accelerating the modernization of Dakar vis-à-vis the construction of new roads, underpasses, shopping centers, tourist attractions, and new hotels, some of which was funded by Saudi Arabia and Qatar. In 2004, Karim Wade, the son of the then-president, Abdoulaye Wade, was tasked with spearheading the committee that would plan and oversee the construction of new infrastructure. Unfortunately, these plans did not include the renovation of historic sites such as Marché Sandaga. Instead, they focused on modernizing the coastline by permitting new hotels and tourist attractions to be built along the Corniche. The conference came and went in 2008, some of the coastal construction continued while some of it halted mid-project. This left the coast of Dakar littered with luxury hotels that were largely inaccessible to the average Dakarois, and partially built and abandoned cement structures that gave a culturally significant landscape an eerie appearance. Journalists investigated the status of permits for building along the coast and reported that some projects were built with permits that were accessed in informal ways and some did not have permits at all (Kane 2020). There was much debate about the value and cultural losses due to urban development on public beach land and several small but vociferous organized protests (e.g., protests organized by SOS Littoral). Concerns over the dismembering the public coastland, however, may have contributed to detracting attention from discussions related to the proposed demolition of Marché Sandaga in the center of the city.

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The coast of Dakar with abandoned buildings.​​​​​​​ Source: Picture taken by author.

Increased Chinese trading in Senegal may have also contributed to the lack of urgency to protect Marché Sandaga. In the early 2000s, China became very involved in investing in many African countries as a strategy for putting the United States and European countries in check and creating new markets for its manufactured goods. As a result of these politics, many entrepreneurs, especially those in the interior of China, gained access to international travel and began to open up shops in places in Africa where Chinese communities had not previously settled. In Dakar, many Chinese traders settled in Centenaire, a neighborhood that was once associated with a Senegalese middle-class. Chinese traders rapidly opened up many shops, and the neighborhood was soon referred to as “Chinatown.” Discourse regarding the need to knockdown or renovate Marché Sandaga circulated the city, and traders in Marché Sandaga assumed that the government’s request to move out of the building had more to do with making way for Chinese traders who would pay higher rents than the safety of African traders. In 2012, I interviewed numerous Chinese traders in Centenaire (Scheld and Siu 2014) and learned that due to the Murid networks in the marketplace, Chinese traders were blocked from renting stalls within the market. One trader spoke of losing a deposit on a stall in Marché Sandaga due to Murid traders’ desire to keep Chinese vendors out of the market. The presence of Chinese vendors in Dakar’s informal economy was thus controversial. Some argued immigrant vendors were taking away valuable commercial opportunities for African traders on all scales. Some African traders and consumers welcomed Chinese trading because Murid

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trading networks had such a strong grip over the markets that few Africans traders had new opportunities; consumers blamed unnecessarily high prices on excessive Murid control over the market. Marché Sandaga was then positioned as an ambiguous space in the city where the power of Senegalese re-membering Africa through commerce was challenged, newcomers from other parts of the Global South were marginalized, and the public that relied on the market for provisions were excluded from decision-making processes that determined the fate of the market hall. CONCLUSION: REMEMBERING AND RE-MEMBERING THROUGH MARCHÉ SANDAGA In the pages above, I have highlighted the biography of Marché Sandaga, a building in Dakar’s landscape with an aura that spoke to many. The marketplace appeared to have mythical qualities. The fragmented knowledge of the market’s past—with archival documents misplaced and damaged, unanswerable questions, and vendors continuing to sell on the periphery of the market regardless of the status of the building’s infrastructure—creates intrigue and mystery about the social life of the market. What really happened within its walls? How did it come to have such importance in the city? How could its cultural significance be overlooked and the building demolished without input from the public? To add to its mythical qualities, the market was a place of power. It exerted power that could fragment the city. For example, colonialists used the market to segregate Dakar, Murid traders used the market to create commercial spaces for themselves in the diaspora and to upend “traditional” social hierarchy of power-holders in Senegal. This power was awesome and something to fear. These two aspects of the market that feed its mythical qualities constitute a call for social memory. Market mythology compels reflection on the past and searches for answers that help unite the market’s fragmented entity. In this regard, the marketplace was rich in opportunities for remembering Africa. Re-membering Africa, in the sense of piecing back together cultural knowledge and communities, as well as well as engendering legibility and belonging in the city, is premised upon opportunities for accessing social memory. It is also influenced by how memory is retained and represented. In this regard, Marché Sandaga’s biography highlights the market as a site for the struggle to represent memory. If the marketplace was an African space that shaped the identity of the city and Senegalese nationalism, then the government’s interest in modernizing the city by demolishing the market, returns the status of the market to a familiar dichotomy inspired by a legacy of “otherizing” Africa: that which is African has been associated with “tradition”

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and accorded a lesser status than that which is associated with modernity and elsewhere. Plans for the future of Marché Sandaga are beginning to unfold, and one wonders which stakeholders will have the greatest say over the way the social life and biography of the market will be remembered. This will indicate the chances that we have for re-membering Africa. NOTES 1. Beeckmanns and Bigon also note that shops named after Sandaga can be found throughout the Diaspora (2016). 2. “Pacha” Diarra, a well-known retired athlete and coach in Dakar conveyed this memory to me. 3. Kar Rapids are lorries that have been converted into types of buses. They are painted colorfully and considered an icon of Dakar.

REFERENCES Appadurai, Arjun, ed. 1986. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Babou, Cheikh Anta Mbacké. 2007. “Urbanizing Mystical Islam: Making Murid Space in the Cities of Senegal.” International Journal of African Historical Studies 40 (2): 197–223. Beeckmanns, Luce, and Liora Bigon. 2016. “The Making of the Central Markets of Dakar and Kinshasa: From Colonial Originas to the Post-Colonial Period.” Urban History 43 (3). doi:10.1017/S0963926815000188. Betts, Raymond F. 1970. Assimilation and Association in French Colonial Theory, 1890–1914. Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska. Bigon, Liora. 2016. French Colonial Dakar: The Morphogenesis of an African regional capital. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Bigon, Liora, and Alain Sinou. 2013. “The Quest for Colonial Style in French West Africa: Prefabricating Marché Kermel and Sandaga.” Journal of Urban History 39 (4): 709–25 DOI: 10.1177/0096144212470103. Coward, Martin. 2009. Urbicide: The Politics of Urban Destruction. London: Routledge. De Botton, Alain. 2007. The Architecture of Happiness. New York: Penguin. De Varennes, Fernand. 2001. “Language Rights as an Integral part of Human Rights.” International Journal on Multicultural Societies 3 (1): 15–25. Diouf, Mamadou. 2000. “The Senegalese Murid Trade Diaspora and the Making of a Vernacular Cosmopolitanism.” Public Culture 12 (3): 679–702. Doucet, Isabelle, and Kenny Cupers. 2009. “Agency in Architecture: Rethinking Criticality in Theory and Practice.” Footprint (Spring): 1–6.

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Gordillo, Gastón. 2004. Landscapes of Death: Tensions of Place and Memory in the Argentinean Chaco. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Greer, Russell. 2020. “Architectonics and Style.” DOI: 10.37514/per-b.2013.0476.2.05. Accessed on November 15, 2022. Kane, Pape Samba. 2020. “Violations du Domaine Public Maritime.” SenePlus, July 9, 2020. www​.seneplus​/opinions​/violations​-du​-domaine​-publique​-maritime​-dans​ -la​-presquile​-du​-cap. Accessed on November 8, 2022. Kopytoff, Igor. 1986. “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as a Process” In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai, 64–91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Low, Setha. 2017. Spatializing Culture: The Ethnography of Space and Place. New York: Routledge. Mlama, Penina Muhando. 1990. “Creating in the Mother-Tongue: The Challenges to the African Writer Today.” Research in African Literatures 21 (4): 5–14. Ntewusu, Samuel. 2014. “Serendipity: Conducting Research on Social History in Ghana’s Archives.” History in Africa 41: 417–23. doi:10.1017/hia.2014.5. Scheld, Suzanne, and Lydia Siu. 2014. “Veiled Racism in the Street Economy of Dakar’s Chinatown in Senegal.” In Street Economies in the Urban Global South, edited by Karen Tranberg Hansen, Walter E. Little, and B. Lynne Milgram, 157–78. Sante Fe, NM: School of Advanced Research. Schneider, Jane, and Ida Susser. 2003. Wounded City: The Destruction and Reconstruction in a Globalized World. New York: Routledge. Seneplus. 2022. “La Cour Suprême Annule L’autorisation de Démolition de Sandaga.” SenePlus, September 23. https:​//​www​.seneplus​.com​/societe​/la​-cour​ -supreme​-annule​-lautorisation​-de​-demolition​-de​-sandaga. Accessed on November 15, 2022. Spencer-Walters, Tom. 2011. Memory and the Narrative Imagination: In the African and Diaspora Experience. Troy, MI: Bedford Publishers. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1985. “The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives.” History and Theory 24 (3): 247–72. Thiong’o, Ngugi wa. 1981. Caitani Mutharabaini. Kenya: Mathaga. ———. 1981. Decolonising the Mind. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. ———. 1981. “Free Thoughts on Toilet Paper.” Index on Censorship 10 (3): 41–46. DOI: 10.1080/03064228108533209. ———. 2009. Something Torn and New: An African Renaissance. New York: Basic Books. UNESCO. 2022. Indigenous Languages Decade. https:​//​en​.unesco​.org​/idil2022​ -2032. Accessed on December 9, 2022. United Nations. 2022. “Department of Economic and Social Affairs: World Population Prospects 2022.” Technical Report. www​.macrotrends​.net. Accessed on December 11, 2022.

PART III

Critical Theory and Practice

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Africa’s Adult Literacy Landscape in the Age of Globalization A Path to Increased Access and Change Daphne W. Ntiri

At UNESCO’s Fortieth General Conference in Paris, member states of the Global Alliance for Literacy within the framework of lifelong learning (GAL) came up with a six-year strategy (2020–2025) to promote adult literacy. GAL put more emphasis on improving equality and enhancing opportunities for marginalized populations, particularly women who constitute the 773 million adults around the world without basic literacy skills. Of this number of illiterates, sub-Saharan African nations featured prominently, with 66 percent adult literacy rates (UNESCO 2022). Several countries, for example, Benin, Chad, Sierra Leone, and Mali, fell below the 50 percent range, putting the continent on an unacceptable level of literacy. To ameliorate these shortcomings, UNESCO’s recommendation has included a three-pronged approach to adult literacy: expanding quality education, providing alternative opportunities for adults, and enriching literate environments. Around Africa, policymakers have for years deliberated on the power of literacy, which has been recognized as a major transforming agent, a pathway to power, a catalyst for academic success, and a key factor in employment promotion and social mobility (Ntiri 2016). African nations, both those struggling and the more robust economies, are re-visioning postcolonial educational and literacy policies and seeking more ideal pathways to spur development in the twenty-first century. Some scholars are advancing the Ubuntu philosophy, an interdisciplinary, Pan-Africanist, and humanistic vision whose aim is to interrogate educational categories on the continent across a 187

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wide range of colonial ideologies and curricula models (Takyi-Amoako and Asie-Lumumba 2018). This picture is not new. In Europe, literacy’s role in the active transformation of societies pushed socioeconomic development to new heights. Ntiri notes as follows: Between 1645 and 1714 in Sweden, the influence of cleric Martin Luther resulted in an increase in basic literacy among males from 50 percent to 90 percent (Resnick, 1983). Political urgency in tsarist Russia caused the former Soviet Union to undertake the mother of all mass literacy campaigns. The government’s promotion of socialism explains the realignment of Russian society from a predominantly illiterate society to a literate one. Illiteracy dropped from 70 percent to 13 percent between 1919 and 1939, thus enhancing the Soviet Union’s leadership in the technical, scientific, and medical fields. (Kagan 1982)

In Africa the literacy puzzle is complex and must be tackled effectively to advance the new skills and knowledge required for the competitive global workplace and escape from universal poverty. Performance indicators point to significant challenges that are impediments to the implementation of realistic and effective policies to meet the demands of knowledge-based industries and fast-paced digitalization to promote economic growth. Only a few African countries since gaining independence are noted to have shown meaningful progress in moving the adult literacy agenda forward. One such country is Tanzania. Its visionary leadership, under Mwalimu Julius Nyerere—mwalimu is the Swahili word for teacher—marked significant changes in the promotion of literacy for the masses in Tanzania. Mwalimu empowered the nation with the power of literacy using the emancipatory approach to enhance endogenous development, self-reliance, and social justice among his people (Ntiri 2009). His ideological teaching and underpinnings, which were influenced by Brazilian educator Paulo Freire and his work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), brought adult literacy with its accompanying social enlightenment to a new level of accomplishment in Tanzania. Cuba’s revolutionary model of literacy acquisition in 1959 has also provided some replicable lessons. The model emphasized the practical advantages of literacy for adults to function and meet the expectations of the society. Its guiding principle was “education to transform society” and the eradication of illiteracy among the masses became an achievable goal (Cairns 1989).

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CHALLENGES TO THE ADVANCEMENT OF LITERACY Though literacy is a constantly evolving concept and is subject to ongoing redefinition to reflect the criteria for social, political, religious, and economic expectations, in many African countries adult literacy remains quite rudimentary. Its definition remains the knowledge of an alphabet and the ability to write a simple sentence and decipher words in a language, preferably, the official, metropolitan languages of English, French, or Portuguese—a point that continues to raise some controversy. Factors such as linguistic complexity; the lack of orthographies for African languages and, effectively, limited book supplies associated with prohibitive book production costs, limited purchasing power, and ethnic rivalry have all derailed progress in this field. With less populous countries like Gambia, which boasts ten (10) languages, and Lesotho, five (5), the enormity and diversity of the linguistic situation make it conceptually unmanageable. Zell (2018) reports that, first, there is a dearth of literature in African languages; second, the support for books and instruction in local languages is tepid for the simple reason that families do not want to invest their limited funds in materials written in the indigenous languages since the opportunities for upward mobility, societal acceptance, and privileges need to be in consonance with the postcolonial language establishment standards. This conflict is captured by Zell (published 2018): The problem is that, unfortunately, those that write in African languages remain invisible, their works are hardly ever reviewed or translated. Publishing venues are limited and getting published is one of the most infuriating challenges of writing in African languages. There are hardly any publishing houses devoted to African languages. So, writers in African languages are writing against great odds: no publishing houses, no state support, and with national and international forces aligned against them. Prizes are often given to promote African literature but on the condition that the writers don’t write in African languages. (Dyssou 2017, 3)

Against this backdrop, a recent exchange in France between a European journalist and Chimamanda Adichie, the widely acclaimed Nigerian fiction writer, was instructive. The journalist had asked Adichie whether there are bookshops in Nigeria (Busari 2018). This question was cause for hysteria in the audience and around the world. Adichie’s retort that the question was condescending exposed, on the one hand, the ignorance and absurdity of the image held by the past colonial powers. On the other hand, the response speaks to the dismal literacy statistics on the continent. That “literacy is ultimately a social construction that determines and is determined by a given social order” (Ntiri 1993) is solidified around such arguments.

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THE GAPS HINDERING LITERACY IN AFRICA A notable similarity between adult literacy in Africa and other continents is that, in Africa, adults with disabilities, older adults, refugees and migrants, minority groups and other disadvantaged groups are under-represented in adult education and adult literacy programs. Another variable featuring prominently in Africa is gender, with women’s access to education affected by such factors as cost, family obligations such as having and raising children, and cultural conditioning. The exclusionary practices against women are more intense in Islamic communities. For instance, it is believed that one may not have a right to education (Eldred et al. 2014; UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning 2019). Women thus find themselves deprived of crucial access to lifelong literacy opportunities (UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning 2019). Another factor that is troubling about Africa is the lack of country-specific data, particularly pertaining to adult literacy. For example, when one conducts a search for the most literate countries in Africa, the results reflect supreme data on such countries as Seychelles, Equatorial Guinea, South Africa, São Tomé and Príncipe, Botswana, Mauritius, Cape Verde, Libya, and Zimbabwe, which reportedly have a literacy rate above 90 percent. In Zimbabwe, for example, 87 percent of the population is literate (UNESCO Institute for Statistics 2022), where literacy refers to the ability to read and write a simple statement in a metropolitan language like English. In their paper, “Secured, Not Connected: South Africa’s Adult Education System,” Land and Aitchison (2019) argue that there have been decades of neglect, or, at best, token support for the country’s adult education and literacy system, while also looking at ways in which the system might be revitalized. The reasons for such neglect have not been well articulated, although Nnazor (2005) made tenuous links between such neglect and Africa’s history of colonialism, based on the picture as observed in Nigeria. Since attaining independence in 1960, Nigeria has instituted several National Development Plans articulating the country’s development priorities and strategies. None of the strategies and plans provided an all-inclusive framework for the development of adult education and literacy (Nnazor 2005). For example, the Nigerian National Policy on Education of 1977/1981 provides for equal access to education, including continuing and further education, with guarantees on the eradication of illiteracy and promotion of lifelong learning. Nothing beyond this expression of desired outcomes has been accomplished. Nearly thirty years after the adoption of the policy, the literacy rate for Nigerians fifteen years and older is about 62 percent (UNESCO Institute for Statistics 2022), which means that the operationalization of

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policies on adult education remains mostly aspirational. Perhaps Africa’s history of colonialism fostered in its people a dependency that makes the continent look to the West for solutions to homegrown problems such as those facing adult education and literacy, as Mart and Toker (2010) have argued. In Kenya, the problems afflicting adult literacy have revolved around general neglect and the sustainability of adult literacy programs (Wanyama 2014). Even in Seychelles, the African country with the highest literacy rate in a metropolitan language at 99 percent for persons aged fifteen to twenty-four years (World Bank Group 2022), data on adult literacy and adult learning are hard to come by. We must then depend on optimistic government prognostications such as the National Report on the Development and State of the Art of Adult Learning and Education (ALE) published by the Seychelles’ Ministry of Education. Openjuru, in a study of adult literacy efforts in Uganda, draws attention to the inexhaustible international and local efforts that have been directed to the literacy dilemma since the late 1940s. That adult illiteracy has been recognized as one of the world’s problems is undisputable, with meetings in Elsinore in Denmark in 1949; Montreal in 1960; Tokyo in 1972; Paris in 1985; Jomtien, Thailand, in 1990; Hamburg in 1997; and Dakar in 1996 and 2000 (UNESCO 1997, 2004). Openjuru notes that in Uganda, even with sizeable investments and various ideological foundations to resolve this problem, the gains have been far from optimal. UNESCO has been at the forefront of many initiatives to accelerate literacy gains on the continent and worldwide since 1946. One such initiative was the Harare Declaration and Recommendation No. 2 (1982) presenting the “Regional Programme for the eradication of illiteracy in Africa by the year 2000” (UNESCO, 1983). It was an effort launched with lofty aims and promising outcomes. Its aims included a coordinated effort directed toward the universal provision and renovation of primary education, coupled with literacy work among adults. These efforts were designed to promote the elimination of illiteracy in Africa by the year 2000. My enthusiasm as coordinator of this program waned quickly as critical funding became inadequate, and the general mood of nations’ dependency added to other problems such as lack of political will and deep-seated cultural values limiting women’s participation exacerbated the situation. External agencies like the World Bank have noted that the postcolonial African governmental edict for rapid modernization and universal literacy keeps moving at a snail’s pace. There are formidable roadblocks to universal literacy in Africa, including the marked disparities between male and female, rural and urban literacy rates. Additionally, rapid population growth had outstripped gains in literacy much to the dismay of the governments (Ntiri 1993). These findings have echoed those of scholars such as Carnoy and Samoff

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(1990) in their landmark book titled, Education and Social Transition in Third World Countries. They interrogated many of the development plans and established that the notable challenges confronting African nations included the following: (1) orality; (2) multiplicity of indigenous languages in the shadow of colonial languages of English, French, and Portuguese for business and educational purposes; (3) orthographies that are new and evolving; (4) poorly designed projects whose impact was negligible; (5) political instability; and (6) ethnic rivalry and competition over the choice of language that must be developed as a national language in most of the fifty-plus countries. In the publication, Africa’s Educational Dilemma: Roadblocks to Universal Literacy for Social Integration and Change (Ntiri 1993), I present a conceptualization of the challenges that continue to thwart initiatives like the Regional Programme and other serious national and local aspirations that are unfortunately cut short despite robust plans. Figure 10.1 (Ntiri 1993) demonstrates the economic conditions that are pitted against education, alongside the political and social circumstances that, in theory, should bring about positive change to literacy. In practice, however, such change is hardly ever registered, because literacy is entangled in a web of political and social factors that pose a threat to an establishment that is often undemocratic and a hindrance to literacy. I therefore conclude that “African states’ lack of commitment to democratic ideals is both cause and result of illiteracy” (369). To change education and

A model of roadblocks to universal literacy for social integration and change in sub-Saharan African countries. Source: Ntiri 1993.

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promote literacy regionally and nationally, these considerations and factors as outlined must be adopted for modeling effective change. THE ROLE OF ORALITY In Africa, orality places adult literacy at the forefront of intellectual discourse. Africa is largely an oral culture, with the masses being heavily dependent on verbal traditions for information that is passed along from one generation to the next. Take the case of the griots, a sacred sect of history keepers in Senegal, Mali, and surrounding communities in West Africa (Gentile 2011; Kayir 2022). The custom of history-keeping is deeply rooted in these cultures, where the griots remain the powerful reservoirs of collective genealogical data. Gentile (2011) situates the griot’s social position in the context of the efficacy of word-power and argues that the griot today holds an intensely ambivalent status of a storyteller. Today, their role is one of the preservers of historical narratives and oral traditions of the people. In contemporary society, they constitute an important role as storytellers, musicians, praise singers and oral historians of their communities. The richness of such a tradition ought to be conserved to explore the possible linkages between orality on the one hand, and literacy and writing on the other. Scholars such as Gee (1988) and Spencer-Walters (1998) have pursued this trend of thinking over the years. What should orality aim to achieve within the context of literacy goals in Africa? An article by Ntiri and Walters (2000) reviews the subject of orality within the context of literacy in the African context and poses the following questions: What role, if any, should orality play in making literacy accessible to primarily oral communities in Africa and the African diaspora? If indeed there is a well-defined role, in what ways does this play out? (1992, 110). In pursuit of these questions, we identified the challenges of orality and its interface with literacy and the linguistic implications not only for third world African countries but also for other African communities in the diaspora. The European civilizing mission during colonialism of the Africans affirmed the moral superiority of the colonizer and the power of literacy. For the colonizer, orality and its various forms were denigrated and perceived as what we called “cultural regressiveness” (110). The quote below sheds more light on the issue: Literacy has become the social construction by which the social order of a given society is determined in today’s world. Orality still has a strategic and distinguished place in the pursuit of democratic ideals and in the

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advancement of literate knowledge. [O]rality must not be extinguished. (Ntiri and Spencer-Walters 2000, 122)

The role and narrative of the griot take us back to the goddess Mnemosyne (Menosynee) in Greek mythology, who held the key to the memory and remembrance of culture (Brake 2019; Orlando 2006). Her powers on memory are evident in her role in classic oral epic poems such as the Iliad and the Odyssey. Mnemosyne was considered the mother of inspiration; this role was central to culture and to the convergence between orality and literature in the Greek experience (Brake 2019; Orlando 2006). The art of storytelling and narration can be instrumental in literacy enhancement; it offers lessons for memory and recall, skills that can be applicable in the instruction of adults. Further, the application of this piece of Greek literature may provide the inspiration needed in the intellectual disposition to further the pursuit of orality and literacy in disciplines that have been heretofore understudied in the canon of literacy studies. ORALITY, LITERACY, MEMORY, AND THE FICTIVE IMAGINATION The study of memory and the imaginative process is an added element to the discussion of orality and its role to literacy. Though there is a dearth of scholarship on this subject in the African experience, the contributions of Tom Spencer-Walters, a literary scholar advances our knowledge with the contribution of two scholarly works, Orality, Literacy and the Fictive Imagination: African and Diasporan Literature (1996) and Memory and the Narrative Imagination in the African and Diasporan Experience (2011). These edited publications met rigorous standards of a highly regarded academic press, Bedford Publishers, of which I was the CEO and publisher. I therefore speak from the position of intimacy on the qualitative dimensions of both anthologies that add volume to the intriguing and enduring issue of cultural memory in the discourse on African and African diasporan literature and oral history. The contributors’ instructive arguments about the subtle and unambivalent complexities of cultural memory lead to a better understanding of the interconnectedness between orality and memory. Their scholarship highlights various perspectives on the role of narrative imagination, subjective identities, and the fragmented past implicating slavery, colonialism, and recurring hegemonic oppression. For example, in Orality, Literacy and the Fictive Imagination: African and Diasporan Literature, the contributors provide a fertile discourse for the examination of African verbal art forms, oral and written traditions and the literary imagination, and how their transformation

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becomes the point at which the past informs and guides the present. How do indigenous African and other cultures reclaim their dignity and identity in the face of their colonial past? Is a reclamation of traditional Africa evident in the advocacy for centrality of orality in efforts at liberation and nation-building? These provocative inquiries capture a fitting assessment by one of Africa’s leading novelist and scholar, Ngugi wa Thiong’o of Spencer-Walters latter work, Memory and the Narrative Imagination in the African and Diaspora Experience. He writes, “this book . . . is an important contribution to the struggle for the collective and corrective reconstruction of the self of the African on the continent and the diaspora, the diverse contributions by these scholars of the black experience in literature, culture and history, find a unity in their elaboration of the black literary imagination and its search for the psychic wholeness severely fractured and fragmented by the big band of slavery and colonialism. It should prove useful to the specialist and the general reader of African, Caribbean and African American literature” (viii). In truth, these anthologies appeal to a broad audience because they present several familiar, relatable tropes as a backdrop for exploratory scholarship. Each of the scholars is dedicated to analyzing live testimonies and examining age-old assumptions and presuppositions of their narratives from various disciplinary and conceptual perspectives. Through these insights, the scholars paint a convincing portrait of what cultural memory entails from each writer’s interpretations and enlightenment, lessons that are useful tools in a literature or history classroom or a public debate as they add qualitative value to the content from both the academic and pedagogical perspectives. Finally, Spencer-Walters’s intent in these anthologies is not only to provoke inquiry into perceptions about orality and its linkages to literacy, cultural memory, and imagination, issues that shift temporally and socially, but also to invite scholars to share their lived experiences in a world that needs these compelling realities. It is of critical importance to conserve the richness that orality offers in the practice of writing and literacy advancement. FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE: THE CASE OF A FARMER IN RURAL BURKINA FASO Literacy has major positive impact on health, employment, politics, and civil society, and interpersonal and social relations (Schuller 2017). Demonstrating the veracity of this maxim is the story of Ouedrago, a nineteen-year-old male from a polygamous family of twenty-four children in a country where I served as a Fulbright Scholar. He was a highly motivated and ambitious young man. At nineteen, he had been deprived of an education and had no sense of the alphabet though his privileged younger siblings did come back from school

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to bedazzle him with words. The drive to read and be literate forced him to seek singular opportunities at a Catholic learning outreach center to realize this dream at an advanced age. Burkina Faso falls into the category of low literacy according to the UNESCO Institute of Statistics. Ouedrago’s ambition paid off: in four years working on the farm and learning intermittently at the center, he acquired adequate reading skills, though he faltered on his writing. At the age of twenty-six, he was granted a scholarship to attend a vocational training center in neighboring Dakar, Senegal, and he pushed through many hardships to excel in his exams. Harboring ideas of becoming a politician and helping his people, he returned to his village where he pushed for social change. His mantra became synonymous with Barack Obama’s buzz phrase, “Yes, we can!” He made history by increasing awareness and leading the people in his village to maximize their strengths and push for levels of literacy acquisition that were previously unimaginable. DISCUSSION That literacy has been viewed as the panacea to Africa’s political, social, and economic problems is a given. With the continent’s fragility, widespread illiteracy has persisted in the face of a multiplicity of systems of education. As such, a re-appraisal of what education is, and should be, has become necessary. To further the understanding of the complexities and challenges surrounding literacy acquisition, Mejiuni (2012) interrogates the critical problem of structural inequalities and its impact on marginalized groups such as women and youth. She complicates the notions of education, literacy and power, and points to ways that shape the identity of women in the age of globalization. Unless we can creatively and willfully seek ways to operationalize the research on adult literacy, Africa will continue to lag behind in the adult literacy landscape. Already, we have compelling empirical evidence on the pervasiveness of gender inequality and a deeply entrenched patriarchy that subverts the vision of what life should be in a civil society. What remains is to put it to good use. CONCLUSION “Possibly the most significant impact that literacy has on people’s lives is its potential to empower individuals and communities and to ‘unsever’ the constraints of dependency and marginalization . . . literacy ‘enables people to read their own world and write their own history.’ . . . Adult literacy has long been viewed as an agent of social change, a vehicle that empowers and gives

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voice to the poor, marginalised, excluded and oppressed” (Pretorius 2004, 343). These words from a South African adult educator present the perspectives that describe adult literacy in a country like South Africa, which ended its brutal apartheid system and is reconciling its past to democratize opportunities for those who have been marginalized over the centuries. Despite the cultural mores that pose a hindrance to schooling for the young, a new political will is encouraged to spur a more rapid advancement of literacy aims and goals in African societies. Illiteracy is recognized as a burden, an intractable structural problem that constrains the effective integration of African nations into an increasingly interdependent and complex technological world. The problems with lack of data (which is inexcusable in the digital age), dependency on donors, linguistic diversity, and general low prioritization of literacy are still immediate burdens that must be addressed. Hopefully, committed policymakers and scholars will advance more ambitious recommendations for effective, development-oriented, continent-wide initiatives. REFERENCES Aitchison, J., and S. Land. 2019. ‘Secured not Connected: South Africa’s Adult Education System.’ Journal of Education: South African Research Education Association. https:​//​www​.researchgate​.net​/publication​/338209653​_Secured​_not​ _connected​_South​_Africa’s​_Adult​_Education​_system. Accessed July 20, 2022. Brake, A. B. V. 2019. “Re-Membering Mnemosyne: Re-imagining Memory as the Voice of the Soul.” Pacifica Graduate Institute ProQuest Dissertations Publishing (13427828). Busari, S. 2018. “Here’s Chimamanda Adichie’s Epic Clapback When Asked If Nigeria Has Bookshops.” CNN African Voices, Change Makers. https:​//​ www​.cnn​.com​/2018​/01​/26​/africa​/chimamanda​-adichie​-clapback​-nigeria. Accessed November 5, 2022. Cairns, J. C. 1989. Lessons from past Literacy Campaigns: A Critical Assessment. Prospects 19 (4): 549–58. Dyssou, N. 2017. “An Interview with Ngugĩ wa Thiong’o.” Los Angeles Review of Books, 23 April 23: 3. Egbo, B. 2000. Gender, Literacy and Life Chances in Sub-Saharan Africa. Buffalo, NY: Multilingual Matters Ltd. Eldred, J., A. Roberts, R. Nabi, P. Chopra, C. Nussey, and L. Bown. 2014. “Women’s Right to Learning and Literacy: Women Learning, Literacy and Empowerment.” A Journal of Comparative and International Education. British Association for International and Comparative Education. https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1080​/03057925​.2014​ .911999. Accessed July 20, 2022 Freire, P. 1970. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Seabury Press. Gee, J. P. 1988. “Essay Reviews: The Legacies of Literacy.” Harvard Educational Review (0017–8055), 58 (2): 195.

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Kagan, A. 1982. “Literacy, Libraries, and Underdevelopment—With Special Attention to Tanzania.” Africana Journal 13 (1–4): 1–2. Kayır, O. 2022. “Reconfiguring Senegalese Filmmakers as Griots: Identity, Migration and Authorship Practice.” International Journal of Francophone Countries (1368– 2679), 25 (1–2): 119. Mart, C. T., and A. Toker. 2010. How Did British Colonial Education in Africa Become a Reason for Decolonization? Second International Symposium on Sustainable Development, June 8–9, 2010 Sarajevo. International Burch University (p. 362). https:​//​core​.ac​.uk/download​/pdf​/153447455​.pdf.  Accessed July 5, 2022. Mejiuni, O. 2012. “Women and Power: Education, Religion and Identity.” Adult Education Quarterly 65 (2): 174–75. Nnazor, R. 2005. “Adult Education in Nigeria: The Consequence of Neglect and Agenda for Action.” International Éducation Journal (1443–1475) 6 (4): 530–36. http:​//​iej​.cjb​.netp.531-https:​//​files​.eric​.ed​.gov​/fulltext​/EJ855006​.pdf. Accessed July 20, 2022. Ntiri, D. 2009. “Toward a Functional and Culturally Salient Definition of Literacy.” Adult Basic Education and Literacy Journal, 3 (2): 97. ———. 2016. “Adult Literacy and Its Discontents: Rethinking Social Justice Issues in Adult Education.” Dialogues in Social Justice: An Adult Education Journal (1): 12–17. Ntiri, D., and Spencer-Walters, T. 2000. “Issues in African and African American Oral Literate Communications.” Journal of African Studies 17 (1): 109–23. Ntiri, D. W. 1993. “Africa’s Educational Dilemma: Roadblocks to Universal Literacy for Social Integration and Change.” International Review of Education 39 (5): 357–72. Nyerere, J. K. 1975. The Arusha Declaration Teach-In. Dar Es Salaam: The Information Services, 1–12. Openjuru, G. 2004. “A Comparison of the Ideological Foundation of the FAL and REFLECT Approaches to Teaching Adult Literacy in Uganda.” Language Matters: Studies in the Languages of Africa. Special Issue: Adult Literacy in the African Context 35 (2): 407–27. South Africa: UNISA Press. Orlando, P. C. 2006. “Mnemosyne: A Goddess for Storytelling, Creativity and Reading Comprehension.” Educational Horizons 84 (3): 151–56. Pretorius, E. J. 2004. “Language Matters: Studies in the Languages of Africa.” Special Issue: Adult Literacy in the African Context 35 (2): Editorial, 343–47. South Africa: UNISA Press. Resnick, D. P. (ed.). 1983. “Literacy in Historical Perspective.” Washington, D.C: Library of Congress. Schuller, T. 2017. What Are the Wider Benefits of Learning Across the Life Course? Future of Skills and Lifelong Learning. Government Office for Social Science. https:​ //​assets​.publishing​.service​.gov​.uk​/government​/uploads​/system​/uploads​/attachment​ _data​/file​/635837​/Skills​_and​_lifelong​_learning​_​-​_the​_benefits​_of​_adult​_learning​ _​-​_schuller​_​-​_final​.pdf. Accessed July 17, 2022 Spencer-Walters, T. 1998. Orality, Literacy and the Fictive Imagination: African and Diasporan Literatures. Troy, MI: Bedford Publishers.

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———. 2011. Memory and the Narrative Imagination in the African and Diasporan Experience. Troy, MI: Bedford Publishers. Takyi-Amoako, E., and N. Asie-Lumumba, eds. 2018. Re-Visioning Education in Africa: Ubuntu-Inspired Education for Humanity. London: Palgrave, Macmillan. UNESCO Institute of Lifelong Learning, UIL (2010). Global Report on Adult Learning and Education. Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. Retrieved July 23, 2022, from https:​//​trace​.tennessee​.edu​/cgi​/viewcontent​.cgi​?article​=1477​ &context​=utk​_IACE​-browseall ———. 2019. Leave No One Behind: Participation, Equity and Inclusion. Fourth Global Report on Adult Learning and Education. https:​//​unesdoc​.unesco​.org​/ark:​​ /48223​/pf0000372274. Accessed July 15, 2022. UNESCO. 2019. UNESCO Strategy for Youth and Adult Literacy (2020–2025). Zell, H. 2018. “Publishing in African Languages: A Review of the Literature.” UK: African Research & Documentation. Journal of SCOLMA—The UK Libraries and Archives Group on Africa, no. 132.

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Remembering Africa Memory, Disability, and the Narrative Imagination in the Polio Survivor’s Experience Rodney B. Hume-Dawson

What sort of anecdotes or narratives do we chronicle or portray about polio survivors and people with disabilities in Africa and the United States of America, two places I know due to my lived experiences in these countries? How does disability shape, inform, and ultimately transform the narrative imagination? Are polio survivors treasured for their resilience, tenacity, and medical experiences or do we regard them as weak, helpless, and deviant due to their paralysis? Do we genuinely perceive them as our colleagues, friends, spouses, and survivors or do we view them as inspirational or people who need excessive sympathy? Do we allow them to humanely flourish and be all they are destined to be, or do we see their persistence as excessive, painful, and taking opportunities away from those who view themselves as normal? Why has this ideology of suffering and helplessness persisted for so long when, historically, people with disabilities and polio survivors are, first and foremost, people and have always contributed to human and social development? Stories about disability in Africa are countless, and this chapter hopes to revisit the ways in which we have narrated those stories and how it contributes to remembering Africa. To understand why this work is crucial and essential, Anderson (1998) reminds us that: It gets complicated. What is remembered or imagined becomes reality. And: if we don’t create our personal versions of the past, someone else will do it for us. This is frightening and political fact. How many books, for instance, seek to 201

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refute the fact of the Holocaust, complete with proof in footnotes, etc. And who can forget the opening of Milan Kundera’s novel, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, which describe a photograph from which a Party official has been airbrushed from history. (Anderson 1998, 118)

This chapter will be organized in the following order: 1.  Why is there a need for improved understanding of polio survivor experiences and individuals with disabilities in general? 2.  How is storytelling in general and from perspective of individuals with polio/disabilities in particular, a means to (re)member Africa? 3.  What are some examples of polio/disability narratives? 4.  What are the major themes in polio/disability narratives in and outside of Africa? 5.  Conclusion and ties back to (re)membering Africa THE NEED FOR IMPROVED UNDERSTANDING OF THE POLIO SURVIVOR’S/INDIVIDUALS WITH DISABILITIES’ EXPERIENCES My goal in this chapter is to foster a greater consciousness of the need for understanding of the experiences of polio survivors and individuals with disabilities as a means for “remembering” Africa. It is for me, an opportunity to revisit those misconceptions and misinterpretations of what constitutes disability and the urgent need to rewrite those wrongs for a more just world where people with disabilities are recognized and appreciated. More specifically, storytelling the lives and experiences of individuals with impairments will hopefully advance a momentum to promote a better narrative of the continent, and especially, its inhabitants with disabilities. Furthermore, I hope to critically explore the ways in which disability is narrated and memorialized in African societies and how prior experts in various fields connected to disability, disability scholars, people with disabilities, and polio survivors have utilized the narrative imagination and collective memories to share their personal perspectives. As Spencer-Walters (2011) invokes Brison’s striking question: “How does one remake a self or society from the scattered shards of disrupted memory” (3)? Perhaps, Spencer-Walters is right to add that we do what Ngugi Wa Thiongo suggests, we develop the courage and fortitude to tackle, reexamine, and narrate stories of the human experience (not the deviant narratives of the past about polio survivors). My interest in the issue of memories and the narrative imagination in the polio survivor’s life derives from my own personal experience with

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poliomyelitis. I was diagnosed with polio at the age of eighteen months. It left me paralyzed from the waist down. However, as one writer puts it, the influence of a disease could be tremendous. It forms and shapes you. It forever leaves its mark on your entire being. It becomes part of your identity and formation whether you choose to embrace it or not. For me, I learned very quickly that, if I was to survive, I needed to accept my fate and the reality of living with poliomyelitis. With the help of my parents and family, I learned to love myself. I learned that I was more than my physical appearance or outlook. I learned to embrace my spiritual essence. It is for this reason that I want to relay my experiences, memories, and the narrative imagination to educate and remember Africa in the freshest and most radiant way possible. After all, as Neil Marcus puts it, “disability is an art, it is an ingenious way to live.” Yes, it is the best art that one can possibly think of. To live with disability in Africa or anywhere, and live robustly with it in a world that was not constructed for people with disabilities, requires passion, a sense of who one is, a notion of social justice, an ability to adapt, and innovation. It requires flexibility, patience, and understanding from both the person with a disability and those responsible for the care and well-being of the person with the disability. This chapter, then, is for those countless people with disabilities who are on the margins of society; those who like many of us have had challenges of maneuvering the terrains of inaccessible buildings, roads, and public transportation. Those of us who have fallen, bruised, broken bones, dealt with pain and chronic issues all throughout our lives. Those who have found themselves in places where they cannot live their true and full potential due to stigma, discrimination, and ostracization. And finally, it is for those whose disability has shadowed their personhood. STORYTELLING AS A MEANS TO REMEMBER AFRICA In this section, I hope to address a major question: How is storytelling, in general, and from the perspective of individuals with polio/disabilities in particular, a means to (re)member Africa? First, it is vital for us to tell the story of people with disabilities from their vantage point because, for ages, they have been relegated to the fringes of their homelands. Their voices were silenced and, often, others including professionals and “would be experts” spoke on their behalf. Additionally, storytelling the lives of people with disabilities is crucial because, depending on where you find yourself located in the world, the disease poliomyelitis might be a novel one to you since it has recently resurfaced in America and other European countries. As Anne Finger points out in her

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memoir, Elegy for a Disease, polio might not even ring a bell for some of the younger generations of Americans. One of the neighborhood kids who hang around the doors asked me if I wanted help. Instead of my usual “No, thanks. I’m OK,” I let him help me, partly because I was beat but also because I was doing him a good turn as much as he was doing me one.” What happened to your leg?” he asked me as he was loading the groceries into the trunk of my Volvo. “I had polio,” I said. “What’s that?” he asked. I felt like an aging movie star who’d been asked her name by a restaurant maîtred.’ Polio was as famous as AIDS. Those of us who had it were figures. We limped around under its metaphoric weight. “It’s a disease. People don’t get it anymore. There’s a vaccine now,” I said, handing him two dollars. (Finger 2006, 610–11)

From the above narrative, it is obvious that today’s youths in certain parts of the globe are oblivious of polio’s visible signs. However, the ravages of the disease are very apparent in Africa. It is conspicuous in many of the major towns and capital cities in Africa. Deplorable and picturesque sights of poverty, disease, and neglect are in abundance as numerous men and women paralyzed by polio and other mobility impairments are forced into begging as a means of survival. Unfortunately, for me, it is not just the physical impairments that are troubling for me. The attributes of how one walks, uses his or her pair of crutches and braces, or the use of wheel chair, and that is if they are even available or affordable for the polio survivor, are miniscule compared to the visual and narrative sights and representation of polio survivors and others with conspicuous disabilities in Africa. Sadly, what is catastrophic for me is the way we present disability in print media, in the movie industry and in the local news. Whether we do this unconsciously or not, we must heed to the ramifications of these reports. Articles and media presentations that report disabling perspectives from a skewed, inspirational, or metaphorical perspectives reduce the complexities of people with disabilities. They erase the genuine and monumental sufferings of persons with impairments. They leave indelible marks on the minds of people about disability for many years to come. They fail to recognize the talents, gifts, and diversity represented in people with impairments. They also unfortunately lead to internalized stigma and psychological trauma of self-doubt in some people with disabilities. In fact, as Bezzina (2018) points out These views of disability are then internalized by disabled people themselves. Shakespeare (1996:103–4) postulates that disabled people are socialized to think of themselves as inferior to others: people “are socialized into thinking of disability in a medical model way” as lacking or damaged, which can be viewed as internalized oppression. A disabled person’s image of themselves “is

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reinforced by segregated education, negative images, cultural representation, absence of positive role models, social treatment of disabled people,” which “parallels the experience of women in patriarchal societies.”

Paradoxically, there are so many untapped stories about the disabling experience. In fact, it is true that the reason for such erasure or lack thereof is as a result of the long-held belief that to be disabled is to be considered as someone of no value. Simply, a person with a physical disability was or is stripped of all his or her rights to be human. As Spencer-Walters (2011) asserts, ruptured memories as a result of colonial conquest and capitalist ideologies have silenced our discourses for a more humane and whole society. Likewise, storytelling will help us to grapple with our understandings of disability. In order to do so, we must be willing to make a paradigm shift. We must challenge ourselves to unlearn some of the cultural and social misconceptions we learned about people with disabilities in the past. We certainly need to refrain from the old dogmas, ideologies about impairments, and seek to find out past relationships, interactions, and meanings attributed to disability prior to slavery and colonialism. To do so, one must revisit the past to wrestle with our history and seek what Spencer-Walters (2011) refers to as the “dismemberment of a continent and its people.” Simply, an intentional reflection on how the African remembering has been convoluted with inhumane practices is a must if we are to move toward a more wholesome and inclusive continent that takes pride in all its people regardless of physical and mental abilities/disabilities. In tackling this, certain questions come to mind. How has disability been dismembered? How did Africans deal with disability before colonialism? Was disability always viewed as a form of punishment, witchery and were people with disabilities valued/disvalued in precolonial times? Bezzina (2018) reports that in precolonial times, before African traditional systems were decimated, people with disabilities were cared for and participated in social functions in places like Burkina Faso. She also stated that the Mossi’s, one of the largest ethnic groups in Burkina Faso, had a place or a home where the elderly and people with disabilities were treated with dignity and respect. Families had a structure on how they supported those with impairments. Some families focused on constructing homes and others relieved parents with the day-to-day duties of nurturing people with disabilities. She further added that disabled people were protected and thought to have supernatural powers, which kept the ill treatment and negative reactions and perceptions to a minimum. Fafunwa and Aisiku (1982) chronicled that in Nigeria the word disability was a Westernized term and children were educated in an inclusive setting. The advent of colonialism and the introduction of the market economy in

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Africa saw a vast change in the way people with disabilities were perceived, treated, and valued in their communities. Bezzina recorded that legacies of colonialism continue to dominate Africa’s handling and perception of people with disabilities. The focus is on productivity and economic independence. Charlton’s Nothing About Us Without Us reminds us that many people with disabilities worldwide are disenfranchised, remain incapacitated, and continue to be impoverished. He adds that disability oppression is a result of yester years and current conditions. He posits that some aspects of disability are vestiges of old-fashioned customary beliefs, economic inequalities, political instability and more recent globalized developments. As a matter of fact, he narrates, numerous people with disabilities in Africa are living on the fringes of society. They are faced with dire, grim-faced social, and muted economic conditions. Their lives are without any hope and are malnourished. Many of them lack access to clean water, academic institutions to improve their conditions, healthcare, and funding for their survival and everyday lives. Sadly, as Charlton quotes Bieler, “they are outcasts deprived of social life, dignity, and citizenship.” What is more, storytelling the lives of people with disabilities also helps us to be contextual in our approach in addressing the myriad of problems in Africa. Recognizing the geographical, economic, social, and political differences between the lives of people with disabilities in Westernized regions and those in Africa and developing countries are essential for the maximization of resources. For instance, the challenges someone who ambulates with crutches in Africa are enormously different from the ones they will face in the United States or Europe. The same can be said of a person who is blind or dealing with other physical or mental disabilities. EXAMPLES OF DISABILITY AND POLIO NARRATIVES Examples of disability and or polio narratives in Africa are in abundance. Whether they are oral or written, they continue to inform us of our cultural beliefs and values. They remind us that the continent is rife with its own adorning ideals and it will take time to reassess those that need to be kept and the ones that must be discarded. In some parts of Africa, such as in Nigeria, views of persons with impairments continue to be diverse, they didn’t entirely disappear with colonialism. For example, in Nigeria “albinos” are both celebrated and feared (and therefore discriminated against) in different regions. In Swaziland, personal stories of how albinos are treated with contempt and hate are still prevalent in contemporary times. Ndlovu (2016) recounted a story of how an eleven-year-old girl with albinism was murdered in daylight while her compatriots looked on without any ability or power to intervene. Sadly, she

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was killed for purposes of providing good luck for people who consider themselves as non-disabled. In addition to those living with albinism, numerous individuals living with paralysis, and other types of disabilities, are treated inhumanely and viewed as the “other.” Many of these people are perceived as shameful and are hidden by their relatives from their communities. In African literature, disability is used as a pariah while at the same time as a teachable moment about life. For instance, in Aminata Sowe’s The Beggar’s Strike, a host of the beggars are physically disabled and living with chronic health issues. The author uses negative terms such as “dogs,” “hurdle[s],” “obstacle[s],” and “dregs of society” to describe these beggars with disabilities. However, this piece of literature, symbolizes innumerable facets of the human condition and how disability plays out in real life. It is a quintessential story that reminds us that impairments are not just about the physical or mental but also the political and social. In a continent where people with disabilities live on the brink and have limited choices of survival, begging is their only hope. Nevertheless, that too is thwarted by principalities, the effects of power, domination, ambition, and colonial legacies. Perhaps one of the most captivating examples of literature that depicts disability in a resilient and humane manner is Sundiata, the king and founding father of the Mali Empire. Born in 1217, he had complications that left him paralyzed. Like most people with an obvious impairment, he was mocked and ridiculed for his disability. However, he used this as a motivation to succeed. Despite the numerous obstacles Sundiata encountered, he rose to become the Lion King of Mali. Unfortunately, his story is hardly known or taught in most schools and universities across Africa. As Jackson (2019) purports in her essay published in the Washington Times titled, “The Story Behind The Lion King”: As of 2017, The Lion King musical has grossed more than $8.1 billion. But what fans don’t know is that the story of The Lion King is not just a great story—it’s a true story. As the movie once again captures the public imagination, it is time to use it as a way to take seriously African history, a topic that is sorely missing from our educational curriculum. A study of precolonial African history would re-center our understanding of the past away from a skewed narrative about the supremacy of European rulers, one that limits our vision of the past and future. (Jackson 2019)

Individuals with polio and other disabilities are often overlooked and not talked about in print media or African motion pictures. This is a point that Ousmane Sembène’s movie Xala (1975) seems to make. That said, this portrayal was an early characterization of individuals with disabilities in films. On the one hand, Ousmane portrays survivors with disabilities as having

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unexpected agency. For example, they make their way across the sand after a very harsh removal by police officers on Elhadji’s command. On the other hand, the kind of influence that is exhibited is controversial, leaving one to wonder the extent to which this portrayal of disabilities is empowering. Regrettably, the fact that almost inadvertently producers and writers depict disabled characters as the lowest echelons of society is mind boggling and disturbing. However, Xala forces us as Africans and circumstantially to interrogate our notions of what embodies disability and ability, success and failure, normalcy and interdependence. Ousmane’s film strikingly depicts the hypocrisy of our leaders and colonial ideology of success, but it also exposes an epoch-making stance, often missing in many of these films and narratives. It reminds us that disability is a human experience, one that all of us will ultimately experience as we age. Elhadji, the main character in the film and the one who maltreats and wants the disabled beggars out of his environment is impotent in so many ways, not just physically but spiritually and, yet, fails to see his own limitations. His blind vision chooses to only see what he has been fed about people with obvious disabilities. In the end, it is the very stone that he had rejected that he turns to for counsel and advice. For me, this is the type of cogent and eloquent expression of remembering Africa and people with disabilities I would like my readers and students to embrace. Furthermore, it must be noted that representations of individuals with disabilities have a special status in the context of (problematic) Western imaginings of Africa. Western media appears to appropriate images of individuals with disabilities in voyeuristic ways that lead to inferiorizing assumptions about African societies. In contrast—populations with disabilities are portrayed in different ways in African representations. As a reminder, in the classic film Xala, by Ousmane Sembène, individuals with disabilities are depicted as possessing power and play an important role in teaching individuals who discriminate against their community. Semebène’s portrayal seems much more inclusive compared to the manipulated images found in Western media about Africa. Moreover, individuals with polio and other disabilities are often exploited in the media. The Afropessimistic view of struggling individuals used for fundraising and charities is certainly a great case in point to illustrate. As documented in the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs webpage, we should recall that: Persons with disabilities are seldom covered in the media, and when they are featured, they are often negatively stereotyped and not appropriately represented. It is not uncommon to see persons with disabilities treated as objects of pity, charity or medical treatment that have to overcome a tragic and disabling

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condition or conversely, presented as superheroes who have accomplished great feats, so as to inspire the non-disabled.

Regardless of the misconceptions about disability in Africa, positive images about polio need to be touted and showcased in order to change the narrative. And today’s greatest success is the monumental efforts to eradicate polio in Africa. It is a very clear success story that in retrospect could not have been be made without African leadership. While there was various support from rich donors in the West and other industrialized nations, it took a collected effort and strategic planning made possible by parents, polio survivors, community leaders, various African countries, and civil society. The World Health Organization (WHO; 2018) attested that, in 1996, seventy-five thousand children were paralyzed by polio in every single nation in Africa. The industrious Nelson Mandela launched “Kick Polio Out of Africa,” marking the campaign that ultimately led to victory. Millions of health workers, community organizers, local chiefs, and people navigated through various hurdles and dangerous conditions to vaccinate numerous children against the killer disease. Africa’s success story is a testimony of the dedication and hard work of many Rotarians who are constantly advocating and volunteering to raise funds and help eradicate polio worldwide. An unequivocal emphasis by the WHO reminds us of how we should choose to remember Africa and its crusade against polio: “On the verge of one of the greatest public health achievements in history, the certification of Africa as poliovirus free will be testimony to the efforts of hundreds of thousands of people living in the region” (WHO 2018). There are other African contributors who are virtually unknown outside of the continent, and sometimes outside of their countries, but who are doing great things such as the Staff Benda Bilili, a Congolese band comprised of mostly polio paraplegic musicians. They were rejected by other music companies for their disabilities but made it big on the world stage for their passion for and commitment to addressing social issues. Notwithstanding, their initial homelessness and working on the streets of Kinshasa, they stayed true to their mission of looking beyond appearances. Lebonbang Monyatsi, a South African paraplegic model who is somewhat well known, is the first South African in a wheelchair to be a runway model. She is a polio survivor and has been recognized for representing South Africa in wheelchair basketball. She was stigmatized as a child and tells the story of how people in her community would hide inside of their homes when they saw her coming, to emerge later when she reentered her home. She works painstakingly hard to help change the perceptions of people with disabilities in Africa. She is very enthusiastic about the needs of children with disabilities, inclusion, and accessibility. She has encountered many obstacles in her

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pursuit of becoming a model because of the lack of diversity in the industry. Similarly, she continues to deal with accessibility issues now that she has beaten the odds of becoming a model. I will be remiss if I fail to include the very famous British-Nigerian artist Yinka Sonibare, who addresses the body, mobility, and fragmentation caused by colonialism. Sonibare is a multitalented artist and one of the most decorated and award-winning persons with a disability. His many laurels include being a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE), a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE), a Whitechapel Gallery Art Icon Award, the eighth recipient of such a prestigious recognition. He is also very open about his disability and incorporates his disabling condition into his work. In fact, he openly discusses how his disability has shaped his artistic prowess. In retrospect, I realize that the personal is pivotal if we are to make any progress in this field. I share my story here with the hope that it will add to the positive remembering of disability and Africa. My polio story began the morning my parents realized I had a fever and could not stand on my own, as I had done in the previous weeks before the disease took over my life. I spent countless hours in the hospital for a multitude of reasons that included attempted operations, a successful surgery, rehabilitation, physical therapy, limb measurements, construction, fitting, and walking rehearsals with new braces. As a toddler, I never felt or thought anything was different about me. Perhaps, I was naïve. Perhaps, my diagnosis at such a young age left me clueless of what it meant to be a non-disabled/ temporary abled-bodied person. Perhaps, it was a blessing in disguise that I was a toddler at the time of the diagnosis and, as a result, knew very little of what it meant to be identified as “normal.” In hindsight, even as I was introduced to my first pair of braces and crutches, I still did not feel any difference. It was not until I was about seven or eight that I first experienced an awareness of my difference—as a result of being encouraged to participate in a national crusade that came with a promise of being able to walk again. I was confused because, in my own eyes and mind, I was fine. However, the world saw me as different. This was the beginning of my political awakening. It was the beginning of my stance in defining who I was. It was the beginning of saying YES to my spiritual self—my true being. Essentially, it was for me the realization that to be whole, one had to be more than just a body, or a body considered less than. Despite my paralyzed body, I was human. I was a person with gifts and talents. I was my mother’s son. I was a brother, a friend, and a neighbor. I was a thinker and, therefore, had the capacity to touch lives and make a difference. The memory and story I want to publicly narrate and declare is that I AM DISABLED AND PROUD! I AM HAPPY WITH WHO I AM—YES, WITH

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MY CRUTCHES AND BRACES, I AM HAPPY. I AM HAPPY TO BE ALIVE AND TO BE HERE TODAY. I choose to challenge the myth that the polio body is not worthy or valuable due to its paralysis. Society has failed to acknowledge Oliver’s (1993) insight that walking with crutches and rolling with wheelchairs are themselves forms of walking, ones that were created by rehabilitation experts. We have failed to embrace polio survivors as a people who have taught us to accept our bodies even though it might walk/roll or perform life’s daily functions differently. We have failed to promote that not all forms of walking are the same. The fact of the matter is that polio bodies have always been devalued. Polio was one of the most misunderstood and feared diseases of the twentieth century. It was sometimes referred to as infantile paralysis or “the crippler of children,” and even the strongest of children were more susceptible to getting the disease than some of the weakest seniors. Those who managed to survive were left with twisted backs, withered limbs and bodies that could no longer run and play. It is no wonder that the “normates” are mostly afraid of these bodies. If we are to be honest, it is these kinds of bodies that are perceived as abnormal and cause discomfort in mainstream American/African culture and society. The moral or religious model views disability as a form of punishment inflicted on a person and his or her family. Growing up in Sierra Leone in the 1980s, I was urged to attend spiritual Christian crusades for the purpose of receiving my wholeness. I needed to stand in front of hundreds, to possibly thousands, of people to receive my healing. Some of my affectionate friends and family members were convinced that with prayers and Godly intervention, I would be healed. In their eyes, because I was on crutches, I was not complete. I was not normal. I do not mean to devalue the power of prayer or their genuine affection for me but only to point out that they did not see me as whole because of how people with crutches are perceived and valued in that region of the world, and most societies. Their view of wholeness was skewed and based on a colonial patriarchal notion of physical perfection. They meant well but did not understand the ramifications of their actions. Walking with crutches does not mean that I am less than. It does not mean I am half a being or superhuman. I am a human being, first and foremost. I have inherent worth. Simply, I stand up against the societal notions of perfection and normalcy that devalue certain bodies that fall outside the norm. What has always struck me, even as a child, and as an adult, is the ways in which our societies (Sierra Leone and the United States) choose to respond to disability. Do we always respond with gusto or do we do so with a feeling of sadness and disappointment? If narratives and memories are supposed to ignite a sense of wonder and interest in one’s imagination, how do we reignite the flame in the minds of the non-disabled and disabled communities?

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How do we center these narratives within the educated elites and those who might be readers but still fail to recognize disability themes in a novel or a particular book? How do we get people to look for disability in places they might think it does not exist? How do we get them to recognize that disability is all around us if only they are bold enough to see it? Could our educated, intelligent, and frequent travelers to other countries and continents be ready to keep an open mind and allow the stories they encounter in their quest lead them to the truth about life and the disabling experience? While I will admit that I get positive responses from generous people worldwide, I have also had folks who tend to see my disability first, before my personhood. Their reactions have left me sometimes speechless and baffled about memory and the narrative imagination. For instance, I remember a vivid experience as an initiate of a fraternity during my undergraduate years. Like my colleagues, I wanted to belong and be part of what the university had promised me. It was a sweltering day, and as one of the initiates of the fraternity, I had to go through the rigors of the recruiting process. I was asked to stand up on one of the narrow and restricted cemented posts for almost the entire day in the middle of campus. It freaked out a lot of the professors, staff, and visitors. Many loud comments were made as people drove or walked by. People made non-empathetic comments like: “Why is he trying to join a fraternity?” “He is not sorry for himself.” “What if he falls and hurts himself?” Some of the responses ranged from anger to frustration to a feeling of righteous indignation. Some people felt that I did not know what I was doing, and they had the prerogative to root me out of there. It makes me question whether, as one writer puts it, narratives can help extend or broadens one’s imagination. However, in some of my interactions with people who read and travel, narratives tend not to help when it comes to interacting with physical or obvious impairments. If that is the case, then what would help? Is it memories? Is it human interaction? Is it the actual voice and lived experiences of the person with a disability, or is it narratives from people with disabilities, or the merging of them all together? From the story about my initiation process, I can say that it was clear that some of those people were genuinely concerned about me. They were worried about my well-being and were afraid of what might happen to me. Their limited experience and/or time with me had brought on anxieties and fears of excessive worry. However, my own bewilderment in this event is that I had expected a lot more from this group since they were educated elites. What if they had approached this response from a humane perspective? What if they had tried to be empathetic for just that period trying to envision a polio survivor who had entered college and wanted to be human? What if they had moved away from the sympathetic mode to one of thinking from my

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own—the survivor’s/empathetic perspective? Would it had made a huge difference? I believe so. To answer these questions, one must reflect on how our investment in modern lifestyle and contemporary living moves us away from community and storytelling. Furthermore, the complex and perceived nature of disability makes us want to run away from profound conversations and anything that might not sound appealing. One way we can bring all of this is in our classrooms and around our dinner tables. As Gregory (1995) puts it: In this essay, I want to take a new look at the old question that goes to the root of our activities in teaching and studying narrative: Why do narratives matter? What is the source of narratives’ power, appeal, and value? Much recent literary criticism and theory implicitly answers that narrative matters because it powerfully conveys ideology (Michel Foucault, Terry Eagleton, and Judith Fetterley, for example), and recent work in the social sciences (Jerome Bruner, Robyn Fivush, and James Q. Wilson, for example) explicitly answers that narrative matters because it plays a crucial role in the construction of knowledge and the development of societies. (35)

Furthermore, Gregory (1995) provides us with a more vivid description of what can potentially happen to readers with a progressive and open mind in a society that has corrupted our understanding of what it means to be human: Although these answers are helpful and frequently insightful, in this essay I want to complement them by attending closely to the kind of discourse that narrative is and to the activity and the consequences of reading narrative. I begin by turning not to the formulations of any contemporary narrative theorist or social scientist but to the testimony of one reader, the Russian dramatist Maxim Gorky, who provides an account both eloquent and moving of narrative’s power to help shape the deepest contours and textures of a reader’s emotional, moral, and intellectual life. While working as a young man in conditions that were physically and morally degrading, Gorky discovered in stories not escape and certainly not escapism but a better and more fulfilling mode of existence. (35)

From this quote, we can presuppose that narratives can provide for us a much more enriched life’s encounters, but what ultimately changes people’s minds, inferring from my own story and perspective is developing relationships with people outside of our circles and having daily interactions and discussions about many of life’s complexities including the disabling experience. Correspondingly, studying and learning about disability, historically, will help us recognize that polio survivors have found a way to cope and adapt to many of the social obstacles that they have encountered. Many of these survivors became the agents of the disability rights movement, the architects

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of the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the pioneers of disability studies. They included Ed Roberts, father of the independent living movement; Judith Heumann, a former assistant secretary of education under President Clinton and co-founder of the World Institute on Disability; and Justin Dart Jr., co-founder of the American Association of People with Disabilities, and one of the instrumental figures that helped pass the American with Disabilities Act of 1990. I, like the others mentioned above, became an activist and a moving force behind the formation of Sierra Leone Union on Disability Issues (SLUDI) With the help of gracious Sierra Leoneans like Messrs Chalie Haffner, A. O. D. George, and M. B. Jalloh, I was encouraged to contact a couple of well-known individuals with disabilities for us to discuss the possibility of creating a national organization for people with disabilities. Together with Sam Campbell, Fred Kamara, and Mrs. Emma Parker, we agreed that I should contact Professor Eldred Jones, a former principal of the country’s premier higher education institution, Fourah Bay College, the University of Sierra Leone. Jones was blind (albeit later in life), had the name recognition, integrity, and the reputation needed for a countrywide association. The mission and purpose of the union is to help sensitize the public and lobby the government about the physical, attitudinal, political, economic, educational, and social barriers that impose restrictions on Sierra Leoneans with disabilities. Professor and Mrs. Jones worked painstakingly on the draft that led to the development of the Sierra Leoneans with Disabilities Act. Despite the devaluing of polio bodies in American society and across the globe, polio survivors and others joined forces to lobby against discrimination. “They demanded ‘equal access’ to public transportation, public accommodations and telecommunications, to school and work, to ‘independent’ or ‘congregate’ living in the community rather than in institutions” (Shapiro 2011). The story of the emergence of the disability rights movement and its academic arm—disability studies—could not be told without acknowledging the prominence of polio survivors among the movement’s leaders. Heumann, Roberts, and Dart all played central roles in the early years of the disability rights and independent living movement. Scholars and artists such as Irving Zola, Paul Longmore, and Anne Finger all were instrumental in gaining recognition for a new interdisciplinary approach to disability known as disability studies. What all these individuals have in common is not only a shared passion for the rights of people with disabilities but also a grounding of that passion in their personal experiences with polio and its aftermath. The discrimination and prejudice those polio survivors and other people with disabilities faced in the middle of the twentieth century led to the struggle for change in the streets and in the law. The disability rights movement was not as visible as the civil rights movement, but it took place in the

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same venues where African Americans protested: the streets and the courts. Lawsuits were filed, demonstrations took place, new organizations were born, and a number of disability rights leaders helped pave the way for a better America. The disability rights movement started with survivors of polio who were courageous and unafraid to challenge the status quo. In 1970, wheelchair user and polio survivor Judith Heumann filed a lawsuit against the New York City Board of Education when her application to secure a teaching certificate was denied because of her obvious impairment. The board explained that people with disabilities were perceived as fire hazards. Heumann was asked to demonstrate how she used the bathroom, but she told the doctor that unless it was a requirement for her to teach children, she was not going to do it. Through the resilience of polio bodies, we learn that all bodies matter. These bodies matter because they are worthy. They matter because polio bodies are sacred bodies that teach us about what it means to live with broken and rejected bodies. They matter because they have experiences that can instruct us in new ways of living and seeing the world. They matter because they exhibit the power of the human spirit. MAJOR THEMES IN POLIO/DISABILITY NARRATIVES INSIDE AND OUTSIDE OF AFRICA In this section, I explore major themes in polio/disability narratives inside and outside of Africa. a.  Individuals with polio and other disabilities are unquestionably human until society has something to say about it. This is illustrated by my story and those of others depicted here. Poignantly, disability is here to stay, it is part of the human condition. Avoiding it will not make it go away. We must recognize that people with disabilities are not the problem, it is our reaction to the disability that is the dilemma. Treating someone with a disability as an outcast aggravates the situation and makes it seem like the person is dealing with multiple forms of impairments. Simply, embracing and loving unconditionally with empathy are the keys to helping people with disabilities live full and engaging lives. b.  Christianity and other major religions have played an ambivalent role in the lives of individuals with polio/disabilities, on the one hand, wanting to provide support, on the other hand framing polio in problematic ways. As a committed Christian, I can attest to the many ways I have been blessed and healed from prayer, devotional time, inspirational readings, electrifying sermons, and Biblical discussions. However, I

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know how, historically, and even in present times, religious empires can be judgmental, unwelcoming, and discriminatory. Religious affiliations and entities must do all in their power to empower people with disabilities with a much more spiritual approach than a worldly pathway. c.  Africa has progressed on diminishing actual polio cases; however, this was due to Africans piecing back together the health of Africans. The deep sense of community, cooperation and sharing made it all possible for this tremendous success story. We must hold on to these values to foster a change where people with disabilities can thrive and be all they are destined to be. d.  If programs can be made in terms of diminishing incidences of polio, why can’t progress also be made with diminishing negative imagery, discourse, and narratives about individuals with polio/disabilities. We have the talents and gifts to bring about change, what we need now is the will to make a difference. e.  Africans are blamed for re-introducing polio to the Global North, which is illogical, and serves to demonstrate that efforts continue to be made to dis-member Africa in service of other political agendas. We must not fall to any level that will destroy years of hard work and exemplary service to humanity. We must show that as Africans and people with disabilities we have the tenacity and will power for good. Spencer-Walters poses an important question in his introduction in his book Memory and the Narrative Imagination in the African and Diaspora Experience (2011). Which elements of your disembodied past do you choose to reconstruct and why? For the polio survivor or the person with a disability, this question is permeated with complexities because of the many wrongs and harms inflicted on them. However, as Africans, we are urged to be the Sankofa (West African looking bird) that should move forward while thinking and reflecting on one’s past. In other words, if we do not know where we are heading or going, we should at least know where we come from. Both as Africans and as persons with disabilities, we are resilient and unique. We need to take pride in who we are as people with disabilities despite our obvious impairments. Be that as it may, we as disabled people can do our own part, but we cannot do it alone without a radical change in our continent’s thought processes, mindset, political will, social and familial commitment, educational and curriculum change, and cultural restructuring. Society needs to recognize that disability is not just a medical issue but a social, political, educational, and cultural matter. Judith Heumann, a polio survivor, the Mother of the Disability Rights Movement in the United States, and a former undersecretary of education in the Clinton Administration’s noteworthy point reminds us

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about where the change is needed: “Disability only becomes a tragedy when society fails to provide the things needed to lead one’s daily life.” REFERENCES Anderson, Donald. 1998. War, Literature, and the Arts: An International Journal of the Humanities 10 (2): 117. Bezinna. 2018. “The Role of Indigenous and External Knowledge in Development Interventions with Disabled People in Burkina Faso: The Implications of Engaging with Lived Experiences.” Disability and the Global South. Charlton, James I. 2000. Nothing About Us Without Us: Disability Oppression and Empowerment. Oakland: University of California Press. Fafunwa, A. B., and J. U. Aisiku 1982. Education in Africa—A Comparative Survey. London: George Allen & Unwin. Finger, Anne. (2005) Writing Disabled Lives: Beyond the Singular. Modern Language Association. ———. 2006. Elegy for a Disease: A Personal and Cultural History of Polio. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Fleischer, Doris Zames, and Frieda Zames. 2001. The Disability Rights Movement: From Charity to Confrontation. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Gregory, Marshall. 1995. “The Sound of Story: Narrative, Memory, and Selfhood.” Narrative 3 (1): 33–56. Jackson, Kellie. 2019. “The True Story Behind the Lion King.” Washington Post. Leaneagh, Jesse. 2011. The Heartbreaking Rumba of Staff Benda Bilili. New York: Walker. Longmore, Paul K., and Lauri Umansky, eds. 2001. The New Disability History. New York: New York University Press. Ndlovu, Hebron 2016. “African Beliefs Concerning People with Disabilities: Implications for Theological Education.” Journal of Disability and Religion 20 (1–2): 29–39. Oliver, Michael. 1993. What’s So Wonderful About Walking. London: University of Greenwich. Shapiro, Joseph. 2011. No Pity: People with Disabilities Forging a New Civil Rights Movement. New York: New Rivers Press. Sowe, Aminata. 1986. The Beggars Strike. London: Longman Pub Group. Spencer-Walters, Tom. 2011. Memory and the Narrative Imagination in the African and Diaspora Experience. New York: Bedford Publishers. Taormina-Weiss, Wendy. 2013. “In Pursuit of Disability Justice.” Disabled World. World Health Organization. World Health Organization. 2018. “Polio Eradication Is a True African Success Story, Made Possible by Devoted Leaders, Countries, Communities, Civil Society, and Parents, March 27. https:​//​www​.afro​.who​.int​/news​/polio​-eradication​-true​-african​ -success​-story​-made​-possible​-devoted​-leaders​-countries.

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Reconciling Traditional and Nontraditional Approaches to Mental Health Services The African Diaspora Experience Senait Admassu, Kofi Peprah, and Edwin Aimufua

In the Western world, mental ailments are treated with medications, therapy, and other objectively and empirically based remedies. Unlike other non-Western societies, where mental health is associated with multiple dimensions of causalities, remedies are also multifaceted and may include the performance of rituals, prayers, and other nontraditional remedies. In the African context, there is the belief that mental health ailments have spiritual causality and there is no separation between the physical and the spirit. To unearth the sources of a person’s mental health ailments, there is also a need to understand their underlying spirituality. In many instances, patients of mental health illness may be blamed for their own ailments, especially in rural societies where psychiatric hospitals are absent and spiritual leaders, herbalists, and religious leaders are heavily relied upon. In such societies, mental health is not only frowned upon but highly stigmatized. This belief influences how patients describe their symptoms to their clinicians (US Department of Health and Human Services [DHHS] 1999). Therefore, to manage and treat mental ailments, there is the need to understand and manage the spiritual component. In some cultures, persons suffering from mental health may be called “crazy.” In this context, clinicians with limited understanding of the cultural background of such consumers may easily misdiagnose such people. Likewise, the consumer of Western mental health services will find it extremely challenging to access Western mental services, due to 219

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mistrust and unappreciation of services offered them. As it is rightly pointed out, Saechao et al. (2011) indicate that mental health is understood differently by diverse populations on account of cultural differences and availability of mental health services in their country of origin. Depending on availability of mental health services, the mental health consumers,’ and their families’ level of education and or traditional/religious beliefs, such persons may seek the “help” of psychiatrists and or religious leaders, traditional healers, or any trusted persons believed to have “powers” to intercede on the victim’s behalf. Traditionally, these remedies may include a probe into the personal life of the victims to unearth the root cause of their mental ailments. Once the root causes have been unmasked, and trust between the consumer and the clinician has been established, treatment plans can then be offered. One cautionary note is that these general statements of the cultural characteristics of a group may generate stereotyping of individuals based on their appearance (Office of the US Surgeon General). To avoid stereotyping, each consumer must be treated as a unique individual from a particular cultural background. It is within this context that the African Communities Public Health Coalition (ACPHC; also known as African Coalition) executes mental health services to members of the African diaspora in Los Angeles County, California. African Coalition believes that without building trust and an understanding of the cultural beliefs and backgrounds of consumers of mental health services, the implementation of any forms of Western methods to address mental health needs will be ineffective. In recognition that culture affects how patients describe their symptoms to their clinicians, the African Coalition not only uses culturally competent clinicians and staff but has adopted a reconciliatory method that combines the Western approach with the non-Western approach to diagnose and administer treatment plans for the African diasporas. This chapter takes a critical look at the Western methods (traditional) and the non-Western (nontraditional) approach to mental health services. It compares the merits and the demerits of both methods and provides an explanation of African Coalition’s reconciliatory methods. It describes what it is, how it is done, why it is done, and where these unique methods are adapted. This chapter explores the challenges and benefits of the reconciliatory approach and makes projections for the future work of the African Coalition. OVERVIEW OF THE WESTERN MENTAL HEALTH TREATMENT PLAN (TRADITIONAL) The Western methods of mental health care are based on scientific enquiries and objective evidence, embedded with self-correcting features of peer



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reviews and publications in professional journals. This Western process allows for scrutiny, evolution of new methods, and replacement of older theories and discoveries. The Western method of understanding and treating health conditions are evidence-based, and the outcomes are measurable by data. However, as rightly pointed out in many American mental health publications, the model is culturally irrelevant to marginalized populations. In a typical Western mental health treatment, a consumer of mental health services may go through psychotherapy, which involves an exploration of the patients’ thoughts, feelings, and behaviors aimed at improving their, the consumer’s, behavior. This is often paired with medication to promote recovery. Even though medication may not outrightly cure mental health, it is an indispensable part of the treatment plan because researchers are of the view that mental health illnesses are the result of chemical imbalance in a person’s brain and medications reduce these imbalances and can provide relief. These medications may include antidepressants, mood stabilizers, antipsychotic, tranquilizers, and sleeping pills. Case management, hospitalizations, support groups, complementary and alternative medicine, self-help plans, and peer support are all imbedded in the Western methods of mental health disorders and treatments. AFRICAN TRADITIONAL OVERVIEW OF MENTAL HEALTH Typically, in the African context, persons suffering from mental health may be called “crazy” and the victim may even be blamed for having caused their own ailments, which may include the victim having committed a crime and or even offending the spirits. Because of this, mental health is considered as spiritual warfare, and seeking help for victims is often embedded with spiritual remedies. Depending on the victims’ and their families’ level of education and or traditional/religious beliefs, such persons may seek the “help” of psychiatrists and/or their religious leader, traditional healers, or any trusted persons believed to have “spiritual powers” to intercede on the victims’ behalf. Traditionally, these remedies may include a probe into the personal life of the victims through a series of queries to unearth the root cause of their mental ailments. Once these probes have unmasked the root causes of the mental health challenges, “appropriate treatments” are then meted out, which may include prayers, rituals, herbs, or visitations to the hospital for traditional Western treatment. Without an understanding of these cultural practices and differences, implementation of any form of Western traditional methods to mental health treatment may seem ineffective.

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CHALLENGES AND BENEFITS OF BOTH APPROACHES African immigrants are attracted to communities with large Black membership. Among these are low-income, hard-to-reach, and under-served populations who, when faced with socioeconomic challenges, tend to work in low-wage professions. These groups tend to be isolated and hard to reach as they cling to their faith groups, ethnic groupings, and community leaders for social support. This, coupled with the distinct languages they speak, leads to both cultural and linguistic isolation that limits their access to public and community resources, especially mental health and social services. It is well documented that many Africans have a high level of spoken English and French language proficiency. However, there are still many immigrants who come to the United States after being forced to escape civil war and ethnic conflict in their countries. Immigrants from countries torn by war and severely impacted by natural disaster often spend years in refugee camps or are otherwise displaced. During such times, it is difficult to access any educational services, let alone mental health services and high-quality English language instruction. The mental health disparities that exist between the first and second generation of African descent and other groups are well documented. Many of the immigrants find that the stress of day-to-day living has negative consequences for family relationships, high suicide risk due to disconnection from their community, and health status, including mental health well-being. Empirical research supports the idea that culturally specific healing practices are effective in engaging individuals from the non-dominant culture. People in cultures that have a collectivist orientation tend to attribute the cause of mental illness to something outside of themselves—it is the responsibility of forces beyond their control. So, the challenge is that culturally competent resources are perceived to be important, yet systematically in short supply. AFRICAN CULTURALLY AND LINGUISTICALLY APPROACH OF MENTAL HEALTH SERVICES In their publication in the Migration Policy Institute magazine titled “Sub-Saharan African Immigrants in the United States,” Carlos EscheverraEstrada and Jeanne Batalova (2019) note that more than 2 million immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa lived in the United States in 2018. While this population remains small, representing just 4.5 percent of the country’s 44.7 million immigrants, it is rapidly growing, and between 2010 and 2018, the sub-Saharan African population increased by 52 percent, significantly



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outpacing the 12 percent growth rate for the overall foreign-born population during that same period. There were very few sub-Saharan Africans in the United States just a few decades ago, with under 150,000 residents in 1980. Since then, immigrants from some of the largest sub-Saharan countries, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Ghana, Somalia, and South Africa, have settled in the United States. Overall, more than 2 million immigrants have come from the fifty-one countries that comprise sub-Saharan Africa, making up 84 percent of the 2.4 million immigrants from the entire African continent. As rightly noted, in 2001, in a publication titled “Culture counts: the Influence of culture and Society on Mental Health,” the office of the US Surgeon General recognized the direct effect of culture and society on mental health, mental illness, and mental health services. To effectively develop mental health services that are more responsive to the needs of such communities, the culture of the clinicians and the service system must factor into the clinical equation. It is within this context that the African Community Public Health Coalition (also known as Africa Coalition) was born in 2011. Through grassroots work, the African Coalition has identified many challenges that are underlying factors that deeply undercut the self-reliance of African communities. While the African Coalition’s work began with a focus on mental health, it has broadened over time to match the intersectional issues that promote social and economic inequality experienced by the African diaspora. This includes advocating for programs, policies, and services that address the needs of communities most lacking in opportunity and access. The mission of the African Coalition is: to improve personal and community health and wellness within the African immigrant community by increasing the availability of culturally relevant physical and mental health services, providing education to reduce the stigma of physical and mental illness, and facilitating social justice through advocacy.

Acknowledging that there are gaps between the needs of African immigrants and existing services, the African Coalition has developed an African-centered approach to addressing these gaps. This is an organization designed to cater to the mental health needs of the African diaspora in Los Angeles County and beyond. The African Coalition not only relies on the Western traditional approach to mental health treatments but they also exhume the cultural undertones of the African diasporas.

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AFRICAN COALITION RE-CONCILIATORY APPROACH TO MENTAL HEALTH SERVICES Although most traditional (Western) mental health institutions concentrate on psychotherapeutic issues to the exclusion of ancillary problems, it is known that mental health problem seldom occurs in isolation from other complications. Because of social, economic, and legal status, The African diaspora carries a range of distinct problems alongside their mental health concerns, and these interact, reinforcing one another, and making both presenting symptoms and treatments especially complex. The loss of culture experienced by many of first-generation African descent and the separation from their homeland by immigrants from Africa, and the consequent impact of these losses, can result in a lack of connectedness to their history and their roots. There is a need for root-cause information and training in this area in order to provide culturally sensitive treatment to these communities. There is significant evidence that negative racial, ethnic, and linguistic minorities’ experiences have historically had significant challenges, including having fair opportunities for economic, physical, and emotional health, which is known as “social determinants of health.” Social determinants of health are the conditions where people live, learn, work, play, and worship that affect a wide range of health risks and outcomes. Applying the social determinants of health (SDH) theory, African Coalition believes that health and mental health outcomes are largely a result of the quality-of-life conditions impacting a population. The guiding principles of African Coalition’s programs, training, and consultations are concern for others, integrity and respect for both cultural and linguistic-appropriate services. The African Communities Public Health Coalition promotes an African-centered approach to mental health care, service delivery, and theoretical understanding of all mental health programs. All members of the founding board of directors share compassionate and committed goals to serve the disadvantaged and under-served African community in Greater Los Angeles County. The African Coalition has historically targeted its services towards African- born immigrants residing in Greater Los Angeles, Santa Ana, and the Inland Empire. Through the African Coalition’s existing grassroots outreach programs, we have identified that African immigrants are attracted to communities with large Black populations—which includes African Americans and Caribbean-born immigrants. Among these are low-income, hard-to-reach, and under-served populations who, when faced with socioeconomic challenges, tend to work in low- wage professions. These groups tend to be isolated and hard-to reach as they cling to their faith groups, ethnic



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groupings, and community leaders for social support. This, coupled with the distinct languages they speak, leads to both cultural and linguistic isolation that limits their access to public and community resources, especially mental health services. Building trust in the African Coalition within the community, by which the organization and its services become known, helps attract community, many of whom are deeply reluctant to seek the assistance of a public organization. The African Coalition builds community collaborations with a broad swath of organizations that represent faith, business, and service-provider community leaders, as well as concerned individuals. Being headed by someone who also arrived in the United States as an immigrant, the organization has a tradition of employing and working with people from similar backgrounds who understand the challenges that refugees and immigrants face. This uniquely positions the organization to understand and advocate for the social, economic, and cultural challenges that the target population encounters and to handle them judiciously. Broadly, the organization advocates for African populations, aiming to bridge the gap between these communities and the highly stigmatized physical and mental health services they need. The African Coalition also advocates for a proficient system that allows refugees and immigrants to gain decision-making powers in identifying the gaps and solutions for ease of access to services that are culturally competent and encourage resilient mental well-being. Advocacy and education efforts made by the organization include participation in formalized political structures in the interest of promoting policy-level changes that will benefit the accessibility and relevance of mental health services for African Americans, and African immigrants and refugees. Many of our clients are disenfranchised and struggling with issues of disparity affecting ethnic and cultural communities that are directly related to mental illness, violence, institutionalization, substance abuse, and trauma. The ACPHC currently serves a generally under-represented ethnic population of children, youth, and families throughout Los Angeles County. At present, the African Coalition’s programs have been effective at addressing the needs of African descendants in Southern California. So much so that beneficiaries have shared their experiences with friends, family, coworkers, and acquaintances. In conjunction with outreach efforts, the African Coalition sees a regular flow of new clients to our organization. In order to assist these latter groups, the African Coalition has competent staff and volunteers who are proficient in most of the dominant languages spoken by African immigrants. These are typically not translated by other agencies that offer mental health and immigration services that may otherwise be comparable to the African Coalition’s host of services. The organization provides mental health and immigration assistance services in English.

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Furthermore, the African Coalition is able to provide mental health, immigration integration, and assistance services (or translation) in the following languages: Arabic, Amharic, French, Creole, Spanish, Hausa, Ibo, Koisan, Lingala, Swahili, Tigrinya, Twi, Xhosa, Zolof, and Yoruba. African Coalition assists African immigrants at the local, regional, and nationwide levels by educating on crisis intervention, presenting educational information on culturally-appropriate local and out-of-state radio talk shows and media outlets, and discussing mental health on the phone with individuals. CULTURAL APPROPRIATE APPROACH Since most attitudinal and behavioral changes occur in the context of relationships, the practice works because it uses “trusted” members of a community to educate other community members. The organization develops intergenerational understanding and support, provides services that build among individuals, families, and their communities an image of the service organization as caring, understanding of individuals’ and communities’ situations and needs—as non-officious, trustworthy, and concerned with the whole human being and families. The ACPHC provides services with cultural and linguistic competence. Cultural competence—whether with respect to ethnicity culture, age, or language—is a critical aspect of a responsive community treatment system. The African Communities Public Health Coalition service delivery design includes: a.  the use of bicultural and bilingual staff; b.  in-languages (more than ten African Languages) translation of educational and intervention materials; c.  experienced male and female staff trained on gender and sexual orientation issues; d.  linkage with informal and formal community care and support systems; and e.  innovative methods of service delivery that address salient cultural aspects of minority functioning. FUTURE Overall, throughout our continued growth in the future, the African Coalition is deeply invested in perpetuating a culture that is inviting and empowering for the target community. In the near future, we will be working on



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incorporating more culturally relevant treatment systems into all of our programs. Depending upon the cultures from which our beneficiaries are raised, differing approaches to mental and physical health are especially effective. It is a distinct goal to continue incorporating more culturally competent services that best meet the needs of our beneficiaries in ways that they are unlikely to receive elsewhere and are effective at creating lasting changes. REFERENCES Africa Coalition Website. 2023. https:​//​africancoalition​.org​/. Carlos Echeverria-Estrada, and Jeanne Batalova, “Sub Saharan African Immigrants in the United States” Migration Policy Institute. Washington, DC. https:​//​www​ .migrationpolicy​.org​/article​/sub​-saharan​-african​-immigrants​-united​-states​-2018. Office of the Surgeon General (US); Center for Mental Health Services (US); National Institute of Mental Health (US). Mental Health: Culture, Race, and Ethnicity: A Supplement to Mental Health: A Report of the Surgeon General. Rockville (MD): Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (US); August 2001. Chapter 2. “Culture Counts: The Influence of Culture and Society on Mental Health.” https:​//​www​.ncbi​.nlm​.nih​.gov​/books​/NBK44249​/. Saechao, F., S. Sharrock, D. Reicherter, J. D. Livingston, A. Aylward, J. Whisnant, C. Koopman, and S. Kohli 2012. “Stressors and Barriers to Using Mental Health Services Among Diverse Groups of First-Generation Immigrants to the United States.” Community Mental Health Journal 48 (1): 98–106. https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1007​ /s10597​-011​-9419​-4. US Department of Health and Human Services. online. 2020. Social Determinants of Health. https:​//​www​.healthypeople​.gov​/2020​/topics​-objectives​/topic​/social​ -determinants​-of​-healthexternal. Accessed June 20, 2020.

PART IV

Conclusion

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Afterword Tom Spencer-Walters

In his foreword to my book, Memory and the Narrative Imagination, Ngugi wa Thiong’o tells a story from a TV program about a man who lost all memory of his past after hitting his head. Ngugi compares this experience to the wiping out of critical data from a computer’s hard drive. But unlike the computer, which loses information only, what is lost in human memory in this case is certainly deleterious to this man’s identity, history, and psychosocial equilibrium. He is void of any filial recognition of and interaction with his environment, his family, and even with his self, all of which are essential ingredients to a wholesome humanity. His wife had to lovingly and patiently nurture him to reclaim his lost memory. This story stayed with me as I continued my research on memory, language, colonialism, and recovery as they impact Africa. I was irresistibly drawn to questions I knew were important and critical to my research but could not unravel then: How do we first reclaim, then reconstruct, African memory that we have lost or has been suppressed by conquest and colonization? In other words, how do we re-member what has been dis-membered? Is it even possible? Awfully daunting questions since the superimposed colonial structure that Mudimbe often writes about has “ensured the domination of space, the reformation of the natives’ minds, and the integration of local histories into the Western perspective” (Mudimbe 1994, 2). This dragnet around African memory thus augers in a new way of seeing and being; one in which African discourses have either been “silenced radically” or “converted by conquering Western discourses” (xiv). Over a long period of time, some writers have unwittingly embraced these discourses that summarily deny or dismiss the value of African language, culture, and identity because they wanted to focus more on the new dispensations of political independence and nation-building. However, there were those like Cheikh Anta Diop, Chinua Achebe, Ama Ata 231

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Aidoo, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o, who began to question the validity of such discourses as suitable vehicles for reconnections with the African past. They understood that the task of reclaiming that past will require creativity, imagination, boldness, and determination. Thus, commitment to re-membering Africa becomes a necessary cultural, economic, political, and intellectual imperative—a battle for the recovery of the continent’s social memory and thereby the restoration of its wholeness. Ngugi emphasized this point when he declared that “writers and the intellectuals in their movement are aware that without a reconnection to African memory, there is no wholeness” (2009, 39) Nonetheless, developing approaches for studying this reconnection became a challenge for many African intellectuals, especially after independence when the primary focus for many African countries was to become nation states. In various research endeavors on the state of African studies, several such approaches ranging from regional, to single nation studies, to interdisciplinary studies, were examined. While these are credible efforts to re-member Africa, they did not include in any significant way, cross-disciplinary interaction and cooperation. Developing a discourse for recovering the African past that allows for or even actively encourages participation by disparate disciplines makes for a richer and more diverse exploration of the African past and, hopefully, a robust reclamation of that continent’s social memory. As my coeditors and I contemplated a manuscript that would address, among other things, this issue of cross-disciplinary research in African studies, we were fortunate to get valuable insights not only from colleagues and friends who made presentations at my retirement celebration in 2019 but from disparate scholars whose areas of expertise intersect with our grand design for the manuscript. The focus of presentations at the retirement event was to honor more than thirty-five years of service to California State University, Northridge, but I was greatly intrigued by the different approaches presenters took to address the theme. Some look at my years of service as emblematic of professional development and contributory institutional building, others see it as creating memories in personal and institutional spaces, and yet still others, as counter-stories that provided transformative opportunities for deserving but underserved students, especially in the ethnic studies departments. What became immediately recognizable out of all these presentations and subsequent contributions from interested scholars is a recognition of the power of language, memory, and imagination in reconstructing the past in ways that help to repair not only fragmented subjectivities but also to create new memories. Recognizing all this, my coeditors and I were inspired to move forward with the manuscript. One area of focus that received copious attention, we discovered, was the pivotal role of language both in the process of “dismembering” Africa and its

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diaspora, and in the subsequent efforts to recover and reclaim lost traditions and culture. Ngugi had observed that “to starve and kill a language is to starve and kill a people’s memory bank.” (2009, 20). In short, language is notably the most important instrument through which a nation’s cultural memory is accessed. It is vital to our physical, psychosocial, and epistemic needs, while equally sustaining the life blood of communities and organizations. Advancing this idea of the pre-eminence of language in re-membering Africa, Sheba Lo’s piece in this volume is a cogent reminder that no matter how elaborate and sometimes violent the efforts are to denigrate and/or wipe out the African past, language runs deep in African culture. Even in simple greeting rituals, Lo asserts, “we acknowledge other’s humanity, our common spirit, and the lived experiences that bind us together.” Whereas the pressures of the dominant cultures may sometimes slow down or change these cultural practices, they are never completely destroyed, Lo concludes. To recover these ruptured memories in the African diaspora, determined efforts must be made to reclaim cultural and linguistic ties with Africa and this was most evident in her discussion about the linkages between African American Language (AAL) and Africa indigenous languages. Selase Williams, expands on those linkages in his analysis of my research on and teaching about Sierra Leone Krio language, both in Africa and in the African diaspora. He noted that the opportunity for students, especially African American students, to speak an African language that has some historical and linguistic connections to African American Language, while being exposed to elements of African culture, was not only revelatory for them but transformative as well. It is the strongest evidence yet of how we remake African memories for history and self-preservation. The picture is not so clear when we talk about adult literacy in Africa, according to Ntiri’s observations in her chapter in this book. She reminds us that literacy was part of the colonialist mission to “civilize” Africans. Therefore, disparaging African oral traditions provided a convenient way to justify the superiority of European languages and culture over those of the Africans. Literacy over time became a major determinant in social hierarchies in the continent. But Ntiri cautions that in spite of this dominance, adult literacy has not fared well in Africa for a number of reasons that include lack of resources and sex discrimination. However, one specific challenge to the success of adult literacy, which is important for our purposes here, is the failure to utilize oral elements such as storytelling and narration in literacy acquisition. Without their utilization, Ntiri further cautions, literacy will not advance as rapidly as initially envisioned. While Williams and Lo talk about linguistic and stylistic influences of African languages and cultures in the African diaspora experience, Kennon’s approach was to analyze two key pieces of literature, Aidoo’s Ghost and

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Anowa, that use of language and African traditions to dramatize the connections between the advent of slavery and the subsequent development of the African diaspora. Kennon aptly captures in these works the role of history and memory in the making and remaking of the African past. Gabriel’s chapter in this volume clearly focuses on language and African memory from a transnational perspective, specifically Marcus Garvey’s ideas about physical, sociocultural, and psychological reconnections between continental and diasporan Africans. He discusses the idea of flexible citizenry through transnational lenses. Because diasporan Africans were rooted from their natural African environment through the violence of slavery in the Americas and the Caribbean, they should be given the right of return if they so choose. The diaspora, he argues, is an extension of the continent. Zemlicka, on the other hand, examines the transnational idea from the perspective of African emigration from Uganda, specifically Pentecostal church members, into the Los Angeles area. Negotiating the spaces between a Western religious organization, like the Pentecostal faith, and traditional African beliefs and practices in America was challenging. The Pentecostals embraced their faith but at the same time sought to reinvent African memories through recall and adaptations. These are memories, like cultural norms, that they consider important to selfhood and community cohesion. This delicate balance between the past and the present, old and new, would not have been achieved if the Pentecostal faith did not afford some flexibility. Admassu, Peprah, and Aimufua saw that need for flexibility when they argue in their chapter for understanding, patience, and flexibility, in dealing with African immigrants in the United States who have mental health issues. The very existence of the African Coalition, they contend, is a template to provide just that kind of service. What we have learned from this and the other chapters that focus on transnational memory is that Africans never completely lose or choose to give up their cultural traditions and language regardless of where they are. They always find creative ways to re-imagine such memories. De Maio and Posner look at language from a more discrete perspective. They argue that to re-member Africa, the dominant language must be closely scrutinized to weed out undesirable terms, like “tribe” frequently used to denigrate, isolate, and show otherness. I might add that similar terms often used in the literature to describe Africans include “natives” and “kaffir” (Black African). The subtleties of meaning surrounding these terms are not only linguistic but pervasively racist and divisive. De Maio and Posner contend that “tribe” (like the other two terms above), has become so indelibly etched in both Western and African discourses that finding a replacement that is uniformly acceptable to the continent and its people is a challenge for African researchers and scholars.

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Memory and the art of storytelling was another area that featured prominently in the retirement presentations and discussions I had with colleagues and friends, and since these are prime areas of my research focus, I was eager to explore their interests in this field. Some observed, and I strongly agree, that memory is the repository of a community’s culture and history, and storytelling is generally the preferred vehicle through which to access these memories, not only with the goal to reexamine the past, but to reconstruct it in ways that would celebrate Africa’s rich traditions and ensure her potential to create new memories. As an artform, storytelling is vibrant, transformative, and creative, and it tends to assuage our need for social interaction while acting as vehicles for historical, cultural, epistemological, and philosophical inquiries. Often, the conduit for this action is the storyteller. Through storytelling, the storyteller combines spirituality, traditions, and history, remembering and telling, and form and meaning. Therefore, the role of the storyteller in re-membering Africa is crucial to the success of the story. Moreno, in her chapter on the power of memory, captures the poignancy of storytelling from a cross-disciplinary angle. She indicates that storytelling in the Chicana/o studies and Africana studies composition classrooms becomes the antidote to memories of trauma and pain for the student populations these departments primarily serve. Using storytelling in the composition classroom, Moreno continues, helps students to remember and recover as they gain critical literacy, in the same way that it helped, Fajardo-Anstine, a writer Moreno referenced, to tell the story of Confluence Park in Denver whose residents and rich history got sidelined because of the gentrification of that city. Fajardo-Anstine’s collection of stories are deliberate efforts to re-member Confluence Park through reconstructions of stories from her grandmother and mother. Moreno’s point about counter-storytelling in the community of Denver, is replicated in Suzanne Scheld’s chapter about Marché Sandaga, a well-known market in Dakar, Senegal, built by the French in 1930. Over the years, it became the center for trading and other African community activities until its decline in the 2000s. Scheld reports that its social history is controversial. The dominant narrative associated with the market celebrates more of Marché Sandaga’s colonial heritage and Murid influences, but less of those elements, like its Sudanese design, its role in uniting communities, and the many stories it tells about its African past. The Senegalese government chose to demolish the building to make way for new structures rather than commit to its cultural preservation. Buildings tell stories and the ultimate question Suzanne tried to address in this chapter was: How should Marché Sandaga be remembered, especially since much of its past is non-existent, lost, destroyed? It is a question worth pursuing now that the market has become a piece of Senegalese history and culture.

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Hume-Dawson’s contribution to the discussion about re-membering Africa was novel and thought-provoking. He makes the case passionately for the need to understand the experiences of people who have survived polio and those who live with other disabilities. By taking this bold step for better advocacy, he is, in effect challenging the dominant narrative about disability in Africa. That is, that disabled people, including polio survivors, are abnormal, with crippled bodies and minds; people to be feared and/or pitied. This narrative, Hume-Dawson argues, is a product of colonial thinking, that privileges full or able-bodied humans while presenting disabled people as inferior. Using his own personal experiences as a polio survivor, Hume-Dawson proceeded to develop counter-narratives that highlight the lives and experiences of disabled people, powerful reminders of re-membering Africa. He exhorts us to shed old dogmas about disabled people; create new memories about the care, love, and respect accorded to them before the colonial intrusion into African lives; and to treat everyone, able or disabled, with dignity. The strength of Nkulu N’Sengha’s vision in this volume is that he does not only discuss what has been dismembered through European colonialism in Africa but how best to protect and, where necessary, reinvent African memories. Using the idea of Bumuntu (a genuine human being who understands the difference between good and evil, as well as the value of the individual and the community), Nkulu N’Sengha proceeded to make the argument that African cultural traditions and philosophy have a lot to offer the world. African creation stories, he points out, speak to our common origins. He suggests that the kind of epistemic violence that is so evident in our world today is antithetical to the spirit of Bumuntu. We must educate people to embrace tolerance, love, and our common humanity. We must create new memories. It is with this spirit of Bumuntu that I conclude this piece. The power of memory and language will always create possibilities for the advancement of knowledge, history, and culture. Memory has allowed us to create representations of our actualized past and correct pernicious narratives while affirming our humanity and our place in history. This volume has done a lot to move us in that direction. REFERENCES Ngugi, wa Thiong’o. 2009. Something Torn and New: An African Renaissance. New York: Civitas Books. Mudimbe, V. Y. 1994. The Idea of Africa. London: James Curry. Spencer-Walters, Tom. Memory and the Narrative Imagination in the African and Diaspora Experience. Troy, MI: Bedford Publishers Inc.

Index

Aba 152 Abarry 130, 152, 160 Abasema 141 Abba 141 Abdoulaye 196 Abeadzi 141 Abena 140, 156, 161 Abimbola 117, 118, 121, 129 Abiola 161 Aboa 118, 120 Abraham 112, 129 Abu 130, 152, 160, 160 Academe 179, 180, 182 Accra 163, 258 Achebe 28, 30, 34, 43, 247 Acta 161 Actes 133 activism 10, 146, 168, 170, 171, 172, 187 activist 10, 167, 182, 230 Acuña 166–168, 170–171, 179– 180, 182 Ada 157, 158, 161 Adams 158, 160, 161 Addison 64 Adéèkó 155, 157, 160 Adéléke 155, 157, 160

Adelugba 160 Adeola 158 Adetunji 157, 163 Adi 111, 129 Adichie 205, 213 Adler 131 Admassu 6, 15, 236, 238, 240, 242, 250, 253 adultery 119, 120 Aesthetic 12, 23, 50, 51, 64, 136, 146, 162, 163 Aesthetics 5, 12, 21, 47, 50, 51, 61 African-American 140, 146 African-feminist 159 Africanisms 30, 258 Africanist 38, 39 Africanists 70, 127 Africanization 126, 194 Africanize 194 Africanized 152, 193 Africanness 12, 62, 69 Africology 255 Afrika 58, 69, 113 Afrikaner 113 Afrique-Occidentale 192 Afro-Caribbean 13, 69 Afrocentric 69, 108, 126 237

Index

Afrocentric 107, 128–129 Afropessimist 128, 224 Afrophobia 128 Afros 50 agbala 117 Aguiar 157 Agyeman-Duah 141, 160 Ahomeka 120 Ahooye 120 Aiden 45 Aidoo 136, 140–141, 143,145, 147, 148, 151, 156, 157– 163, 248 AIDS 220 Aihiokhai 83, 102 Aihwa 70, 75, 77 Aimé 110, 130 Aimufua 6, 15, 236, 238, 240, 242, 250, 253 Aisiku 221, 233 Aitchison 206, 213 Àjé 159 Akan 118–120, 131, 136 Akello 81, 88, 90–91, 93, 94, 97, 100, 102 Akufo-Addo 76 Akyeampong 160 akyiwade 120 albinism 222223 albinos 117, 222 Alcinda 103 Ali 121, 131 Alif 159 Alim 64 Allen 233

Allender 180 Almadies 195 Amadou 194–195 Amandla 50, 63 Ameet 44 Aminata 223, 233 Amiri 51, 63 Amun 115 Anastaplo 118, 129 Anderson 103, 104, 217, 218, 233 Angelou 61, 71 Anglophone 136 Ankh 63, 161, 161 Anlo 160 Annan 122, 122, 122 Annule 200 apartheid 48, 50, 74, 213 Appadurai 80, 85, 95, 100, 102, 188, 199, 200 Appiah 108, 130, 157 Arapaho 173 Arjun 102, 199, 200 Armah 47, 62–63, 139, 161 Arndt 159 Asie-Lumumba 204, 214 Asonzeh 104 Assmann 130 Athlyi 257 Atum 115 Ayala-Alcantar 168 Ayamyie 120 Ayebia 160–161 Ayi 47, 62, 63, 139, 141, 155, 161 Aylward 243 Azodo 157–158, 161

238

Index

Azusa 83, 104 Badenya 121 Badiane 185 Baganda 91, 100 Bailey 71 Bakhtin 179, 182 Bakole 122, 123, 130 Balintine 257 Baluba 117–120, 126 Bamba 194–195 Bambaata 62 Bambaataa 69 Bambara 123 Bambudye 123 Bana 119 Bancal 130 Bancel 111 Bantu 118, 118, 119, 119, 123, 123, 125, 255 Bartow 180, 183 Basch 103 Bastide 126 Batalova 238, 243 Bates 130 Baugh 52, 63, 64 Baum 114, 125, 126, 130 Bay 230, 256 Beck 131 Bedell 64 Bedford 30, 132, 162–163, 200, 210, 214, 233, 252 Beeckmanns 190–191,199 Bell 131, 161, 220 Benezet 121

Bénézet 130 Benin 203 Bennett 55, 114, 132, 146, 159 Benston 161 Berg 163 Bergunder 103, 104 Bernal 130 Bernasconi 111, 130 Bernth 146, 159 Betts 192, 199 Bezinna 233 Bieler 222 Biggs 39, 43 Bigon 190–193,199 Bilili 225, 233 Biodun 158–160, 162Blabla 172 Blackwell 103, 131 Blakely 129 Bloomington 30, 104, 130, 132, 158–163 Blyden 19–20, 30, 69 Boeck 94, 103 Bois 19, 30, 74, 76, 161 Boisian 69 Bonsu 122 Bonton 158 Borrell 110, 111, 130 Botswana 206 Botton 190, 199 Bouncin 64 Bown 213 Boyce 158, 161 Bracey 63 Brake 210, 213 239

Index

Bridges 161, 181, 183 Brill 45 Brison 218 Brown 63, 141, 158, 179 Browne 128, 130 Bruner 229 Brunet 113 Brunett 103 Brunswick 103, 159, 161–162, 179, 180, 182 Brusco 102 Buchi 145, 158–160, 162, 181, 184 Buckingham 253 Buhari 45 buhika 119 Bujo 121, 130 Bull 186 Bulopwe 123 Bulsa 118 Burch 214 Burgess 39, 44 Busari 205, 213 Busia 140, 161 Busia’s 156, 156 Buttyson 44 Buxton 158 Cairns 204, 213 Caitani 187, 200 Caligulan 127 Callaloo 30 Cameroon 64 Campbell 230 Camus 110, 139, 157

Canfield 178, 182 cannibalism 112 Carnoy 207 Carter 112, 133, 178 Caulker 166, 179, 180, 182 Cecil 104 Césaire 110, 130 Chaadayev 128, 129, 130 Chaco 200 Chad 203 Chain 64 Chakravorty 200 Chalie 230 Chapman 161, 254 Charlton 222, 233 Cheikh 110–111, 114, 131, 195, 199, 247 Chikwenye 145, 159 Chimamanda 205, 213 Chinweizu 62, 63 Chomba 44 Chopra 213 Christel 156, 163 Christianity 20, 24, 30, 79, 81, 83, 87, 104, 115–116, 121–122, 124–126, 231 Chukwudi 131 Clanand 147 clans 35 Clapback 213 Clark 44, 64, 255 Clarke 160, 161 Clenora 159 Clifford 30, 103, 158 Clinton 230 240

Index

Coakley 103 Cole 23, 30, 257 Coleman 256 Comaroff 81, 103 Conde 161 Congo 90, 114, 117, 255 Conley 30 consciousness 69, 71, 74–76, 83, 166, 170, 172, 191 Coppens 112 Copula 56, 58, 60, 61 Corina 173, 181, 183 Corky 181 Cornelis 103, 104 Corniche 196 Corten 104 Cosby 52 counter-memory 14, 165, 166, 169, 170, 175, 178, 179 Cour 200 Crawford 45, 84 Creek 173 Creole 23, 28–30, 53, 242, 258 Creolization 23–24, 29–30, 257 cross-cultural 144, 146148 Crossette 122, 130 Crouch 124 Crummell 69 Cupers 190, 199 Currey 44, 129, 133, 162, 182, 183 Daara 60, 64 Dale 180 Dama 58 Dangarembga 159

Danticat 157, 161 Dapo 160 Dart 230 Dassow 115, 133 Davies 158, 161 Dawkins 113 de-centered 147 Decker 166, 182 Delaney 69 Delgado 179, 182 Delpit 64 Delumeau 130 Derek 149 Devine 158 dialect 35, 52, 54–55, 60, 148149 Dijk 99, 104 Dinaa 59 Dini-Osman 76 Dionne 38, 44 Diop 110–111, 114, 131–131, 247 Diouf 194, 199 Dixon-Fyle 23, 30, 257 Djia 127 Djibouti 256 Djily 61 Dogon 117, 117 Dominguez 48, 258 Doucet 199 Dover 75, 77 Dovi 75, 76 Drinkard 28, 30 Droogers 103, 104 Drouin 157 Dubois 74 Dubow 131

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Index

Duke 75, 77, 103, 200 Durham 75, 77, 103, 132, 200 Dwyer 60, 63 Dyssou 205, 213

Ezekwesili 45

Eagleton 229 Ebonics 52, 53 Echeverria-Estrada 243 Eck 87, 103 Edwidge 139, 157, 161 Efam 75, 76 Efuru 158 Egbo 213 Eggers 169, 180, 182 Ekeh 37, 40, 44 Elaine 95, 103 Eldred 30, 206, 213, 230 Elhadji 224 Ellis 63 Elmina 142, 154–155, 157 Emecheta 145, 158–160, 162 Emenyonu 158 Enfield 163 Erdrich 178 Ethiopia 71, 75, 89, 239 ethnic 12, 21, 33, 33, 36–45, 89, 100, 108, 118, 125, 127, 156, 165, 167–168, 170, 171, 176, 178, 178–180, 182, 182, 184, 205, 208, 221, 238, 240–241, 248, 254, 256 Eulalie 14, 141–144, 146–154, 157 Ewald 113, 131 Eyerman 139, 161 Eze 111, 131

Fadda 60 Fadenya-Badenya 121 Fafunwa 221, 233 Fajardo-Anstine 166, 172–174, 181, 183, 251 Fama 141 Fang 118 Fanon 127 Fante 141, 152, 152, 152 Fanti 141, 150 Farrar 44, 161 Fatou 56, 186 Fayard 130 feminism 141, 145, 159 Fetterley 229 FGM 253 Fink 181, 183 Fisher 125, 126, 131 Fitz 257 Fleischer 233 Floyd 51 Fluehr-Lobban 33–34, 43–44 Follett 158 Foner 158 Fontelles 110 Foucault 229 Fourah 230, 256 Fraser 103 Freire 204, 213 Frie 113, 131 Fuga 123 Furusa 47–49, 62, 63 Fyle 22, 30

242

Index

Gabon 118, 195 Gambia 61, 205 Garnett 69 Garvey 5, 12, 50, 67–71, 73–77, 257 Garveyism 50, 65, 257 Gastón 200 Gates 108, 130, 157 Gay 157, 158, 161 Gayatri 193, 200 Gayle 64, 64 Gchingiri 158, 162 Gee 209, 213 Geertz 82, 103 gender 15, 43, 84–85, 94, 100, 103, 158–159, 162, 168, 206, 212–213, 242, 255 Geordie 158 Geschichte 112, 131 Gewel 186 Ghana 44, 51, 73–77, 87, 119, 131, 136, 140–143, 146, 148, 151, 153–154, 160, 161, 163, 189, 239, 258 Gibril 30 Gibson 39, 44 Gilroy 69, 71, 75, 75, 76, 179, 179, 179 Giroux 44, 161 Glick-Schiller 94, 103 Globalization 6, 9–10, 49, 80–82, 87, 100, 102–104, 126, 129, 132, 188, 203, 205, 207, 209, 211–213, 215 Gobineau 110

Godwin 112, 133 Goelet 115 Gold 140, 141 Goldberg 111, 131 Gonzales 181 Góór 57 Gordillo 191, 200 Gorée 62 Gorky 229, 229 Gourevitch 35, 44 Gouye 194 Goyal 137, 159, 161 Graves 158, 161 Greene 157, 161 Greenwich 233 Greenwood 158, 160 Greer 190, 200 Grove 30 Gueye 185 Guinea 206 Gunner 159 Günther 110 Gurin 179, 183 Gustav 131 Gutenberg 74 Gutkind 45 Gyekye 119–120, 131 Haffner 230 Hair 162, 186, 189 Hamilton 43, 44 Hancock 64 Hansen 200 Harare 64, 207 Harbeson 131 243

Index

Hardt 80 Hare 257 Harlem 67 Harley 158 Harris 133 Harryette 28, 30 Hart 104 Hartford 64 Hartman 143, 157, 161 Hausa 242 Hegel 111–112, 128, 131 Heinemann 30, 64–65, 129, 132–133, 200 Hennon 257 Herrera 166, 172, 181, 183 Herrnstein 111, 131 Herson 60, 63 Heumann 230231 Hildegard 159161 Hill 74, 76, 131 Hilton 181–182 hip-hop 53, 60–62, 64, 71, 254 Hirsch 63 Hoeller 160, 161 Holland 75, 77 Holley 75, 77 Holloway 30, 258 Holocaust 218 Holquist 179, 182 Holst 159 Hong 93, 195 Honwana 94, 103 Hopkins 158 Horace 144 Howell 257

Hudson-Weems 159 Huntington 110, 131 Hurere 150, 152 Hurston 168, 173 Hutu 36 identity 29, 35, 39–42, 52, 71, 73–74, 87, 100, 103, 111, 123, 126, 139, 143, 156, 158–159, 161–162, 167, 171–172, 180, 183, 188–189, 198, 211–212, 214, 219, 247 Igbo 23–24, 28, 158 Iliad 210 illiteracy 204, 206–208, 212–213 indigenous 21–22, 28, 34, 36, 45, 48, 87, 94, 121, 124–125, 130, 138, 167, 194, 200, 205, 208, 211, 233, 249 Innes 141, 158, 161 Irele 142, 161 Islam 20, 30, 115–116, 121, 199 Islamization 126 Jackson 223, 233 Jacobs 180, 183 Jagne 158 Jahoda 131 Jalloh 230 Jammeh 61 jazz 50, 60, 186 Jeddah 195 Jian 72 Joern 172, 179–181, 183 Johanson 112 244

Index

Johnson 158 Jones 22, 30, 45, 52, 54, 64, 90–91, 97–98, 230, 255 Joom 127 Judaism 116 Kabaka 93 Kafkaesque 122, 127 Kagan 204, 204 Kalbfeld 64 Kali 166, 172, 181, 183 Kamara 230 Kamina 126, 132 Kandimba 40, 44 Kane 196, 200 Kapu 31, 157 Kar 195, 199 Karenga 108, 131 Karikari 122 Karp 121, 131 Kasara 39, 44 Katrak 159 Kayir 209 Kayr 214 Keane 58 Kelley 166, 170–171, 174, 178– 181,183 Kenya 30, 38, 43–44, 48, 90, 117, 120, 187, 200, 207 Kenyatta 19, 30 Kër 56 Kermel 191, 199 Kete 114 Ketu 159 Kibona 64

Kikuyu 187 Killam 43 Kilopwe 123 Kiluba 118, 119 kin 117, 143 Kintu 118, 120 Kinyatti 48, 64 Kismayo 256 Klan 174 Klein 177 Kohli 243 Koisan 242 Kombegin 153 Konadu 157, 162 Kong 93, 195 Koopman 243 Kopytoff 188, 200 Koster 64, 255 Kramon 39, 44 Krio 12, 21–24, 26, 29–31, 157, 166–167, 170, 249, 257258 Krio-English 22, 30 Kurukan 123 Kushite 115 Kutz 50, 64 Kyaligonza 9798 Kyiakor 141 Laffont 131 Lajuan 57, 57 Lambert 75, 77 Lamine 185 Lanehart 63 Lang 30 Langhorst 172, 174, 179–181, 183

245

Index

Lanham 3, 4, 64 Lanhorst 181 Lansing 63 Laurenti 131 Lauri 233 Lave 11 Leakey 112 Leaks 181, 184 Leaneagh 233 Lebonbang 225 Lebow 190 Lee 63 Legon 136, 141 Lehman 179, 183 Leiden 45 Lekk 57–59 Lesley 258 Lesotho 205 Levin 111, 132 Lewis 131, 179, 183 Lewiston 129 lexicon 34, 53, 54–55, 117, 144, 145 Leyen 110, 133 Leza 119 Liberia 70 Libya 206 Lichtheim 115, 131 Limpopo 117 Lincoln 199 Lindfors 146, 159 Lingala 242 Linus 132 Liora 199

Lipsitz 168, 173, 178–179, 181, 183 literacy 6, 12, 14–15, 21, 24–29, 135–136, 156, 163, 165–168, 170–171, 174–177, 181–183, 203–215, 249, 251, 255, Littlefield 4 Littoral 196 Livingston 243 Livingstone 34, 43 Loban 33, 34, 43 Locke 161 Lohfink 116, 131 Longman 14, 157, 160, 233 Longmore 230, 233 Lopez 40, 44 Lowe 12, 33, 42, 44 Luba 118, 120, 123, 126, 132– 133, 255 Luganda 91 Lujan 173, 181 Lumbila 126 Lumumba 51 lupus 122 Lynsey 180, 183 Maami 146, 150 Maat 115, 118, 125 Machiavellian 127 Machismo 102 Madison 110, 132, 254 Mafeje 33, 34, 44 Magesa 117, 131 makoji 119 Makuchi 158, 162 246

Index

malaka 119 Malawi 45 Mali 117, 203, 209, 223 Mamdani 34, 35, 41, 44 Manchester 199 Mande 121 Mandela 225 Mandingo 123 Manichean 69 Manitou 111 Marcus 50, 67, 74–77, 219, 250 marginalization 94, 212 marginalized 23, 29, 102, 118, 125, 138, 198, 203, 212, 213, 237 Marimba 47, 63 marriage 14, 84, 120, 142, 144, 146, 150 Marseille 193 Martin 69, 70, 75, 77, 130, 178, 199, 204 Maryknoll 129, 130–131 masculinity 102 matriarch 95, 146 matrilineal 140 Mauritius 206 Mayfield 51, 64 Mazrui 121, 131 Mbacké 194, 195, 199 Mbaimba 166, 179, 182 mbalax 186 Mbiti 120, 132 Mbuli 48, 64 McComas 75, 77 McLaughlin 58, 64

McNee 60, 64 McWhorter 53, 64 Mecca 172 Medina 194 Mende 26, 73, 123 metaphors 28, 146 Metaphysical 44, 138, 139, 181, 183 metropolitan 23, 205, 206, 207 Meyer 85, 87, 100, 103 Michel-Rolph 136, 163 missionaries 25, 70 missionization 87 Modernity 5, 13, 25, 75, 76, 79, 80–83, 85–92, 94–96, 99–104, 161, 163, 199 modernization 80, 82, 87, 88, 126, 129, 196, 207 Modupe 142, 157, 158, 162 Monka 142,150, 151 monogenism 112 Monotheism 130 Móódu -56 Mora 40, 44 Moreno 6, 14, 165–166, 168, 170, 172, 174, 176, 178–180, 182, 184, 251–255 Morrison 159, 166, 172, 177, 179, 181–183 Moses 115–130, 149–152 mosque 86 Mouride 194 Mudimbe 111, 130, 132, 139, 157, 162, 247252 Mufwene 30 247

Index

Multicultural 132, 199, 257, 258 multiculturalism 108 Multilingual 213 Munashe 47, 62, 63 Muntu 118–121 Murid 14, 194–195, 197–199, 251 Muslim 121, 126 Mutharabaini 187, 200 Mwalimu 204 mythology 137, 156, 163, 198, 210 myths 112, 117, 119, 121 Mzwakhe 48, 64 Nairobi 64, 182, 183 Nana 76, 141, 142, 146, 150, 151 Nasta 146, 159, 161, 162 nationalism 9, 27, 116, 145, 186, 198 NCTE 51, 169, 173, 177, 180, 181, 183, 255 Neanderthal 113 nègres 131 Négritude 107,128, 130, 141 Nelson 104, 225 neo-Colonialism 132 neo-Pentecostalism 87 neo-Sudanese 185, 192 neocolonialism 12, 13, 109–110, 114, 128, 132, 138, 145, 160, 162 neoliberal 102, 127, 176, 195 Nfah-Abbenyi 158, 162 Nicholas 110, 128–129, 132, 159 Niger 34, 117 Niger-Congo 53

Nigeria 117, 118, 121, 205–206, 213–214, 221–222, 239 Nigerian 102, 104, 157, 205–206 Nile 115, 117 Nkrumah 110, 132, 140 Nnaemeka 146, 159, 162 Nomadic 63 Norbert 116, 131 Nostalgia 27, 99, 141 Ntewusu 189, 200 Ntiri 6, 15, 25, 26, 30, 203–210, 212, 214, 249, 255, 256 Nubia 114 Nyong’o 139, 157, 162 O’Neal 51, 64 OAU 125 Obioma 146, 159, 159, 162 occultists 86 Odamtten 147, 156, 158, 160, 162 Odumna 147, 151 Ogunyemi 145, 159 Ojoye 40, 45 Okot 47, 64 Okpewho 136, 162 Oladele 158 Olakunle 161 Olaogun 142, 157, 158, 162 Olikenyi 118, 132 Oliver 227, 233 Olúfémi 157, 163 Ong 70, 72, 75, 77 ontological 119, 139 Oppenheimer 113, 114, 132

248

Index

orality 12, 14, 21, 24–30, 54, 135–136, 156, 163, 181, 184, 208, 209–211, 214, 257 orature 136, 152, 155, 156, 160 Orbis 129, 130, 131 Othering 147, 148, 159, 162, 170, 198, 250 Ouagadougou 256 Paganism 25, 122 paleontological 112, 113 Palm-Wine 30 Pan-African 15, 50, 60, 62, 68, 69, 107, 128, 129, 156, 178, 186, 203 paradigm 62, 80, 108–109, 111– 112, 116, 118, 120, 125, 127, 129, 221 partitioning 138, 139 patriarchal 84, 181, 184, 212, 221, 227 patronage 39 pedagogy 11, 167, 171, 176, 180, 181, 183, 204, 211, 213 Pellow 256 Pendergast 181, 183 Penina 200 Pentecostal 13, 80–89, 92–93, 95–97, 99–101, 103–104, 250 Pentecostalism 79–86, 88, 89, 94–104 Pentecostals 5, 79, 82, 83, 85, 87, 103, 250 Pidgin 55, 55, 63, 64 Plato 114

Platte 173, 181, 183 polemics 138 Polio 6, 15, 217–220, 222– 233, 252 polygamous 211 polygenism 112 polylectics 160, 162 Polytechnic 254 Post-colonial 45, 102, 103, 127, 190, 199 post-independence 136, 140 post-independence-era 141 postcolonial 14, 27, 38, 45, 103, 108, 111–112, 122, 126, 127, 136, 138, 142–143, 158–159, 163, 179, 182, 194, 203, 205, 207 postcoloniality 13, 108 postdoctoral 255 Postmodernity 162 Pre-Colonial 44 precolonial 28, 41, 43, 45, 221, 223 primordial 27 Pritchard 114, 132 pro-emigrations 69 Protestant 84, 87, 102 psychiatrists 236, 237 psycho-spiritual 75 psychosocial 138, 247, 249 Qatar 196 Quartz 75, 76 racial-apartheid 69 radicalized 169 249

Index

Ranger 41, 45, 174 Rastafari 69, 71, 75 Re-Membering 3, 5, 6, 10–12, 14–16, 19, 47–63, 82, 165, 173, 178, 185, 187–190, 195–196, 198–199, 213, 248, 249, 251– 252 refugee 238 reparations 13, 71–77 repatriation 69–73 reunification 68, 69, 143, 145 reunion 73, 75, 76, 181 Rhodesian 42 Riasanovsky 128, 132 Richard 44, 45, 71, 113, 131, 158, 160, 179, 182 Rickford 53, 64 Robbins 83, 85, 104 Robert 65, 74 76, 81, 90, 114, 125 126, 130, 131, 257 Roberts 213, 230 Robin 44, 64, 157, 166, 174, 180, 181, 183 Roman 116, 179, 182 Rome 114, 116, 195 rooted 9, 41, 43, 87, 136, 209, 250 rootlessness 147 Rosaldo 81, 103 Russia 127, 128, 132, 204, 229 Sabrina 173, 181, 183 Saechao 236, 243 Saharan 243 Sahel 185 Saïd 110

Saidiya 143, 161 Saigon 89 Salaam 214 salience 35, 40, 139 salient 36, 39, 41–42, 51, 58, 94, 100, 214, 242 Salikoko 30 Sam 230 Samantha 159, 163 Samba 200 Samuel 110, 131, 189, 200 San 131, 133, 178 182 Sanchez 52, 63, 64 Sandaga 6, 14, 15, 185–200, 251 Sankofa 50, 62, 87, 156 Sankore 131 sapiens 113 Sarajevo 214 Sarkozy 110, 111 Sartre 110, 132 Sassoli 110, 133 Scandinavian 159 scapegoating 108 Scheub 28, 30 Schneider 57, 58,59, 64, 191, 200 Schuller 211, 214 Scott 161, 170 Seck 186 Secker 30 secular 97 secularism 81 Segmentation 45 segregate 198 self-affirming 21, 23 self-determination 50, 68 250

Index

self-governance 137, 140 semantic 22, 26, 60, 138, 257 Sembene 126, 127, 132 Senegal 12, 49, 55, 60–63, 114, 161 185, 187, 188, 194–200, 209, 212, 251, 256 Senegalese 58, 59, 61, 64, 126, 186, 189, 194, 195, 197, 198, 199, 214, 251 Senghor 27, 141 Seychelles 206, 207 Shakespeare166, 179, 180, 182, 220 Sierra Leone12, 21–24, 29–31, 70, 76, 167, 170, 175, 179, 182, 203, 227, 230, 249, 256, 257, 258 Silko 178 Sipe 180, 183 Siu 197, 200 slang 53, 54 Smith 34, 41, 43, 45, 53 Smitherman 51, 52, 52, 52, 54, 64, 64 socialism 204 socialization 34, 40, 41 socializing 81, 186 societe 200 society 15, 25, 27, 28, 33, 36, 37, 38, 44, 47, 48, 50, 54, 94, 101, 107, 121, 122, 125, 126, 127, 132, 152, 168, 171, 180, 188, 190, 204, 209, 211, 212, 218– 225, 227, 229, 230, 231, 232, 233, 239, 243

socio-linguistics 23 sociocultural 22, 136, 250 socioeconomic 15, 43, 84, 204, 238, 240 sociology 13, 109, 160 sociopolitical 107, 139 soliloquy 153, 154 Somalia 239, 256 Southall 33, 45 Soyinka 121, 132, 137–139, 163 spatial 93, 172, 180, 183, 193 Spatializing 190, 200 specter 14, 69, 137 Spencer-Walters 3, 5, 6, 9–14, 16, 19, 21, 22, 23–31, 107, 132 135 136, 138–140, 142, 156, 157, 162, 163, 165–168, 170–171, 173–177, 181, 182, 184, 188, 200, 209–233, 247, 248, 250, 252, 255, 257 spirituality 16, 63, 125, 126, 130, 133, 235, 251 Spivak 193, 200 Stanford 131, 255 stereotypes 33, 44, 147, 148 stigma 219, 220, 239 stigmatization 148 Stockholm 159 stools 186 stratification 80 Sub-Sahara 255, 256 sub-Saharan 9, 121, 122, 140, 203, 208, 213, 238, 239, 254 subalternity 110

251

Index

subjectivity 29, 160, 168, 169, 173, 175, 210, 248 subjects 14, 70, 165, 168, 178 Sudan 36 Sudanese 251 Sudano-Sahelian 185 Sundial 181, 184 Sundiata 223, 223 Supreme 111, 123, 124, 187, 206 Susser 191, 200 Sustainability 75, 77, 207, 254– 256 Swahili 204, 242 Swaziland 222 Sweden 204 Switzerland 256 syncretic 24, 29, 135, 136 Szanton 103 taboos 120, 151 Taiwo 45, 157, 158, 163 Táíwò 157, 163 Takoradi 142 Takyi-Amoako 204, 214 Tanzania 204 taxonomies 117 territorialism 9 testament 71, 125, 132 Thailand 207 Théodoridès 116, 133 theologian 121, 257 theologians 83, 110, 111, 112, 123 Thiong’o 12, 15, 16, 44, 48, 49, 65, 112, 133, 162, 166, 173, 174, 176, 177, 181–183, 187, 187,

188, 200, 211, 213, 218, 247, 248, 252 Thomas 71, 110, 129, 132, 133, 166, 179, 182, 182 Thompson 158 Tigrinya 242 Tilley 124, 124, 132 Tolerance 44, 86, 86, 109, 121, 127, 252 Tomé 206 Toronto 195 Touba 194, 194, 194, 194 transatlantic 9, 14, 68, 142, 146, 147, 153, 157, 162, 187 Transcultural 104 transfixed 98 transgress 94 transgressive 70, 166 transmigrant 93, 103 Transnationality 5, 12, 67, 69, 70–73, 75, 77 transnationals 91 Trevor-Roper 111 trib 36, 36, 38, 43 tribalism 35, 36, 37, 38, 40, 40, 40, 44, 44, 44, 45 tribalist 36, 43 trope 137, 144, 146, 158 Trouillot 136, 163 Troy 30, 132, 132, 162, 163, 163, 200, 214, 214, 252 tsarist 204 tutelage 176 Tutsi 36 Tutuola 28, 30, 141

252

Index

Twi 156, 242

Williams 5, 19, 20, 22, 24, 26, 28–31, 133, 249, 257, 258 Wilmot 19, 30, 69, 180, 183 Wilson 113, 229, 257 Woldeamanuel 255, 256 Wole 121, 132, 137, 163 Wolof 12, 49, 55–61, 64, 186 women 92, 95, 98, 99, 140, 145, 148, 149, 158 Womanhood 159, 162 Woodson 112, 133

Uganda 79, 81, 82, 86–100, 104, 120, 207, 214, 250 Ugandan 5, 13, 79, 80, 82–90, 92–96, 100, 101 UNESCO 108, 123, 200, 203, 206, 207, 212, 215, 256 Uppsala 159, 256 urbicide 191, 199 Uzoamaka 157, 158, 161 Vail 41, 45 Varennes 188, 199 Vernacular 53, 63, 148, 149, 160, 199 Victorian 174, 174, 183 Vincent 158, 159, 160, 162

Xala 223, 224 Xavier 103, 103, 103, 103 xenophobia 110 Xhosa 242 Xuman 61

Wa Thiong’o, Ngugi 12, 15, 16, 44, 48, 49, 65, 112, 133, 162, 166, 173, 176, 177, 181–183, 187, 188, 200, 211, 213, 218, 247, 247–249, 252 Wade 80, 81, 104, 196 Wande 129 Washington 22, 73 76, 131, 133, 158, 159, 180, 182, 223, 233, 243, 257 Weltanschauung 122 Westernization 110, 129 westernized 84, 221, 222 Westernizers 128, 129 Westernizing 87

Yakovlevich 128, 130 Yasso 181, 184 Yaw 141 Yawson 141, 146 Yoruba 23, 24, 117–119, 121, 123, 129, 132, 242 Zahan 126, 133 Zambezi 117 Zambia 41, 44 Zangari 33, 34, 43, 44 Zeleza 12, 43, 45 Zell 205, 215 Zemin 72 Zimbabwe 28, 48, 64, 141, 206, 257 Zulu 69

253

About the Contributors

Senait Admassu is the founder of the African Communities Public Health Coalition (African Coalition; ACPHC), a Los Angeles–based nonprofit organization. Admassu is extensively recognized for her expertise in community social mobilizing and culturally appropriate facilitation of trainings. In addition to providing community-based workshops and trainings to African-descent immigrants, Admassu assists the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health (LACDMH)-Black/African Heritage Underserved Cultural Communities (UsCC) subcommittee in assessing mental health service provision in the African and Caribbean communities. Admassu also serves as a vice chair of the Western Region against Female Gentile Mutilation (FGM) task force, and as a member of CA Mental Health Service Oversight and Accountability Commission—Culturally and Linguistically Competency Committee. Admassu’s education and community advocacy efforts have demonstrated her diligence to mental health consumers, especially those of the black migrants and refugees. Admassu earned a master’s degree in clinical social work from the University of Southern California (USC). She earned a bachelor of science degree in psychology from University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA). Edwin Aimufua’s legal career commenced in 1988, when he graduated from the University of Buckingham, England, with an LLB (Honors) degree in law. Aimufua was admitted to the California Bar as an attorney in 1996. Shortly thereafter, Aimufua hung his shingle as a solo practitioner, representing the varied interests and well-being of his individual clients. More recently, Aimufua has diverted his services to providing pro 255

About the Contributors

bono representation to individuals mired in the justice system and can ill-afford to pay for legal services. As the staff attorney and general legal counsel for the African Communities Public Health Coalition (African Coalition; ACPHC), an organization dedicated first and foremost to serving the needs of African migrants in the United States, most especially, those in the Greater Los Angeles Area, Aimufua’s representation now spans various indices including but not limited to civil rights issues, housing rights issues, marital and family law issues (divorces), probate law issues (conservatorships), and also importantly, their immigration law issues. Jennifer De Maio is a professor of political science at California State University, Northridge. She has a BA in English and history from Georgetown University, a MSc in the history of international relations, and a PhD in political science from UCLA. Her research interests fall into three broad areas: (1) human security and public health policy in the African diaspora; (2) civil wars and international relations of Africa; and (3) politics of cultural pluralism and economic development. The common thread that links her work is an interest in social change. Her first book, Confronting Ethnic Conflict: The Role of Third Parties in Managing Africa’s Civil Wars, was published in 2009. She also coedited a volume on sustainability in sub-Saharan Africa. She has also published and presented papers on ethnic politics, civil wars and conflict management, and the impact of social media in political and social transformations in Africa. In addition, De Maio has published two editions of an Introduction to American Politics textbook, which was awarded Most Promising New Textbook in 2020. De Maio is advisor for the department’s Model United Nations Program and is co-coordinator of the Interdisciplinary Studies of Africa Minors Program, which offers a minor in African studies. Rodney B. Hume-Dawson, an expert in inclusive practices, education, and disability studies, is a faculty member in the Liberal Studies Department at California Polytechnic State University, Pomona. He holds a bachelor’s and master’s degree in English, philosophy, and teaching, and a 256

About the Contributors

PhD in education with an emphasis on disability studies from Chapman University. Raquel Kennon is is associate professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and formerly associate professor of Africana studies at California State University, Northridge. She received her PhD in comparative literature from Harvard University, and earned an AB in comparative literature and Spanish from Stanford University. Her research focuses on nineteenth through twenty-first-century African American, African, and Caribbean literature. She is the author of Afrodiasporic Forms: Slavery in Literature and Culture of the African Diaspora. Sheba Lo is professor in the Department of Africana Studies at California State University, Northridge. Her research interests include African and African American literature (oral, written, and film), including hiphop. Her scholarship highlights artists as agents of social change and political change throughout the African world. Sheba Lo has published chapters in Ni Wakati: Hip Hop and Social Change in Africa, edited by M. K. Clark and M. Koster; and Higher Learning: Hip Hop in the Ivory Tower, edited by K. Stanford and C. Jones; and has published articles in Africology, the Journal of Pan African Studies and the Journal of Negro Education. She received her PhD in African studies from Howard University. Renee M. Moreno is professor in the Chicano/a Studies Department at California State University, Northridge. She holds a joint PhD in English and education from the University of Michigan and has held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Notre Dame. Moreno teaches writing; directs the Chicano Studies Writing and Tutoring Center, which provides writing support for all majors across the University; and she also supervises faculty teaching composition courses. She co-chairs CSUN’s University Writing Council and is the former director of the Ronald E. McNair Post-Baccalaureate Scholars Program, funded by the US Department of Education. She has served in various leadership positions for the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) and was past chair of the Trustees of the 257

About the Contributors

Research Foundation, which funds the important program Cultivating New Voices among Scholars of Color (CNV). Mutombo Nkulu-N’Sengha is a tenured professor at California State University, Northridge, where he teaches (since 2003) a variety of courses including American Religious Diversity, World Religions, and Religion, Logic, and Media. He is the founder and director of the Bumuntu Peace Institute. Professor Mutombo received his education in Africa, Europe, and the United States. He has done extensive research on ancestral values in Central Africa over the past eight years. Beside two entries in the Encyclopedia Britannica on Bantu philosophy and Luba religious thought, his publications include African Traditional Religions (2018), “Bumuntu Memory and Authentic Personhood: An African Art of Becoming Humane,” in Memory and the Narrative Imagination in Africa and the Diaspora Experience (edited by Tom Spencer-Walters, 2011), and “War, Environmental Crisis, and ‘Mining Terrorism,’ in the Congo: Prolegomenon for an African Philosophy of Sustainability” in Sustainable Development in Sub-Sahara Africa: Problems, Perspectives, and Prospects (edited by Jennifer De Maio, Suzanne Scheld, and Mintesnot Woldeamanuel; 2018). Daphne W. Ntiri, PhD, is Distinguished Service Professor and director of WSU Another Chance Program in Wayne State University’s Department of African American Studies. Ntiri has authored and edited more than forty refereed research articles, book chapters, books, and handbooks on adult education/literacy and its intersection with gender empowerment in Africa and the African diaspora. Her most recent book was Literacy as Gendered Discourse: Engaging the Voices of Women in Global Societies. She has served as a long-term consultancy to the United Nations/UNESCO in Paris, France; Dakar, Senegal; and Kismayo, Somalia; and as a research fellow to the International Labor Office in Geneva, Switzerland. Her international faculty appointments include the universities of Uppsala, Ouagadougou, and Djibouti. She is an International Adult and Continuing Education Hall of Fame laureate, a Fulbright Scholar, and the recipient of the President’s Award for Excellence 258

About the Contributors

in Teaching. Ntiri serves on several editorial boards, including Adult Education Quarterly, Adult Learning Journal, and Dialogues in Social Justice. She received her graduate degrees from Michigan State University and her bachelor’s from Fourah Bay College, the University of Sierra Leone. Ebenezer “KofI” Peprah is a founding board member of the African Coalition and the founder and CEO of KAN OFF THE Street Inc, a nonprofit organized with a mission of ending homelessness in Los Angeles. He is also a geographer with a background in Global Health Science, currently teaching at Glendale Community College. As an African-born immigrant living in the United States, Peprah’s passion is de-stereotyping Africa and promoting the authentic ways Africans have managed to survive and thrive in a world that continues to underestimate the continent’s values, customs, and traditions. Daniel N. Posner is the James S. Coleman Professor of International Development in the Department of Political Science at UCLA. He is the author of Institutions and Ethnic Politics in Africa (2005) and the coauthor of Coethnicity: Diversity and the Dilemmas of Collective Action (2009), as well as numerous articles on ethnic politics, distributive politics, and the political economy of development in Africa. He has been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. From 2010 to 2013, he held the Total Chair in Contemporary Africa at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Suzanne Scheld is a professor in the Anthropology Department at California State University, Northridge, Californi. Her research focuses on the politics of public space in West Africa and the United States. She is the coauthor of Sustainability in Sub-Sahara Africa: Problems, Perspectives, and Prospects, with Jennifer De Maio and Mintesnot Woldeamanuel (2018); Africa and Urban Anthropology: Theoretical and Methodological Contributions from Contemporary Fieldwork, with Deborah Pellow (forthcoming); and Rethinking Urban Parks: Public Space and Cultural Diversity, with Setha Low and Dana Taplin (2005). 259

About the Contributors

W. Gabriel Selassie I is an assistant professor of Africana studies at the California State University, Northridge. Gabriel is a Garvey and Garveyism scholar, theologian, and historian of African, Caribbean, and American intellectual, cultural, and political history. Selassie’s works include an exegesis of the Fitz Balintine Pettersburgh, The Royal Parchment Scroll of Black Supremacy; The Holy Piby: The Black Man’s Bible, Robert Athlyi Rogers; and Leonard Percival Howell’s The Promised Key (2017;a three-book series of proto-Rastafari religious texts). Gabriel earned an MA and PhD in history from the Claremont Graduate University, a master’s degree in African American studies at the University of California at Los Angeles, a master’s degree in theology at the University of Notre Dame, and a bachelor of architecture and civil engineering from Prairie View A & M University of Texas (HBCU). He also holds a certificate in democracy in Africa from St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford. Tom Spencer-Walters is professor emeritus of Africana studies at California State University, Northridge (CSUN). He studied at the University of Washington (Seattle), where he completed a master’s degree in comparative literature focusing on literatures from both the English- and French-speaking regions of Africa. He also received a second master’s in communications and a PhD in communications, specializing in semantic applications in journalism in Africa—both degrees from the University of Washington (Seattle), as well. Among his primary published works are, Memory and the Narrative Imagination in the African and Diaspora Experience (2011); Orality and the Fictive Imagination: African and Caribbean Literatures (1998); and Shared Visions: A Multicultural Reader for Writers (1996). He has also published several book chapters and articles, including a chapter on creolization of the Sierra Leone Krio in New Perspectives on the Sierra Leone Krio (edited by Dixon-Fyle and Cole, 2006) and another chapter on family patterns in Sierra Leone in Families in a Global Context (edited by Hennon and Wilson, 2008). Before his retirement in 2019, he served as department chair for the Africana Studies Department, Writing Program director for the same department, ombudsperson for the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences (CSUN), president of Phi Beta Beta Delta (CSUN), senior Fulbright Scholar at the University 260

About the Contributors

of Fort Hare in South Africa, resident director of the California State University International Program (CSUIP) in Zimbabwe, and a United Nations Fellow in the Department of Public Information at the United Nations Headquarters in New York. Tom is currently a certified language tester for the American Council for the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL). Selase W. Williams taught linguistics, Black studies, and international studies at the University of Washington and served as chair of the Africana Department at California State University, Northridge. He was elected president of the National Council for Black studies for two terms and co-directed the First International NCBS Conference in Accra, Ghana. As dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at California State University–Dominguez Hills, Williams was awarded a Crossing Borders Initiative grant from Ford to organize a series of inter-ethnic studies symposia and develop a Global Diasporas curriculum. His support of international education and scholarship continued when he became provost and vice president for academic affairs at Lesley University where he established a multifaceted International Education Center. Williams’s scholarship has focused on the history, structure, and politics of African American Language (AAL), Sierra Leone Krio language, the importance of Black studies in the academy, and the role of education in the full participation of African Americans in United States and global affairs. His notable publications include “African American Language: Educational Tool or Social Weapon,” in Empowerment Through Multicultural Education (edited by Christine E. Sleeter, 1991); “The African Character of African American Language: Insights from the Creole Connection,” in Africanisms in American Culture (edited by Joseph E. Holloway, 2005); and an edited volume, The Borders in All of Us: New Approaches to Three Global Diasporic Societies (2005). Kevin Zemlicka has an MA with an emphasis in cultural anthropology from California State University Northridge (CSUN). He has worked as an applied anthropologist exploring topics such as the relationship between humans and autonomous technologies and the politics of 261

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humans and their relationships to public space. He is currently employed as an academic advisor for the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences and a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at CSUN.

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